A Scapegoat for Promiscuous Drunks, Friendly Calls, and Humbug Resolutions

Biblioklept3 Comments

mark-twain

From Mark Twain’s January 1st, 1863 column in the Territorial Enterprise:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.

The Best and Worst Movies of 2008

Edwin Turner10 Comments

THE WORST

The Dark Knight

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We liked the first act of Nolan’s second Batman movie very much. In fact, nothing in the whole movie could top the robbery scene at the beginning. Yes, we loved Heath Ledger’s Joker. He wasn’t in it enough. But we were getting pretty bored by the end of the second act, and by the time it became clear that Two Face would be a villain in this Batman film and not the next sequel, well, we were downright exhausted. The clunky editing, clumsy fight scenes (you really couldn’t see anything in the film), and convoluted plot turns didn’t help a film where the hero endorses the Bush administration’s methods (torture; spying on its citizens). And don’t even get us started on Bale’s silly “Batman voice.” Worst of all was all the praise this film garnered, as if everyone had been primed to love it and had no other choice. The Dark Knight is a crushing fascist vision; that its true hero is the Joker will be lost on all.

Hancock

An interesting premise and a funny opening scene quickly devolve into an incoherent mythology and a superhero story absent of any real villain. We usually like our films short, but Hancock felt thin at under 90 minutes. What was cut?

Speed Racer

Speed Racer, a psychedelic cartoon blur of flat characters and unfun nonsense should be the nail in the Wachowski’s brother-sized coffin. We’re beginning to think that The Matrix was just a matter of the right William Gibson rip-off at the right time (right time here = right technology). Ugh.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

You saw that South Park episode, “The China Probrem,” right? Where Spielberg and Lucas literally rape Indy? That’s about right…

The Happening

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Shyamalan owes us the ninety minutes he stole from us. We suggest he show up at Biblioklept World Headquarters (shamefaced, of course) prepared to work–there’s always some caulking and mowing and painting that needs doing. On second thought, we’re sure he’d figure out a way to fuck up even the simplest chore. Possibly the worst movie we’ve ever seen.

THE BEST

Iron Man

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Where The Dark Knight plumbed the worst aspects of human nature, Iron Man gave us a hero with a truly redemptive arc, and did so in a way both moving and humorous. Iron Man also looked great, and featured the best origin story of any of the big superhero movies of the past decade. In fact, we’re calling it: Iron Man is the best superhero movie of the decade.

 

Be Kind Rewind

We laughed, we cried, we wrote a review.

Burn After Reading

Coming after No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ shaggy dog comedy felt light and even superfluous at times. Still, elements of the story stuck with us long after the viewing, and, as usual, the Coen’s get great performances out of their cast.

In Bruges

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We don’t want to give away too many details from In Bruges, but it’s worth pointing out that the trailers and ads totally missed–or misrepresented–the tone of the movie. In Bruges is funny, but it’s hardly a buddy film–at it’s core it’s a sad, even philosophical, reflection on loss and guilt. Great stuff.

Pineapple Express

Enough has been written at this point on Judd Apatow’s crew and the successes they’ve had in recent years that we don’t need to comment, except to point out that we loved Freaks and Geeks when it originally aired and it’s great to see what all these kids have done since then. Seth Rogen is hilarious, but James Franco steals the show here as a dope dealing loser who just needs a friend. Great action scenes too. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, also featuring Apatow cohorts, was pretty good too, of course.

Wall-E

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Who knew a post-apocalyptic film criticizing consumerist culture and our ever-increasing loss of connection to both the natural world and our own bodies would be so good? We loved, loved, loved Wall-E. Best film of 2008.

Films we still haven’t seen but in which we have interest: Rachel Getting Married, Synecdoche, New York, Hamlet 2, Hellboy 2, The Wrestler, Quantum of Solace, Let the Right One In.

Amerika — Franz Kafka

Edwin Turner3 Comments

amerika

I had a (very, very minor) Kafkaesque moment when Mark Harman’s new translation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika first arrived at Biblioklept International Headquarters. Wanting to compare the style of Harman’s translation to Edwin and Willa Muir’s work, I searched for my old copy of Amerika. I figured I’d re-read the first chapter, “The Stoker,” the only part of the novel that Kafka reworked (it was published as a short story). So I looked and looked and it turns out that I don’t own Amerika, despite the obligatory Kafka phase I went through in high school (followed by a post-bac Kafka phase years later). But I knew I’d read “The Stoker,” or at least it seemed likely that I’d read “The Stoker,” and it turned up in a collection of Kafka’s short stories that I own–only it was the Donna Freed translation. So I re-read it, only I’m not sure that I was re-reading it. I didn’t remember any of it, other than the famous opening image of a Statue of Liberty armed with a sword. I’m still not sure that I ever read it before now; that is, I’m not sure that I read the Muir translation that Harman seeks to amend. I guess it doesn’t matter, and it seems appropriate that a Kafka review begin with a meandering false start. Where were we?

