A story about invention and death and fiasco and false starts and foolish dreams and childish wonder and acoustic guitars and fluttering heartbeats and cold chills on the back of your neck and jesus and love and songs of abandon and cheap wine.
A note about smiles that smile until they hurt and the hard lump that forms in your throat when you know it is over it is done it won't cause you the pain of love or the taste of death or the knowledge that you are not even close to enough.
A film about a little boy who thought he was made of wood and strings and cigar boxes and superglue and scraps of memories and glimmers of light and chilled ice cubes making your mouth become numb.
A book about nothing and everything and something less than that and something more and this and that and sudden movements and cold dead bodies that look somehow so wrong in death so fake and made up and plastic and not people you love and not people that you remember you won't mind when they're gone you don't remember them they are gone and dust and you are left to carry on and act like life matters when you know it doesn't when you know that you live only to carry over carry through Cary Grant Hawkeye pierced and waiting for the day you can sleep.
A chapter about origins and endings and falls from grace and the day they caught you and the day you knew the truth and the day after that when you still went on and you wondered why how why you wondered when it would happen and the waiting was a dream and a nightmare and a sweet penance and a dread relief and a seductive drift into oblivion.
An index of things that made noise and things that made light and things that made light of noise and things that made noise of light and things that went bump and things that taste like chicken and things that don't.
A footnote from the beyond about never having enough time to stop and breath to stop and think to stop and say thanks for a thankless task to stop and stop and to count the seconds to let time slip by without filling every moment with something to stop waiting for the time of our lives to realize that it is here now while we yearn for it it is all around us while we angst and wonder and wait and then it is gone all too soon all too swiftly but can you replace it you wonder can you find it again or is this good enough what is good enough when everything is pale and grey and full of that tension that pulls your shoulder blades together that feeling in the pit of your stomach that tells you that you should run (our brains taking clues as to how we should feel from our bodies in such things as these).
An aside (like this? (not like that (or this one where we talk about the obvious run on sentences that fill this missive (no. (how about me I'm speaking in the first person because I can and I have plenty to whisper (not even close. (damn.)cry baby.) damn.) oh well thems is the breaks.) damn.) leave it be.) crap.) yup.) about the futility of plans and the celebration of things left to chance, planned to be left to chance, plotted and outlined and diagrammed and practiced and left to chance.
What would this book be titled?
10:37 the time of our lives, no 10:38.
Bricks of soul and the love of polka.
The smoke and the leaves and the orange moon glow and rubber bands... and post-it notes those are really romantic things.
The fog of lore the log of thor the frog of door the flog of more the dog of four the tog du jour the god of war.
Heavy.
or just...
Aren't you lucky they only take people.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Books 'n' stuff, November 07
I'm still in the middle of a bunch of books, and I haven't had a ton of time lately but finished off these few while traveling.
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy was a let down. It was probably over-hyped by the notoriety that it got via Oprah and her club. Given that the new Coen brothers' movie is based a book of his I thought I'd give it a try. Basically a post-"end of the world" novel about a boy and his father walking on a road across what is left of America. I just didn't get anything out of the book. No brilliant insights into mankind, no clever twists on story, just slogging through the basics of survival. Find food, lose food, get beat up, beat someone up, flashback to life before the end, wake up in desolation, repeat fifty times, end.
"Gentlemen of the Road" by Michael Chabon is a treat. A short little adventure set back 300 or 400 years in the past on the roads of the middle east. He admits that he originally called this book "Jews with Swords" but got too many snickers from friends. If you like his feasts (like the recently reviewed book about yiddish policemen) you'll enjoy this slim morsel. He just writes so well and has such fun with his characters that its hard not to devour it in a single sitting.
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman is a collection of short stories and poems of horror and fantasy. I think I like his long form work better Maybe resetting every few pages and reading the same kinda story (or at least the same theme) so many times from so many different angles is just too much to take. This might have been better if I checked out a story or two and then hid the book away for a month or two before reading another story. In any case I think this is the year of Neil Gaiman with his recently released "Stardust" which was quite well done to the upcoming Beowulf movie that he co-wrote. If you haven't read "Anansi Boys" or "American Gods" you're missing some fine fantasy (and bear in mind I don't like fantasy as a rule).
"The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly is a good enough example of why I don't read fantasy. It wasn't bad but it wasn't in any way rewarding. Basically the tale of a boy growing towards manhood during World War II in England. He stumbles into a world of stories (mostly riffs on Brother's Grimm tales) and learns how to be a better person by the end.
