A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

This is the first Naipaul novel I've read, and I found the experience quite disorienting, in ways both pleasurable and upsetting. I think my upset is what will persist, and that may be a good thing.

I'm well accustomed to literature which travels a predictable path of indignation regarding the injustice of European colonialism. I don't know that I've ever read anything, though, that so fully encompasses the complexity of the relationships between all the various players in a colonial situation. The shorthand version of colonialism -- wealthy European whites exploiting poor African blacks -- conceals a plethora of more nuanced and complicated relationships. That seems a pretty self-evident thing to say, but I don't know of another text that brings it to the fore as forcefully as this. Instead of the basic master/slave dynamic, we find here highly complex systems of classes within classes, exiles within exiles, powers within powers.

An ethnic Indian trader prospering on the east coast of Africa moves with his mixed-race slave to an interior African country which was recently decolonized by a European power and is now tipping into a civil war sponsored in part by European interests and partially by ethnic and class divisions within the aboriginal culture. Everything that's wrong with colonialism (slavery, oppression) and all of its benefits (clean water, electricity) are on display. Everything that's wrong with independence (kleptocracy, recapitulation of colonial power structures) and all of its benefits (a sense of common destiny and self-determination) are on display. Human relationships are a hall of mirrors. "Everyone is a villager," and everyone's a kind of slave. As Naipaul puts it more than once, "It wasn't that there was no wrong and no right. It was that there was no right." He has no respect for any of the systems on offer, imperial or revolutionary or anything in-between, and his analysis of how the different constituents of the river town exercise, cede, and accumulate different forms of power -- economic, political, sexual, emotional -- is nuanced, precise, and persuasive.

All this is an easy sell as far as I'm concerned. I've written myself about what seems to be the sad inevitability of revolutions turning back into empires. The discomfort enters for me, though, because it does sort of seem like Naipaul is especially contemptuous of the revolutionary part of the cycle. There are passages here which remind me of Shelby-Steele-like rhetoric, which seem to accuse the oppressed of abetting their oppression, and that kind of thinking makes this white boy fidget with discomfort. It may well be a productive upset, though, because one thing I can say for sure is that few pieties about colonialism can survive a careful reading of this book.

Ketchup

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

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Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009). Eggers tells the story of a remarkable family in a very easy-going and simple voice.

Animal Kingdom, David Michôd (2010). Stark, crisp, finally melodramatic.

Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (2010). They should show this as a curtain-raiser before every war movie. War isn't hell, or glory, or dramatic; it's tedious, confusing, and random.

The Town, Ben Affleck (2010). I've never much cared for Affleck, but this is twice now that he's turned in some really fine work as a director.

Howl, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman (2010). Wow, totally unwatchable! I made it up to the part where they're on drugs and everything turns into an undersea cartoon or something.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy (2010). Sly and fun.

Friday Night Lights (2006-). Has there ever been a more emotionally manipulative show? This thing constantly makes me cry, even though there are precious few characters I really have any sympathy with. It's weird.

The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998). I got weirdly hooked on this for a while there. Shandling is on the one hand hard to watch and on the other I can't turn away.

Four Lions, Chris Morris (2010). This seemed like a bad idea. I had to check. It was.

The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis (2010). This was tight and gripping. Haggis knows what he's doing.

The American, Anton Corbjin (2010). Lifeless.

The Social Network, David Fincher (2010). Eh.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick (1964). Every other year or so.

Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg (2010). Very nicely done.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

The French are so easily seduced by even the most caricatured image of the outlaw. Richet thinks he's showing us Mesrine's pathos but all that really comes across is how much he worships the man. Still, this is super entertaining and great to look at.

The Way Back, Peter Weir (2010). Almost absurdly epic. Absolutely worth the afternoon.

Colonel Chabert, Honore de Balzac (1832). Superb.

Salt, Phillip Noyce (2010). I can't remember anything about this now.

Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes (2009). Anything with Paul Giamatti is worth a look, in this case only barely.

The Tourist, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2010). 

The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry (2011).

Two incoherent and atrocious payday films from relatively interesting directors. It's almost like they're trying to be as contemptuous of you for watching this dreck as they can be.

Fair Game, Doug Liman (2010). This is the dramatization of the Plame affair and one of the best films I've seen about the Bush administration's post-9/11 rush to judgment. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are both terrific. Highly recommended. 

