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Brain in a Girl-Shaped Jar
Objective: To combine the sensibilities of Hunter Thompson and Diane Ackerman by looking at wildlife while drunk off my ass and then writing about it.
Current music: Led Zepplin - Whole Lotta Love.
Just to keep it mixed up, contrary to my recent experience, I recently read an almost-sorta-genre novel that I enjoyed and a nonfiction book that I didn't.
The novel was Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay. I'd been sort of dubious about Chabon after seeing the movie of Wonder Boys, but the premise of K&C lured me into buying a copy, which sat around on my shelf until I decided (prompted partly by Chabon's recent Nebula win and partly by the desire to determine if such a thick book needed to continue taking up real estate on my shelf) to pick it up. It lacks the pure all-of-a-piece brilliance of Murakami and Ishiguro, to name a couple of other prominent lit. authors who have given the certain practitioners of the genre the shits by beating our leading assholes at their own games, but it's a solidly enjoyable novel which balances its improbable and sometimes melodramatic incidents on each other with a mortar of able characterization and carefully modulated tension. Key to redeeming the author of Wonder Boys, in my mind, was the sensitive and fair portrayal of the main female character, Rosa Saks, and her relationship with each of the title characters. Granted, any film made of this book will fail the Bechdel test like Mick Jagger peeing in a cup. Michael Chabon sticks here with that All-American and often crashingly dull theme, how Boys become Men and Men deal with being Men(tm). But under the circumstances, is could have been much worse, and the historical context goes a long way to redeem what he does.
The nonfiction book was Donald Thomas's Villain's Paradise: A History of Britain's Underworld. This incredibly promising title starts out with an interesting thesis - that the persistence of rationing beyond the point when post-war Britons had been led to expect unprecedented prosperity was the spark that lit the fire that eventually belched out such ashes as the Krays - but loses itself in the Great Grimpen Mire fairly early on. Thomas is good at laying out the numbers on the ground, how many pounds worth of nylons were stolen in this heist or that. But he can't seem to put together a cohesive story from chapter to chapter. He often tries to tie political impulses to public mood to crime rates, but flounders in explaining why, then, in what he claims is an era when things went continually from bad to worse, Britain became ever more liberal in terms of limiting and then abolishing the death penalty; he merely reports the public as perennially, ineffectually discontented with the lack of floggings and hangings. His occasional attempts to deal with sex crimes and serial killings seem badly out of place in his overall focus on economic causes and effects of crime, since he lacks the depth to contextualize them, but instead treats them as lurid and incomprehensible. And he inexplicably attempts to brings the story, which has lingered in the territory between the end of WWII and 1965, up to the present in the last chapter by spending a few paragraphs decrying "hysteria" over pedophiles and a few paragraphs decrying the loss of civil liberties in the 21st century.
So there you go.
Back in February, I made a short post about one Dr. John Francis, who abstained for roughly two decades from speaking or riding in cars, initially as a reaction to an oil spill in San Francisco Bay, later as a way of developing, and I use this word knowing that it will make some people itch but it's really the best way of describing what actually happened here, mindfullness. It was serendipitous, then, that LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program wound up giving away copies of his newly revised autobiography: Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence.
.I had extremely high expectations, and I have to say that this book lived up to them. I'm not, as a rule, someone who is easily swept away by the inspirational, and I like to think that living in Ithaca as long as I did gave me a nose for self-serving liberal do-gooder rhetoric. But I was inspired by this book, and moved. You can't accuse Francis of being a trust-fund hippie. He continually acknowledges and reevaluates his own motives and the difficulties that his choices cause for others, avoiding self-righteousness. He describes natural beauty and human goodness without being precious.
The nitty-gritty: the story opens in 1971, a few months before Francis's decision to abandon the automobile, and ends in 1994 when he comes to the conclusion that he can best help the people he's met on his journey if he leaves open the possibility of using motorized vehicles on a case-by-case basis. In between, he acquires two degrees and a plethora of surprising jobs, crosses the country, is frozen, dehydrated, and threatened by violent racists, almost buys a mining claim, and is eventually tapped to work for the U.S. government. Much of this happens while he's using pantomime and occasional note-writing for all his communication needs, and carrying a banjo. Many of the descriptions - of the community's noble yet often futile response to the oil spill that drove the author's big change, of walking through the nukeiferous wastelands of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, of meeting with monks who are repairing a roof and listening to the Rolling Stones - stick in the mind; the descriptions of the oil-slicked birds made me cry a little, but I'm like that.
The pacing of the book is very interesting. The portions drawn directly from his journals are dated, and you soon realize that time is flowing in that uneven fashion characteristic of summer vacations, years off from college, and the other periods - all-to-fleeting in most people's lives - when we're not chasing anything. This despite the fact that Francis does have a goal in mind on each of his expeditions; that goal is just not as important, narratively speaking, as the getting there. At first disconcerting, this quirk quickly becomes enjoyable. There's also very little follow-up from episode to episode - the feel is almost picaresque, although without the satirical edge that the word connotes. Ultimately, I found that this made for a very relaxing read, the textual equivalent, more or less, of the mood I was in when this picture was taken:
This is a good feeling, which I recommend
So, to sum up: recommended book, thoroughly enjoyable without being nice, and I would hope that, given the tenor of the times, it will be wildly successful.
You know, I didn't really expect the mermaid story to be so well received.
Congratulations to all the other nominees, who I expect will kick my ass. I mean, I know for a fact that Jeff Vandermeer drinks absinthe from a human skull. Whereas I drink Red Hook ESB from the bottle*. It's not really a fair fight. I don't know what this Andy Duncan character drinks, but information would be appreciated...
