Get me them socks!

D-WAYNE WADE

During the 2008 season, D Wade was more of a factor during the commercials between quarters than the actual games, but his Olympian performance is serving notice: he’s back. Chuck’s #1 speed dial shut it down at the end of last season to rest his dinged up body. Wade’s aggressive offense puts him on the receiving end of LeBron-type punishment, but Flash doesn’t have LeBron’s frame. So as he limped into the locker room at the end of last year, with his Heat mired in the shit and the basketball world’s attention falling on the renewed Lakers Celtics “rivalry”, Wade faded from view. The perennial question: “Who’s basketball’s best?” went from multiple choice to a binary, LeBron or Kobe.

Well, all three are on this Olympic team and clearly it’s time to restart that discussion. Wade’s demonstrating a blazing first step and an ability to streak into passing lanes for easy steals. Watching him in the triple-threat at the arc reminds me of watching a defense pursue Adrian Peterson - the first guy is pretty much guaranteed to miss, so it’s on your second layer to shut him down. But just like Peterson, Wade isn’t fazed by the second man, in fact, he’s embarrassing them. Right now he’s attacking the basket with a fury I can’t remember seeing, and he’s elevating better than ever. Check the US v. Germany matchup for a master class in transition basketball - most impressive was the reverse layup as he hit the deck, followed closely by the two-handed slam in his defender’s face.

Simply put, he’s been a revelation. Wade shines even brighter compared to Kobe Bryant’s sluggish performance in these games. Kobe seems ill at ease with the international competition, and not because of the wide lane, short arc, or inconsistent officiating. It’s because of the talent level of his own squad. Kobe’s an apex predator, he has been ever since Shaq left town, and he’s only comfortable producing from the A1 position, where expectations are high. On a team full of his peers, Bryant’s game has looked scattershot and oftentimes desultory. He seems to acknowledge the egalitarian ideal of Coach K’s system, by passing up open threes he would shoot every time against the Clippers in December, but he hasn’t embraced it. He hesitates passing out of those open looks, as if he’s fighting all his best instincts.

On the other hand, Wade is showing absolutely no hesitation. You can’t even see him making decisions on the court, he’s simply transitioning from one movement to the next until the ball is in the basket. I’ve always believed Dwayne Wade is the greatest sidekick in the NBA today, on par with Scottie Pippen. Pippen was almost always the best player on the court, with the enormous exception of Jordan, who was even better than Pippen, who was already better than everybody else. So it is with Wade. In 2006, when he was playing with Shaq, Wade looked perfectly at ease and willing to specialize. After Shaq left, he looked out of sorts and less effective in the A1 position.

I don’t think Wade’s wired to succeed in that kind of position like LeBron or Kobe - if you want to play psychology, his affability and apparent humility doesn’t seem to jive with the murderous swagger the role demands. Or, if you want to talk basketball, his game isn’t expansive enough to shape an entire game. Wade’s a great defender with quick hands, and on offense he slashes better than almost anyone, but he’s intensely specialized in these two areas. The best players simply play basketball however they need to in order to win games. For instance, LeBron can fire a three point barrage to bring you back in, as well as pass, but he can also drive to the hoop for and 1s. Versatility allows dominance, essentially.

Even though he’s the 3rd guy I’d call if I’m starting an NBA franchise, Wade’s limited. He’s the kind of superstar that will exceed expectations so long as they’re reasonable. Right now he’s absolutely killing it in the sixth man spot, thriving quietly. This is something you see all over the NBA, especially with guys like Gilbert Arenas’. They’re motivated by your skepticism, and they’re looking to prove you wrong. Of course, what happens when there is nothing left to prove is another question.

Now take a look at Kobe. If you ask the impossible of him, he’ll give you the improbable - the more you ask, the more he gives. He’s not limited by anything save his own psyche. Like Hearst says in Deadwood, “I’m having a conversation that you can’t hear.”

So all of that looks like a bunch of backhanded compliments for D Wade and a bunch of apologies for Kobe. That’s not what I mean to say. Wade really has been a joy to watch, just as exciting as LeBron, and you have to wonder - might the Heat be ready for contention? I mean, if your 2 through 4 is Wade Marion Beasley, you could play crash test dummies at the 1 and 5 and still net the eighth seed in the east, right? The question will be chemistry. Remember how I was comparing Wade to Pippen? Marion fits that bill even better - so what happens when the two best complementary superstars in the NBA play together? Do they wait for madman Beasley to put on the crown? Should be something to watch.