Even the Rain, Icíar Bollaín (2010). Nice conceit, nice try, but it turns out a muddle.

Etc. etc. etc.

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The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995). Limpid prose kept me reading all 9000 pages, but there's not much there there.

Youth in Revolt, Miguel Arteta (2009).
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright (2010).
Cleverish enough, I guess. I like this Michael Cera fine, but why can't the protagonist in these things ever be a girl?

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005). Cunningham's a lovely writer sentence by sentence. The concept seemed too high-concept for me at first, but I grew into it and wound up enjoying this a great deal.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (2010). One of the last great showbiz workaholics.

The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988). If you've seen it, you know. If you haven't, you should.

Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983). Terrific, fascinating documentary about the rise of graffiti and hip hop culture. Amazing to see NYC in the early 80's and realize how much time has gone by. Provided me with at least one long-sought source for a sample I'd wondered about: "You only specialize in one thing, you can't call yourself the all-out king."

Foul Play, Colin Higgins (1978). Second only to Seems Like Old Times on my list of Hawn/Chase childhood favorites. One of those 70's flicks that's simultaneously total fluff and highly clever.

The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2004). There was no reason not to like this, but for some reason I couldn't engage with it.

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst (2010)
The Arms Maker of Berlin, Dan Fesperman (2009)
WWII espionage fiction: My annual holiday indulgence. A return to form for Furst, who seemed to me to be phoning it in the last few times. I blame Fesperman for not being Furst, but that's of course unfair.

The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko (2010). This isn't perfect, but it's very good, and it gives me a lot of hope. A reasonably serious and insightful story about a family of two moms and two kids going through a crisis of confidence, written and directed by an out Lesbian. Some might say that the achievement of the movie is that it doesn't even matter that the parents are gay, that it's just a story about a family crisis. That's only about half true. The parents' Lesbianism is integral to the story, but it doesn't determine the story. To me, this seems like a tremendous achievement; the piece neither claims special status for the couple nor asserts that this couple is just like any other. The view of human sexuality on offer here is also refreshing. It ain't Foucault, but it's way more sophisticated than the permanent adolescence Hollywood usually peddles in the bedroom.

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (1857), translated by Lydia Davis (2010)

We are, of course, on paper, thrilled that the scary-smart, MacArthur-certified, uber-cool Lydia Davis has translated the novel that made modern literature possible. What do we do with the fact that her version sounds so stilted? I read this alongside my fusty old Lowell Bair. There are certainly moments where I prefer Davis to Bair, but there are more where I prefer Bair to Davis, usually because Davis's syntax is more convoluted or because she uses more exotic diction, likely with the intention of keeping her vocabulary closer to its nearest French cognates. (I'm not willing to make the effort to dish up a bunch of examples here, unless my faithful readers demand them.) Also, this is minor, but Davis's pages and pages of notes are weird.

I've had a love/hate relationship with this novel for a long time. Insofar as it represents the ascendancy of style over substance, I loathe it. Insofar as it demonstrates that human relationships fundamentally consist of nothing but the collision of one's own self-delusions with those of another, I find it irresistibly perfect. I can't think of another book I hate so much and admire so completely. (I can, oddly, think of plenty that I love but don't particularly admire.)

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (2009)

There's not a whole lot to this novel--it's short, and feels even shorter--but what's here is admirably written and often delightful. In 1837, the rural poet John Clare--once celebrated, now forgotten by the literary powers that be--ends up in an asylum run by a spendthrift renaissance man "doctor" as inept as an inventor as he is primitive as a psychiatrist. Another of the doctor's patients is the brother of Alfred Tennyson, who's come to the neighborhood to be near his troubled sib. Nothing particularly surprising happens: The doctor's daughter falls for Tennyson, Clare hangs out with Roma in the forest, the doctor schemes and goes broke, other patients at the asylum are troubled by their various demons, etc. Still, Foulds--also a poet--writes with clarity and grace, and there's more than enough here to please and amuse you on two or three plane rides, depending on their length.

