I Suck At Reading

Well, I could make up a litany of excuses as to why I have not been reading Hard Times by Charles Dickens (or much of anything else for that matter.) I had my wisdom teeth out a week ago, the economy is shit, I'm worried about money, blah blah fuckity fuck. Generally, I've been looking for distractions. Any kind of distraction. And, well, Hard Times is a shitty book to read if you are in pain and depressed about money. I guess that's sort of obvious.
Anyway, I am not at the moment feeling so good about books I think I "should read" because of one reason or another. There is a time for that, but it's not now at this particular moment. If I'm going to get anywhere in this competition, I need to focus on my natural inclinations - which are not always the most, uh, lofty. (gleefully claps hands together)TRASH TIME!

Anyway, instead of Dickens I've been reading and doing other things that do not fit into the parameters of this competition because they are less than 200 pages or are not books. So I can tell you what those are. Then I'm going to put Dickens aside for the moment and read something less weighty. Yeah? Good.

Locke and Key:Welcome to Lovecraft - Joe Hill


Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is the first issue of a 24-issue series written by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son. He has won a bunch of Bram Stoker awards for his short fiction and this is his first comic. A co-worker and comic freak lent this to me. Her taste is very good, but I took one look at Gabriel Rodriguez's cutesy art and was like "Augh! This looks like Bratz! Terrible!" and didn't pick it up for two weeks. Then I started reading and finished it in two hours. It's damn good.

I wish I hadn't known that Hill was King-spawn, because I can't help but make comparisons between the two of them. Hill has King's knack for dialogue, especially with kids. A lot of the story comes from the perspective of a small child so this is important. And the story ultimately belied the cutesy artwork by being very, very dark, dealing with kids and murder and unspeakable paranormal terrors. And yes, it's not an accident that the town the story is based in is called, uh, Lovecraft. The Lovecraftian elements especially ring out when one character discovers a secret door that literally turns people into omniscient ghosts. The supernatural elements never overwhelm, though. It's heartfelt, too, and not in the melodramatic way that some horror comics are. Hill pitches his tone in a way that somehow matches the medium and the artwork perfectly. I don't know anything about comics, so whatever, take this as you will. But I eagerly await the next installment.

Elmore Leonard - When the Girls Come Out To Dance



I generally find I'm in the minority here, but I just fucking love Elmore Leonard. His books are so satisfying. I love the way his characters talk and always say the right thing. I love how most of his female heroines either carry guns or know how to shoot them. I love that the assholes in the stories always get their comeuppance in a very classy and/or hilarious way. I love that all his characters talk hard and drink ten of the hardest drinks in a row (generally made with some kind of horrible whiskey like Tullamore Dew with a twist of lime) and they can still rattle off one-liners. So all of these things happen in this collection of short stories and I was tickled, amused, saddened and most of all wistful. That's what Elmore Leonard does to me. He makes me wistful for experiences I couldn't possibly relate to. And yet I DO. Let's all quit our jobs and be con artists.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

I used to hate silent films. The few I had seen (mostly in some film class or another) struck me as cheesy or painfully melodramatic. And worst of all---unnecessary. I thought I was a "dialogue person." Then last weekend, I was supposed to go wish a friend farewell. I was vaguely anxious about this and drank a bunch of wine and watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on YouTube with extremely low expectations. I was completely mesmerized. Everything about this film is mind-boggling. The acting, the music, and most of all, the shots and the set-pieces:



YES. So beautiful and ahead of the times. Imagine an entire film designed like this about a hypnotist, his sleeping and very creepy subject, and MURDER. Also, there is a twist, and I found it genuinely SHOCKING. Who thought a movie could be so shocking in 1919? My goodness. After it was all over I was terrified and immediately went to the party because I had to be around other people. Also, I felt like an artless troll. Never again will I doubt the paralytic power of the silent film era. No, really.

Oh, and here's the YouTube link.

Ok. Thanks for indulging this diversion. Hopefully I will be back on track in a few.

9) I Hate Myself

Book Read: Um, Twilight. Book the first.

Pages: Enough.