Why, you’ve found me

WordPress has a feature that shows you which search engine terms lead people to your blog. I love this feature, mainly because this blog must be a terrible disappointment. Maybe 1 in 10 people are finding this blog useful, I imagine. Well, not anymore! Today I am going to serve you, my constituency, by providing all the information you seek and the answers you crave. Let’s begin:

The Stick Figure Enthusiasts: If you’re googling “stick figure weapons”, do you really want to read amateur criticism about Jose Saramago? Probably not. There’s been a deluge of searches all related to stick figure violence. Is this a subculture nobody told me about? “how to put wepons [sic] on stick figures,” “stick figure weapons,” “stick figure love weapons,”
“stick figures playing basketball,” “stick people with weapons,” “how to get weapons for my stick figure”. Clearly there is a niche to be filled here. Now while my artistic talents are relatively modest (I’m still trying to master the fluid style of the Lascaux bows), here is a veritable arsenal of weapons for your pleasure.

From L to R: Sword, Axe, Pistol, Morningstar (Sunflower) Nuke (Goldfish)

But it’s not just stick figure armories people are looking for, not at all. One persistent searcher was finding my blog day after day as he searched for “minotaur weapons”. Of course after I Am Legend hit theaters, a flurry of hits for “i am legend weapons”. Somebody wanted to know about “weapons in the odyssey,” and another “weapons grade knives.”

Q: What weapons does a minotaur use?
A: Mainly his wicked curved horns, once ivory but now stained pink from the blood of hapless adventurers who have stumbled into the heart of his awful labyrinth. Also, he’s been known to use an axe.

Q: What’s that gun Will Smith is carrying in I Am Legend?
A: It’s called his charisma. It’s so effective that you sat through that movie until the end where he (SPOILERS) dies, and suddenly you realize, “Hey, this movie is kinda bullshit.”

Q: What weapons were used in the Odyssey?
A: The time-honored weapons of misogyny.

Q: How do I know if a knife is weapons grade?
Socratic A: Does it have an edge? Is it not plastic? Why would you ask this question?

Then of course you have people looking for answers for their freshman English study guides.

Q: What is the one thing Billy cries at in Slaughterhouse 5?
A: IT’S AN ILL-TREATED HORSE, GUY.

Q: What are some major themes of Catch 22?
A: In no particular order: Catches, people cashing in, the individual vs. society wrt paranoia, eating your liver, Italian whores, how badly it sucks to have your entrails spill out

There’s also the vanity searches, or maybe they are stalker searches. Either way, somebody is googling Bidnam Lee and William Longano. Now I can’t answer any questions from the conceited, but let me field a few from the stalkers:

Q: Where can I find youtube video of Bidnam performing what appears to be Christian beat poetry?
A: Here.

Q: What kinds of weaponry does William Longano prefer?
A: A special-action .38 Beretta for mid-range stops, and a machete for the close in work.

But what has drawn the most people here, like moths to a Serbian flame? Yes, it’s Sasha Pavlovic, with 43 hits. I don’t know if this makes me the president of his fan club, but it’s an honor either way.

Q: Does Sasha get off the bench?
A: I believe he struggled with a contract dispute and nagging injuries this year.

Q: What’s up with his eyebrows?
A: Unsure.

Q: Is he a full-hand waver, or a three-finger waver?
A: See picture below.

Adios from the website's patron saint

The Stone Raft

OR: 52 in 08’s Stone Speed Bump

The Stone Raft represents my third foray into the works of Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, Portugal’s favorite son (one imagines). Last year I read The Gospel According to Christ, which came in at the 8 spot in the recap and provided the first book about Jesus I could stomach. In The Stone Raft, Saramago deals with territory he’s more familiar with, namely his home territory. The book is magical realism - proving that not just South American Latinos can do it - and details the period after the Iberian Peninsula breaks free of the Continent and drifts off into the Atlantic. Hence: “…at this moment we are not traveling by train, we are traveling more slowly, on a stone raft that is sailing the sea”. This fable might lack the impact of his later Blindness or the strong characters of The Gospel, but still bears his trademark narration and wry good-humor.