Ghostwritten, David Mitchell (1999)

I enjoyed this, but it's uneven. Like Robert Altman and (sometimes) Jim Jarmusch, Mitchell likes to get one narrative rolling, then leave it behind and start an apparently unrelated one, only to show you, further on, that the first and second are actually parts of a whole. Then he introduces a third, fourth, and so on, each time providing a little jolt of pleasure when you recognize how each fits into the whole scheme. That's fun, but here a lot of the connections seem arbitrary to me -- maybe I'm missing something? That's entirely possible -- and some of the sections are a little formulaic, which is my nice way of saying boring. The author of the wonderful Cloud Atlas is hereby forgiven this early ho-hummer. (I haven't read the new one everyone was chattering about a couple months ago.)

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (2000)

Marvelous. A playful and morbid treatise on how political, religious, and literary institutions corrupt and compromise the individual. The passages where the protagonist is summoned to lead Pinochet and his generals in a seminar on Marxism are sublime.

This is my second Bolaño. I'm starting with the early small ones before getting to the later big ones everyone professes to love. So far I'm delighted; he reminds me by turns of many of my favorites like Sebald and Bernhard, but is utterly distinctive.

Ketchup

Sometimes the rate of my consumption of culture outpaces my capacity to reflect upon it. Here's what's passed through my head of late:

The Wire, David Simon et. al. (2002-2008). I believe this displaces The Sopranos as the best television I've ever seen. If you've seen it you already know what I'm talking about; if you haven't seen it, you should. There were of course some passages that were more successful than others--I for one found the invented serial killer idea too clever by half--but on the whole this is a masterpiece. I was very sorry when I ran out of episodes, but then I realized that this story is of course far from over; all you need to do is read the Sun paper now and then and imagine the episode Simon would have wrought from the day's news. Here, this one took me about forty seconds to start scripting in my head.

Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison (1999). What a pleasure to read Harrison's collected nonfiction about Leelanau by a lake just northeast of Muskegon on a July afternoon.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion (2006). What a pleasure to read Didion's collected nonfiction in the air over California's central valley. Old and new favorites. Too bad this edition's pages are so thin.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1942). Oh my stars. I'm only on page 500 or so of the some 1200, and I'm going to have to put this away now that school's started, but I feel like it's OK not to read this straight through, and I also, frankly, feel like I've mostly gotten what's on offer here, namely deliciously incisive diagnoses of a grand society striding confidently toward the edge of a cliff. I can't think of any other novel that so decisively nails the 20th century's disastrous obsession with progress. "With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones, or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers." Paging Ross Perot.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polankski (2010). Whew, Polanski's just oozing decadence these days. This is supposedly a thriller about a CIA plot to, you know, take control of everything, but Roman can barely be bothered to flesh out any of the absurd plot points; he's too busy setting up beautifully lit shots of fog and sad adulterers. Beautiful photography, but not really a movie. The amazing house on the beach at Sylt receives more attention from the director than do any of his stars.

The Green Zone, Paul Greengrass (2010). Essentially a continuation of Greengrass's Bourne movies, in that Matt Damon takes on the entire corrupt U.S. military-industrial complex and wins. This one is purportedly set in the "real world," though, namely Baghdad's green zone. The movie is absolutely absurd, but the takeaway for the action movie crowd at the mall is that their government lied to them about Iraq, and that's a truth I'm delighted to see promulgated as widely and effectively as possible.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine (2006). Muddily structured but useful. I really had no idea this was going on when it was going on.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009) does for 20c European history what Bergman's so-called "trilogy of faith" (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) did for God. Namely, shows it to be incomprehensible and cruel, but absolutely beautiful to look at in luminous black and white. Go back and look at those Bergman films, though, and then look at this again, and see if you don't feel, as I did, how creepily clean Haneke's images are. Maybe I've been spending too much time in Lightroom, but The White Ribbon feels like a masterpiece of post-production as much as anything.

Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh (1949). Walsh remakes High Sierra as a western, with Joel McCrea in the Bogart role. Nice enough for a Sunday afternoon, particularly if you like Virginia Mayo, which I do, but a minor Walsh by any measure. I like the hideout in the ruined village of Todos Santos.

Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955). Sturges also directed The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Eagle Has Landed, among many others. Notice a theme? Manly men in conflict with other manly men. This one fits. A strange and small picture, in which Integrity (played by Spencer Tracy) squares off with Deceit (Robert Ryan) and comes out ahead. Atmospheric and nice to look at for a while, but finally the claustrophobia that Sturges is trying to engender just turns into tedium.

