This one guy starts as a champion of the people and turns into a corrupt demagogue. It's a gripping story and a terrific book - sortof a political noiThis one guy starts as a champion of the people and turns into a corrupt demagogue. It's a gripping story and a terrific book - sortof a political noir - but you're like come on, that would never really happen.
"Listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity."...more
Iceberg Slim didn't invent the great American pimp archetype in 1969 but he codified it, he exposed it to mass culture, so he's an influential writer.Iceberg Slim didn't invent the great American pimp archetype in 1969 but he codified it, he exposed it to mass culture, so he's an influential writer. Everything from Slick Rick to blaxploitation to the pathetic "pickup artist" scene owes a debt to him. So when Robin Kelley writes for the New Yorker, "I'm always amazed when I encounter well-read people unfamiliar with Iceberg Slim," I kinda get it. But then, does influence equal value? I mean, is this a good book? Are you going to like it?
It's not terribly pleasant to read. For one thing, it uses more unfamiliar slang than A Clockwork Orange. You're gonna need the glossary in the back, or a jive translator. For another, the things it describes are unpleasant. Its narrator, who is more or less actually Iceberg Slim, has a dim opinion of women. He does bad things to them. That's an understatement.
He is somewhat repentant. Borrowing a trope from Fanny Hill and Vanity Fair, he presents Pimp as a cautionary tale, and unlike those two books he seems to mean it; he doesn't glorify his life. Much. Big Daddy Kane's mileage apparently varied.
The book competently follows your basic biopic plot arc. Naive youngster learns the game; rises to the top of the game; hubris; fall; wisdom. (The other way these stories end is the Scarface way, but since this is a memoir you already know that's not happening.) There's a noir influence: "She was brown-skin murder in a size-twelve dress." There are some trenchant and self-aware points made about what it means for a black man to pimp a black woman to a white man. So, is it good? Sortof, sure. It does a good job of being what it is. It is well-written.
So this ends up sortof in the same department as Ulysses. It's influential and effective, but you're unlikely to enjoy the actual experience of reading it. "The account of my brutality and cunning as a pimp will fill many of you with revulsion," says Slim, showing, as he often does, remarkable perception....more
Joyce Carol Oates has appropriated our American wet dream, the winner of the global boner bracket, the all-time "Who'd You Rather?" champion, she's taJoyce Carol Oates has appropriated our American wet dream, the winner of the global boner bracket, the all-time "Who'd You Rather?" champion, she's taken and made some kind of Cinderella Christ myth out of her, tarted up for the ball by her leering old fairy godfather and when the clock hits twelve martyred for our filthy sins. No soft-focus angel Christ here, either: this is Mel Gibson torture Christ, all meat and oozing sores inside her mouth. Oates insists on the fact of her body: Marilyn Monroe spends the entire book menstruating and sweating and stinking and pissing. When she's sodomized by an old guy Oates describes it, "like a beak plunging in." She never blinks. She feels everything. Like Christ, she has some Daddy issues. Like Christ, she tries to chicken out. Like Christ she seems to understand where this is all headed, and to face it bewildered and terrified. She's not dumb, she just has no defenses. She knows why she's here.
"It was my intention to create a female portrait as emblematic of her time and place as Emma Bovary was of hers," says Oates, and you're like, "Create? Wasn't Marilyn Monroe already created?" But the historical Monroe is a palimpsest for Oates. She has her own agenda. "The historical individuals are not in the novel," she says: "Rather, their historical roles are the subject of the novel." In one scene Marilyn Monroe goes incognito to the theater to watch her own movie and finds herself surrounded by men staring up at the screen and masturbating, and that scene is this book in a nutshell.
Oates has her sights set high. Blonde is her longest book and her most audacious in a long career of audacity, and it totally works. (Suck it, Mailer.) The singular Great American Novel doesn't exist, because there are so many Americans, right? The loner cowboy; the runaway slave; the pioneer woman - and the dizzy blonde, too, the sexpot, that's an American archetype. "Oh hey! - you can't miss Marilyn," says Marilyn: "She'll be the one with the vagina." Here she is....more
You know how everyone says this book is great? Well, me too. This book is great. I laughed and cried! Well, not really, but I came about as close to cYou know how everyone says this book is great? Well, me too. This book is great. I laughed and cried! Well, not really, but I came about as close to crying as I've come since Where the Red Fern Grows.
