13) Jumping The Shark, Crawling Back on the Board

I admit it. I've been extremely lax with my posting. But I've still been reading. I'm currently on book #16, which I admit is sad...it makes me sad. But I was jarred after an dear former schoolmate told me that she was secretly reading the blog (hi Rosel) and so I decided to start posting "reviews" again, as it were.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with George Elliot Clarke. He's kind of a literary giant here in Nova Scotia so I was aware of him before reading I & I. And afterwards --- well, wow. It's unnerving to have someone write so boldly and beautifully about the place you're living in. Elliot's Halifax in I & I is filled with drunken louts, gunslingers and romantics. He writes about the neighbourhood he grew up in (and now my adopted neighbourhood) the Halifax North End with such agony and love. The writing is painful and drippy. It made me hungry. Here's my review of the prose novel, originally published in The Coast a month or so ago. Upon re-reading it, I feel it doesn't give the plot, nor the writing, enough justice. Go and read it yerself, and don't just take the word of this hack.



At first glance, George Elliott Clarke's prose novel I & I seems to follow a familiar formula. Boy meets girl, girl's family doesn't approve, boy and girl run away, and after a seemingly accidental violent incident, both go on the run. And as the tragic romance of rich, white Betty Browning and the black boxer Malcolm Miles unfolds, Clarke indeed makes the requisite nods to Romeo and Juliet and Bonnie and Clyde. But in a novel jam-packed with cultural and literary allusions, these references swirl by in a maelstrom of blood, booze, sex and food.

Even Clarke's version of 1970s Halifax feels deliriously alien; north end gangs dig up corpses in order to bury them properly while "brass knuckle pimps" and other lowlifes rule the streets. Clarke lets the story unfurl with his trademark gusto, lingering over scenes of beauty and gore with the lip-smacking verve of a bawdy Wilfred Owen.

Strangely, though, it's his rendering of the book's biggest villain, the libidinous bible college professor Lowell, that rings the most sharply. When Lowell meets his inevitable end---with his gaping mouth "hot and raunchy/Inside, an adult, genital pink"---it comes across as the most obscene act in a story filled with vile characters and dirty deeds.

I've Been Drawn Into Your Magnet Tar Pit Trap

Author: Joe Hill
Book Read: Heart-Shaped Box
Pages: 382


My attention was drawn to Joe Hill when I read the first in a series of graphic novels he's working on called Locke and Key (mentioned in this entry.) I liked his style. He's not doing anything mind-bogglingly original with the ghost story genre, but his stories are propulsive and well-paced, with interesting characters. This continues with Heart-Shaped Box. I read this in an evening while coughing up my lungs from a brief cold that felt menacingly tubercular. The book suited my mood.

Judas Coyne is an aging Alice Cooper-esque rock star living in a decaying upstate New York farmhouse with a twenty-three-year-old Goth girl named Georgia (the latest in a series of young Goth girls, we learn.) He's tough and burnt out from thirty years of hard rocking and partying and now lives his remaining years in a creative rut, treating his Gothy live-ins like garbage, remembering his youth as an abused farm child, avoiding email and daydreaming over various gross artifacts he's collected over the years (skulls, snuff films, books of the dead, etc). One day his puppy-dog-like overeager manager Danny shows him a link for an online auction site, where someone has put their dead stepfather's suit up for auction. Judas orders it to add to his collection. It arrives - and guess what shape the box is in? And guess what else has come to stay in his house with the suit? I JUST DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT!

What comes next is many pages of trashy fun. If you like horror, this is probably the cream of the most recent crop, and you won't be able to put it down. Now, I won't say that Heart-Shaped Box isn't a guilty pleasure. Any book that can be read in under six hours while piled under blankets and gulping NeoCitran most definitely falls in that category. There aren't any heart-stopping literary endeavours happening here. There is, however, some ripping good storytelling, characters that you care about (despite not necessarily being able to relate to them) some huge scares and some shocking moments of violence. The ghost's first appearance should be predictable, but Hill lets it creep up on you, and when the moment comes - teased through agonizing, minute description - it's very scary. This shit will suck you in. Even as you sit shaking your head and thinking "I should read Invisible Man" or "Wow, that copy of The Crying of Lot 49 is just on my bookshelf, sitting there," your body-heart will chide your mind and roar, "Quiet, fool! I need to read the next part!"

I Don't Hate Joan Didion Anymore

Book Read: The Year of Magical Thinking

Author:Joan Didion

I really like Joan Didion's writing. Technically, she is nearly flawless. Her sentences are characterized by her careful word choices and restraint, and yet her profiles of people and situations are close. They seem true. Like most people I prefer her journalism from the '60s, especially the stuff collected in The White Album. Dark tales drenched in California sunshine. Murdering housewives, Charles Manson, the shifting faces and allegiances of the Beatles. Didion has a way of making everything seem iconic. There's also a backside to this. Emma Brockes hit it dead on in this Guardian interview:

While many of her journalistic peers got carried away in the 60s, Didion wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry. Her self-possession is such that the mere act of breathing in her presence feels like a vulgar transgression.

Although I loved the writing, the fragility of its author didn't sit well with me. And it confirmed my suspicions that this clean, laboured, clipped prose came from a detached, stingy, frail hypochondriac. Knowing this made the writing more interesting. It did not make me warm up to Joan Didion herself.