A Single Man, Tom Ford (2009) has its affecting moments, but is mostly, probably predictably, an exercise in style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if the style brings pleasure. Some here does--lots of beautiful California summer light, lots of fantastic bric a brac to ogle--but someone really should have steadied Ford's hand on the post-production dials; the gimmick where he keeps making people pale when they're sad and rosy when their faith in humanity (and/or libido) is restored is tacky and emberrassing.

Band of Brothers, various authors (2001). The Pacific is way better, and do you know why? Because this is pre-9/11 triumphalism, and that is post 9/11 realism. That's oversimplifying, but really, the difference is amazing. In Band of Brothers, PTSD is represented as tough luck that befalls the weak. In The Pacific, it's clearly shown that those who appear not to have PTSD are the truly weird ones. Like I said, The Pacific's a great example of how our understanding of historical realities is shaped by our present historical circumstances. So is Band of Brothers, unfortunately.

Music in rotation: Tosca, Up Bustle & Out, Jazzanova, Cal Tjader

Three Novellas, Joseph Roth

We have here "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" (1933), "The Bust of the Emperor" (1935), and "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" (1939). I suppose the last of these is the most famous (partially because Roth died not long after writing it and partially because it seems to offer autobiographical insights), but my favorite is the middle one, which sums up Roth's keen sense of the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in a single bittersweet parable. All three short pieces are well worth the read.

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1991, 1993, 1995)

A very stolid, very British trilogy set during WWI, concerned less with the fighting itself than with its cultural, social, and psychological ramifications. I enjoyed reading this, but looking back it seems to me more like a particularly informative and well-designed museum exhibit than a work of art. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself, but I wasn't changed. I feel misanthropic saying that, because it's really very well done, but there it is.

One more grouchy but true comment. The jacket copy goes on about how these are antiwar novels. This is not true. The books feature many antiwar characters, both historical and fictitious, but the spirit of the enterprise is clearly one which values most stiff upper lips, heroism, willingness to kill, allegiance to comrades and country, and all that.

Actually, when I really get thinking about it, these books are kind of rotten. Barker presents us with a large group of vivid and sympathetic characters, all of whom are opposed to the war in one way or another, and all of whom are marked by self-doubt, moral failings, and various other weaknesses. By the end, though, all the books' heroes have sucked it up and gotten on with being soldiers, and it's pretty clear we're supposed to be proud of them.

I might feel differently again tomorrow, but just now I'm kind of thinking these are really kind of pernicious!

The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker (2009)

A nice plum trifle from the trifle-master, about a semi-"successful" poet trying to meet a deadline and win his ex-girlfriend back. The long disquisitions on scansion are pretty dumb, and the soi-disant barbs about the "poetry world" are way less pointed than they could be, but as always Baker offers plenty to love on the local level of the one-liner insight, especially when he's talking about the contortions writers go through in order not to write. Both the ink-stained wretches in this household read this in a weekend, frequently snorting with glee.

Oh, I do need to add that I found it weird but kind of wonderful how Baker insists on taking so many of his examples of poetry from poets who are not much thought of these days, like Teasdale and Swinburne, for instance. I'm not likely to develop a sudden desire to go back to all the dusty 19th century poets Baker mentions, but the fact that he did, and found happiness in doing so, is a good reminder that the culture's conception of greatness changes. At one point the narrator suggests that Olson's time in the sun isn't likely to last much longer, for example, and that seems to me quite possibly true. Twenty years ago, Jorie Graham was YHWH; I wonder if my 20-something students give her a second thought today. I can see how poets might find this state of things, or rather the lack of any state of things, anxiety-producing; I personally find it hugely liberating, since it means I'm permitted to like what I like when I like it without having to promise I'll always like it or feel bad because I failed to like it in the past.

Oh, and while I'm nattering. Just read some excerpts from David Shields' new Reality Hunger. I find his thesis--fiction, with its rickety claptrap contrivance of plot, has become unbearably dull, and so should be supplanted by writing which does away with artifice and speaks directly to the reader--incredibly stupid, for a whole bunch of reasons I won't go into now. However! Shields would find this novel, as well as several others, perfect fodder for his argument, since the characterization and plot here feel very much like makeup on the face of what is essentially an essay.

The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West (1918)

This slender novel was West's first work of fiction; her first book, published two years earlier, was a study of Henry James, and the Master's influence is clear here in West's intricate syntax and piercing psychological analyses, though there are moments too where you feel her almost physically shake him from her shoulders; after a long and careful sentence you get: "Well, she gave Chris duck eggs for tea."

