WaPo Video review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

If you think I'm wrong when I say that Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is released today, it's because you've been hearing far too much about it already. Somebody's marketing department needs to learn about over-hype and literary fatigue. The backlash has started already. But, seriously, today is only the beginning.


I don't just dislike Franzen's novels, I dislike the man. It's not that he spurned Oprah. It's that he said ok to being her book selection so he could sell millions of copies but then refused to be on the show. If you don't like the whiff of mainstream popularity, don't steal its money and head for the hills. Also, I'm just not in the mood to read another book about middle-class white men and their existential crises. Poor white men, my heart aches for them.


Below is a mixed review which sounds about right. Sounds very much like The Corrections.


See ya. I've got some fun books to read.

Inception: Deception of the Supposedly Thought-Provoking Film

this article contains major spoilers 

Recently, I read the phrase "the medium is the medium" in reference to social networking and how fitting that I was treated to a trailer about that Facebook movie whilst I waited for Inception to begin. I'll get back to that. Given that there will be thousands of online reviews about the film, I'm going to offer some thoughts on one aspect of the film (and reaction to the film) which vexes me.

First, some quick impressions: 

• I liked the internationalist aspects of the film, Japan, Paris, Mombasa, Los Angeles, some rocky, snow-capped mountains; it this respect the film has been compared to James Bond movies, my favourite part of James Bond movies. The bit in Kenya had that post-colonial yet colonial feel, white men doing shady deals in a exotic and dangerous locus. No, it's not politically correct but I would have been fine with the film spending most of its time in Africa. More Hollywood action films should be shot there.

• No character was written to fulfill a stereotypical role (like comic relief or the best friend) except for the crazy wife who had to played be a French actress. But even then the idea is sufficiently understated to pass muster. Ellen Page is not only luminous but you can see her think about what a character had just told her. I was not familiar with actor Tom Hardy. Good find. The entire cast is great.

• Fisher Jr. having his subconscious trained against extraction. I love it when a movie is honest about setting me up for something, makes me forget it and then surprises me with it again later. Advantage Nolan.

• With so many levels of reality, what's at stake for the characters is watered down. Hitchcock could build scenes of almost unbearable tension with the simplest of ideas. When ideas get too complicated and a same life can be lost to limbo in three different levels of dreams, the effect nullifies itself.

• Also, limbo did feel like enough of a threat for me to feel a sense of urgency and danger. So many abstractions in the film gave you the notion from the get go (a notion confirmed in the last scene) that the entire thing could all be in the mind, thus reducing, if not obliterating, a sense of danger.

• I realise Nolan doesn't do sex, but are we to believe that men have such tame dreams?  Doesn't anybody realise that aside from Mal, the only woman that appears is a projection of Eames? But the dreams in Inception aren't dreams, are they? This made up world belongs to the world of gaming with a designer, different levels to complete, car chases and everything exploding all the time.

• I have a bone to pick with some of Inception's action scenes. It's clear that if any of us were to find ourselves witness to an epic battle or a car chase in real life, we would be so overwhelmed and confused, we would find ourselves unable to give the police anything like a complete description of what went down. Films have for a long time given us an objective view of such scenes, and even when the camera is positioned to make us feel as though we were in the scene ourselves, we are always given enough overall P.O.V.  to understand/verify that the stunt people and stunt designers have done a sound job. We are shown that what we saw makes cinematographic sense.  This contract between filmmakers and audience, that an action scene should make some empirical sense as understood within Hollywood suspension of disbelief, is breaking down fast. Now, under the guise of reality (I'm guessing) we are too often given the reality of what would be a partial view. We are given a camera P.O.V. of the shocked and the sense of being overwhelmed by fighters, gunfires, car explosing, glass shattering all around us. This  "more" realistic sense of disorientation is not entirely dissatisfying, I just hope filmmakers realise we know they are cheating and, in some ways, dampening our enjoyment. The satisfaction of a good fighting scene or a car chase is to see the artistry that went into making such complicated scenes make sense. Compare the eighteen-wheeler scene in Terminator 2 with the very confusing car chase scene in the second Matrix movie. Actions scenes don't need to make any geophysical (or for that matter scientific sense) anymore. I believe that is a pity. Inception is not the greatest offender in this but it is worth noting.