Yes. Harman’s translation. With Amerika, Harman continues a project he initiated with his translation of another unfinished Kafka novel, The Castle. (This book was published in 1998, and I listened to the audio book last summer, incidentally, and it was really, really good). Harman’s translations aim to restore some of the humor, ambiguity, and modernism that the Muirs’ early translations occlude in favor of their own religious readings. Harman also takes great pains to remove Max Brod’s editorial interventions, even going as far as to keep many of Kafka’s consistent solecisms (“Oklahoma” is restored to Kafka’s original – and consistent – “Oklahama”). Now, my Kafkaesque confusion over whether or not I’ve read the Muirs’ translation of Amerika prevents me from commenting here on Harman’s apparent restoration of Kafka’s humor, but I do think that Amerika is often funny, and often terrifying. Its protagonist Karl finds himself in a parallel-universe America (one constructed wholly from Kafka’s imagination, and announced in its surreal glory from the opening image of a Statue of Liberty armed with sword), one where he’s consistently misled, swindled, cornered, cramped, and generally mistreated by various enigmatic authority figures (yes, its Kafkaesque, if you’ll allow the tautology). As noted, Kafka never finished writing the book (or any of his three novels, for that matter), and Harman makes no attempt to reconcile the plot, opting instead to simply reproduce (in frank English, of course) the words Kafka wrote.

Amerika is not the starting place for those new to Kafka’s work–I would suggest readers who weren’t turned off by their high school English teacher’s inept bungling of The Metamorphosis start with a collection of the short stories. However, I think Harman’s translation is not only essential for fans who wish to rediscover an old favorite, I also believe that it will quickly become the definitive translation. It’s modern and terse and funny, and it also pays subtle respect to the dialogic interplay between Karl’s point of view and that of the omniscient narrator, often creating moments of intense and delicious irony. Reading a translation of Kafka focusing on his oft-neglected humor brought to mind the late great David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Series of Remarks on the Funniness of Kafka, from Which Not Enough Has Been Removed” (read it here or get the mp3 of DFW reading it here). Here is Wallace, explaining why American undergrads don’t get Kafka’s humor:

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Wallace’s observation stealthily acknowledges why the heroes of Amerika and The Trial and The Castle never get to where they’re going, why Kafka could never wrap up his big stories. Kafka, the first modern writer, embraced the “horrific struggle” of humanity and never sought easy reconciliation or pat conclusions. Harman’s new translation brings this critical aspect of Kafka’s writing to the fore, and he achieves this in the most simplistic manner: unobtrusively letting Kafka’s words stand on their own. Recommended.

Amerika is now available from Schocken Books.

Pessimus Populus: The Worst People of 2008

Biblioklept3 Comments

10. Joe the Plumber

Joseph Wurzelbacher, as manipulated by the McCain campaign, somehow came to stand for the “common man,” the “everyday” American (from real America, of course) who would just totally get dicked-over by a pinko like Obama. If Joe the Plumber does represent the average, everyday common American, that basically means the average, everyday common American is kinda dimwitted, slovenly, and prone to saying stupid stuff. And around Biblioklept Headquarters in Real America, we’re too patriotic to suggest such a thing. Olbermann takes down Joe:

9. Michael Phelps

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Okay. We get it. You can swim fast. But please. Please. Don’t be such a smug dick–you’re not charming, as your awkward, unfunny appearances on SNL and The Colbert Report attest. Also, your skanky new girlfriend hardly lends you class. Thank god the Olympics only happen every four years.

8. Elisabeth Hasselback

Hasselback’s yapping maw jibber-jabbered at such a consistently shrill pitch for most of 2008, that even those of us who avoid The View like the special little plague it is were subject to take some notice. Someone has thoughtfully distilled Hasselback’s 25 most annoying moments into one dandy poisonous clip:

7. FOX News

6. Voters who voted for anti-gay ballot measures in California, Florida, Arkansas, and Arizona this year.

Evangelical leaders–many who claim to “love” everyone–consistently attempt to turn this fight into a matter of semiotics, into the meaning of the word “marriage.” Hogwash. Years from now–hopefully not too many–we, as a country, will look back on these anti-gay measures with the same sense of shame that now surrounds opposition to the Civil Rights movement. Anyone who claims that the issue is simply about what the word “marriage” means is being dishonest with themselves and everyone else. At least the loonies who follow Fred Phelps are openly and honestly bigoted.
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5. John McCain

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Dear Maverick McCain,

We used to like you, a little bit, way back in 2000, but yeah, we really did see you as an outsider for awhile, and sure, you’re a war hero (if getting shot down and surviving as a prisoner-of-war makes one a hero)–But–

Don’t you think the campaign you ran against Obama was kinda sorta most definitely shameful? I mean, like, aren’t you literally ashamed of the tacit and not-so-implicit and sometimes downright violent xenophobia and (yes) racism that you guys incited in your mobs? Aren’t you worried that any goodwill capital you built over you last 25 years in politics has been more or less spent? And Palin? Jesus! Seriously? Palin? Don’t get me wrong, your choice was truly a delight to watch, but come on, man. Show some sense.

4. Wall Street Investment Bankers

You oily pricks get what you deserve. Never have so many done so little for so much money. Also: Anyone who still believes that unregulated laissez-faire capitalism just “works.” Look around you.

3. The Bush Gang

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Let’s lump them all together and let God sort them out. Or, better yet, let’s prosecute them. Or, better yet, tar-and-feather them, and run them out of town on a pole.