I hope you don't consider that a spoiler; if you don't suspect that not everyone's gonna make it through this book, you have misjudged it badly.
It's the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. There are a bunch of dudes and a bunch of ladies and a whole bunch of cows.
I blazed through this in four days, during which I had to be convinced to do anything other than read it. It's immensely entertaining, sharply written and observed, true about the nature of people. It has an epic scope but you'll never have any trouble keeping the characters apart; hell, you won't even have trouble keeping the horses apart.
There are a few extremely disturbing passages. One in particular involving guts that has merrily joined the rest of the nightmares roiling around at the bottom of my brain waiting for me to have insomnia. I wish McMurtry hadn't thought of that. Terrible things happen with little warning here. Get ready.
Absolutely one of my favorite books of the year....more
I was prepared to compare Steinbeck to Faulkner and Hemingway, because those three tend to get discussed together - but what he really reminds me of iI was prepared to compare Steinbeck to Faulkner and Hemingway, because those three tend to get discussed together - but what he really reminds me of is Upton Sinclair. Same powerful expose of the conditions of the poor and exploited, but you know how the problem with The Jungle is that the story itself is pretty awkward? Well, this is better.
So I hadn't realized what a screaming Commie Steinbeck was. That was a fun revelation. And he's sadly prophetic here. He describes how small farmers get pushed out by larger farms, and then the larger farms buy, for example, canneries, and sell their own peaches to their own canneries at under market, to make the profit back with the canned final product, and the smaller farms can't compete and even more of them go under, and eventually there'll be nothing left but huge farms. And that's exactly what happened: nobody stopped it and now it's done.
So I really, really liked this book. I thought the characters were great, the plot grinding. For a while I wondered (back to the Faulk/Hem comparison) whether the writing style was a little simplistic, compared to the very stylized techniques those two used - but then, those self-conscious techniques can get pretty annoying in both cases. In the end it's maybe not so bad to have a guy who can just write a sentence without getting too caught up in doing it either the simplest or most confusing way possible.
(And it's not like the writing is graceless, of course. Just check out the first chapter: we open on a universe of dust that has to be consciously recalling Dickens' description of fog in the opening of Bleak House. Beautiful, bleak stuff.)
Tom Joad is a character for the ages. Steinbeck is leaning on the mythic here: "Whenever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there." but it works because Steinbeck's good enough to make it work. Tom Joad's built for Bruce Springsteen to pick him up 70 years later: Steinbeck is creating a protest, and he succeeds.
And Ma, the unbending matriarch: "'You get your stick, Pa,' she said. 'Times when they's food an' a place to set, then maybe you can use your stick an' keep your skin whole. But you ain't a-doin' your job, either a-thinkin' or a-workin'...you jus' get you a stick now an' you ain't lickin' no woman; you're a-fightin', 'cause I got a stick all laid out too.'" That's some shit right there, huh? That's expressed in foreign terms, but we get the idea.
And check out my favorite character, Ruthie. That's a really sharp, fine, careful character description there, this little girl slowly going feral under circumstances that could take her no other way. It's beautifully done. Check out that allegorical croquet match. It's here where Steinbeck pulls away from Faulkner and Hemingway: Ruthie is a minor character, but Steinbeck draws her perfectly. Hem & Faulk don't have that attention to minor characters: they have more precise narratives. They wouldn't think to include someone who scuttles away and burrows under the story like Ruthie does.
Not sure where all the black folks went - this is almost entirely a white world - but for what it's about, it's got its shit together. Yes to this book and yes to Steinbeck. He's compulsively readable; he's about something useful and important; this is a great book....more
Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally demapped himself, to see it as a suicide note. But it's about all this other shit too, right? Addiction, and mothers, and the weight of potential, and assassins in wheelchairs, and tennis. If Wallace had suddenly become a tennis star instead of dead we would look back on this book and be like man...we should have seen that coming. That shit was all about tennis.