Mental masturbation cannot be intellectually fertile

So, I come to the aspect of Inception which bothers me on many levels (hahaha). Simple: the idea that Inception is a thought-provoking film offends me. In my view, it's anything but. This matters to me because summer is still young and I've got BBQs and all manner of social events to go to and when Inception comes out on DVD before Christmas, it will be just in time for another very social season. This means roughly six months of listening to people, mostly guys, argue the minutia of Inception like they are participating in a truly philosophical discussion. They will argue about whose dream is whose, the implications thereof, is the entire film a dream, are our lives just about dreaming. Philip K. Dick and then Ridley Scott got there decades ago with Blade Runner and it was hardly a philosophical question then. Books and movies about solipsistic notions are attractive and it's easy to understand why. For the artist, it affords the ability to toy with boundaries of reality and to the young or geeky readers, it gives them the hope that their actual lives may be much better than the one they are entrapped in right now.

Solipsism is a seductive idea, but a circular one that doesn't lead anywhere. I believe this is why certain types are so enamoured with it. A movie like Inception derived from vaguely solipsistic ideas will give rise to thousands of discussions everyday because to talk about ambiguity in the film gives pretence to complexity of thought. 

Inception is only the latest fetish object in a long string of cultural items in a collection of subjects for a certain type of geeks. Trekkies have been around since the sixties and have always been deemed innocuous. It is however the elevation of geekdom which has brought obsession upon the mundane into the mainstream. It became cute to dedicate one's every spare moment, or one's every moment in life to the dismantling of every aspect of a TV show, scifi book or film. The advent of the internet and social networking allowed disparate geeks to "meet" and grow and validate each other. Asperger has become a desirable condition, one that many geeks satisfactorily brandish proudly upon self-diagnosis.

Asperger is a mild form of autism and one hallmark of this terrible disease is the inability and difficulty to bond. Autism is in part the difficulty to understand the human condition and to have empathy. A person with Asperger or autism may be able to recognise patterns, identify weak signs the rest of us would overlook but that maybe due to a lack of interference from the understanding of certain complexities.

We are talking about different types of complexities and ambiguities when we discuss, for example, David Lean's A Passage to India based on the novel  by E.M. Forster rather than Inception. When we engage in a discussion about whether or not a Muslim Indian man raped a white British woman, we plunge into far more challenging grounds. A conversation about ambiguity that touches upon real life and real life concerns can lead to enlightenment, self-knowledge and greater knowledge of the other. A conversation about details of Inception will likely be pornographic. Obsessed with meaningless detail and circular. Such forensics amount to mental masturbation and mental masturbation can never be intellectually fertile.

I'm not saying people shouldn't talk about Inception, I am saying that we should stop pretending the film is thought-provoking and that discussions about it have value.

In a sense, I'm as guilty as anyone else, for we speak and type words endlessly these days without putting much meaning in them. Whether it is in blogs, social networks, or on the mobile phone, we waste words every day. Inception proved effective to me on one level (ha...), it was a gigantic, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars Hollywood hammer. Only a few minutes into the movie, I dreaded how Nolan, as one of our realm's major architects, had made the world outside just a bit more artificial with rooms across the world filled with masturbatory discussions about his film.

The David Foster Wallace Archive

DFW's notes on a DeLillo book

I try not to think about David Foster Wallace's passing anymore but when I do the idea that the best author of his generation hug himself at the age of forty-six is almost unbearable. Studying writing around the time DFW published Infinite Jest was a hopeful time, a time for the possibilities of renewal in the much worn-out form of fiction writing. And that was all due to this Gargantuesque, avant-garde book. We didn't all like him but he inspired us. As precise and as disciplined as DFW must have been with his writing, the riffs, the footnotes, the erudition which made every turn of the page a 52 pick-up move, all those scattered pieces of writing arranged themselves into seemingly easy brilliance. We can't all be geniuses but a genius like DFW jacked up our writing up to the next level.


