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Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:06:42 GMT

To Have and Have Not / Ernest Hemingway, 1937.

When asked by a friend to describe this novel, I said that it was a mean story about mean people who do mean things to one another. More specifically, Hemingway is exercising a kind of casual, detached social criticism with Harry Morgan, a down-on-his-luck captain of a private fishing boat, and his attempts to do business with a series of lowlifes who at their best prove untrustworthy, and at their worst lethal. Viewed as Depression-era social criticism, the novel is half-baked and unconvincing, but I suspect that Hemingway was no more convinced of his social message than Harry Morgan is convinced by the politics of the young Cuban revolutionary he agrees to smuggle out of Key West with three other men in the novel's third part. Harry is no bleeding-heart, and he is as quick to toss his friend Albert's dead body off his boat and into the sea as he is to grieve over him. To me, the point of the book is not that the author Richard Gordon, for example, is a "have" and that Harry Morgan is a "have not," and isn’t that a shame. The point is that, in Key West, anyway, the two live right next to one another.

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:22:51 GMT

The Wordy Shipmates / Sarah Vowell, 2008.

Since professing a love of historical sites, museums, commemorative plaques and the like in her essay about retracing the Trail of Tears, Sarah Vowell has become to American history what John Stewart is to politics. Her writing matches the narration of historical facts with a sharp wit that consistently makes her work accessible without sacrificing its thoughtfulness. This book resembles a standard work on American history more than any of her previous work, focusing as it does on a series of primary sources: diaries, journals, and published pamphlets produced by the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There is less here of Vowell's tendency to filter her history lessons through the lens of her personal experience touring museums and interviewing tour guides, and I missed those elements to some extent. But the book is no less a showcase for Vowell's brand of patriotism, which here seeks to dispel misconceptions about the Puritans while celebrating some of their most influential ideas.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:23:25 GMT

The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck, 1939.

Steinbeck's iconic American novel felt to me like the 1983 film Testament. In the film, a suburban mother cares for her family in the wake of a nuclear attack. In the film's final scene, after burying her two younger kids, the mother sits at a table with her son and their young neighbor. They are celebrating her son's birthday by the light of a candle. Steinbeck's novel ends on a similar note of hopeful uncertainty. Like the Wetherly family in Testament, the Joads are disintegrating both as individuals and as a family, but they face the possibility of their demise with a resoluteness I admire. The novel so eloquently depicts the prolonged tension inherent in their battle to stay alive and the fear of the unknown that when the narrative comes to its end, it feels very much like the end of a real life. Even the outspoken political observations and social criticism Steinbeck lets loose in the chapters which alternate with those advancing the Joad narrative, which might have seemed hollow if written by an author with less skill, here only strengthen the novel's impact.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:04:20 GMT

The Year of Magical Thinking / Joan Didion, 2005.

This book was prompted by the sudden death of Didion's husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne. Her "magical thinking" includes the notion, at first not at all evident even to herself, that given the right set of circumstances or the right behavior on Didion's part, her husband will return. Didion attempts to make sense of her thoughts, however irrational. An intellectual enterprise with an emotional core, Didion's investigation is also a rumination on the nature of memory and grief.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:02:41 GMT

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession / Ken Alder, 2007.

As the title implies, this is a history of the polygraph and the men and women responsible for its development and promotion. Its central thesis is that the polygraph reveals more about the beliefs of the nation that alternately embraced and rejected its use than it has ever revealed about deception. Alder is a professor of history, and his book is less concerned with the mechanics of the device or its significance within the study of physiology or psychology than with its social and cultural implications. It is obviously well researched, as documented in the author's notes and bibliography, and Alder does an excellent job of conveying the complexity of his subject, which lies at the intersection of physiology, psychology, forensics, criminology, law, and popular culture. But Alder chooses to devote most of the book to the history of the muddled careers of the polygraph's proponents. Though their lives reflect some of the ambiguities inherent in lie detection as a pseudo-science, I preferred Alder's analysis of the machine itself, particularly its recent history in the wake of the war on terror. A muddled study of a muddled history.

Mon, 04 May 2009 17:14:12 GMT

Live and Let Die / Ian Fleming, 1954.

