Category: Reviews

One Moment of Unwanted Falseness in Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle

Walls’s book is a memoir about her nomadic childhood with well-meaning but narcissistic parents. At one house in gold-mining country they live with many stray animals, including an injured buzzard her father brought home one day. His name was Buster. Just before the moment in question, young Jeanette has encouraged her father to drive the car as fast as possible on the highway, causing it to overheat and break down.

We sat there for a long time. I could see buzzards circling high in the distance, which reminded me of that ingrate Buster. Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

I hate this paragraph and all the lies it tries to tell. It’s like: just about every memoir I read would be so much better as a novel. Please, book industry, recover from your true-story addiction.

National Lampoon’s Lemmings: Dead in Concert

The conceit of Lemmings is that we’re watching live footage of the Woodchuck Festival, Three Days of Peace, Love, and Death, where people have amassed on a farm in upstate New York to listen to music and kill themselves. It stars very young (and alive) versions of Christopher Guest, John Belushi, and Chevey [sic] Chase. Aided by musician Paul Jacobs and former Miss Arkansas Rhonda Coullet, they play songs spoofing the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, CSNY, Joni Mitchell, and others.

This doesn’t do the movie any justice.
Continue reading National Lampoon’s Lemmings: Dead in Concert

I Used to Have a Blog

Another one. It still exists. For a time, the most popular post was about Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo”, which you are welcome to Google. Now, this most popular post, by which I mean the post that is read based on the greatest number of Google searches, by which I mean the relevant thing on the blog people are most often searching for, is Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream” a.k.a. “The Harper’s Essay”. Here, in the interest of complicating those search results, is what I ages ago had to say about it:
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A Quick Note on Narrative Mirroring, or: Learning from The Simpsons

Watching the Ruth Powers episode of The Simpsons. When she picks Marge up for their night out, Marge says Ruth looks “Nice,” and Ruth insists that nothing about this night is going to be nice. Then she pops a tape into the stereo: it’s Lesley Gore’s “Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows”. Maybe the nicest song ever written. “Sorry,” Ruth says. “Wrong tape.” Then she pops in “Welcome to the Jungle”.

Skip ahead four scenes. Wiggum is giving Homer a ride home, after coming across him up at the top of Mt. Springfield. (Or at least wherever the Hollywood-esque sign that reads “SPRINGFIELD” sits.) He’s behind Ruth’s car (stolen from her ex-husband) and decides to pull it over because the left taillight is a little smaller than the right. Wiggum turns on his lights, Ruth speeds off, and Wiggum says, “Looks like we got an old-fashioned car chase!” Then he pops in a tape.
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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

“And … if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.”

David Foster Wallace says this early on in the road trip David Lipsky took with him in 1996 for the latter to write a big piece for Rolling Stone on the post-Infinite Jest hype. This book is a direct transcription of seemingly every single thing these two Davids said to each other over the course of three days. Some of it’s great, as above, and below: Continue reading Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Learning (Once Again) from Joan Didion

There’s time now that graduation is over and my grades have been turned in to begin reading in earnest again, and I’ve done so, with Michael Martone’s Michael Martone (a collection of quasi-fictive/quasi-nonfictive contributor’s notes about which I take back everything I’ve said over the past week regarding the demand for factual purity in writing; I want to know everything in that book that is true solely to bask in the thing’s pure truthness), and now I’m about halfway through Didion’s After Henry.

It’s an essay collection, and after reading this paragraph, from “Pacific Distances”… Continue reading Learning (Once Again) from Joan Didion

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: The End

Maybe this is all why I like taxidermy so much. No one would ever mistake a mounted animal for a live one, no matter how intently the taxidermist tucks his eyelids and paints his nostrils. No matter how lifelike the pose. I mean, which—to borrow a phrase—is the authentic animal?

This:

Or this?

Continue reading Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: The End

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: Part 2

I’ve been a fan of pro wrestling for a long time. Not the inspiredly named NES game pictured at right (about which I can only recall that The Amazon, part-snake, part-man, was unstoppable—at least when wielded by my friend Darrell), but the spectacle that’s now marketed as Sports Entertainment. I shouldn’t be a fan of sports entertainment. I’m so rarely entertained by sports. Fortunately, professional wrestling is to sports what the Jonas Brothers are to rock stars.
Continue reading Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: Part 2

Two Ways of Looking at Falseness: A Series of Blog Posts in Defense of a Position

There are more than two ways to look at falseness.

One of my favorite documentary films is The Cruise made in 1998 by Bennett Miller, who went on in 2005 to make Capote.