I came to this out of an interest in shell shock, but Chris Baldry's war-induced amnesia turns out to be only the macguffin West deploys in order to set in motion the drama with which she's centrally concerned, one about competing versions of gender and class. Absolutely no regrets, though, since this is an exquisite, deeply intelligent, near-perfect little book.

The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer (2005)

Interviewing candidates for a position in creative nonfiction this past winter, I noticed that many of them were mentioning the name Geoff Dyer in conversation, and felt chagrined that I'd never heard of the fellow. I did a bit of research and found that it's no wonder CNF types are into him, since his shtick is to write not so much on subjects, but to write about himself writing about subjects, a stance rapturously endorsed by the AWP.

It so happens that one of Dyer's books -- this one -- uses a subject matter quite dear to me, namely photography. So this seemed like a great place to begin to get to know him.

I should have known better. Early on, Dyer makes very clear that he doesn't know anything about photography. Um, OK. Then he lets us know that his account of the history of photography will be wholly idiosyncratic and aleatory. Um, OK. Then he proceeds to remind us, every five pages or so, that he can't be held accountable for anything he says because of how idiosyncratic and aleatory he's being. Um, not OK. After fifty pages or so of truly stupid interpretations salted with assertions of how exciting I'm supposed to be finding same, I put it down.

What really drove me over the edge was Dyer's perseverating insistence on the originality of his conceit that photographers are continually taking and retaking versions of the same photograph, inhabiting each other's styles, reincarnating each other's images over time. (Hence his book's title.) It's a fine idea, as it goes, not terribly original (cf. Eliot, cf. Bloom, hell cf. Heraclitus) but useful enough and valid as a through line. What's absolutely maddening is Dyer's incessant meta-commentary on the boldness of his decision to use this as a framework. He's like a proud toddler who thinks he's the first to have ever successfully shat in the proper location.

Still, a few weeks later, I went back. I think the awesome Eggleston on the cover kept drawing me in. Also, I paid eleven dollars for this thing.

There are many wonderful moments in this book, most of which exist despite rather than on account of the author's intentions. It seems clear Dyer thought this was to be a book where he'd ignorantly stumble through the history of photography, making associations and finding insights which would be valuable precisely because he isn't an expert on the subject. This does in fact happen here and there, it really does, but not nearly as often as Dyer thinks it does, and not nearly as often as he announces to us that it has.

Fortunately, though, Dyer's a very good researcher, and he has a really good ear for telling quotations and anecdotes from other sources. So the book I wound up reading isn't the one Dyer wrote but the one he found, and that book, unlike the other, I can recommend without hesitation. Ignore Dyer's fulminations and boasting and instead focus on the comments, anecdotes, and images from Strand, Stieglitz, Evans, Kertész, O'Keefe, Weston, Arbus, Winogrand, Lange, Frank, Eggleston, Shore, Meyerowitz, et. al., and you'll find plenty to enjoy.

It's kind of like eating lobster: a lot of work and a lot of trash but worth it for the sweet bits.

Diana & Nikon, Janet Malcolm (1997)

A collection of previously published exquisitely perceptive essays on photography and photographers from one of my favorite writers. Really helped me contextualize the pas de deux of photography and painting from the 19th century through the 1980's, and also brought a number of the great photographers to life for me. Criticism of the highest order in that it both fully engages its subjects and ramifies beyond them, all in prose to die for. Thanks!

Flight Without End, Joseph Roth (1929)

David Le Vay's translation of this minor Roth novel tries very hard to make the book unlikeable but fails; Roth's piercing analysis of inter-war European mores cuts through Le Vay's fug. (I hasten to say too that every Roth novel is a major novel in my book; this one's "minor" only insofar as its smaller and less ambitious than his masterpieces.)

Franz Tunda, of the Austrian aspiring classes, goes off to fight, is captured in 1916, spends his war a prisoner in Russia, escapes and hides out in the taiga, learns a year after the fact that the war has ended, and begins to make his way home. Trouble is, things have rather changed in the world. He finds himself swept up in the Russian revolutionary bureaucracy, then wanders like a ghost through the new European realities on offer in Austria, Germany, and France. Trenchant commentaries abound on any number of subjects, from the banality of the new induststrialists to the pretentiousness of the avant-garde. Here's Tunda in Paris. He's broke, and has asked the wealthy President of a cultural organization to help him out; here he reflects on his reluctant benefactor. I've tried to ameliorate the translation as best I can.