2. Sarah Palin

This year, Biblioklept is doling out a first: a special “Cunt of the Year” award, just for Palin. Aw, that’s kind of mean. Actually, it was really entertaining to watch Palin fumble through interviews (she reads “everything”!), wink and consistently drop the word-final “g” sound from her every utterance, and destroy any hopes that the GOP had of winning the ’08 election. And for every time she infuriated us (insinuating that there is a “real America,” one we are not a part of), she always made up for it with some comic gold. (The infamous turkey-pardoning-while-turkeys-get-slaughtered-in-the-background-video is a particular gem from 2008; (How, oh how, can Palin not see the irony here?)):

Of course, had McCain-Palin won–which is to say, if Americans had yet again made a bad, poor, ignorant, stupid, willfully stupid decision about who should lead them–we would not make light of Palin’s idiocy. But they lost. They lost! Ha ha, they lost! So, it’s perfectly fine and dandy to recall all of Palin’s flubs (Remember when that morning shock jock pranked her? Remember the debate?!) With a little luck, the Republican leadership will continue to stand behind Palin (literally!) and ruin any chances the party has to ascend to power again in 2010 or 2012.

1. George Bush

As of this writing, there are only 25 days left in the Bush presidency (keep track here if you want), yet it seems probable that he’ll manage to fuck something else up for the incoming administration. I say the decade officially ends this January. Let’s move on.

Just like last year, we find Dubya dancing:

Happy Xmas

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black_santa

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch of their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord'” — Luke 2:8-11

William Burroughs — “The Junky’s Christmas”

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Part One:

Part Two:

Dylan Thomas Reads “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”

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a-childs-christmasWhen he wasn’t busy drinking himself to death, Dylan Thomas wrote some pretty awesome poems and stories, and the Welshman had quite the knack for reading them aloud. Check out his sonorous reading of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a lovely impressionistic series of vignettes about Useful vs. Useless Presents, ever-present Uncles, eating with the fam, letter-carriers, etc. Good stuff. Fellow Welshman John Cale wrote his own version of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” It’s on his pretty-good record Paris 1919. Merry Xmas!

The Best Books of 2008

Edwin Turner2 Comments

We read many, many books this year, but most of the books we read–especially the very best ones–were not published this year. And as usual, we’re always playing catch up. Case in point: we finally finished Roberto Bolaño’s much-lauded-in-2007 hit The Savage Detectives just last month, and despite feeling that it was kinda overrated we couldn’t help picking up his much-lauded-in-2008 hit 2666 at Green Apple Books in San Francisco this weekend (sidebar that will not surprise any San Francisco reader: San Francisco has the best book shops. Sick). So, we will spend at least the first part of 2009 getting through that massive tome.

Bar none, the best book we read in 2008 was Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, published back in 1985. So good we read it twice, and so should you. We also loved loved loved Philip Pullman’s Nietzschean sci-fi trilogy His Dark Materials. Finally, we must highly recommend E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime, which we finally got around to reading this year (last week, so, no review). This book is great, and you will wonder why you haven’t read it before now. A somewhat neglected classic. But. Let us move on.

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There were a couple of fantastic highlights in 2008, of course, most notably Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, a novel on which we cannot heap enough praise. In a time of overstuffed, overlong novels, A Mercy is rich and complex yet lean at just over 170 pages, and, as many critics and reviewers have pointed out, the novel serves as a touching counterpoint for her 1988 masterpiece Beloved.

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We also loved–and frequently returned to–Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, a work of cultural criticism that managed to be fun and infuriating and serious and frivolous at the same time. Too often reviewers fall back on hackneyed phrases like “thought provoking,” but Žižek’s work really is provoking, often to the point of confrontation. Like Plato, Nietzsche, and Derrida before him, Žižek is the gadfly, the upsetter, the spoiler. He has earned his haters.

The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III and The O. Henry Prize Stories collections were also sublime–great interviews, great stories, lovely tasty morsels. Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Millhauser–what’s not to love? We also really were digging Mark Reibstein and Ed Young’s sumptuous children’s book, Wabi Sabi. You’d think a book that included a haiku on each page would be cheesy or cloying or too precious, but no. Great stuff.

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We’d also be remiss not to give props (again) to Wendell Berry’s essay “Faustian Economics,” published in the May, 2008 issue of Harper’s. Berry’s piece is beautiful and sad and timely, and everyone should read it. It was one of the best things we read all year. Speaking of Harper’s, the latest issue includes–along with a touching memorial to critic John Leonard, who died last month–the remarks of those who spoke (including Zadie Smith and Don DeLillo) at David Foster Wallace’s memorial service this October. Wallace’s suicide was and is awful, and remarking on it in a “Best of 2008” section seems tacky, but we can’t help it. We love his work and are sad that there won’t be any more, or at least much more, or at least any “finished” work from the man, but, as George Saunders puts it in his portion of the memorial: “In time–but not yet–the sadness that there will be no new stories from him will be replaced by a deepening awareness of what a treasure we have in the existing work.” So, if we remark on DFW here, it is only because he was one of the best, and he died this year, and in some sense, we need to remark on it yet again, despite having written too much already.

But let’s not end on a sad or sour note. Plenty of great reads in 2008, and surely we neglected a tome or three in this rehash, but hey, we’re human, we err, etc. We look forward to more reading in 2009, and perhaps, improbably (we lie to ourselves, who doesn’t though?) we may actually defeat that stack of books by the bed, on the night stand, on the coffee table.