Preamble: So you guys know the basic story, right? This is the book that has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like, five years, has made millions of girls cry and do obsessive fan art, and culminated in three sequels and a movie that got terrible reviews but made millions of dollars and broke a box office record in its opening weekend. Damn. I've been curious about this phenomenon for awhile now, stole the book from Bea, and began. I have used images from the film to illustrate my hack plot synopsis, which is as follows:

Girl moves to sunless Washington town, meets strange boy, who, according to the film version, looks like a glam rocker with ridiculous hair:



She spends half the book wondering why he's so weird and superhuman and can crush moving cars with one hand (HE'S JUST NOT LIKE THE OTHER BOYS!) and realizes he's a vampire with agonizing slowness (she meets a werewolf, who tells her this) and then the vampire takes her to a treed area where he shows her that in direct sunlight, contrary to popular misconception, vampires sparkle. Then he explains he's a "vegetarian" vampire, which is a stupid and nonsensical way of saying that he and his family drink the blood of bears instead of humans.

Then (and as I understand it, this is the driving conflict of the entire series) he explains that he craves her blood more than other humans' blood, which makes her love him all the more. Because it's dangerous, see?

And then there's a vampire baseball game.



Then some other vampires show up and everyone almost dies, but then no one dies and Edward and Bella go to the prom. THE END.

Distraction level: The first 40-odd pages of the book took me a few hours. I spent two hours putting it down and getting up to eat crackers, smoke cigarettes, make tea, watch videos of cats sneezing, make tomorrow's peanut butter sandwiches and basically do anything that did not involve me reading any more of this book. The third hour, I threw it at my boyfriend with glazed eyes and shouted in an unfocused manner while he listened politely.

You see, Twilight is not a good book. It is not good at all. It is in fact very, very bad. I am an ardent fan of bad, at times, but it must be followed by the qualifier "good." Bad-good. Craptastic. Some other examples of craptastic work in the florid goth-romance genre include anything by Poppy Z. Brite, or, say, Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (the novel AND the movie, natch!). The thing is, I'm not sure whether Twilight (the novel) qualifies as good-bad or just bad-bad.

The Bad-Bad, The Good-Bad, and the Just Shitty: One trait that may qualify the novel as bad-bad are the many, many long passages where Bella dwells on Edward's handsomeness and godlike perfection. There is also many long conversational passages where Bella and Edward talk about how she likes him, how he likes her, and how he wants to drink her blood all the time because it's like "heroin" (that's a direct quote) and how she doesn't care because she loves him so much, over and over and over and oh hell I'll just show you some of my favorites.

In no particular order, these are three of the passages that made me basically stop reading and sent me into a fit of laughter/incredulous coughing sounds.

Page 91: Bella(girl who likes vampire) and Edward (vampire she likes) discuss driving to Seattle over the weekend.

Edward: Well, I was planning to go to Seattle in the next few weeks, and to be honest, I'm not sure your truck can make it.
Bella: My truck works fine, thank you for your concern.
Edward: But can your truck make it there on one tank of gas?
Bella: I don't see how that is any of your business.
Edward: The wasting of finite resources is everybody's business.

Page 331: Bella and Edward in the midst of one of about 60 conversations about liking each other, or something:

Bella: Well, do you find me attractive, in that way, at all?
Edward: I may not be human. But I am a man.

Page 357: Bella confesses to her father (who up to this point in the novel has shown no discernible personality) that she likes Edward.

"You are going out with Edward Cullen?" he thundered.
Uh oh. "I thought you liked the Cullens."
"He's too old for you," he ranted.
"We're both juniors," I corrected, though he was more right than he dreamed. (BECAUSE HE'S A VAMPIRE GET IT)
"Wait..."He paused. "Which one is Edwin?"
"Edward is the youngest, the one with reddish hair." The beautiful one. The godlike one.

Page 476: After some vampire-related adventure and near-death experiences, Bella explains to Edward for the first of the 600 times that she wants him to turn her into a vampire, too.

He rolled his eyes and set his lips. "Bella, we're not having this discussion anymore. I refuse to damn you to an eternity of night and that's it."

Flowers of Romance? This is the type of writing that is making girls all over North America insane. They are going insane over the character of Edward Cullen---his beauty, his perfection and his raging inner conflict over whether he should like Bella or eat her. As The Guardian astutely observes, Twilight is nothing more than a romance novel packaged cleverly as a young adult book. The bad dialogue, poor character development, cheesy attempts at humor and lingering passages of Bella smelling Edward's breath and Edward breathing on her face all sexy-like remind me of every bodice-ripper I've ever read in the bathtub.

Despite all my sneering, I have to admit this isn't necessarily an awful thing. V.C. Andrews employed the same trick and I loved her novels during my most hormonal years. And the bitch of it all is that Twilight is absorbing---absorbing in an addictive, soul-sucking sort of way. Once I got past my initial horror, I tore through the thing in about three hours. The book weaves a sickening sort of spell that you can't escape even as you curse yourself for ever picking it up in the first place. A reviewer at Pajiba put it aptly:

That’s Twilight. It’s intoxicating. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s intoxicating like convenience-store malt liquor — you get a hangover before you’re even drunk. It’s addictive. Like crack cocaine, only you don’t get to experience the high, you just skip straight ahead to the blackout and wake up in a stranger’s bed with a matchbox car six inches deep into your rectum. But you can’t turn away.