If writers like Pynchon are brilliant, that sort of twenty-minute-drum-solo writing never inspired me. It intimidates and it's difficult to read. DFW by contrast gives the reader so much pleasure. Reading the title piece in the collection of essays A Supposed Fun Thing I'll Ever Do Again, I had to stop reading it on public transport. I wasn't simply laughing out loud, I kept hurting my ribs and chocking due to uncontrollable laughing fits which never seemed to end. The type of display which is more than other commuters can bear at 8 in the morning.


He was the writer of my generation and his passing in 2008 reminded me of long discussions with Claire and Carmine and Peter and Rob about DFW over pitchers of beer at the Copa. All these came back to the surface a couple of weeks ago via a New Yorker article announced the University of Texas had acquired the David Foster Wallace Archive. The collection includes multiple drafts of his published writings, graffitied copies of books by other authors, "the archive also contains an extensive amount of writing from Wallace’s childhood and youth: a whimsical childhood poem about vikings, signed “David Foster Wallace”; school essays about “Pride and Prejudice” and “Moby Dick”; four issues of “Sabrina,” the Amherst humor magazine he co-founded with his roommate, Mark Costello. For an author who leapt with astonishing rapidity from youthful promise into adult virtuosity, the juvenilia may prove especially illuminating."


The archive will be open to the public this autumn. It just might be worth the trip to Texas.

Are mass market books bringing us all down?

This Guardian blog comments on the disgust from elitist corners about the recent wave celebrity novels and ghosted memoirs in Britain (one multi-million copie best selling memoir "written" by Katie Price, a professional slag who makes Pamela Anderson seem positively classy, distinguished and regal). Blog writer Robert McCrum nags the reader with a familiar refrain about popular culture being, well, popular, going back to the Middle Ages. He compares the printing press to the internet, few of the 16th century tracts and pamphlets of reportedly disreputable nature from that age survive, but McCrum is sure they must have been just as badly written as our emails and tweets.

The industrial revolution, he goes on, gave rise to a wide class of professional writers and just as in the Middle-Ages and Renaissance, those times saw great writers find their voice above the fray.

McCrum doesn't fulfil the promise of his blog subtitle, how mass market sales support better fiction, but one intuits that  it must be true. What's interesting however is whether recent mass market phenomena principally in the UK but also in North America have dumbed down the entire industry.

I'm always struck by stories about what ravenous readers people used to be in the Eastern block. In Russia, Pushkin was the best seller. All Russians knew their Dostoeysky backward and forward. Within  a couple of years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, Danielle Steel was the best seller. That's one hell of a cultural shift. Pushkin readers didn't start devouring Proust once bourgeois lit became available. Steel didn't expand Russian readership. She actually replaced Pushkin.  People went from reading the best that world literature has to offer to reading, well, something far from the best.

This is purely anecdotal but I've noticed a similar trend amongst friends with whom I studied literature. Most read a wider range of books in the years following graduation and many continue reading literature, classic and contemporary. Many, however, do not and are reading complete trash if they are reading at all.

I'm fine with walking the same earth as the likes of Dan Brown and if the revenue he generates means that John Donne's sermons remain available in paperback, then I appreciate his contribution. Still, there's that Martin Amis short story in which poets are treated like rock stars, put up at the Beverly Hills hotel when in town and in the old Soviet Union it was like that. Poets were rock stars. I'm not advocating communist censorship of course, but there is certainly something to the idea that the lowest common denominator has a way of bringing too many of us down to its level.

The Real Brideshead

In the penultimate year of World War II, Evelyn Waugh obtained a three month leave. He asked for time off for the express purpose of writing Brideshead Revisited. Although based on events which focus on 1931, the urgency for writing this book was upon him. He told a friend he felt had to write the novel now or it would slip away forever. 

It took Waugh five months to complete the book. He wrote feverishly, two thousand fastiduously revised words every day on average.  He wrote the book in the same place where he fell in love with the Beauchamp family, the family upon which Brideshead is based on.

In 1931, Waugh had just converted to Catholicism when he befriended the Lygon girls. Their brother Hugh had just gone off with his father to France after convincing him not to commit suicide. Waugh had been close to Hugh at Oxford. 

