When the TV networks heard, they sent time agents back to 1975, to ensure I'd never learn to read...
January 22nd, 2007 (11:27 p.m)
I'm not about to claim some kind of 52-books-in-52-weeks goal, but we're three weeks into 2007 and I've finished two books. Two!
The Road,
by Cormac McCarthy
I've read
plenty of end-of-the-world stories (and have even contemplated writing one of my
own), but I have to say that McCarthy's take is totally unique, as much for what
it doesn't do as for what it does. McCarthy's apocalypse comes, presumably, via
nuclear apocalypse, although even this is hazy. The struggle for survival, it seems,
tends to push luxuries like vivid memories out of the characters' minds. If memories
come in this story, they're often in the form of nightmares.
McCarthy's not interested in the how or the why, or even the immediate chaos that followed the bright lights in the sky and the explosions. He sets the story a few years later, after the food has run out, after the animals and vegetation have all died, when sky and earth and water are all made of ash.
In this setting a father tries to keep himself and his young son alive as they make their way to the coast -- for no other reason than it's somewhere to go. Also wandering the landscape are the expected cannibals and thieves, and supposedly even a few scattered "good guys" -- people who don't use weak survivors for slave labor or lock them in farmhouse basements for later use as food.
The father and son encounter some of these people, but the overall story isn't about conflict, or about beating the bad guys. It's about trudging, day-in and day-out, covering small, exhausting distances, just to stay alive. The pair walk the earth during the day, scavenging for food and drinkable water, and sleep at night, praying that their campsite won't be discovered, and that they won't be killed, or worse. The next day, they get up and do it again, stopping to rifle through garages, stores, and houses in the hopes that previous looters have missed something.
Many complain about The Road, saying that it has no plot. And I can see that point, although I don't think it's very important. The father and son have no goal other than to stay alive. The father constantly struggles to keep his son motivated and focused, and in one dark moment, wonders if the kindest mercy he could offer his son would be to put a bullet in his son's brain. The father's love and protectiveness is contrasted, though, by a harsh, amoral streak that places survival above all else.
The story's told in McCarthy's rustic, rough-adorned style, as one long story with no chapter breaks, only fragmentary paragraphs. It can be oppressive, it can be bleak, but in its own twisted way, it's possibly one of McCarthy's best treatments of one of his classic themes: the bond between father and son.
I loved it. I devoured this book in a few frantic sittings, constantly impressed that McCarthy could accomplish so much with such a (seemingly) simple concept. It reminded me a lot of The Old Man and the Sea, in the way that Hemingway conveyed so many things through the ritual of the old man's fishing.
When you shave away the extraneous elements that clutter most post-apocalyptic tales, the simple fight for survival is plenty compelling on its own.
The Book Thief,
by Markus Zusak
The Book
Thief is billed in some corners as a young adult novel, albeit a dark one.
I don't have a problem with that; The Book Thief could sit comfortably
on the shelf with adolescent-lit presentations of Nazi Germany likeJane
Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic
Liesel Meminger is a young girl who goes to live with a foster family in Molching, Germany during World War II. Her little brother has died, and her new foster mother is a stern, sharp-tongued lady, while her foster father is a kind-hearted painter and part-time accordion player.
Over the course of the book, her foster-father teaches her to read, starting at first with a gravedigger's handbook that Liesel stole when her little brother died. From there, Liesel acquires a taste for stealing books, slowly learning to read as she makes her way through each one.
But this is Nazi Germany, and stealing books is the least of Liesel's worries. The Nazi Youth recruit her friends, her foster family shelters a Jew in their basement, and as the war winds to a close, her foster-father is sent off to war, and the town of Molching is bombed by the Allies. It's in this setting that Liesel grows up, learning both loyalty and defiance in equal measures.
The book's narrator, though, is Death, and this may be where the book fails or succeeds for many readers. Death is efficient, business-like, and his observations about humanity are dry and sardonic -- the viewpoint of a being who's privy to things beyond the concerns of mortal man. Or the viewpoint of someone who's just seen too many humans behave the same way over and over throughout eternity. As a character, Death's voice is slightly elevated, and I could easily see someone like James Mason playing him.
Death likes to interject little lists and observations into his narrative. At first, this bugged me as a very self-conscious device on the part of the author, but as the story got going, it began to seem more part and parcel of the story.
By the time the Nazi Machine is in full swing, and the concentration camps are going about their grisly business, Death begins to lose some of his detachment:
They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and bleeding, and there are soft, coal-colored clouds, beating like black hearts.
At one point, he simply says, "the sky was the color of Jews."
It's a fascinating question: how would Death react to the deaths of six million Jews, and to the millions who died throughout the world during this time, on battlefields, and in Stalin's Russia? It's that progression through Death's thoughts that transforms him from an interesting narrative device into a character who's just as compelling as Liesel, the book thief herself.
"Kids are the best, Apu. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they
practically raise themselves, what with the Internet and all."
(Homer Simpson)
January 11th, 2007 (12:26 p.m)
I don't often look at my web site statistics. Very few people visit the site, and I know most of the ones who do by face and name. But it's fun sometimes to look and see what seemingly innocent search terms lure unsuspecting surfers to my little corner of adjective-laden self-indulgence. It can be ... interesting, to say the least.
This time around, I can often point to specific posts that matched up with someone's search criteria. For example, a couple of people got here by way of "sweet tea and pregnancy." Obvious enough. The missus is expecting, so I've written about that a good bit. And if there's one comfort I can offer anyone seeking discussions of pregnancy on this site, it's this: apparently consuming vast quantities of sweet tea throughout your life doesn't make you sterile.