Bella Swan: Empty Vessel: I can understand why teenage girls---and all girls---eat this up. One of the big reasons is that the main character, Bella, is so passive and indistinct that you can literally insert yourself into her body---and thusly into the handsome Edward Cullen's arms. My friend Bea made a good point as she was tearing her way through the beast, saying that Bella is nothing but a vessel for the readers' own unresolved romanticism and adolescent crush tendencies.

That's the one thing Meyer does well: she helps you remember what it was like to be a teenage girl having a crush on the cute boy at school. We were all there. The constant hopefulness that the boy would be in class, pretending not to notice him so he wouldn't notice you, the hours of thought devoted to what is he doing? where is he right now? what is he thinking? and being generally irrational and insane. I remember being there (although my objects of affection were not nearly as cavalier and indestructible as Edward Cullen. Also, at Bella's age I looked like the dorky kid from The Wonder Years in drag, so my crushes were largely unrequited.)

There's been a lot of arguments amongst friends of mine and in various media about Bella's passivity and vaguely nauseating role as the sacrificial lamb here. She loves Edward so much that nothing else matters in her life: not her goals, her dreams, college, anything like that. Her dream is to be with Edward forever. That kind of supplication definitely made me queasy as I read. I also found it compelling.

I have never read a young novel in which a female character was so passive. Most of the authors I read as a young girl (S.E. Hinton, Roald Dahl, Gordon Korman, shit, even Stephen King for Christ's sake) featured women who were strong or vengeful or brilliant or sassy or quirky. Bella is none of these. She is simply a simmering cauldron of love for Edward, who lets him save her over and over again. Others will find this completely objectionable or irrelevant. I'm torn between both of these sentiments. Either way, I would kill someone to get ahold of the next book. And yep, I kind of hate myself for it.

6) The Good Ol' Gulag: Martin Amis and House of Meetings

Book: House of Meetings

Author: Martin Amis

Pages: 240

Distraction level: High. I'm into the fourth season of The Wire and so far it's my favorite. (Little kids struggling to get by! The guy from Queer As Folk running for Mayor! It's too much! It's like heroin!)I'm also fighting a cold and a general sense of wintertime malaise, which is not an ideal state of mind to be in when you're reading a novel about Russian prison camps in the Arctic Circle. I should just get it over with already and pick up How Stella Got Her Groove Back or something.

Favorite quote:Gaaahh. It's so hard to pick a favorite from a Martin Amis novel. Even if it's not his best book (and this one is not, Spoiler Alert!) he always packs 'em full of lines full of hilarious nastiness and underpinnings of deep sadness. Witness:

"The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread."

"Zoya was not an acquired taste. He face was original but her figure was a platitude---tall and ample and also wasp-waisted. Every male was condemned to receive its message. You felt it down the length of your spine. We all got it, from the street draggle-tail who pleaded to carry her books and hold her hand, right the way up to our pale and ancient postman who, each morning, stopped and stared at her with his mouth unevenly agape and one eye shut, as if over a gunsight."

And later:
"The great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons."

Before I sat down here at the old computer to wrestle with House of Meetings, I was listening to the Grinderman song "No Pussy Blues." Grinderman is fronted by the incomparably awesome Nick Cave, who throughout his various years, projects and musical incarnations has succeeded in becoming even cooler in his wiry, dirty-moustachioed old age. It struck me (as it has struck me a few times before) that there are many similarities between Nick Cave and Martin Amis. They even look alike:

Mr. Amis:




Mr. Cave




Ahh, the unabashed cigarette smoking, the naturally quiet and British demeanors (and yes, Nick is Australian, but he's practically British in my books), the dark clothes and dark brows, the receding hairlines that somehow remain sexy.
And yeah, both have been objects of my embarrassing lust and fangirly dad-crush type affections for some time, now. I have written love letters to them both (In case you were wondering: I sent Nick Cave his, but never had the cajones to slide my page of shitty, breathless prose into an envelope postmarked to Amis' British publicist.) And both survived a lecherous and debased youth, but grew to retain the best parts of their artsy intellectual backgrounds. Amis was a womanizing literary enfant terrible in his day with a writer dad (Kingsley Amis) while Cave more or less wrote the book, so to speak, on how to be a post-punk and heroin-addicted sex fiend while also writing amazing songs, a novel, a fucking amazing Australian Western (The Proposition) and performing university lectures on the construction of the Love Song. His dad was a teacher.