The Cruise is made perpetually watchable by its perpetually listenable subject: Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, who guides Grey Line Bus Tours of Manhattan with a rapidity and a nuance for detail that has to be heard (and seen, of course) to be believed.
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The New Creative Nonfiction

The current issue of Creative Nonfiction (a magazine out of Pittsburgh; I used to walk past its Walnut Street offices in the days I lived with girls in Shadyside) is in a new magazine format—laid out, graphically rich, pull-quote-heavy, 8ish” x 11ish”—that is welcome and good. I think the days of serial publications looking like novels are over, and it’s clear the folks of CNF have realized this, too. One of the issue’s early essays is from the by now former editor of TriQuarterly, on the move of his journal to an all-digital format, run by students. It’s a decision made perhaps stupidly by Northwestern’s administration, and while it’s a loss, clearly the idea with this magazine (inclusive also of an essay by R. Rodriguez on the death of the PBS Newshour’s five-minute essays) is that change is afoot. Although it’s unclear whether “afoot” means happening now to happening soon, and so let’s just say things change. Let’s make it present/infinite tense because this is a statement that’s always true.
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The Value(s) of Books

There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just trust but more like place the entirety of my faith in. (And I know, having read thoroughly my DFW, that the late grammarian would have no problems with the preposition hanging out at the end of that there sentence up there.) The other great thing about the OAWT is its superlative tables for certain groups of adjectives. Like the one that ties “kind” to “cruel” through words like “humane” and “inoffensive” and “pitiless”. Also the tables of specifics for those writers like this one who tend always to satisfy themselves with dull generics. A whole table of terms involved with knitting and crocheting! A list of oaths and curses inclusive of both “fuck it” and “jeez Louise”!
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Charles Baxter, “Lush Life” craft lecture (part 2)

baxter_flute-playerC.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will:

Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass was fragrant. Sitting back in her uncomfortable chair and gazing first at the grass and then up at the ceiling’s crisscrossed wooden beams, Ramona thought back to the previous week, when she had visited the Vermont State Fair. [. . .] Suddenly startled, Ramona came back to the present. Baxter was still droning on about lushness.

The problem with such a passage is its implication that the past resides in a place separate from, or beside the present. That we exist in both times at separate occassion, whereas, Baxter argues, quoting Faulkner, “the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” If the past resides in the present, then writers looking to capture that experience need to render both simultaneously.
Continue reading Charles Baxter, “Lush Life” craft lecture (part 2)

Windell Middlebrooks

windellHas anyone seen the new Miller High Life ad campaign? Well: “new”. The one where some distributor/deliveryman wiseacre crashes upper-crust fetes at the horse track and I think a yacht? and kidnaps their untouched cases of Miller High Life to then redistribute / -deliver said cases to “common sense” folk?

Putting aside the whole general dumb offensiveness of the ad—and the way many people still assume class snobbery is unidirectional from the top down—I have to admit its cleverness. Or at least Miller High Life’s malleability. Let’s stop and look once more at the name of the beer—”High Life”—and remember that this is a beer that likens itself to champagne on its label. In a time when any touches of the upper class are to be met with near-universal loathing (at least on TV), what’s a fancypants beer to do?

One solution: fire Errol Morris, and hire the Robin Hood of beer.

His name is Windell Middlebrooks, and for Lincolnites, he’ll be at the 27th & Cornhusker Super Saver this Friday 6 November from 10am to 11:15am.

Let’s not ask how I know this.

Richard Rodriguez on Newspapers Dying

harpersIt’s in the Nov 09 Harper’s (pictured, right). The pizzicato paragraph structure, the prose itself, the density of its Bay Area history. It’s incredible:

In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance has placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.

The essay’s relentlessly bleak, completely disinterested in pointing out what might come in place of the daily morning newspaper to act as an improvement on the earlier model. (Did folks fret this much when the evening newspaper died back in the middle of the last century? Has anyone missed it?) But I do appreciate Rodriguez’s linking the newspaper’s decline not to “The Internet” but rather to the decline of the importance of place in our lives. I appreciate it as a fresh contribution to an otherwise rank and bloated conversation.
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More TV Crankiness

jim-pam-wedding-pictures-01Does anyone remember how the original U.K. Office came to lead TV comedy in new directions through the force of its genius and novelty? And then the U.S. Office surprised everyone by actually being good through the strength of its performances and the idiosyncrasies of its secondary characters?*

What happened? Jim Loves Pam swelled into this tsunami that flooded out any other subplots and diluted all the stuff that made the show innovative. Tonight was the culmination: the hour-long wedding episode that was a total inevitability from like the first time Jim looked longingly at Pam as she left the office with Roy.

The inevitability of wedding episodes is fine, I guess. Rites of passage and all that. But what a shame that The Office, in trying for something new and outrageous to do at a TV wedding, opted to grab some tedious viral video off YouTube.

Maybe you’ve seen it? Twenty-some million apparently have. Instead of the boring old Pachelbel a wacky group of wacky young white folks decided to play a pop dance song and like boogie down the aisle in shades! I don’t get it, right? I have no idea why anyone would want to watch this video.

But why does anyone watch anything on YouTube? This doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that a show like The Office, which I used to, okay, “believe in” in big ways that are probably silly, not only just took this whole idea and dropped it right into the script, but made sure to clue the audience in not once but twice! to the fact this is from YouTube. That this ridiculousness has been sanctioned on the Online, and so it’s not stupid and unfunny, but rather culturally relevant!