Diary of a Bad Year

Junot Diaz recently appeared on the Colbert Report. I dearly loved his book Drown, and I’m sure I’ll read Oscar Wao sometime soon. So I was eager to see what the Pulitzer Prize winner looked like. He was much like I expected, especially the voice, but he was clearly uncomfortable on a talk show. Diaz fixed his gaze right on the table and didn’t look up much, allowing Colbert to steamroll him conversationally. Oscar Wao is about a nerdy Dominican kid, and Colbert brought up the popular canard that a book’s main character is nothing more than a verbal proxy for its author. Diaz half-heartedly disagreed, saying Oscar is pretty much the combination of everybody he ever knew, but Colbert wasn’t having it.

I was a little frustrated to see it. This is why I like showing my work to perfect strangers, but not so much to close friends - the strangers won’t have any context to try and perform a psychological reading that the friends mind, who sometimes see it as an opportunity to get inside your head without getting you drunk first. So I try to assume a distance exists between a writer and his work, that a work billed as fiction is indeed fiction and not thinly-veiled autobiography.

J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year challenged that assumption. Coetzee - my third favorite Nobel Laureate, behind Garcia Marquez and Saramago, if you wanted to know - has written a subtle and potent book with a catholic set of interests, intriguing structure, and a fearless eye, featuring yes, Coetzee himself.

I didn’t want to believe it at first. Here’s the bones of the plot: and old man man named Senor C, (initials JC), born in South Africa and now residing in Australia, is writing a series of essays called Strong Opinions. Senor C encounters the lovely Anya in the laundry room of their apartment building, and he contracts the younger Filipina to do his typing on the manuscript.

Now I knew that Coetzee was a South African, and obviously I knew his initials, but I never imagined he would write such a nakedly personal book. Disgrace, his other work I’ve read, had a narrator that maintained a clinical distance even while he bludgeoned you emotionally. But the evidence kept mounting. I learned that Coetzee recently became an Australian citizen, and at one point Senor C references one of his previous books, Barbarians at the Gate, which is in fact a book by JM Coetzee.

Who knows why this surprised me so - perhaps I didn’t want to think it possible that a writer of Coetzee’s gifts and standing would resort to something so base as self-expression, which was widely denounced in my philosophy class on aesthetics. Though now that I think about it, I don’t know why. Something about how self-expression is barred from the gates of Art because its personal nature denies it wider artistic relevance. It’s sort of like if you convinced Randomhouse to publish a selection from your diary. That’s what I recall, anyway, I only got a B+. Go read T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” if you give a damn.

Okay, speaking of self-expression, there’s been way too many Is in this review. To business:

Bad Year, employs a novel structure, with the page divided into thirds. The top third are the cerebral Strong Opinions. The middle is diary entries from Senor C’s perspective. The bottom is Anya’s perspective, which focuses on her relationship with her bastard boyfriend Alan as well as Senor C.

Taken in isolation, each component would work. Senor C’s Strong Opinions would form a very readable volume of essays. His diary would form a good short story about an old man at the end of the line and his gorgeous young help. Finally, Anya’s POV would be another short story, this one from the young people upstairs arguing about the opinions of an old man they don’t really understand and give no credit to. But when Coetzee weaves these all together, each component strengthens and informs the others, creating a complete picture of the titular Bad Year.

Coetzee’s protagonist has a lively intellect, and Strong Opinions raises a lot of great points. One brief essay on the cultural vehemence against pedophilia questions why we are so discomfited by movies featuring depictions of adults having sex with the underage: “Should there be a ban upon publishing in print form a story, a self-proclaimed fiction, in which an appropriately petite twenty-year-old actress plays for the camera the role of a child having sex with an adult man? If not, why insist upon a ban on the filmed version of the same story, which is no more than a transposition from conventional (verbal) to natural (photographic) signs?”

Strong Opinions also has keen insight into the writer’s status these days, and should you read Bad Year, you’ll probably want to go and read the Russian greats, for Dostoyevski (I’m not even spell-checking that) figures largely into the ending. Of course, if you aren’t a writer you might not give a shit about the writer’s status. Your mileage may vary.