Lord Beauchamp was a devoted father and a man of many talents. As Paula Byrne writes in Vanity Fair in an article based supporting the launch of her new book on Waugh, Lord Beauchamp was also a fan of embroidery. One of his works, "The Golfer", was showcased at the 1920 Paris Exhibition, "It depicts a naked golfer, raising his club as he concentrates on his shot. It was not just the golfers. Lord Beauchamp was said to have an 'exquisite taste for footmen'".

Homosexuality was accepted or ignored in aristocratic circles and Beauchamp's penchant was an open secret. His Lordship's brother-in-law, the second Duke of Westminster, hated him however and hired to private investigator to bring proof to King George. Many fabled retorts are attributed to the King as Westminster told the King that one of his knights of the Garter had dishonoured the "office'. One of them has King George replying he thought people went abroad to do such things. And abroad Beauchamp was dispatched, it was eternal banishment or dishonour at home. He left Britain accompanied by Hugh, an over-sensitive boy, who was the inspiration for Sebastian in Brideshead.


Beauchamp had just left Britain and his wife was divorcing him and also away from Madresfield when Waugh befriended the Lygon girls. They had been abandoned to the 136 room house which stood on four thousand acres, just like in the book, a group of kids running the place with only servants to look after them. Sibbell was twenty-four, Maimie 21 and Coote 19. Elmley, the eldest son served as an MP, dividing his time between London and his Norfolk constituency. The Lygon girls often gave parties but particularly adored Waugh who they asked over for dinner every night at Madresfield. It fascinated Waugh that the house was inhabited by the same family for eight centuries. Waugh was later closer to Coote who is Cordelia is Brideshead. Maimie was his favourite. She was a female version of Hugh.


Hugh would come back and forth. He had shaped Waugh's tastes and they had shared a great passion at Oxford. Homosexuality at Oxford was seen as a phase. It was chic to be queer and Hugh was a Peter Pan figure who refused to grow up. Very much like Sebastian in the book,it was adulthood that killed Hugh. His homosexuality, like his father's, did not regress upon graduation and he remained haunted by what happened to his father. Hugh succumbed to alcoholism and his family had to monitor him closely. 


The Lygon sisters refused to condemn their father and brother, both had given them so much love. Hugh died at the age of thirty-two. The girls were admitted to parties and led a full social life, but, tainted by scandal, they were not showered with respectable offers. Of the seven Lygon children (there was an older sister who was married and a younger son), only two left issue.


Upon reading a draft of Brideshead, Nancy Mitford recognised the Lygons at once. Waugh had a discussion with Coote before publication, explaining that the family was simply a inspiration. She did not appear to mind and often said that similarities between her family and Brideshead were exaggerated. It is well known Waugh remained exasperated at the focus on the family, insisting religion was the central theme of the book. Catholicism is the aspect most likely to unnerve both readers and critics of Brideshead.


We love to read a great story about an extraordinary family and Brideshead Revisited is certainly that. 

Evelyn Waugh: The Comrade Bingo store

[Vanity Fair]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prequel book trailer

Book trailers: are they a good idea? We think so. If books can be publicised in magazines and on billboards, why not the youtubes and movie theatres near you?


This trailer is for the prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Elizabeth Bennet is suitably Anne Hathaway-ish, the tricorn hatted zombie is photographed in a gorgeous sepia green. Blood, gore, humour. It made us want to read it! In bookstores on the 23rd of March.


The Bennet sisters are ready. Are you?


[Comrade Bingo's Austen/zombies bookstore]

Alan Bennett telling tales

Alan Bennett reads about his childhood in this new (could be a repeat) series for BBC7, Telling Tales. It's for old fogeys, at least for old fogeys at heart like me and for those who love seamless prose. There's nothing like Bennett's voice, with its feminine crackling tips and its deep resonant core.

The series started a couple of days ago but you can catch up for the next five days here.

Look back at Alice: A.S. Byatt remembers Wonderland

In keeping with my curmudgeon-y film day, I declare I have no intention of seeing Tim Burton's Alice. One, I've got Burton's imagination down pat, I know exactly what the film is going to look like. Two, film makers are going to have to make good films rather than resorting to newfangled techniques, 3D, and other Oz-ean gimmicks to get my bum back in one of those movie theatre seats. Three, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is too important a book to me for me to see on film.