Tunda walked through the serene streets with a great emptiness in his heart, feeling like a released convict on his first walk to freedom. He knew that the President could not help him, even if he gave him the chance to eat and buy a suit, just as a convict isn't freed when dismissed from prison, just as it doesn't make an orphan happy to find a place in an orphanage. He was not at home in the world. Where did he belong? In the mass graves.

The blue light was burning on the grave of the Unknown Soldier. The garlands withered. A young Englishman stood there, a soft, gray hat in his hands. He had set out from the Café de la Paix to see the tomb. An old father thought of his son. Between him and the young Englishman was the grave. Deep below were the bones of the unknown soldier. The old man and the boy exchanged a glance above the grave. It was a tacit agreement between them. A pact not to mourn the dead soldier together, but together to forget him entirely.

Tunda had passed this monument several times already. There were always tourists with their traveling hats in the their hands, and nothing hurt him more than their salute. It was like those pious globetrotters, who if they come to a famous church during a service, kneel at the altar out of habit with their guidebooks in hand, so as not to seem impious. Their devotion is a blasphemy and a ransom for their conscience. The blue flame burned not to honor the dead soldiers, but to reassure the survivors. Nothing was more cruel than the blissfully ignorant devotion of a surviving father at the grave of his son, whom he had sacrificed without knowing it. Tunda sometimes felt as if he himself lay there in the ground, as if we all lay there, all those of use who set out from home and were killed and buried, or who came back but never came home. For it doesn't really matter whether we're buried or alive and well. We're strangers in this world, we come from the realm of shadows.

Does that seem turgid to you? I think it's awesome. It seems to me that what Sebald did for post WWII Europe, Roth did for Post WWI Europe. Namely, showed his readers how eager they were to forget the past, and how the past persists regardless.

One other note of interest here: I'm adding this novel's narrator to my list of what I'm calling, for lack of a better term, "authors as distant first-person narrators." The story here is actually told by one Joseph Roth, who claims to have met Tunda once. Yet Roth is nowhere to be found in the novel. It seems like I'm coming across a lot of this lately in novels I really like. Other examples are Bolaño's Distant Star, all of Sebald, Pamuk's Snow . . . I know there are others I'm forgetting at the moment. I think some Bernhard novels fit this description. What's the effect/use of this techinque?

Ketchup

On sabbatical and taking my notes elsewhere, but here's what's been passing in front of my eyes.

Tarabas, Joseph Roth (1934). Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. A parable of eastern Europe's transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries.

The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (2009). Up close account from embedded journalist during the "surge" of 2007. Mayer and Hersh remain the most impressive political accounts of the Iraq war; this book demonstrates better than any other I've read what it's like to fight in Iraq.

In the Loop, Armando Iannucci (2009). Not as fun as I thought it was going to be; the jokes are repetitive and eventually predictable. I was fixated on the mise-en-scène, which sometimes felt like that ersatz-documentary kind of The Office vibe and other times like a cool Michael Clayton slick.

Office Space, Mike Judge (1999).
Idiocracy, Mike Judge (2006).
I was pleased to see these at last, after having realized how often they get referenced. They're pretty dumb, but fun.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Phil Lord & Chris Miller (2009). Charming cartoon about believing in yourself and not wasting food.

The Curtain, Milan Kundera (2007). A history of the novel, an argument for its importance, an education on nationalism, an intellectual memoir, and, here and there, a manual for being human. I stopped underlining because I was underlining everything.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1880, Francis Steegmuller, ed. (1980 & 1982). Went here at Kundera's behest. Delicious, wicked, vital.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow (2008). Yes, good, fine, and all the more reason to love Bigelow if you didn't already, but kind of a disappointment for me, since I've been reading so much nonfiction about the war, and I chafed a bit at seeing the soldiers' experiences shaped into a narrative and invested with pathos. The terrifying thing that Finkel (vide supra) makes so clear is that just because a tour of duty elapses over linear time, that doesn't mean it's a narrative. He shows how the soldiers struggle with that fact; when they've got a month left in their tours, they're aching to have a sense of the story of the year, of progress made, crises resolved, etc., but that's not how it works. All that said, this is a terrific movie; my complaint is basically based on the fact that it's a movie, and that's really not fair.

Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror, Peter Jan Honigsberg (2009). Repetitive, smug, and unnecessary if you've read Philippe Sands' Torture Team. A great disappointment. Massively dull and technocratic one minute, puffed up with bombastic indignation the next. Ugh. Big regret that I got it in hardcover.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland (2010). My thoughts here.

Also:
The Long Meadow, Vijay Seshadri (2004). Mannerist, but I like it.
Squandermania, Don Share (2007)
Deniability, George Witte (2008)
Factory of Tears, Valzhyna Mort (2008)
National Anthem, Kevin Prufer (2008). This is a terrific book.
On Crimes and Punishments, Cesare Beccaria (1764)
War Bird, David Gewanter (2009)

Wired for War, P. W. Singer (2009)

What's weird about this picture right now is that there is a robot in it. (Specifically the Packbot, manufactured by iRobot of Bedford, Mass., the same company that makes the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.) In twenty five years, the weird thing about this picture will be that there's a human being in it. Singer's book is way too long, chatty, repetitive, gung-ho, and philosophically facile, but if you scrape away all the excrescent prose here, you get a complete and compelling account of how and why the military will be getting more and more dependent on robotics in the future. This is certainly good news in some ways. The Packbot is already saving lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. But when you consider the fact that 20 year olds are sitting in trailers at Nellis AFB in Nevada, controlling Predator drones over Iraq and Afghanistan and occasionally using them to shoot Hellfire missiles at suspected terrorists, you're right to think that a whole host of ethical, legal, and moral questions are coming into play as the act of killing becomes more and more impersonal through the use of technology. Here's another one to chew on: DARPA is spending millions upon millions of dollars developing AI for these robots and drones which will allow them to select targets on their own, without a human being in the loop. (Believe me, programs like this are not being funded by the Department of Defense in order to produce robots capable of reading newspapers to the blind.) I'm generally not a big paranoiac when it comes to questions like this; it seems like -- as with biological and so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons -- the human race usually seems to put the brakes on truly catastrophically stupid ideas before they're fully realized. But some of this stuff truly scares me, since I know that there is such pressure on politicians to win wars without shedding blood.

Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño (1996)

It's petulant and dumb, but when suddenly everyone's talking about a particular writer, I grumpily recoil like one of those guys with crew cuts on late night infomericals telling you to cash out your 401k and put it all in precious metals. So when suddenly a couple years back Bolaño was all over the literary press I remained studiously aloof and snooty, reading my Walser in a corner and fancying myself deliciously immune to fashion.

But there's a difference between refusing to throw oneself at every new cutie NYRB/TLS sanctions and stupidly depriving yourself of fresh genuineness. So when a colleague cleaning out his office upon retirement offered me this early Bolaño novel for the reasonable price of free, I accepted it, pleased too to begin with this lesser known work instead of either of the bigger books which were so ballyhooed.

What a fool I've been. This little book is thrillingly weird. First person narrator tells of a charismatic young poet in his university writing workshop who, after Allende's fall in 1973, becomes a sort of Göring, equally obsessed with austere militarism and obscenely decadent aesthetic poses. The two sides of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle's personality come together when he performs exacting skywriting displays of poems at once nationalistic and drippily romantic, making of himself a sort of machine-age Caspar David Friedrich. As you can probably tell, I'm finding it all hard to explain; instead I keep reaching for comparisons. How's this: Bolaño traverses the landscape of Chilean literary culture the way Sebald traverses the landscape of Europe, coolly describing unremarkable evident phenomena while at the same time continually suggesting -- but lightly, lightly -- the dark rot just underneath. Other authors that spring to mind here are Pamuk and Bernhardt, in each of whom fragile artistic culture and brute historical realities collide.

I have a strong sense that one must have to read a whole passel of Bolaño in order to grok the mission as a whole, since it seems several of the books refer to one another. I'm looking forward to it! And apologizing to myself for making me wait this long.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart (2003)

The exquisite satire here would itself be worth the price of admission, but even that is just the sugar coating around Shteyngart's genuine (and bitter) insights concerning the ongoing absurd and tragic conflict between east and west. In other words, both great fun and super smart, a sort of bastard child of a tryst involving Joseph Roth, Rebecca West, and Groucho Marx.