It’s like it’s more important for The Office to be in on the joke than it is to actually make the jokes.

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* Dear The Office: keep Meredith and Creed on heavy rotation and I’ll still bring the love every week.

NYTimes’ Changing of the Guard

Safire_WilliamDid anyone catch the Magazine’s On Language column? Maybe you heard last week that its longtime columnist, William Safire, died. This week’s is written by Ammon Shea, who recently achieved fame in that newly named genre of annualist nonfiction by reading the OED over the course of a year.

I didn’t make it a habit of reading William Safire, despite my shared interests in language, but from what I knew he was a pretty strict prescriptionist when it came to grammar and usage. Sure, he tried in his column to get a perspective on new, hip coinages, but prescriptive usage—the insistence on following certain established authorities in the constructions of utterances—and maybe of course conservative punditry are what he built his long career on.

Shea’s column isn’t just descriptivist—i.e., insisting on the inherent authority of any native speaker in constructing utterances—it’s basically a manifesto for the beleaguered descriptive grammarian. “My aim here,” Shea writes near the top, “is not to illustrate how to be annoyed by those who insist on correcting your language (that will come naturally) but rather to provide a guide for how to make them go away.”
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ABC: Your Source for Mimbo TV

N & I have been ill-ish and have wanted these past few evenings to do nothing but lie on the sofa with chicken soup and the DVR, and so last night despite a backlog that built up while we were in N.C., and despite NBC’s Thursday night of premieres (shame on you, NBC, for holding out on new 30 Rocks until mid-October! It’s your best show! You already skimp on the number of minutes each episode gets (average of 20 compared to the standard 22), and so help me if there are fewer total episodes this season than your long-ago-shark-jumped The Office we’re going to have to have words) we investigated the new shows on ABC’s Wednesday night lineup.

Men, apparently, are best left dumb and oversexed.
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Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and the Successes of Realist Fiction

mooreThis weekend N & I were in Oak Island, N.C., where my sister got married. I did the ceremony. You may as well prepare for a long post on all this. It was, maybe, a once-in-a-lifetime event: getting to the write the words that people listen to while they watch a couple ceremonially join their lives. People seemed to like what I came up with, and it was fun standing there and being in charge and just feeling only happiness when they kissed right in front of me, and then it was over.

Good food at the restaurant, which was right on the water and reserved, the whole place, just for all of us. The centerpieces consisted of orange candles and sand set in glass vases and were, anyone could tell, a little unfortunate. The tops of the candles extended beyond the rims of the vases. They looked awkward, like a kid in clothes he’s well outgrown. The colors on the cake ran and the edible shells melted and looked wrong. You could tell they were meant to be shells and many of them were but some weren’t.

I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just relaying a part of the experience of being at the wedding. I’m doing it wrong, though. Because, I mean, what are the options? When telling a story in whatever yer medium is, how do you render such details? TV gets it all wrong. TV puts stuff like this in shows called BRIDEZILLA and uses careful editing to create post-produced “drama” it couldn’t quite find on camera. On TV, an outsized candle or droopy marshmallow shell is the cause for life-stopping hell to be raised.

For the sake of brevity let’s skip all other media and go right to fiction. Even here you’ve got lots of options. The candle and the cake could be symbols for whatever theme on the state of things in the world yer trying to develop. They could be set dressing, rendered through a jack-knifed assembly of words no one has quite seen before—artful, stylized, “languagey”. But it feels a lot of times to me like a kind of lie to do either of these, because the fact of the candle, if it is a fact, is that it was fine, in the end. I mean, yeah, it was higher than the vase, but the sand inside was taken right from the very beach where the couple was wed, which made guests’ getting to take these centerpieces home all the more nice. Plus there was a ribbon tied plainly but attractively around the widest part of the vase. The misfortune of the candle was something anyone could notice and that everyone would forget about moments later.

Isn’t this, then, the effect one should go for in writing? Noticing and then forgetting? Being able to remember if you need to but not being forced to remember against your will?

The cake, well all I can say about it is that it was by needs gluten-free and tasted way better than the gluten-rich cake the restaurant provided for those unheedful of wheat in their diets.

I asked my sister whether she was upset and she seemed not to care too much. And then I kept looking for that part of her that was covering up the fact that this small part of her big day had been ruined, but I never found it. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t a big deal. There was so much else worth everyone’s concern.
Continue reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and the Successes of Realist Fiction

Adventureland: So Dull!

adventureland

Far be it from me to hate on a movie filmed not just in Pittsburgh, but mostly in ever-beloved Pgh theme park Kennywood (that’s the Steel Phantom, above, which is now I think called something else, which for a time had either the longest drop or the most vertical drop or the fastest maximum speed of any other roller coaster in the country: and it’s not even the best one at Kennywood), but I couldn’t hold onto anything in Greg Mottola’s latest other than the set.
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