*but not water!
Current music: Betty Davis - Don't You Call Her No Tramp.
So, last night the Park Slope Food Coop, of which I am a member, acting on a proposal brought by the Park Slope Food Coop environmental committee, of which I am also a member (although other members did far more work on this issue than I,) voted to discontinue the sale of bottled water. By a near-unanimous vote of the General Meeting, no less.
I was, to be honest, expecting it to be wildly contentious. American liberals, especially in Park Slope, are not immune from the common and devastating mental disorder that leads so many of my brethren to confuse a set of highly constrained but apparently individual-driven consumer choices and a degree of personal comfort with the God-given liberty and justice that has, I am assured, flowed down like a stream of milk and honey through the history of the good old U.S.A. (I'm betting that if you left a stream of milk and honey out in the sun for very long, it would be equally as curdled and fetid as American history, so let's say that that part of the metaphor stands.) For once, the combination of rhetorical appeals, meticulous research and prolonged discussion that I've always instinctively felt ought to be the proper way to persuade people of things actually worked. Of course, the fact that plastics turned out to be the current weirdo scaremongery contaminant story of the month, supplanting the pharmaceuticals in tap water scare, didn't hurt at all.
Still, it was nice to be able to see my social and environmental convictions working totally in sync for once. The downside to shipping water from Fiji in small packages made of bits of dead dinosaur that will most likely be used once and then disposed of in such a way that they will contribute to making the water closer at hand less drinkable is so self-evident that it reads like a Douglas Adams parable. And only a libertarian would argue that allowing governments to sell off their arbitrary claims to certain bodies of water or the parts thereof to large corporations so that the said corporations can then sell back the water to those among the citizenry who can afford to pay makes sense from the standpoint of overall human well-being or even our instinctive ape-sense of alleged justice. The arguments we heard against it were almost all of the "precious bodily fluids" type, centering around fluoride, chlorine, tiny crustaceans, and other things that my elementary school teachers assured me were good for me (although I may be confusing "tiny crustaceans" for "learning to get along with the other children" again.) I can understand why people have this haunting fear of being unwittingly contaminated and destroyed from within, but can't we go back to making scifi movies about it? That was funner.
In short, we hit it out of the park! As it were.
Next up; getting rid of plastic bags. Now that ought to be fun.
Current mood: triumphant.
Pictures (not by me) of some snapping turtles in the Central Park Reservoir indulging in sexy fun times. Although this reservoir is no longer an active part of NYC's drinking water system, I still feel that this ties in nicely with
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q_spade's observation that anything that doesn't kill New Yorkers makes them stronger.In other news, I tried to read Liz Williams' Poison Master but gave up after three chapters. I think that if I don't get hold of the most recent issue of Weird Tales quickly I might be burned out on fantasy entirely, which would be awfully awkward.
So apparently with the right shit on your resume you can shoot a guy 50 times for trying to avoid you and get acquitted. Who knew? (Except those other cops in LA. And Detroit. And Chicago. And....)
So, shortly after I waxed obnoxious about story, I received via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's Program a copy of Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story by Leslie Van Gelder. Now if there's one thing I like more than exploring story, it's exploring place, as you know. So I dived right in.
It was a bit of a mixed salad. On the whole, I appreciated Van Gelder's approach, which was jigsaw-esque rather than linear; she dropped in a piece about wilderness and the stories we tell ourselves about that, and then a piece about home and the stories we tell about that, and then a piece about ruins and the stories that we tell about them, all building a large, panoramic view her subject; but occasionally I got the impression that she was trying to squeeze in a piece that didn't fit, most awkwardly when she dealt with her mother's suicide. The subject of a parent's mental illness and how it transfigures the place called home into something that doesn't fit the necessary narrative criteria of "home" would make an interesting book in itself, but there wasn't space to deal with it here. The other recurring flaw was an irritating vagueness in the language - some of it might be chalked up to academic habits, but those don't generally bother me and my sense was more that she was shying away, being too deferential and qualifying. Myself, I like a book that will stand up and argue with me.
That said, there were many particularly shining moments. The whole discussion of cave paintings, and the modern drive to appropriate them and imbue them with a mystical significance that their creators might very well never have intended, was both incisive and funny; much of the material on naming and relationships, presented in the context of the narrator nearly getting eaten by blackflies in backwater Canada, was damn cool.
Of the people on the f-list, I think this book would most appeal to
suzanna_o.In other news, is it just me or does anyone who has anything to do with ferrets end up being three olives short of a loaf sooner or later?
Information: In my next major chunk of free time, I plan to attempt to possess Judd Apatow, control his body, and force him to stop making movies with painfully stupid premises. Watch for his/my/our hilarious yet poignant documentary on Marbled Murrelets to hit theaters sometime in 2030, and the follow-up Luther Burbank biopic sometime after the Great Old Ones rise.
Question: Does the fact that the Yale thing is second-level make Something in the Mermaid Way more or less prescient?
Carrie Laben: two steps ahead of Yale students since 1996!
Current music: David Bowie - Fill Your Heart.
Put cell phone through laundry. Go me!
Read Tom Piccirilli's Headstone City on the plane down. Interesting book (although the blending of fake and real Brooklyn place names was a bit jarring at first); shit ending. The problem with paranoia/nature-of-reality books is that the weirder things get as you go along, the harder it seems to be to get to an ending that makes sense, is consistent, and doesn't feel like a cop out. That said, I think that Tananarive Due's The Between handled its similar conundrum better. The ride was enjoyable up to that last bit, though.
Lots of birds. Details later in the usual spot; pictures eventually.