One of the more clever parts about the book’s structure - and again, one doesn’t think of J.M. Coetzee as much of a gamesman with his fiction - is how there’s a sort of thematic unity to each page. Each third might deal with, say, masculinity, but since they are all examining it in a different context (1st with a social context, 2nd from an old man’s perspective, 3rd with the clash of new and old masculinity), each one colors the reading of the other. In fact, the order one reads the thirds changes the way one feels about the other two thirds, so what appears to be a straightforward book turns out to be far richer and interconnected. Diary of a Bad Year examines the transition from life to art on two levels - Senor C’s relationship with Anya changes some of his opinions, and the Diary itself does the same for Coetzee, who is no different from Senor.

Shit, I’m confused.

Out Stealing Horses

When I’m reading, I dog ear both the top and bottom of the page. The bottom is the standard bookmark, but the top is where I mark scenes I want to return to later, large thematic elements, stuff like that. Also, I dog ear the top of the page when the writing knocks me flat on my ass. So by calculating the ratio of dog-eared pages to untouched pages, you get a rough index of just how affected I was by a book. Out Stealing Horses posted an unheard of 1:10.

Described by the New York Sun as a “masterpiece of tough romance,” you might be forgiven for thinking Per Petterson is Norway’s answer to Cormac McCarthy when you read the first paragraph:

“Early November. It’s nine o’clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don’t know what they want that I have. I look out the window at the forest. There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water.”

These brief and wearied sentences recall McCarthy’s devastating book. But Out Stealing Horses has a wounded heart, and its a sweeter book, far more wrapped up in the past. In fact, if you’ll forgive yet another comparison, Out Stealing Horses shares a lot in common with Old Filth. The protagonist, Trond, an old man living alone, grapples with his past through a series of flashbacks interspersed with chapters devoted to his current solitary existence.

Compare it to whatever you like, Out Stealing Horses stands up as a great book. It’s emotional, moving, but also understated, with a typically Scandinavian reserve.

The book doesn’t let you get a bead on it for a few chapters. We begin just before the millenium, with widowed Trond, 67 years old and living alone in a cabin. He reminisces on the summer of 1948, when he was 15 and living in a cabin much like this one. The young Trond does indeed go out stealing horses with his friend, Jon. It’s a beautiful chapter, but it’s really just a gorgeous diversion. This story isn’t about Trond and Jon, or their relationship. The story actually begins on page 70: “I can see he misses his father, quite simply and straightforwardly, and I would wish it was as easy as that, that you could just miss your father, and that was all there was to it.”

Yes, this is a book about fathers. Notice how Trond hints at his own conflicted feelings towards his father - it’s part of the reserve that makes him such an intriguing narrator. He doesn’t like to give too much away:

“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings…”

But as the reader, we enjoy a privileged position, and we actually do come to know Trond and his feelings.

We know he feels very strongly about his father, a capable, likeable man of about forty. We know he doesn’t get along so well with his mother, and his sister is a non-factor. Spending the rest of the year in urban Oslo, Trond loves work, the outdoors, the river, and the forest.

This love of nature informs the whole book - it seems like every major scene takes place out of doors. Petterson handles natural description as well as anybody I’ve read since maybe Matthiessen. Trond is always walking down forest paths, rowing across the river, or working in the fields. I made one of the aforementioned dog ears on page 60, where it reads:

“The [hay]rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it.”

But it’s not all pleasurable toil, there’s some tragedy too. I won’t spoil any of it, but this summer in 1948 is formative for Trond, and he begins to sense the adult world, blocked from him by just a thin membrane, which another few more years would have destroyed had it not been for the events of this summer.

Petterson really impressed me with his knack of capturing small moments:

“The sun was high in the sky now, it was hot under the trees, it smelt hot, and from everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hawk and a hare’s last sigh, and the tiny muffled boom each time a bee hit a flower. I heard the ants crawling in the heather, and the path we followed rose with the hillside; I took deep breaths through my nose and thought that no matter how life should turn out and however far I travelled I would always remember this place as it was just now, and miss it.”