Thanks to Burton nonetheless. The brute force of the Hollywood machine has propelled all things Alice back on the tip on the culture's mind. It's a well-known story but not one that isn’t discussed as often as you'd think. Even in academia, few have attempted interpretations. The truth is no one really knows what to make of the books. Undeterred, A.S. Byatt admits in her Guardian article that Alice stands on its own, "it's different from other imagined worlds."

Time and space are different here, "progress in the looking-glass world is in mad rushes and jumps at inordinate speeds across the chessboard". It's some "other kind of order", perhaps one emanating from Carroll understanding of the order of nature. His background was in mathematics.

Alice makes you think about its language, it makes you, along with Alice, try to sort out a world that only keeps amplifying its resistance to analysis. Alice remains in control of her mind until she recognises this world’s she’s in for what it is.

Byatt makes a fascinating comparison between Alice and other children’s book of the time. Distinctive features of 19th century British children’s literature include, self-sufficience, the undefeatable armour of the British child. Also, British children keep their wits about them even as they are often taken to different, worlds and wonderlands.

This, I believe, arcs back to Defoe’s 18th century tale of Robinson Crusoe, a tale which heralds steely British nature. By recreating as much of the British world and his British-ness on the island, Crusoe can thrive in any desolate, barbarian setting.

These were times of indoctrination, in the unwavering superiority of the British empire, from Defoe’s time to its height, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Alice, Kipling's Jungle Books and The Wind in the Willows were published.

British inner strength, the one that can see it through any jungle or wonderland, was originally based on the real time Robinson Crusoe, who was found on a deserted island, alive, yes, but absolutely barking mad. One has to wait until Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, to get a real taste of the frailty of the human mind (even British) when confronted with a “savage” environment.

In the end though, the hardiness of Alice’s mind and her self-control is not an unworthy trait to convey to young minds, especially young girl’s minds. And, it goes without saying that it’s Carroll’s imagination and our imagination of it that makes Alice a singular gem in world literature.

[The Guardian]

An Africa Woman in Scots

I wouldn't exactly say I pride myself on my literary tastes but five years of higher education in literary study mean that what constitutes literature and good writing are the only things in life about which I possess a sterling sense of confidence and serene righteousness.

There are authors out there who are read in the tens of millions and who write very badly indeed and, abhorring snobbery of any kind, I have my guilty pleasures too. But my puff-pastry reading must be written by a good writer. Mystery books are my weak spot and that is probably the only reason I have read Alexander McCall Smith. Now that I think of it, I was sceptical by all the hoopla when the Detective Agency talk began and ASM was finally foisted upon me by some book group.

As Alexander McCall Smith once said, all crime writers (AMS's neighbour Ian Rankin for one) refuse to say they write crime fiction but in the case of AMS the case is easier made. The No. 1 Ladies Detective series is about Precious Ramotswe, a woman who happens to own a detective agency rather than being about crime.

I was a fan of the first book of the series and read the second but gave up on AMS until the Telegraph began to serialise Corduroy Mansions, the first book in a new fiction series which was followed up this year in the pages of the London paper with the excellent The Dog Who Came Out of the Cold.

The Corduroy Mansions series may not be a huge shift from the Mma Ramotswe books, and yet, when set in London, the Wodehousean qualities of ASM's fiction come to the surface. The Corduroy Mansions world is less rooted in a completely fantastic world like the one invented by Wodehouse, but the vacant headedness of the characters and the innocuously lurid situations they find themselves in definitely echo the author of the Jeeves books.

Both Wodehouse and perhaps to an even greater extent McCall Smith, as far as contemporary standards apply, are light hearted authors who also happen to be good stylists.

This month, AMS has decided to publish his latest Mma Ramotswe book in Scots titled Precious and the Puggies meaning Precious and the monkeys. Obviously, I don't know as much as I should because I had to be told that Scots and Gaelic Scot are two entirely different languages. According to wiki, Scots is "the Germanic language variety traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster. It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in the Highlands and Hebrides." Having heard but not read Scots, it seemed to me it wouldn't be too difficult to master, a bit like learning Middle English. I could be wrong.