The Eight Best Songs of 2008

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In no particular order…

Fleet Foxes – “White Winter Hymnal”

Beyoncé (Sasha Fierce) – “Single Ladies”

Crystal Castles – “Crimewave”

Deerhunter – “Nothing Ever Happened”

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Marnie Stern – “Transformer”

Max Tundra – “Will Get Fooled Again”

MIA – “Paper Planes”

The Eight Best Albums of 2008

Edwin Turner1 Comment

2008 was a relatively disappointing year in music. My Bloody Valentine played some shows, but didn’t put out that album they promised. Axl Rose put out Chinese Democracy, and, um, yeah. Plenty of our favorite bands put out decent but inessential albums (we’re looking at you, Stephen Malkmus, Lambchop, Stereolab, Deerhoof, Destroyer, Girl Talk, Wolf Parade, Max Tundra, and Magnetic Fields), while other cherished artists hit (what will hopefully be) their nadir (Fiery Furnaces’ interminable live album, Mercury Rev’s atrocity, Silver Jews’ unfun silliness). Chalk it up to heightened expectations and an engorged sense of entitlement derived from a decade of internet piracy. Still, there were some great records that came out this year. These were our favorite. We haven’t spent much time putting them in order, but the top three are pretty concrete.

THE EIGHT BEST ALBUMS OF 2008

My Morning Jacket, Evil Urges

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People kind of hated this album, but we thought it was a hoot. Sure, in a sense, it wasn’t Z Part II, but it did live up to that 2006 effort’s relentless genre-hopping. From the opening title track’s clumsy soul-singing, to the James Taylor schmaltz of “Sec Walkin,” to the Cameo-isms of “Highly Suspicious” (peanut butter puddin’ surprise, anyone?) the album is all over the place. But we like that. “Smokin’ from Shootin'” is lovely, and album closer “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream pt 2” is funtastic krautrock done right. If Ween had made Evil Urges, we’re sure it would’ve been roundly lauded. I guess there was a general concern that MMJ were serious about these songs. Give it a second (or first!) listen.

Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Modern Life

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So Kevin Shields didn’t get a new MBV record out. So what? The Chemistry of Modern Life isn’t a substitution or replacement, but an extension of MBV’s signature shoegaze sound, only brought up to date for the angry aughties via vocalist Pink Eye’s hardcore vocals. Fucked Up’s record is sorta like putting all those great SST records you grew up on (early Dinosaur, Black Flag, the Minutemen, Sister) in a blender. Great result.

Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna

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Speaking of blending influences, Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna does a great job of mixing genres and cultures without ever seeming calculated or cynical or hackneyed. Tracks like “First Communion” and “House Jam” are fun and serious psychedelic dance music, and “Princes,” guest-starring rapper Tinchy Stryder sorta creates a new genre all together. We like.

Fennesz, Black Sea

fenneszBlack Sea might be a strange counterpart to Fucked Up’s Chemistry. It’s harsher than Endless Summer, and lacks the warmth of Venice, but Christian Fennesz’s new album–like Fucked Up’s–orchestrates beauty from (cognitive) dissonance and distills some of the grim anger that’s characterized world politics for the latter part of this decade into a thick, sometimes lovely-sometimes frightening haze. A record that the listener is asked to feel.

Animal Collective, Water Curses

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Sure, it’s an EP, but Animal Collective’s Water Curses was on repeat around Biblioklept World Headquarters for most of the year. The jovial title track has a pop immediacy that doesn’t wear out its welcome even after the hundredth listen, but it’s Avey Tare’s “Street Flash,” weird and beautiful and slow, that really steals the show. Water Curses is that rare gem, a series of outtakes that actually outshines the album from which they were excised (Strawberry Jam). Animal Collective have proven to be one of the best new bands of this rapidly aging decade, and the recently-leaked “Brother Sport” from their upcoming LP indicates that they will only get better with age.

TV On The Radio, Dear Science

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Chock full of hooks, horn blasts, and hand claps, Dear Science should sound cluttered and overstuffed. Instead, TV On The Radio have followed up 2006’s outstanding effort Return to Cookie Mountain with a fantastic pop rock record, where all the bells and whistles (including the horn section from Antibalas) simply add to the listening experience. Where Cookie Mountain‘s songs seemed constructed out of gorgeous textures layered around Tunde Adebimpe’s sonorous voice, Dear Science comes across as a more focused album comprised of radio-ready songs. Opener “Halfway Home” builds to epic speed, “Crying” is death-disco done perfect, “Dancing Choose” channels “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in both its anger and its humor, while songs like “Family Tree” and “Love Dog” showcase Adebimpe’s cathartic voice. What many of the bands detractors might not get is that funky tracks like “Golden Age” and “Red Dress” should be pop radio staples right now–TV On The Radio aren’t experimental art rock, they’re an alternate future-now for pop music.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lie Down in the Light

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We are pretty old. In fact, we’re old enough to have thought it was weird when the Palace Brothers became Palace Music (this didn’t get in the way of loving Viva Last Blues (which we listened to on audiocassette, on our Walkman!)). So by the time Palace had become Will Oldham had become Bonnie “Prince” Billy, there were so many 7″s and Spanish import EPs and live bootlegs (oh the live bootlegs!) that it all became a bit too much to keep track of. Not to say that we didn’t enjoy Ease on Down the Road or the strange strings on The Letting Go, but Will seems to put out a new record every Tuesday. So we were slow to respond to Lie Down in the Light. Which is a shame. Because it is probably his best record. We imagine that many people interested in Oldham might be daunted by his vast back catalog. If you, dear reader, are such a person, take heed: Lie Down in the Light is a fantastic place to start. The songs on Lie Down are about family and friends, singing, sex, closeness, and a good, good God. The death, weirdness, incest, loss, and stark pain that’s permeated many of Oldham’s previous recordings might seem absent here, but that darkness is here–in Oldham’s voice. How else could he sound so convincing on the title track when he sings: “Who’s gonna hold my heart / Who’s gonna be my own own own? / Who’s gonna know when all is dark that she is not alone?”