Trond misses a lot of things - Out Stealing Horses is all about those left behind, those who have had everything taken from them, leaving only absence. Out Stealing Horses also emerges as an early front-runner for best ending; it builds steadily, bringing back all the motifs and capping it with a spectacular last scene.

Then We Came to The End

Joshua Ferris’s well-reviewed debut novel draws no less than three comparisons to Catch-22 in its “Praise for” section. One can see why - the book is the same mixture of humor and sadness that Heller utilized so effectively, and disgruntled office workers and disgruntled soldiers aren’t too different. Also, Ferris is cribbing jokes from Heller in the very first page. The original, on page 3 of Catch-22:

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

And the third sentence of Then We Came to the End: “Most of us liked everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled.”

I’m sure everyone appreciates an homage to Catch-22, but if I were Ferris, I wouldn’t want to set my book anywhere near Catch-22 - the airmen of Pianosa cast a pretty long shadow. So I read skeptically, as John Yossarian might.

The first facet of the book I challenged was its narrative voice. TWCTTE received a lot of admiration from critics for its daring usage of the first-person plural. Yes, almost all of the book takes place in the “we”. For whatever reason, the book has a reading guide appended right to the end, so here’s Ferris’s rationale for the stylistic choice: “Companies tend to to refer to themselves in the first-person plural… What used to be the ‘royal we’ might now be thought of as the ‘corporate we’… In Then We Came to the End, you see just who this ‘we’ really is - a collection of messy human beings - stripped of their glossy finish and eternal coprorate optimism.”

Fair enough, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a gimmick, like writing in the second person. The narrator is the summed consciousnesses of every employee, and while it’s interesting to explore the group’s psychology, the real problem is a group doesn’t have a psychology. A group is something intangible that results when a bunch of individuals get together and for a complex web of relationships. So why not ground your narrative with the individuals, since they’re the base anyways? Ferris anticipates this critique, and I think he suggests throughout the book that that’s precisely the point: there are no individuals at the workplace, not really, just cogs who come and go depending on the vicissitudes of the economy. It’s a valid counter, but I don’t buy it entirely - I suspect Ferris mainly wanted to play around with this very novel narrative voice. And offers instant juxtapositions and all kinds of opportunites for irony.

But Ferris really succeeds when he starts dealing with individuals. Tom Mota, a bit of a maniac with a thing for declaiming Ralph Waldo Emerson, stands out as the book’s best character, a hard-line contrarian on the order of a Yossarian. And more shades of the assyrian when Carl Garbedian strips naked in his car as his wife is trying to drop him off, and refuses to enter the building, much like when Yossarian rejected his uniform. But better than the grunts is their boss, Lynn, who struggles with a diagnosis of breast cancer. There’s a long section in the middle that abandons the “we” in favor of a more conventional 3rd person narrative, and it’s superb. Lynn’s well-rendered, and, according to the oh-so-handy reading guide, this “interlude is the book’s emotional heart.” True enough, Lynn’s story salvages a book that otherwise threatens to be a weaker version of the third season of The Office (which wasn’t even a good season to begin with).

Again, I’m pretty much pitting Catch-22 vs. a debut novel, which is unfair unless your debut novel is… Catch-22. So to be fair, yes, Then We Came to the End is a funny book, and yes, it can generate some pathos. But the action in Then We Came to the End isn’t as hilarious as Captain Black or as heartbreaking as Snowden. Yet even with the specter of Catch-22 looming over it, TWCTTE does manage to make itself known. It’s an enjoyable book and a fast read, and Joshua Ferris is somebody you’ll be seeing again.

The Odyssey

“Bitch, I shall instantly find Telemachus to tell him your words; and he will hew you in pieces where you stand.”

So says Odysseus to a serving wench who gets lippy with him. What’s that you say about archaic? I read the TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) translation, and in his translator’s note he gets a lot of things right:

“Crafty, exquisite, homogeneous - whatever great art may be, these are not its attributes. In this tale every big situation is burked and the writing is soft… It is fun to compare his infuriating male condescension towards inglorious woman with his tender charity of head and heart for serving-men… his notebooks were stoked with purple passages and he embedded these in his tale wherever they would more or less fit… obviously the tale was the thing; and that explains his thin and accidental characterization.”