The English version of Precious and the Puggies comes out next year but I will try to conquer the intricacies of amazon.co.uk and obtain the original version subito presto. No doubt the time AMS has spent in Africa contributed to his concern for languages at risk of being forgotten. "Every language has something to offer," ASM tells the Scotsman, "a different way of looking at the world, a stock of poetry and song. The disappearance of a language is like the silencing of some lovely bird." Alexander McCall Smith should be commended for using his multi-million readership in an effort to attract attention to the problem.

[Comrade Bingo's Alexander McCall Smith aStore]

Checklists: surgeons, the mentally-challenged and me

It was a bit of a shock, all those years ago, channel surfing and falling on a checklist with items such as

wash your hands

bring keys

bring bus pass

make sure the door is locked

make sure your fly is up

Et cetera. "That's my list!" I thought. Ok, my list was a bit less basic but bringing key and bus pass were certainly in there.

The next few seconds filled me with pure dread. These lists were for mentally-challenged people deemed capable of living alone but who needed a little help with their forgetfulness.

I never made a "basic list" again. I continued making lists for groceries and particularly hectic days, but I was thoroughly and utterly shamed. Damn you Life network.

I later learned Albert Einstein was just as forgetful as I am but that factoid failed to provide any solace. It's not as though I forget my keys because my brain is too busy pushing boundaries in the world of physics. And I never read about Einstein having to resort to lists.

Enter Atul Gawande. He's been everywhere this week from the Today programme on the BBC to The Daily show with Jon Stewart, flogging his new book, The Checklist Manifesto.

One hundred thousand people die from post-surgeons complications in the U.S. each year. With the help of Boeing, Gawande and his team devised a two minute checklist for surgical teams to go use before every procedure. Gawande says the death rate from complications could be reduced by one third. Surgeons resisted at first, some still do.

It is believed that the checklists saved two hundred lives in a programme covering eight hospitals in the U.S.. When polled, eighty percent of surgeons from those hospitals said they loved the checklist, twenty percent said they hated it. When that twenty percent was asked whether they would want their surgeon to use the checklist if they were to be operated on, ninety four percent of them said yes.

I'm not sure one needs to shell out money to be told how to make checklists for everyday life, but Gawande certainly deserves a plug here for validating my need for lists. And basic steps such as "wash your hands" is on the surgeons' checklist.

Phew.

The Checklist Manifesto on Amazon

[The Daily Show] [Today]

Those who know celebrities

• 
  

Maya

by Alastair Campbell (Canada, Hutchison; $39, UK, Hutchison; £18.99)

Available 4 February 2010

Steve Watkins, logistician, is on the verge of closing a mega-deal at work and on the verge of becoming a father. His childhood friend, now international superstar Maya, believes she is at a crossroads professionally. Meanwhile, Steve thinks it is her marriage to TV presenter Dan Chivers which requires reassessment.

These are the elements that create the perfect storm making Alastair Campbell's Maya quite the pageturner. Steve who, having only seen Maya episodically since her marriage, allows his lifelong, yet unavowed, obsession with Maya to finally slip into full blown pathology as he gains re-entry into her life. One intrusive step leads to another and Steve loses the ability to connect the mendacity and menace of his actions to his intentions which he never doubts for a moment.

The disconnect in Steve is blatant early on and this fraught relationship Campbell sets up between the narrator and the reader contributes to the book's success. Steve's path though inevitable remains suspenseful. Steve does it all for Maya, a character who couldn't possibly be as perfect as he sees her. The characterisation of Maya is nuanced to the end and the ultimate moral judgement to be cast upon the heroine is left up to the reader.

Former Director of Communications in Tony Blair's government, Alastair Campbell is renowned for his antipathy toward the media. In turn, the media is constantly, overly sensitive and defensive to any criticism Campbell brings to bear. Critics are sure to see Maya as another blow directed at them but that could be missing the point. It is Maya and her entourage who initiate and pursue manipulation of the media. If Alastair Campbell would likely be forgiving of those who are under media scrutiny and acknowledge the need for stars to control their image, he leaves the reader space to dissent from that view.

The lack of clear heroes and villains in Maya is but one aspect which gives the book a unique place between mass market fare and literary fiction. Campbell may have just found a way to break into vast new strata of readership.

Comrade Bingo has an Alastair Campbell Amazon page