Removed from its film adaptation, which was produced as a kind of blaxploitation flick nearly 20 years after this book's publication, the second James Bond novel reveals itself as an entertaining if muddled foray into race relations in America. The Harlem and Jamaican based smuggler Mr. Big calls himself a wolf living by a wolf's laws. Fleming describes his rise to power through the manipulation of Voodoo superstition. Those seeking meaningful insights into African-American identity should look elsewhere. But there are amusing passages, as when Bond's superior, M., comments that the "Negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions," and so naturally there will be Negro progress in crime, as well. Bond and his CIA counterpart are like tourists as they infiltrate Mr. Big's operation: first in Harlem, then in Florida, and lastly in Jamaica. Like all Bond books, the action is interlaced with travelogue-like passages which describe the local cuisine and hotel accommodations, and somehow these are as entertaining as the bits about sharks and barracudas.

Mon, 04 May 2009 16:39:26 GMT

The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925.

Who was I fooling, reading this at 20? Oh sure, I'd met a few Daisy and Tom Buchanans, I was dating a Jordan Baker and I was more than a little enthralled by a Jay Gatsby (or maybe two), but did I realize it then? No. Now that I'm 35, though, I see what turning 30 meant for Mr. Carraway, and I can only nod my head and say, yes, that's true. There's strength in recognizing the past for just that: the past.

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:02:13 GMT

The Elements of Style / William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, 1959.

Spurred by an NPR story about the 50th anniversary of E.B. White's revised edition of Strunk's guide to writing, I sat down to read it again and realized I had never really studied it before, only used the index to find the entries on the use of "farther" and "further" or the formation of the possessive singular of nouns. Looking it over, it now looks to me less like a reference book (though it is one) than a kind of extended essay on writing. It actually reads well from cover to cover, and I feel I should consult it more often, though the authors' opinion of the use of "he" for men and women gets my dander up. And no matter how hard I try, I still feel uncomfortable about ending sentences with prepositions.

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:44:20 GMT

The Plot Against America / Philip Roth, 2004.

Roth imagines a Lindbergh Republican win over FDR in the 1940 presidential election and its effect on the Roth family in New Jersey. Totally absorbing and even frightening in 2009, this must have been dynamite when it was first published in 2004, given the second Bush White House win. Roth raises the stakes in his narrative very gradually, as both the novel's characters and the reader expect the Nazis to come knocking at the family's door at any moment, only to find that what happens instead is far more sinister. Unfortunately, the careful work Roth does to marry the personal story of the Roth family to the larger, political dynamics occurring internationally gives out in the novel's last few chapters. It felt to me as though Roth lost interest in the project, and the conclusion, which suggests that reason may prevail, seems less convincing than I would have liked. Still, I appreciate the postscript, which includes a bibliography and a reprint of Lindbergh's actual speech at the America First Committee rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941.

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:17:08 GMT

Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright / Lucas Hilderbrand, 2009.

Unabashedly nostalgic about analog media, Lucas Hilderbrand's book is an analysis of the industrial, legal, and cultural history of videotape. Offering what he terms an "aesthetics of access," Hilderbrand demonstrates that the development of videotape ushered in cultural and legal innovations which remain relevant in the digital world. He then offers "case studies" of a video bootlegging aesthetic embodied in the development of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, the underground circulation of Todd Haynes's Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and the feminist network represented by the Joanie 4 Jackie video chain letters. Reading Hilderbrand's study, I found myself reconsidering both my childhood spent interacting with videotape and my adulthood as a consumer of DVDs and other digital media. It's rare for a scholarly work to come so close to home for me, and the extensive bibliography has left me hungry to read more on the subject of sound and video recording.

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:06:58 GMT

Organize Your Digital Life : How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World / Aimee Baldridge, 2009.

There's something ironic about seeking out a book for advice about digitizing analog media and organizing the resulting digital files. Nevertheless, this book is proving to be a useful guide to me as I seek to scan old family photographs and safely back up my increasingly large digital media library. In a sense, this book can be read as a how-to-build-your-personal-digital-archive guide. Baldridge supplies common sense approaches to potentially overwhelming digitization projects. She assumes enough knowledge of technology on the part of the reader to operate a computer without hesitating to explain the basics of available hardware and software. I particularly appreciated her introduction to NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives and her suggested filing scheme for digital photos.

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:40:01 GMT

An American Tragedy / Theodore Dreiser, 1925.