Honestly, that was about as much as I noticed through the book. But I surely TE Lawrence doesn’t know everything - after all, the guy died in a motorcycle crash. What a jerk!

The first long fiction I ever wrote I titled the Odyssey. It’s unclear whether or not I had heard of the epic at this point, or had just come across the word somewhere else. I misspelled it. Nowadays I’m writing a new story that could very charitably described as a “reimagining” of the epic. I don’t know what my fascination with the story is. It’s of course a classic boy’s story, with lots of people getting run through with spears, shot with arrows, punched in the face, blinded, beaten, eaten by monsters, or drowned.

But most of the text is actually devoted to describing people feasting and yakking. The story picks up with godly Telemachus whining ineffectually as a horde of suitors vie for his mother Penelope’s hand in marriage. Odysseus has been gone a decade and more, and these suitors do all their wooing in Odysseus’ hall, eating up his food and drinking all his booze. So Athene - whose interest in the family is never explained - flies from Olympus to counsel him. She suggests he sails a ship around and pick up whatever hearsay he can. So he does, and a lot of heroes treat him very hospitably.

Hospitality seems a crucial point to Homer. Agamemnon is cut down at his own table, and that crime is singled out as particularly monstruous. Odysseus slaughters the suitors for abusing his hospitality in his absence. And when Telemachus or Odysseus receives kind treatment in a stranger’s hall, they always praise them as goodly and god-fearing men - after all, suppliants and beggars are Zeus’s special wards. I figure the reason the greeks exalt hospitality is because the times were so dangerous. There had to be some agreed upon timeouts. Also, the person telling the story of Odysseus was probably reliant on a host’s largesse. Of course, Homer makes a big deal about the importance of a good bard, being one himself.

So while Telemachus is enjoying the good food, wine, and stories, Odysseus’s story after the fall of Troy begins to piece together.

It’s a good thing the story holds the reader’s interest, because the characters don’t. They’re essentially binary switches. First position: talking, feasting, drinking, questing. Second position: weeping. There’s no subtlety to their emotions, they’re either crying or not crying. And if you’ve known anybody prone to histrionics, you know how quickly that wears thin. If a crewman dies, the survivors weep. If Odysseus comes back after twenty years, his companions weep. If Penelope goes to her room (and I’m not kidding, this happens every time), she weeps until the goddess Athene puts her to sleep.

Her husband isn’t much better - Odysseus is a hard character to like. He’s impressed with his own cleverness and subtlety (though his strategems seem… well, pretty basic), and let’s face it, the guy’s life wasn’t that hard. After landing on Circe’s island, Odysseus’s entire crew are transformed into pigs by the witch. So brave Odysseus heads over to her hall under divine protection, and raises his sword as if to murder her. Circe quails in fear, and offers to fuck him. So Odysseus has some god sex and the men are back to normal, as well.

Then he sleeps with Calypso for seven years, all while Penelope wastes away in a tower room. I mean, seven years? You’re not exactly trying. But he finally makes it off Calypso’s island, thanks only to Pallas Athene. That’s another point - Odysseus isn’t particularly clever, he just has powerful friends. In every perilous situation he receives some god’s favor which saves him from destruction. He rarely earns anything by his own wits.

The writing is, as Lawrence noted, soft. Homer overuses epithets, so it’s always “rosy-fingered Dawn” and “god-like Telemachus” and “subtle Odysseus” and “stentorian Menelaus”. The seas are always wine-dark, and when the rowers set to their tasks, they “pale” the sea with their oars. Metaphors are contorted and generally confusing:

“Their souls were terrified and they stamped down the long hall like a herd of cattle distracted and put to flight by some dancing gad-fly in the rush of the year when the days grow long: but the onslaught the four made upon them was a stooping from the mountains of crook-taloned, hook-billed vultures upon small birds, forcing them out of the skies to cower along a plain which yet affords no cover and no escape; so there they are harried to death, and men love the sport of it.”

Whole pages are devoted to name-dropping, like when Odysseus travels to Hades to visit with ghosts, and reels off two pages worth of characters entirely unrelated to the story. Sisyphus and Tantalus are mentioned, and late in the book Achilles and Agamemnon have a truly and deeply irrelevant conversation.