The Walkmen, You & Me

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A night album, a moon album, a growler, a grower. We listened to it once, and then put it on again. And then again. And then again. Let’s start with the music: the main instrument is Hamilton Leithauser’s world-weary voice, and the rest of the band works around it, with meticulous percussion and bass lines that carry the musicality of each song. The guitars, organs, and extra touches like horns and strings are used to grand effect, but never crowd the track. And the music is really, really great. Adding another layer of complexity to You & Me, Leithauser’s lyrics seem to tell an impressionistic story over the course of the album’s fifty minutes. The opener, “Dónde Está la Playa,” seems to tell the story of a soured affair with a married woman the narrator has while on vacation. The same narrator seems to move, quite literally, through the songs, lamenting about a life on the road while also recognizing the small joys and adventures that come with such a lifestyle. On “Seven Years of Holidays,” Leithauser cries “Well, I’ve traveled so far and I’m worn / And I’ve lived in a suitcase for too long” before conceding that “The whole world around us is too small.” On the gorgeous and lilting “Red Moon,” he pines: “Tomorrow morning / I hope to be home / By your side,” but he has to admit that “The riptide is pulling me under / I’m drifting, drifting away.” Tracks like “New Country” and “Canadian Girl” take a more positive outlook, but it’s the stellar build of “In the New Year” that best captures the feel of the album. “Oh, I’m just like you, I never hear the bad news / And I never will” Leithauser growls over a triumphant organ riff. “We won by a landslide / Our troubles are over” he continues, before taking the dream to a hyperbole beyond reality: “My sisters are married to all of my friends.” But as the song builds, the organ becomes dissonant, breaking into the sweetness of the fantasy. By the end of the album, the fantasy is totally punctured, as evidenced in the wistful closer “If Only It Were True.” And that’s when the listener hits repeat. You & Me is an album-album, not simply a collection of great songs, and we’d love to hear more works like this next year. Great stuff.

A Very Sun Ra Xmas

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We love Christmas music. We especially love the track, “It’s Christmas Time,” by Sun Ra’s early doo-wop group The Qualities. We first were made aware of the track via Yo La Tengo’s lovely rendition on their 2002 EP, Merry Christmas from Yo La Tengo.

The image of Sun Ra is from the Sun Ra Picture Archive, a totally radical site. And you should go there. And you should download these songs. And you should listen to them. And bring good cheer to all your friends and neighbors.

The Only Earthly Certainty Is Oblivion

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Check out this odd, possibly disturbing clip from the obscure 1986 claymation masterpiece, The Adventures of Mark Twain. Bizarre, fun stuff.

A Mercy — Toni Morrison

Edwin Turner1 Comment

a-mercy

With her latest novel A Mercy, Toni Morrison offers up more evidence of why she is possibly America’s greatest living author. As in earlier works like Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, in A Mercy Morrison examines the strange intersections of race and geography, family and culture, memory and storytelling. And like those great novels before it, at the center of A Mercy (a center, mind you that Morrison frequently works to decenter) is that great post-modern question: what is identity?

The late-seventeenth-century America of A Mercy is at once paradoxically both alien and familiar. This America is seemingly wild and free and unconstrained, yet the land–purchased with the blood of the native Indians–is worked by slaves and indentured servants. The freedom to be viciously intolerant of anyone else’s religion abounds. A lazy eye might get you burned for a witch. Life is cheap and difficult, but there is also much beauty here, and for a time, the makeshift family of characters who populate A Mercy seems happy enough. Morrison’s genius in this novel, however, is to only present these moments of contentment and happiness in fragments, interspersed between each of her character’ desires for freedom, future, family, and ultimately, self. We see glimpses of one character’s joys or sufferings through the eyes of another character, a technique that builds and layers and enriches a narrative where, honestly, very little happens. A farmer-turned-trader gets sick and dies, never finishing the house he was building. Then his wife gets sick, and sends her young slave to get the blacksmith, a free black man, who she believes can heal her. By the time he arrives, she’s better, but her ersatz family is forever sundered. Summarized, the linear plot sounds thin, but the depth of storytelling around Morrison’s deceptively simple story is marvelous. Morrison achieves this depth via the different voices and perspectives that propel her novel.

The voice of the young enslaved girl Florens initiates the novel with the enigmatic opening line, “Don’t be afraid.” Her opening command both engages and disorients (and, sign of a great novel, begs to be read again after completing the book). “Stranger things happen all the time everywhere,” she recognizes, before asking “One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?” Right away, Morrison tells us this a novel about how to read, where to find cause, and possibly, how to create one’s own agency in a world that makes slaves and servants–or food–out of almost everybody.