Nobody really wants to like Infinite Jest, because it's a fixation of all the most annoying dudes you know. But it is a super good book, unfortunately. Here's how to like it.
DFW was super good at actually writing Check out two similar scenes. In one, Hal & Orin have a long phone call where they tackle a bunch of important family history, and during most of it Pemulis is standing around getting impatient because Hal is supposed to go do something with his friends, and it adds this weird indirect tension that makes the scene pop. In another scene, Pemulis goes into this long-ass description of annulation, which is some kind of expository "this happens in the future" shit, and it would be boring but the kid he's talking to is blindfolded and has to pee wicked bad (don't ask) and again there's this palpable tension from the weirdest source. What this is is a magic trick. It's a pretty good one.
Wallace doesn't avoid his pop influences. Dude likes Stephen King. The fight scene featuring Gately - as far as pure plot goes, the climax of the book - is straight up thrilling. Riveting. If Wallace wanted to (and had like a million fewer demons), he could have just been a potboiler writer and sold a million books.
He's a virtuoso and he gets virtuosic sometimes, okay. There's a lengthy scene in the cafeteria, describing things like the way muscles look when they chew, that's just..."Okay bitches, here is some motherfucking writing." He describes basically the entire cafeteria, its social structure, everyone in it, the history of the things on the walls, down to the way chewing works muscularly...look, I love Eruption, which happened solely because Eddie Van Halen was capable of doing it. Go on with one's bad self, right? You can't do it, so shut up. You're watching something happen here.
He was very smart and everything The math in IJ is generally accurate; here's a rundown of the few mathematical errors in it. Wallace wrote a nonfiction book about infinity and I guess reviewed a couple of math books; he knew his stuff. And there's the dizzying display of medical expertise on display, which made me suspect he was pre-med at some point. (He was not.) A real old-school polymath here, huh?
And of course he was pretty good at English...here's a Slate piece on his apparently famous syllabi (links to actual PDFs included in article). And here's a list of all the words someone learned from the book, including the note that "my spellchecker is telling me that 129 of these words aren’t real words." Not sure if that number is accurate - spellcheck often misses difficult words - but we can all confirm that he did make words up with impunity.
It's pretty much fun to read Ending spoilers: (view spoiler)[It ends fine, shut up. You know as much as you need to. What, you've never read a book that didn't end with that freeze-frame shit from Animal House? (hide spoiler)]
Okay, I was a little disappointed at Chekhov's Giant Mutant Toddler's failure to appear. Although I guess that was just Gately anyway? Whatever: I wanted a literal Giant Mutant Toddler.
It's as good as it's supposed to be, and with the weight of its reputation that's really good. It's funny and terrifying and hysterically realistic and Wallace lays himself right open: it's an absolute refusal to be coy or ironic or guarded. It's a rock-you-on-your-heels book. It's the shit.
This is my point: Infinite Jest took me two full weeks longer to read than fucking Bleak House did, and Bleak House has many more slow parts. This isn't a minor commitment; it's a whole relationship. Infinite Jest wants to meet your parents, and it's gonna be awkward because it's got this weird shit about mothers. But it is worth it, honest.
PS if you want to see what Eschaton looks like, here's a Decemberists video. Thanks Nicole for pointing me to it.
* Read this book on Kindle. Don't worry about the footnotes. I mean, read them, but don't worry about it being hard on Kindle; it'll be fine. More importantly, Kindle will let you look up all the words you don't know, and if you think you know all the words you are an asshole. And the point is, "opi" is probably not a word but if Wallace can make shit up so can I, which isn't true....more
Here is what Edith Wharton called the Great American Novel, and when it showed up on the Guardian's Top 100 English Novels list it was suggested that Here is what Edith Wharton called the Great American Novel, and when it showed up on the Guardian's Top 100 English Novels list it was suggested that perhaps she was being sarcastic. But when one nominates the Great American Novel, one is defining America at least as much as the Novel, yes? And I'm going to venture to suggest that it may not have been the Novel that Wharton was feeling sarcastic about.
There's a straight line between Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' Lorelei and Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, just as there's a line between Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath and Lena Dunham, and you can see why Dorothy Parker found it necessary to rebut this book with her short story Big Blonde; these are different archetypes here, and they don't go to the same parties.