For all that, there’s still something essential about this plot. Wayfaring across the “fish-haunted” oceans, menaced by gods and men, and returning to one’s rightful place. Unfortunately all that good stuff is all too rare in a bloated narrative. Decent at best.

The Crying of Lot 49

Kurt Vonnegut, talking about semicolons, once said, “they are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Thomas Pynchon writes just like Vonnegut might’ve, had he a thing for trannies.

The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon’s second novel, and like most second children, he’s not terribly proud of it. But this slim book is an enticing entree into the Pynchon corpus. I bought the book maybe four years ago, having an over-high opinion of my own sophistication. I put it down almost immediately and didn’t touch it again until just this week - one imagines the opening sentence had something to do with that:

“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

Catch up, Pynchon’s saying. The second most famous recluse of American letters (behind JD Salinger, of course), Pynchon’s work may surprise you. It certainly surprised me - he’s an acknowledged master, a mortal lock for a Nobel prize at some point, so I figured this book would be tough slogging, but no, Pynchon writes with a liveliness and a humor that truly does put me in mind of Kurt Vonnegut. A playfulness hums throughout TCL49, and you get the sense that the virtuoso Pynchon is just writing for his own amusement here, but instead of being self-involved and off-putting, it’s immediately inviting.

One shudders to think what a serious Pynchon novel looks like, as an earnest tone might make his writing border on the oppressive. Sentences like this one would be intolerable from a more pompous writer : “She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.” Luckily, Pynchon isn’t trying to impress, he’s just extending an invitation into the word game he’s playing.

Your first clue that you’re supposed to have fun with this are the names. The protagonist is Oedipa Maas, her husband is Mucho (Wendell) Maas, and it just gets weirder from there. My personal favorite is probably Mike Fallopian, but Genghis Cohen is in the running as well.

These oddly named characters are signposts leading her to the heart of Trystero, the central conspiracy that lashes together the sketchy plot. I’m hard pressed to say just what TCL49 is about, but I can say what it’s interested in: paranoia, postal service, and poking fun at the emptiness of California life circa 1964.

But hey, this is a postmodernist story, so who says that’s even a criterion of quality? The plot’s contrived, and a lot of parts feel like Pynchon’s saying, “Okay, just go with me on this one”, because he just wants to move to the next conversation Oedipa has with some wacky guy.

The characters aren’t particularly developed - lots appear and disappear with just a scene. Clearly Pynchon’s capable of rendering character, because there’s a marvelous seduction scene between Oedipa and Metzger early in the book. It’s 13 pages (which is almost 10% in a book this slim), and Pynchon has great control of the pacing, tight dialogue, and a nice handle on psychology. But he backs off from these character-based scenes in favor of the sweep and mystery of the Trystero conspiracy. So the plot’s middling, the characters sometimes an afterthought. Why is that not such a big deal? Because line by line the writing’s superb.

For instance, when Oedipa goes to watch a play: “The Courier’s Tragedy was being put on by a San Narciso group known as the Tank Players, the Tank being a small arena theater located out between a traffic analysis firm and a wildcat transistor outfit that hadn’t been there last year and wouldn’t be this coming but meanwhile was underselling even the Japanese and hauling in loot by the steamshovelful. Oedipa and a reluctant Metzger came in on only a partly-filled house. Attendance did not swell by the time the play started.”

The in-depth synopsis Pynch provides for this imaginary play is remarkable, both for how funny it is and how involved it is. He’s got the foundation for an actual play here, and reels off couplets (and songs, at a few different points) with ease. Pynchon can simply write:

“She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears.”

And Oedipa’s embroilment in the Tyrstero mystery is genuinely thrilling, as the world reveals itself to her full of a dark order, shadowy figures swarming in the periphery, signs and societies and subtle clues. It all builds, growing more horrible and far-reaching, and the final scene pays it off.

Plus, there’s Nazis! Well, sorta. Just one, really.

Old Filth

Filth stands for “Failed In London, Try Hong Kong”, and it’s the epithet for renowned lawyer Eddie Feathers, now retired in the south of England. Old Filth is Jane Gardam’s protagonist and our guide through a well-crafted meditation on the pains of dotage, the power of desire, and the importance of memory.