William Blake - Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796)
William Blake - Europe Supported by Africa and America (1796)

This question of agency runs throughout each of the chapters that alternate with Florens’s first person narrative. There’s Jacob Vaark, who takes Florens as part of a debt owed him by a fading aristocrat. Vaark is disgusted at the aristocrat’s lavish lifestyle, and although the slave trade repels him – “God help me if this is not the most wretched business” – he agrees to take Florens at the pleading of her mother (Florens will be haunted forever by what she interprets as abandonment). Vaark is, however, smitten by the slaver’s elaborate house and vows to build one just as grand. His attempt to build a castle from his own labor in the New World, a castle free from any title or rank or order is his own claim to agency. There’s also the voice of his wife Rebekkah, who spends her chapter in a pox-ridden fever dream that dips and floats and weaves through time and space. Her father essentially sells her mail-order to Jacob. She leaves the dirty, crowded Old World on a dirty, crowded ship. Stuck in dark steerage, she makes a community with a group of whores, “Women of and for men,” who, in transit, exist in a strange uncomfortable comfort, a “blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon.” Rebekkah will attempt to forge another strange, transitory family when she arrives in America. She grows quickly to love Jacob; soon, she even loves Lina, the enslaved Indian girl Jacob buys for both pity and service. Lina and Rebekkah forge an alliance, weathering the death of the Vaark’s children, as well as Jacob’s extended absences as he expands his trade. They are less ready to accept another foundling, Sorrow, who Jacob brings home (solely for pity); a little bit crazy (“daft”), she spends much of the novel mysteriously pregnant. However, Lina quickly warms to Florens, treating her as her own daughter, even if Rebekkah will not. Also there are Scully and Willard, two indentured servants who may never gain their freedom. Willard imagines the family they all comprise: “A good-hearted couple (parents), and three female servants (sisters, say) and them helpful sons.” But it’s not family, or community, or the idea of a country that A Mercy will validate. Instead, the novel suggests these concepts are ultimately transitory–like a passage over the Atlantic–and that there can only be a claiming of self.

Throughout the book, some characters gain agency, others die trying, and several lose themselves to grief and loss. But it’s Florens’s narrative that binds the text. She grows from a lovesick kid, desperate to please everyone, to a realized person with a conscious sense of her self. “The beginning begins with the shoes,” she says. “When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody’s shoes.” By the end of the novel she can go barefoot, free, in a sense, the soles of her feet “hard as cypress” – and this New World requires hard soles. And even if Morrison suggests that we need to learn to walk, hard-soled on our own feet, there is a great pleasure–a sad, sometimes sour, shocking pleasure–to be gained in walking for just a little while in these characters’ shoes. Very highly recommended.

A Mercy is now available from Knopf.

Roughing It

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Classic_Novels_pub_coverUS.indd
The American cover isn’t bad…

Simon Mason’s The Rough Guide to Classic Novels covers “a selection of 229 novels . . . from 36 countries, published between 1604 and 2002.” Roughly pocket-sized (if you have big pockets), Classic Novels provides short, simple summaries of each of the books, outlining the plot as well as contextualizing the relative importance of the novel. Mason also recommends the best English translations and discusses film adaptations (quite even-handedly), where applicable. He also includes a “Where to Go Next” bullet for each novel. Sometimes these suggestions work: liked Brave New World? Then check out Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Other times, they’re a bit nonsensical–does anyone really go to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man after they’ve made it through Ulysses?

...but we prefer the British cover
…but we prefer the British cover

But this criticism is mere quibbling; Mason does a great job with an almost impossible task–after all what books would you cover in such a limited space (and you’d have to include Ulysses, and you’d have to give it pride of place over the Portrait, right?). Simon admits in his preface that inevitably “the selection is a personal one, and not likely to be the same as anyone else’s.” Of course he includes the “classics” that will jump to anyone’s mind–Jane Eyre, War and Peace, Moby-Dick, etc., but he also includes works by Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Haruki Murakami, along with dozens and dozens of books I’ve never heard of, but now feel that I simply must read. And in exposing a potential reader to a book they’ve never heard of, Classic Novels is a success.