But Lorelei is an archetype, one of the great characters, an American Becky Sharp, and this book makes an impact, despite its often preposterous plot. (You know where else Freud makes a personal appearance is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.) Anita Loos (her real name, surprisingly, not a dirty joke you didn't get) knows exactly what she's doing. Lorelei's ditzily unreliable narration packs a ton of information in between its lines.
And it's funny. Like, super funny: one of the funniest books I've ever read.
I'm writing this on Thanksgiving, and the news today is filled with breathless anticipation of tomorrow, which we call Black Friday because people are most likely going to actually die in pursuit of discounts and yes, sure: Lorelei is the Great American Hero we deserve. ...more
Jim Thompson's 1952 pitch noir pulp classic is about as dark as dark gets. Lou Ford is a deputy sheriff whose life is a half-hearted attempt to stop hJim Thompson's 1952 pitch noir pulp classic is about as dark as dark gets. Lou Ford is a deputy sheriff whose life is a half-hearted attempt to stop himself from murdering anyone, and as we get started he's just about to lose the battle.
It's a totally successful book. Thompson's an efficient writer, and even when he indulges in loopy noir purpleness - "I kissed her, a long hard kiss. Because baby didn't know it, but baby was dead." - I mean, that stuff's always fun, and he pulls it off.
Stephen King makes an argument in his forward that this is a Great American Novel, and yeah, sure, why not? This is America too....more
It's about a whale eventually. Before that it's a gay romantic comedy. "In our hearts’ honeymoon," says Ishmael, "lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving It's about a whale eventually. Before that it's a gay romantic comedy. "In our hearts’ honeymoon," says Ishmael, "lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair." If you never made it past page 100, because you were assigned this in high school and it was boring, you might wonder where the whale even is. Where's this majestic tome everyone's yelling about?
About a quarter in, captain Ahab shows up raving about Moby-Dick and the book takes this intense lurch into legend, and it feels like a pretty radical change of direction here. Ahab completely takes over, a character of Shakespearean primal force: "Ahab never thinks; he feels, feels, feels." Melville wasn't a careful planner at the best of times, but something else happened to him as he was writing this book, and here it is:
[image] dude's name is literally "hawt & horny"
It's Nathaniel Hawthorne, the master of metaphor himself, whose relationship with Melville happened to coincide with the writing of Moby-Dick, and whose influence was so deep that Melville dedicated the book to him. So Melville's over here writing some kind of Robinson Crusoe slash fic, he meet cutes Hawthorne, and the next thing you know...
[image] "to produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme"
It's Hawthorne who suggests to Melville that he's onto something with the whole whale thing - Hawthorne with his towering feel for metaphors - and here we have our mighty theme. And look, I know, you're not really used to whales being scary, right? You've gone on a whole boat trip just trying to get a peek at one. It surfaced for like two seconds 100 yards away and everyone was like ooh, so majestic. Pretending like whale watches aren't boring as fuck. You might feel the same way when Melville spends seven chapters in a row talking about the physiognomy of sperm whale heads. But he's doing a Jaws here, withholding the reveal, building suspense, and by the time the whale actually appears - 30 pages before the end - you know exactly what that head is capable of. What comes next is one of the best action scenes in literature.
[image]
Anyway the thing is that you gotta remember that in 1860, nobody knew shit about whales. Here - think of the whale like the rapper Ice Cube. Back in the NWA days, he created a scary, unknowable being of immense power and danger - a thing most of us had never seen in real life. Now he's recast himself as the star of "Are We There Yet?" He's cuddly now, and whales are on bumper stickers about saving. But once upon a time, both represented the implacable unknown.
[image] the symbol you love to hate
The implacable unknown, and obsession, and futility and mortality and - and - like all the best metaphors, the whale means anything you need him to. Including, by the way, sperm. Because while the book becomes more mighty and more weighty, it never becomes any less gay at all. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long," Ishmael chants: "I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it!" Did your high school English teacher tell you to grow up, it's not that kind of sperm? It is that kind of sperm.