It's easy to dismiss this novel as an antique curiosity, with its clunky, humorless prose and its turgid plot. Dreiser is the kind of author that tells you everything you need to know about his characters before they do anything. He breaks the primary rule of fiction writing by telling rather than showing. And he does so at length. In fact, he dwells on the occasional advancements in his plot for whole chapters, with the result that the novel repeats itself. Worse, he allows himself melodramatic forays into interior monologue, which lead to passages like, "But why? Why? Why?" Viewed by modern standards of reading, shaped in part by the Hemingway school of spare storytelling, Dreiser's work is at best primitive and, at worst, boring. In short, this is not a page-turner.

Still, buried inside this novel's critique of wealth and privilege and social inequity and organized religion is an ambiguity that belies Dreiser's tendency to tell rather than show. Clyde Griffiths's arrest for the murder of Roberta Alden at first seems to be the climax of the novel. But there are still dozens of chapters left. The lengthy descriptions of Clyde's trial and its aftermath feel like a case of beating a dead horse. But as I trudged on I forced myself to push past this reading. Instead, I found myself thinking about the title and the notion that there is something peculiarly American about the tragedy of Clyde Griffiths, whose ambition to escape his shabby, poverty-stricken religious upbringing is framed by his desire for nice clothes and a large house like the one his wealthy uncle inhabits in Lycurgus. Clyde spends the first half of the novel ignored, neglected or misunderstood, yearning for wealth and power. His tragic fate, at first, seems to be invisibility. But then he gains national attention (and inspires national disgust) when he is accused of murder. As perceived by the public that so swiftly condemns him, Clyde's tragedy is not merely his moral bankruptcy, but his brazen attempt to duck out of responsibility and obtain a social status he had no right to claim. By prolonging the agony of both Clyde and the reader in the novel's final chapters, it seems to me that Dreiser begs the reader to consider tragedy and to draw his or her own conclusions about fate.

The Gilded Age.

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:47:27 GMT

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:—"I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars."

- Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

BOOKS READ #23.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:22:14 GMT

Alive and dead in Indiana : stories / Michael Martone. 1984.

I discovered Martone through David Foster Wallace. In his essay "Greatly Exagerrated," Wallace includes Martone among a group of authors writing what he calls "Image-Fiction":

... the new Fiction of Image uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about "real," albeit pop-mediated, characters.

Thus Martone's writes fictional stories about James Dean, Colonel Sanders and Alfred Kinsey, among others. What caught my eye, at the time, was the fact that Martone was writing about people in Indiana. I read the expanded edition of this book, retitled Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List, soon after. I spotted this version (the 1st edition) at the book sale of the Saugatuck-Douglas Public Library during my summer vacation.

FILMS WATCHED #105 - 115.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:03:30 GMT

Graduate school has left me very little time for LiveJournal. Or rather, I've stopped spending time on LiveJournal in favor of the readings for my classes. I have good ones this semester: Archives & Collective Memory and Information Storage and Retrieval. I am spending most of my time on homework and work work, but I have managed to fit in a few films, particularly because of the Chicago International Film Festival. No capsule reviews here, just a summary ...

... behind the cut.

Flash Gordon / Mike Hodges. 1980.

Eastern Promises / David Cronenberg. 2007.

28 Up / Michael Apted. 1985.

49th Parallel / Michael Powell. 1941.

La Science des Rêves = The Science of Sleep / Michel Gondry. 2006.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me / David Lynch. 1992.

Control Anton Corbijn. 2007.

La Antena = The Aerial / Esteban Sapir. 2007.

Thunderball / Terence Young. 1965.

Chicago 10 / Brett Morgen. 2007.

Babel / Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2006.

BOOKS READ #22.

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:45:30 GMT

A geography of time : the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist / Robert Levine. 1997.

I understand that my time truly is my time. And even though the pace of my life, like everyone else's, is often directed by the world around me, it has become clear that people have considerably more control over their tempos than they often let themselves believe.

- page 224

FILMS WATCHED #104.

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:26:49 GMT

Wonder Woman / Vincent McEveety. 1974.

This television movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby was a predecessor to the Lynda Carter series. Crosby's Wonder Woman does not seem to have superhuman powers, but gets by on her wits and a collection of gadgets. In many ways, she resembles Batman or James Bond as she trades clever remarks with international criminal Ricardo Montalban. (!) The film's lukewarm reception led ABC to green light Stanley Ralph Ross's conception of a campy show that paid homage to the character's roots in World War II era comic books. But to me, this film is a pretty fascinating exercise in stretching the character's boundaries and attempting to appeal to young women in the midst of the sexual revolution. What's more, it's surprising to see how much the first few episodes of the CBS Lynda Carter series, which updated Wonder Woman to 1970s Washington, borrowed from this movie. What a delight it was to see this again after so many years, and to be able to watch it whenever I like by visiting here.