graphic-novels

If Danny Fingeroth’s The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels is less successful than Mason’s Classic Novels, that shortcoming is in his attempt to sanctify a canon in a medium that is still often misunderstood as a genre. While most of us will readily agree that Don Quixote and The Catcher in the Rye are classics, the canonical works of the comic book medium still need some sorting out, and many fans of graphic novels will find Fingeroth’s language a bit too-definitive. After a great first chapter that asks “What Is a Graphic Novel?,” a brief history of the comic book story-telling medium, and his own comic, “For Art’s Sake,” (a fun but forgettable overview of the graphic story-telling arts from an artist’s perspective), Fingeroth initiates the bulk of the book, “The Canon: The Sixty Best Graphic Novels.” As if his language weren’t definitive enough, he kicks the section off with “Ten Graphic Novels Everyone Should Read.” And while Fingeroth’s “Canon” and top-ten list are full of obvious choices that should certainly be there–Spiegelman‘s Maus, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, Clowes‘s Ghost World–there are also gaping holes on one hand and complete over-representation on the other, as well as some real head-scratchers thrown in to boot. Why, for instance, does Fingeroth include Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again over its vastly superior and more influential predecessor, The Dark Knight Returns? Why is Sin City canonized at all? Although Alan Moore’s From Hell is canonized, why is his controversial recent novel Lost Girls included over work like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, or Saga of Swamp Thing–all books that had a tremendous impact on comic book storytelling? Why does Dave Sim’s massive contribution Cerebus get glossed over in a single sentence, while Kyle Baker’s trifling missive Why I Hate Saturn is given pride of place on the top ten list? Fingeroth could’ve saved himself a lot of nitpicking by simply changing his language a bit to at least admit that his choices are subjective. Far more satisfying is the next chapter, “The Icons,” covering some of the most influential persons in comic history, including Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and the Hernandez Brothers. I would’ve liked to have seen this chapter expanded quite a bit (perhaps at the expense of the superfluous chapter on manga); if The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels is to be a starting place for new readers interested in this medium, “The Icons” best represents that starting place. Those interested in discovering graphic novels they haven’t heard of will also be pleased with the many full-page art reproductions throughout the book, probably its best feature. Despite its flaws, however, there is something admirable about Fingeroth’s attempt to create a canon out of a medium that has for far too long been marginalized.

The Rough Guide to Classic Novels and The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels are now available from Rough Guides,

After the jump: Fingeroth’s top ten list vs. Biblioklept’s top ten list–

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The Savage Detectives — Roberto Bolaño

Edwin Turner14 Comments

savage

I give up. I don’t know how to review The Savage Detectives.

Everyone told me I was supposed to love this book, but I didn’t. There, that’s a review. Not a good review, but there. I can’t remember a book ever taking me so long to finish or a book that I put down so often. When I truly love a book, I am moved. Often physically. Sometimes I have to stand up to read a book, I’m so moved. That’s a good book. (I never had to stand up during The Savage Detectives, although I often had to force myself to read thoroughly and not just skim). When I truly love a book, I’m a little sad and deflated when it’s over. I know a book is great if I’m compelled to go back and immediately reread sections. (Again, with Detectives, this didn’t happen). But it looks like I’m trashing the book. I shouldn’t. It has a lot going for it.

I read the first 140 pages, the journal entries of young Garcia Madero, in a blur. Funny and passionate, Madero’s voice explodes with the immediacy and intensity of youth. He joins up with the visceral realists, a group of anti-establishment poets (who no one cares about). Led by two enigmatic outsiders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the visceral realists gripe about the state of Mexican and Latin American literature, screw around, and argue with each other (no one else will listen to them). Madero paints Mexico City in the mid-1970s as vibrant, a place full of poetry and art. He becomes a biblioklept, God bless him (yet he ethically agrees not to steal from a poor old blind bookseller). He writes poems. He has sex. He runs away from home, sort of. There’s a breathless energy to Madero’s narrative that makes the book hard to put down, and the first section of The Savage Detectives, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico” culminates in one of the book’s most exciting events. Madero, Lima, and Belano help a young girl named Lupe escape from her belligerent pimp. Then, that portion of the story unresolved, the narrative shifts dramatically.

In the second section, “The Savage Detectives,” we are treated to, or subjected to, or made to endure, or made to navigate–pick your verb, please–over 450 pages of (one-sided) interviews spanning 20 years. Some of the interviewees appear consistently throughout this section, like Amadeo Salvatierra, who helps Lima and Belano in their quest to find the lost original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. Other voices only pop up once to tell a weird story about Lima or Belano–or more accurately, a weird story about themselves with Lima or Belano playing bit parts. Some of these stories, like Lima’s strange time in a Tel Aviv prison, or Belano’s tenure as a national park guard in France are great; other times they are painfully tedious or repetitive (you know, like real life).

Technically, The Savage Detectives is quite an achievement. The myriad stories in the book’s main section represent the fragmented narratives that might compose a person’s life–a series of perspectives that others have about us, views that can never add up to a unified truth. The bulk of these stories are very much about poetry, art, and travel. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Detectives is a peripatetic novel, full of specific locations and very, very explicit directions (Joyce famously claimed that were Dublin destroyed in a catastrophe, it could be rebuilt based on his novel; the same seems true for Bolaño’s Mexico City). Also like Ulysses, Detectives is an epic about the banal, ordinary things that fill our lives: jobs and eating and getting to places and having one’s friendships sour and being disappointed and so on. Lots and lots of “and so on.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of heroism and adventure–saving kids from satanic caves, stow-away sea voyages, and dodging bullets from Liberian rebels make for interesting narrative peaks. However, most of the novel remains rooted in a realism that is often dreadfully visceral in its painstaking replication of just how depressing a life could be. As the seventies and eighties turn into the nineties, things get more bleak and more depressing for Lima and Belano. And it all adds up to an incomplete picture (literally; check out the last page of the book if you don’t believe me).

o_roberto-bolano

By the time we return to Madero’s journals in the third and final part of the novel, “The Sonora Desert,” the sadness and deflation of the previous section infects and tints every aspect of the narrative. Lima and Belano, with Madero and Lupe in tow, search desperately for the forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero. Their search works as a pitiful parallel to “The Savage Detectives” section, a comment on the elusive nature of identity, and the strange disappointments that punctuate our expectations. Even the novel’s climactic ending seems understated after the monolithic middle section. And while this deflationary technique is undoubtedly a carefully considered conceit on Bolaño’s part, the payoff for the reader–this reader anyway–did not merit the effort and concentration that the book required. Or, to put it another way, after hours of time invested, I was unmoved.