"The State of the Art" by Ian Banks is a collection of short stories from a master. If you've never read any of his novels this would be a good place to start. Many of the stories are set in his future civilization called the "culture." Think English manners and sense of humor but with a few thousand years of evolution and stagnation. It makes for a curious projection into the future of society and how it may work. All good.
Not books...
"The Darjeeling Limited" by Wes Anderson is another typical Anderson film. If you like his films you'll really enjoy this one. The cinematography is perfect, the colors are amazing, the characters are just plain fun and the locations (throughout India) are breathtaking. Anderson always makes some location into a character, in this case its a train (in other movies it was a sub, a building, or a school campus). For a taste of the movie they released a prequel called "The Hotel Chevalier" for free on iTunes. Watch it and decide if you want to see the movie, note the colors and the framing of the scene, gold. By the way, great soundtrack too.
"Across the Universe" by Julie Taymor is a flawed film but a worthy experiment in retrospective history-telling and musical collage. Formula? Take a bunch of Beatles songs, weave them into a story about a boy named Jude and a girl named Lucy with plenty of sidebar characters (the best of course being the three played by Joe Cocker). Include someone crawling in through the bathroom window and a cameo with Bono in a slightly too long psychedelic sequence add some freaky costumes left over from one of your Broadway productions and beat the audience senseless with edits, repeat. If you like the Beatles and can stand a bit of amateur directing, its worth seeing... on DVD.
"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy was a let down. It was probably over-hyped by the notoriety that it got via Oprah and her club. Given that the new Coen brothers' movie is based a book of his I thought I'd give it a try. Basically a post-"end of the world" novel about a boy and his father walking on a road across what is left of America. I just didn't get anything out of the book. No brilliant insights into mankind, no clever twists on story, just slogging through the basics of survival. Find food, lose food, get beat up, beat someone up, flashback to life before the end, wake up in desolation, repeat fifty times, end.
"Gentlemen of the Road" by Michael Chabon is a treat. A short little adventure set back 300 or 400 years in the past on the roads of the middle east. He admits that he originally called this book "Jews with Swords" but got too many snickers from friends. If you like his feasts (like the recently reviewed book about yiddish policemen) you'll enjoy this slim morsel. He just writes so well and has such fun with his characters that its hard not to devour it in a single sitting.
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman is a collection of short stories and poems of horror and fantasy. I think I like his long form work better Maybe resetting every few pages and reading the same kinda story (or at least the same theme) so many times from so many different angles is just too much to take. This might have been better if I checked out a story or two and then hid the book away for a month or two before reading another story. In any case I think this is the year of Neil Gaiman with his recently released "Stardust" which was quite well done to the upcoming Beowulf movie that he co-wrote. If you haven't read "Anansi Boys" or "American Gods" you're missing some fine fantasy (and bear in mind I don't like fantasy as a rule).
"The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly is a good enough example of why I don't read fantasy. It wasn't bad but it wasn't in any way rewarding. Basically the tale of a boy growing towards manhood during World War II in England. He stumbles into a world of stories (mostly riffs on Brother's Grimm tales) and learns how to be a better person by the end.
"The State of the Art" by Ian Banks is a collection of short stories from a master. If you've never read any of his novels this would be a good place to start. Many of the stories are set in his future civilization called the "culture." Think English manners and sense of humor but with a few thousand years of evolution and stagnation. It makes for a curious projection into the future of society and how it may work. All good.
Not books...
"The Darjeeling Limited" by Wes Anderson is another typical Anderson film. If you like his films you'll really enjoy this one. The cinematography is perfect, the colors are amazing, the characters are just plain fun and the locations (throughout India) are breathtaking. Anderson always makes some location into a character, in this case its a train (in other movies it was a sub, a building, or a school campus). For a taste of the movie they released a prequel called "The Hotel Chevalier" for free on iTunes. Watch it and decide if you want to see the movie, note the colors and the framing of the scene, gold. By the way, great soundtrack too.
"Across the Universe" by Julie Taymor is a flawed film but a worthy experiment in retrospective history-telling and musical collage. Formula? Take a bunch of Beatles songs, weave them into a story about a boy named Jude and a girl named Lucy with plenty of sidebar characters (the best of course being the three played by Joe Cocker). Include someone crawling in through the bathroom window and a cameo with Bono in a slightly too long psychedelic sequence add some freaky costumes left over from one of your Broadway productions and beat the audience senseless with edits, repeat. If you like the Beatles and can stand a bit of amateur directing, its worth seeing... on DVD.
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