March 2008 Archives

I've decided to read the entire Zuckerman series by Philip Roth, and I'm on book two. I read The Ghost Writer back in October (though I didn't write actual comments) and many years ago I read some of the later books in the series. (Is "series" the write term to use for Philip Roth novels? This isn't like an Orson Scott Card Ender's Game thing. Well, anyway, you know what I mean.)

I've been continually impressed by Roth's ability (especially in his earlier books) to write a novel where a quarter of the book is one extended conversation. He doesn't shy away from "transcribing" the whole of an event. For example, if a novel features a speech at a wedding, most writers will write around it, summarizing or avoiding altogether the actual speech. Roth, of the other hand, will write a seven page speech and put it into the book.

Since I've been drawing my web comic for one year now (actually, 1.7 years, with a 7 month hiatus) I figure its about time I do the honorable thing and pass on some independent web comics that I enjoy reading. Please don't confuse this with an attempt to place my comic on the same level as these excellent masterpieces.

Dinosaur Comics : A classic web comic about dinosaurs standing in the same position.

XKCD : A very, very clever techie comic. It may not be as funny if you have never used Emacs.

The Perry Bible Fellowship : Kind of hard to explain. It is posted somewhat unpredictably, but who am I to complain?

Indexed : I am completely jealous I don't write this.

Kate Beaton History Comics : I recently discovered this very amusing set of comics about history!

A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversable : It's beautifully rendered and fantastically written. I wouldn't call it "funny," rather, each comic is like a piece of art that tells an absurd story. This comic appears to be on permanent hiatus, but read the archive and take a strange journey into a surreal land.

The Secret Sharer is really a novella, but it comes in book form.

It's funny, clever, exciting, mildly touching, and seems like it could have really happened. There are a lot of cold war era spy novels and movies that involve spies spying on spies spying on spies, either serious or spoofs. This one manages to be both. The only other Graham Greene novel I've read is The End of the Affair, which is also excellent, though with a very different tone.

Sometimes I have a problem with such prolific authors. Greene wrote 28 novels, 12 collections, and numerous other works. Even though I really like his books, how do I know which books to read? I'm overwhelmed with options. While in the book store I can't decide which book by him to buy. Let's say there are only three available... are they available because they are his best books? Or are they available because his best books were already purchased and these are the worst books? I usually end up going with someone else entirely. Fortunately, I took a shot with Our Man in Havana and it was a winning choice.

1. Surprise! I'm Wearing a Wire! (Or recording you on a tape player, etc.)

Of the three, this is the least annoying movie clichè, because if I were in these situations I would also be wearing a wire. However, it's getting old. It's anti-climactic. Get the bad guy to admit something and then say, "Gotch! It's all on tape." Once again, if I ever managed to get myself wrapped up in this kind of situation I'd probably have a tape recorder surgically attached to my body and fed directly to the police. But sometimes I want my movie to end with more drama.

2. Surprise! I Was Wearing a Bullet Proof Vest!

How many times do I need to watch in shock as the protagonist of the movie gets shot down at the end of the movie, only to sit up a few minutes later, open his shirt, and reveal a bullet proof vest? It's gotten to the point where I no longer believe bullets have any power in Hollywood. Like the tape recorder, if I ever get mixed up with the kinds of people who protagonists get mixed up with in movies, I am going to start wearing a bullet proof vest all the time. And, if I'm ever shooting somebody, I'm shooting them in the head.

One more question about this: I've never worn a bullet proof vest, but are they really this easy to put under your shirt without anyone noticing?

3. Surprise! A bus just came out of nowhere and hit you!

This was cool when it happened in Final Destination. But now vehicles are coming out of nowhere in every movie. Has no one but me noticed that this is just a really low-tech camera trick? If you zoom the camera in on the victim, when the bus speeds into the frame it is totally unexpected. But the victim doesn't have the narrow field of view of the zoomed in camera... the victim has peripheral vision. And if the victim's mother taught the victim anything, it was to look both ways before crossing the street.

In the underrated 2001 film The Mexican (with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts) they actually poke fun at this. Brad Pitt, in Mexico, looks down a road that goes on both ways into the horizon. Then the camera pulls in closer, he tries to cross the street, and a speeding truck forces him to stop. Based on the distance the truck would have had to cover in four seconds, this is clearly impossible. But that's the joke. How is it that a joke from The Mexican is being used as a dramatic plot point in serious films? I now flinch anytime the camera closes in on somebody because I think a speeding vehicle is going to mow them down.

Final Note:
Two of these three clichès are pivotal to the end of at least two of this years Acadamy Award Best Picture nominated films. In order to avoid giving anything away, I won't say which two clichès and I won't say which two films. But note that I've only seen two of the Best Picture nominees, so we're currently two-for-two.

Contest:
Find me a move that includes all three of these clichès! You will win a MixedMetaphors.net hat.

Amazing. I want to mock Safren Foer's blurb on the back of the book where he talks about how it is impossible to describe this book, but he does have a point. It's very hard to describe.

I'd say there are four major currents running through this novel:
1) The author's relationship to his current lover.
2) The gangsters.
3) The author's time teaching at a poetry school.
4) The author's first marraige and child.

All four of these currents intersect in various and strange ways. The novel is very "post-modern," whatever that really means. The world of the novel is set in the future (how far in the future, I don't know) where a group of gangsters terrorize the world (no American president has lived for more than a few days since the gangsters came into power), where aliens from Jupiter visit, and where the government sends you a postcard on the day you are going to die. But it's not just that the world is set in the future, it's also a few degrees off of normality. There are vampires living peacefully in basements, poets who have turned into kitchen appliances, etc.

If I had to say what I think this books "means," I'd venture that it's about a man who is so devastated by the loss of his child that his mind has crafted this shattered world around him and around his memories to protect him from his true emotions. Maybe that explanation is a bit too simple and banal for such a rich, funny, and emotional book. But dealing with the death of a child is very difficult to do in literature (and impossible to deal with in life, I imagine), and I think that tearing apart and rebuilding the entire world is an appropriate response.

Anyway, it's a beautiful book, and I read it in two days, thanks to plane travel and thanks to the fact that it's a really fast read (a quarter of the pages have no more than one or two lines on them). If you can get a copy of it (mine is from the NY public library and we had to wait a week or two for my branch to request it) I highly recommend it.

As always, plane travel for me means lots of books for book track. I almost abandoned Absurdistan a quarter-way through and then again half-way through. I just haven't been in the mood for satire. As far as satire goes, it's good satire. I mean, it's funny, it's well written. I'm not quite sure what the satirical point is, though. At first I thought it was mocking Halliburton and corporate greed, but, no, actually Halliburton is okay in this book. It seems to be mocking Hasidic Jews, but it's pretty clear from the beginning that the book is mocking the mocking of Hasidic Jews. I suppose it's really mocking the politics of fake minor ex-Soviet sattelite nation-states. Shteyngart may actually have a satirical point to make about the politics of fake minor ex-Soviet sattelite nation-states, but, really?

The real problem is that it doesn't even get to that level of satire until the halfway point. The first half of the book is spent in alternative US flashbacks and Russia, without even the mention of Absurdistan. I know the book is about the character of Misha (note that he has the same name as the penguin from the last books I read) and not about Absurdistan, but the book kind of dragged for me. If insteresting things didn't start happening when he finally got to Absurdistan (they did) I would have stopped reading for sure.