As rave reviews of the English translation of his last novel 2666 begin seeping out of the critical woodwork (this month’s Harper’s has devoted a full four pages to the book), it seems that Bolaño will top most critics’ lists again this year. At over 900 pages and reportedly full of grim, bleak violence, it’s hard to imagine 2666 will be any easier to get through, and as FS&G summarily ignored our requests for a review copy, there’s no pressing obligation, I suppose. The critical praise heaped on 2666 this year will surely lead interested readers to The Savage Detectives. I think Mark Twain’s infamous note at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would provide the best warning to these potential readers: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” While no serious critic could dismiss Bolaño’s lyrical skill and complex control of the many voices that populate Detectives, I think a number of readers–serious readers–would not be wrong for considering the tome a bit overrated.

The Tenth Muse — Judith Jones

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tenth-muse

Judith Jones’s memoir The Tenth Muse, aptly subtitled My Life in Food, chronicles the life of one of the most influential foodies you’ve never heard of. The book moves quickly through Jones’s terse blueblooded Vermont childhood, through her time at Bennington College, and her first trip to Paris, all the while keeping Jones’s passion for food as its focus. This passion leads her to move to Paris after her college days, where she and future husband (and fellow writer) Evan Jones can eat pâté to their hearts’ content while palling around with writers, artists, and other beautiful people (even Balthus pops up in her narrative here). After some years of bohemian bliss, Jones returns to the U.S. to champion Julia Child, working hard to get her seminal cook book Mastering the Art of French Cooking to an American audience (she also manages to get The Diary of Anne Frank translated for publication as well). Shocked at the paltry selection of fresh foods in New York City, Jones and her now-husband Evan learn to make many of the fine French foods they enjoyed in their Paris days. At the same time, they continue to introduce a wider audience of Americans to cooks like James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher and Edna Lewis. Through it all, food (rich, thick, luscious French food) remains the primary focus, with the art of writing–and editing–a close second. Jones’s narrative abounds with anecdotes of chefs (Claudia Roden, Lidia Bastianich), editors, and writers (Camus, Capote, Updike), but readers who pine for psychological introspection or juicy melodrama won’t find much to chew on here.

Jones tends to gloss over information that most memoirs would milk for maximum drama. Evan was married when she first began living with him, a fact that would’ve scandalized many women in the 1950s but here goes largely unremarked. Two teenage children are adopted with little explanation or follow-up. Even the focus of Jones’s mastectomy returns to food, her pre-op meal, which Evans sneaks in to the hospital (“good pâté de campagne, some ripe cheese, a baguette, and a bottle of wine”). Also, readers who tend to pay attention to matters of class and economics might find Jones’s complete lack of self-reflection on how her wealth and background have allowed her to live and eat so richly a bit distasteful, particularly when she rails against the state of the modern American kitchen (too unused, or too full of processed, “quick and easy solutions.” Jones would have us killing and dressing beavers we catch on our vast estates, apparently. (Relax, I’m exaggerating (although she does prepare a beaver her son-in-law shoots)–but seriously, preparing a duck for dinner is not nearly as easy as she cheerily suggests)). But ultimately in The Tenth Muse, such lack of reflection simply leaves room for the food, which is really why you want to read this book anyway.

Jones caps off her book with over 80 pages of recipes, lovingly arranged in their own sort of narrative, one that parallels her life story. Jones includes favorite dishes from her early youth (“Spaghetti and Cheese”), plenty of French favorites (“Boudin Blanc,” simple “Baguettes,” “Brains with a Mustard Coating”), and recipes from her country estate (“Gooseberry Tart”). The selection of recipes at the end, “Cooking for One,” inspired by her continued love of complex cooking even after the death of her husband, is particularly poignant (Jones includes seven things to make from one duck).

The Tenth Muse may not meet the usual memoir-reader’s needs for salacious detail or analytical introspection, but those who simply want a glimpse into the life of an influential foodie–and some great recipes to boot–will not be disappointed. Recommended.

The Tenth Muse is now available in paperback from Anchor Books.

A Desolation, A Simplicity, to Which the Trappings of a Gaudy World Make a Strange Back-ground

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Drawing of Adrian Jones by Michael Fay
Drawing of Adrian Jones by Michael Fay

In Section IV of his Prelude, William Wordsworth evokes the most moving encounter with a veteran of war that I have ever read. At first reticent to be anything but a voyeur, the narrator (Wordsworth, in all likelihood), slips “into the shade/ Of a thick hawthorn” to spy on the “meagre man” with a “ghastly” mouth “in military garb” resting on a “mile-stone.” As the poor ex-soldier, “Companionless,” begins to issue “low muttered sounds, as if of pain / Or some uneasy though,” the narrator shakes his “heart’s specious cowardice” and hails the veteran as a human being, asking for his story. It turns out that the guy is slowly–and with great difficulty–returning to his “native home.” Wordsworth takes the veteran to a nearby friend’s house for companionship and rest, before returning to his own home in a contemplative mood. Full text of the “Discharged Soldier” episode after the jump–

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