Hawthorne's influence made Moby-Dick deeper but not less gay, because Melville was in love with Hawthorne. “Whence come you, Hawthorne?" says one of his letters to him. "By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine.” And what happens next is Hawthorne moves across the state and they kindof stop talking. What happened? Did someone's wife catch them making out? Or was it just a crush? We have nothing to indicate Hawthorne's feelings; Melville burned all his letters. Maybe it was one-sided. Maybe Hawthorne was the white whale.
And that's one of the wonderful things about Moby-Dick for me: Melville has Trojan Horse'd the Great American Novel. Dude wrote DICK right on the cover of the book and no one got it. Still, to this day, my Penguin intro by Nathaniel Philbrick never once mentions how incredibly gay it is. Once again: It is that kind of sperm.
Look, you have this sense of Melville as ponderous, and he can be, but he's also funny as hell. He's like Shakespeare, who was a massive influence: if it feels like it might be wordplay, it always definitely is. Here's a thing he does right in the first chapter of the book, he goes
In this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim).
The Pythagorean maxim in question is "avoid beans;" Melville's making a fart joke. When he talks about squeezing sperm, how dumb do you think he'd have to be in order to not realize what he's writing? And furthermore Billy Budd, which doesn't even make sense if it isn't gay. And where I'm going here is that this isn't just a mighty book that sortof sounds gay: it's a mighty gay book. It's by a gay man. Even if we leave Hawthorne out of it, between Melville and Walt Whitman, the foundation of American literature is largely gay.
I mean, not to read too much into it. It's a book about a whale. But we should be clear that the whale is gay....more
Huck Finn is miles weightier than Tom Sawyer, and it's almost the Great American Novel it's called. Tom Sawyer was all fun and games - Don Quixote, asHuck Finn is miles weightier than Tom Sawyer, and it's almost the Great American Novel it's called. Tom Sawyer was all fun and games - Don Quixote, as he points out himself, "all adventures and more adventures." Huck Finn's a different person; he's concerned with doing the right thing. He spends most of the novel helping a runaway slave escape, and he brilliantly represents a person judging the morals of society against the morals he's come up with himself, and ending up in the right place. That's why Huck Finn isn't a racist novel: Twain means to show us how a person who approaches life honestly will come out against racism. He's not subtle about it.
And Twain pulls off this wonderful reversal near the end of the book: Sawyer suddenly (view spoiler)[reappears on the scene, pulling the same hijinks he always has, but now we see it through Huck's and Jim's eyes, and it's maddening. Huck wants to find the most direct solution to the problem of freeing Jim, who's been recaptured. Tom wants to complicate things, as he always does; rather than just pulling a loose board out and making off, Tom insists on digging under the wall, and loosing bugs into Jim's prison so he can be properly prisonerish, and finally warning the family about the impending escape to make the whole thing more dangerous. (hide spoiler)]
While Sawyer did horrible things in his own book - most notably faking his own death so his Aunt Polly could about die of sadness - we forgave him then because the book was a lark, told through his eyes, and we understood that it was all about fun. Twain takes a leap in Huck Finn, showing us an adult world and then showing us what real stakes look like when Tom Sawyer gets a hold of them, and it's devastating to watch Tom toy with Jim's life this way. This radical flip is one of Twain's best moves, and it elevates Huck Finn considerably.
But Jim, for all his humanity, is still problematic. He never drives anything forward himself, and his passivity makes me uncomfortable. He's certainly shown to be kind, and we're allowed to see him weeping for his separated wife and children, and we get to see his heavily allegorical refusal to allow Tom to throw rattlesnakes into his prison to make it more realistic. We're allowed into Jim's humanity, yeah, but he never gets to drive the plot. At the end, when he realizes that he'd been a free man all along, and Huck didn't know it but Tom did and Tom was just playing...I wanted a moment of anger from him. Didn't he deserve it? Shouldn't Jim have had a moment when he said, "What about my wife and children?"
Toni Morrison says that "the brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises." As great as this book is, I'm uncomfortable in parts. In making Jim the co-lead but giving him no action, Twain failed Jim; so while this is an anti-racism book, it's not totally an enlightened one....more
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