FILMS WATCHED #103: SCORSESE FESTIVAL.

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:40:35 GMT

Boxcar Bertha / Martin Scorsese. 1972.

This Roger Corman clone of Bonnie and Clyde isn't nearly as provocative as I Call First/Who's That Knocking On My Door, Scorcese's first film. Barbara Hershey and Bernie Casey are pretty good, but David Carradine struck me as wooden.

FILMS WATCHED #102: **** FILMS ACCORDING TO LEONARD MALTIN

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:10:27 GMT

Brief Encounter / David Lean. 1945.

Celia Johnson is really striking in this film. She is not a typical leading lady. Her face is lined and careworn, her character claims to be "an ordinary woman" leading an "ordinary life," and she looks it. The first time we see her and Trevor Howard, the camera catches them in a corner of the "refreshment room" of a commuter rail station. They are nothing special. Then the camera closes in on them, and with that second look they become the film's focus. Johnson is convincing both in her scenes with Howard and others and while miming to her own voiceover, the sort of trick that fails miserably in, say, Lynch's Dune.

BOOKS READ #21.

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:27:52 GMT

Catching the big fish : meditation, consciousness and creativity / David Lynch. 2006.

Lynch is not a master of language, but the observations he makes here about the creative process are useful and thought-provoking. His attempts at articulating the transcendental experience don't come off as successfully, but are obviously heartfelt. Lynch also offers a few anecdotes about his films here, mostly to illustrate some of the points he makes about creating.

FILMS WATCHED #101: WOODY ALLEN FESTIVAL.

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 21:19:54 GMT

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy / Woody Allen. 1982.

It's amusing to be watching this at the tail end of summer, when presumably the mind is beginning to snap back to reality in preparation for the coming winter. The film sort of falls apart at the very end; Woody seems a bit ambivalent about the spirits that inhabit his character's invention, and José Ferrer's demise seems rushed, as if Woody was a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. Still, both Julie Hagerty and Mary Steenburgen are a riot.

BOOKS READ #20.

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 13:50:20 GMT

Amerika : the man who disappeared / Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann. 2002.

This translation was first published in 1996, then reissued a few years ago while I was working at Barnes & Noble. It's a perfect example of a book that, at the time, I thought, "I should really read that," and then proceeded on without another thought of it. I haven't read the earlier, Edwin Muir translation, but in his introduction, Hofmann makes a good case for this first novel, the last to be translated and published and often marginalized by critics. The America Kafka writes about is a fantasy world, a bit like Baum's Oz. Yet, as always is the case with Kafka, I couldn't help but sympathize with the protagonist here as he attempts to make his way.

BOOKS READ #19.

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:52:47 GMT

Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder / David Weinberger. 2007.

I nearly read this book twice. A number of people witnessed me hugging it closely to myself for most of the mid-to-late summer, referring to it as my new bible. It was a happy discovery, a book I found referenced here and there and that I sought out with the kind of persistence I usually reserve for music. Weinberger argues that digital information is changing the nature of knowledge itself. That he does so by discussing Aristotle, Plato, Linnaeus and Melvil Dewey makes this an especially satisfactory read, even if it was borrowed from the Business, Science and Technology section of the Harold Washington Library.

FILMS WATCHED #100.

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:33:19 GMT

The Poseidon Adventure / Ronald Neame. 1972.

The quasi-spiritual message here that God wants strong people who are willing to try to live was very meaningful for my mother, so I can't help thinking of her when I see this. I had forgotten how heroic Shelley Winters is in this film. God bless her.

FILMS WATCHED #99.

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 13:28:55 GMT

The Great Muppet Caper / Jim Henson. 1981.

randomcha purchased this at the going out of business sale at West Coast Video on Broadway. I have seen this movie so many times that owning it on DVD feels almost redundant. Nevertheless, the bit when the Muppets are all talking at once, and someone yells "QUIET" and only Janice is left saying, "Look Mom, it's my life, okay? So if I want to live on the beach and walk around naked ..." and only then does she stop and notice that everyone else has stopped talking ...

... that bit gets me every time.