And both produce their most satisfying work when they stick to what they know best. Nick Cave's latter-year ballads alternate between embarrassingly maudlin and breathtaking, but after 20 years on the road, his renditions of dirty-as-hell songs like Stagger Lee and Deanna still turn me into a blithering pile of lusty goop. Amis' early novels The Rachel Papers, Success and Money are so very, very nasty, full of misanthropic, hateful characters doing terrible things to each other. But they're also just so fucking good. Amis is often considered quite a dick, and for all intents and purposes, he still seems to be one, especially when answering questions posed by fans, but he's also acerbic and much smarter than I am, and he's very good at what he does. So I forgive.

I had been waiting for House of Meetings for a long while. It continues with Amis' latest obsession with mass genocides, Soviet Russia, the facists and the mongrels, or, as he puts it in the book, the brutes versus the bitches. (If you're interested, Amis previously walked through this desolate and bloody world with Koba the Dread, a subjective history of Joseph Stalin.) In House of Meetings he's attempted a fictional rendering of the time period, focusing on two half-brothers who somehow survived a prison camp near the Arctic Circle and Zoya, the beautiful woman who haunted them both.

But it's not a love story, as the back cover of the book seems to suggest. None of Amis' books really are, although they might wear that premise as a thin shell. Nope---it's all about hatred, misery, regret, and some thin kind of survival. Amis' narrator (the handsome brother, if you believe his amusingly narcissistic description of himself as "six foot two with thick black hair and orderly features") survived, but he also ranks as one of Amis' all-time Grade A wankers. In letters to an unseen daughter that serve as the narrative to the tale, the guy freely shares stories of rape and beatings, withering appraisals of his brother, sister and even Zoya, the object of his so-called affections.

Hmm. I'm never sure how to reconcile or forgive Amis' characters. He doesn't write books where the characters possess some innate, highly visible vulnerability that might account for their behaviour. They simply are---and the narrator of House of Meetings simply is. I'm sure surviving the gulag would make me a bit of a shithead, for example, but Amis' character is a shithead before he even arrives---it's a trait that's directly attributable to his survival. I think we're supposed to try and understand that living in Soviet Russia itself made men do terrible things and act out in ways that defy self-control and rationality. This aside, this narrator is the first Amis character I couldn't hang onto. It was extremely difficult to keep holding his hand as he marches through the book's various miseries. I couldn't do it---and I have always had a high tolerance for the misogyny and self-loathing of Amis' characters, because it seemed to lead to something larger, something more, something satiric. But with this guy, I was, for the first time, repulsed.

It also doesn't help that this guy is supposed to be a hardcore Russian and yet he talks like an PhD candidate at Oxford. This is, of course, the undeniable Amis-ness coming out. Amis has such a beautiful command of the language that his characters can't help but sound highly learned (I think the one exception might be the working-class lady cop of Night Train.) This has often been criticized as being a detriment to his novels by critics, and in House of Meetings, it distracts and tortures the reader with wincing, agonizing clarity.

Amis knows he can't match the veracity and distinct vernacular of his literary heroes Dosteyovsky, Nabokov and Conrad (and well, shit. Who can?) which is perhaps why his character name-drops all these venerable authors on a nearly constant basis. To be honest, all the Britishisms and self-awareness is fucking annoying. The worst parts are when the narrator addresses his young, apparently hip daughter directly---a tirade about her generation's tendency towards self-mutilation and whining about her nose piercing made me throw the book across the room. For fuck's sakes, Amis, you're a canonized British author, you hang out with Christopher Hitchens and Philip Roth and you've almost won the Booker Prize, like, ten times. You don't need to make a Bill Cosby-esque comment on intergenerational quirks.

Of course, there is a very sad and tragic story in all of this, and Amis occasionally knows how to bring our faces straight into the gulag and the shittiness of the political situation, kneading us down into the stink of it all. And occasionally, the story rises with a mounting, Poe-like dread that sticks leaden in your throat (especially as the book's climactic encounter between the narrator and Zoya nears completion. It will make you squirm.) But overall the book left me feeling detached and frustrated, and that's an extremely difficult confession for me to make about one of my all-time literary heroes. I left the book thinking, "Well, fuck. Is Amis on a downturn? Is he too old for this game? Am I too young? Too stupid?" To be honest, three days later, I still have no idea.