But what the hell does that tell you? Old Filth is a thoroughly British book, British all the way down to its bones. Feathers was born a little after WWI, and it spans the decades between then and the 9/11 era, an eventful period in the history of Empire. Namely, its demise.

And Eddie’s dying too, just like the empire. “Way over” 70, his dear wife Betty has recently passed away. He knocks around his house in Dorset, trying to deal with mortality. He sees it as “a serious, even beautiful equation. Life ends.” Filth turns to his past as a Raj orphan, sent to foster in Britain to avoid the diseases of the east.

Old Filth has a particular structure, much like an old man’s rambling tale. The narrative jumps about in the present and in Filth’s very busy past. You’d be forgiven for not finding any of this particularly enticing so far - after all, who has the patience to sit through the interminable yarns of the elderly? I have difficulty with another Briton authoress by the name of Jane, Jane Austen. Her stories strike me as too precious, her plots too neat, her characters too charmed. Nothing interesting ever happens. But you have to readjust your expectations, and meet the story on its own terms. Austen’s strength is, as one foreword (roughly) put it: her ability to work in miniature.

Gardam’s is an unerring sense of the moment. Every book has an entry point, the point where you’ve found its rhythm and you don’t notice turning pages. Old Filth’s came early, page 28. Terry Veneering, Filth’s nemesis from back in the day, has moved in next door. After locking himself out, Filth has no other choice but to enter the house of his enemy. Instead of finding the blustering, arrogant bastard he remembers, Veneering is much diminished, a sweetly sad old man working on his dusty jigsaw puzzle, happy to see him. Each scene with Isobel Ingoldby is similarly strong.

But the book has weaknesses. Filth struggles with the idea of writing his memoirs, which is fine because Gardam has done it for him. Problem is, the book just isn’t long enough. I’d have been happy to get another 200 pages of material. Many plotlines are underexplored - the relationship between Betty and Filth sounds complex and rich, but we get none of it. We never see the two back East. We, shockingly enough, never even see Filth at work. As a vaunted lawyer and judge with a tortured past, I imagined he’d grapple with a particularly painful case. Not so, and Gardam never takes us inside the courthouse. There’s a good-sized portion dealing with Queen Mary during WW2, but it can’t reveal much. Flashbacks to his time East with Betty would have been great.

A lot of the book’s poignancy draws on just how outmoded Filth is. In the 21st century, his fine suits and bowler hat and gentlemanly ways are anachronisms, and Filth himself senses it. He knew how to operate in the dying years of Empire, but now that it’s dead and buried, he’s at a loss, just like with his wife Betty. Midway through the book, when we’re introduced to a new character named Vanessa, a 32-year old lawyer, I though, “Aha, here’s how Gardam is going to bring Filth into the present. He’ll impart some wisdom to young Vanessa here.” Nope.  Filth wanders on, a coelacanth, as the modern lawyers call him, and we know he’ll never come to terms with the present.

So it’s a very sad book, yet the back of the book says Old Filth is funny. I didn’t pick up on that. Sometimes I felt like GOB saying, “I don’t appreciate the dry british humor.” Filth is packed off to a boarding school run by a birder by the name of Sir, and just Sir, and this Sir’s right-hand man is Mr. Smith, who is always called Mr. Smith no matter what the man’s name actually is. That’s funny, and so is Albert Loss, a half-Scotch half-Chinese cardsharp whose given name is actually Ross, but he’s half-Chinese so he can’t say “r”s, right? That was about as much humor as I mined from the book - your mileage may vary, and I think you’d get more if it’s your kilometerage that may vary.

Gardam’s a skillful storyteller, and Old Filth is an understated and quick read.

The 42nd Parallel

Super short review, since I read this book month’s ago and never got around to thinking critically about it, since I had to read it for a class. Dos Passos writes great sentences that are short on punctuation and leave you breathless and impressed. 42nd Parallel is the first third of a trilogy, and at the end of it, I didn’t feel like it summed up to much. This may be because Dos Passos wrote the USA trilogy to provide a dizzyingly comprehensive panorama of the american experience from, oh, 1900 to 1930, so not much respect is paid to narrative and character arcs.
That’s all I can think of.