Several folks found the site by searching for ways to kill yellowjackets with gasoline. As it turns out, I once told an epic tale of my encounters with these black-and-yellow fiends. Beowulf had nothing on this saga of monsters emerging in the night, and of both sides suffering horribly! Hopefully, these brave souls preparing to take the battle to the yellowjackets before the yellowjackets got a chance to take it to them, got a laugh or two, and learned something useful -- like, don't hold the flashlight in your mouth.
Surprisingly, a random reference to the South Park episode where Chef's
parents visit and tell their story about the Loch Ness monster got several people
here. I still laugh about that episode. Heck, I'll probably give my kid an allowance
of $3.50 as soon as he/she's born, just so I can say "three fitty!" once a week
like Chef's mom.
My quickie review of the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me got caught in the following searches: "townes van zandt funeral lyle lovett song" and "injecting bourbon." Hopefully, that last one wasn't looking for a how-to. Bourbon's not fit for drinking, kids, much less injecting. Take it from a lightweight who knows.
One of my favorite searches was "does jd wilkes have a girlfriend or wife." Ah, Colonel J.D. Wilkes, the unforgettable leader of the Legendary Shack Shakers. A primal force he is, and it's not hard to see why some wide-eyed lass (or lad) would wonder with starry eyes if this wiry, caged beast of a man was already benefitting from the sweet love of a good, tattooed rockabilly woman.
The one I have trouble figuring out is the search for "hippopotamus anus fish." I know what this search refers to. There's a fish, Labeo velifer (I admit to looking the name up), which consumes hippopotamus excrement. I have no earthly idea how that search got anyone here. I tried it. Couldn't make it work, but at least the searches brought up zoological and scientific sites, and not some weird fetish site.
But that's not quite as weird as "hippopotamus play aikido." I practice Aikido, and mention it from time to time (usually when the assorted pains and bruises are making me feel really old), but apparently, I've felt the need to discuss hippopotami (and possibly their anuses, and maybe even their martial art of choice) at some point. I don't remember it, but it must be hidden somewhere in the archives.
Last but not least, I learn the hazards of having the word "sweet" in your site name. A friend and I used to joke about having a website devoted to honey buns, addicted as we were to the ones in the office snack machine. For a brief moment, we considered doing a web search to see if anyone else was wasting their time in such a way, but decided at the last minute that performing a search for "honey buns" at work wasn't a good idea -- even in those relatively innocent Internet days of the mid-'90s. Heck, I've probably just increased my traffic 30 percent with this paragraph containing the words "sweet," "honey," and "buns." Suffice to say, there's some weirdness out thar the on the interwebs, and "sweet" is the label a lot of people like to slap on it.
What it feels like to be haunted by another person's visions
January 9th, 2007 (10:20 p.m)
The missus and I went to see Children of Men tonight, and it's hard to put what we saw into words. Let's start off with perhaps the only lighthearted image to be found in the entire film:
Yep, if you look closely and know your pessimistic classic rock, they're standing in the building displayed on the album cover of Pink Floyd's Animals, complete with flying pig. At this point in the film, Clive Owen's character seeks help from a contact, who works at some kind of agency or foundation that saves the world's surviving works of art from the fact that, well, the world's pretty much gone to hell. The film's use of Michaelangelo's David and Picasso's Guernica were nifty, but I think this sly little moment mystified our fellow theatre-goers.
Children of Men depicts a chaotic dystopia where the human race has been infertile for the past 18 years, and where the death of the world's youngest person is treated as a worldwide tragedy. Anarchy and mob rule have swept the globe, with Britain surviving only because it has mutated into a police state. The populace is bombarded by terrorist attacks (or government diversions) on one side, and by advertisements for a self-suicide product called Quietude on the other -- the word "bleak" only begins to describe it. Illegal immigrants flee the horrors of their own countries for the "prosperity" of Britain, only to be rounded up and thrown into camps or ghettos. It seems that the absence of children has removed all hope from the world, and humanity's reaction has been even worse than you'd expect.
Even when a refugee girl miraculously becomes pregnant, it's uncertain how different groups would exploit what should be a planet-wide moment of joy. It falls to Owen's character to spirit her through a dangerous, complicated landscape to a mysterious group waiting offshore.
Director Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, A Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) drops the viewer right into this world with little explanation and absolutely no cushion. This is a world where Seattle is under siege, New York has been nuked, and where survival instinct inspires acts of unmatched savagery. Cuarón doesn't flinch from horrific images: stacks of presumably infected cattle burning in the fields, mothers mourning and cradling freshly killed adult sons in the streets, Abu Ghraib-inspired images of stress positions and abuse at the refugee camps.
This film pretty much portrays Hell on Earth. To describe the final scenes, where a ferocious battle, filmed with amazing one-shot skill through a blood-spattered lens, captures acts both noble and craven, and where a spellbinding silence blossoms out of gunfire and explosions, is to tell too much. Suffice to say that Children of Men is haunting, and harrowing, and dark. It's a film that burns your mind even as it rubs your soul down to a dead nub, and then, with a simple sound over the end credits, one we hear every day and take for granted, inspires hope.
I feel the need to beg of my friends, the ones who automatically dismiss anything with the "science fiction" tag, to please not do so with Children of Men. The film takes place in a near-future dystopia, and that's about as far as the science fiction goes. Everything else the film portrays feels like its simply a pandemic or a police state away. Like the best science fiction, Children of Men tells a unique story, but it also turns a mirror on plenty of issues that affect us now.
Easily the most powerful film I've seen in a long time.