Flash forward to The Year of Magical Thinking. In 2004, Didion is sitting with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in their New York apartment, eating dinner, making idle conversation--the things that couples do. Suddenly he keels over, having suffered a heart attack. He dies that evening. Meanwhile, Didion's 39-year-old daughter Quintana is in hospital suffering severe complications related to pneumonia. Magical Thinking deals with Didion's life after Dunne's death, and to a certain extent, her memories of him and Quintana both. (Quintana died a few months after the book was written, and Didion opted not to revise it to include this information.)

Yeah, it's a heavy book. But not as heavy as it could be. As most of you know (or can probably guess) Didion applies her finely-honed journalistic detachment to these traumatic life events. In a sentence, it's simply a thoughtful, well-researched account of a personal crisis. Early on after Dunne died, Didion lapsed into what she calls a sort of "dementia." She refuses to throw away Dunne's shoes (despite having donated the rest of his clothes to charity) because she wholeheartedly believes he "might need them later." She is aware that rationality, at this moment, is not there, and continues to maintain her cool exterior. Her form of grief is, in her words, entirely American. This detachment helps her come off as a "cool customer" to doctors, nurses, and worried friends. It helps her scrape by.

At the same time, Didion researches the ins and outs of virtually every aspect of both Dunne's heart condition and Quintana's various operations and complications. She feels knowledge is power. She needs to know everything to feel in control. This is where the book hits its emotional mark. Although Didion's writing is entirely sober and almost numb in its impassiveness, I sucked in a breath at the point where she recalls asking Quintana's doctor delicate and nauseating questions about whether her brain has shifted, or swollen, or have both her pupils fixed yet, or just one?

Didion's ruminations on her grieving process show up in the novel's last few chapters. It was the first time I had encountered her "real voice" and I welcomed it. It is good to learn that an author you previously felt was unapproachable--and indeed, completely unreachable as a relateable person--indeed understood grief, and guilt and her own state of unravelling. It's bleak, but not despairing; sad but not saccharine. We know Didion well enough at this point to know she will get through. It is the process that compels us to turn the page, and I suspect comforts as well.

There are many terrible books about grief, mourning and death out there---self-help manuals and Christian or new-age edicts disguised as meaningful literature. Magical Thinking is only the second book I've encountered that has presented the process in any kind of graceful and honest way. (The first is Banana Yoshimoto's beautiful Kitchen .) The book has an immensely calming effect, and you don't have to be mourning a recent loss to take something from it.

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.

Final Numbers for January

Well hot dog!

Total books read: 8

Total pages read: 2612

Number of books left to read: 92

Goals: More Charles Dickens, less HBO on DVD, Joan Didion...and a certain insanely popular young adult novel that has kicked off three sequels and a movie and made a star of a tall gaunt young man with incredibly shitty hair. Guessed yet?

Double Book Attack: 7) Three Day Road and 8) Flight

Book(S) Read/Authors: Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, and Flight by Sherman Alexie

Pages: Three Day Road (382) Flight (181) And yes, I realize Flight is a little short for the, uh, RULES, but I figure TDR's whopping girth more than makes up for it.

Distraction level: Um, I dunno? I managed to negotiate the reading with a vigorous schedule of listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album (meh) watching Takashi Miike films (and enjoying the resultant nightmares) and drinking gin and tonics with Bea and Eric. Yep. Vigorous.

Method of Acquisition: Three Day Road has been recommended to me by a few people whose tastes I completely respect. Thanks Mike and Keith! Meanwhile I picked up Flight on a whim in my local library's Native section.

Flight and Three Day Road are both about the Native experience, but that comparison is extremely broad. They're both very different books. Three Day Road deals with two Cree best friends who leave Moose Factory to go and fight in France during World War One; Flight is set in 2007 and follows a half-Indian fifteen-year-old pimply protagonist and budding criminal who experiences time travel. At the same time, the boys in these books are also linked by their overwhelming awareness of their culture, its rituals and the stereotypes born from those rituals.

Three Day Road was an interesting read. It's one of those critically adored sprawling Canadian novels that will no doubt find its place in the canon of very good, enduring historical Canadian literature, snuggled alongside In The Skin of a Lion and The Wars. In that light, it is a very good book indeed. Boyden writes in sparse, controlled sentences. He doesn't waste a word. Considering that two of the three main characters have only a rudimentary grasp of English, the simple prose makes sense---the characters speak, think and reflect with a necessary economy.

I read a review somewhere that pointed out that although Boyden is dealing with stock characters---the mysterious native medicine woman, the two best friends destroyed by a war, etc etc---somehow it doesn't feel tired. I wouldn't entirely agree with this. But that's a personal thing. I'm pretty numb towards the World War One theme as rendered in literature and film, even one as well-conceived as Three Day Road. At risk of sounding a bit callous, I've simply seen too much of it. Although the scenes in the trenches are well-plotted and occasionally wrenching, I couldn't get entirely swept up in them. I was more taken by the smaller moments in the book...the moments lost in translation as a white sergeant shouts at one of the boys, who curses at him in Cree while the other boy snickers...the medicine woman whispering in the ear of her morphine-addled nephew, her arm slung across his body as he lies half-dead in a sweat lodge...the boys pushing a canoe through a shallow lake as a forest fire rages around them. Boyden is able to inhabit the brains of his characters and push breath through them. It's here where he really shines, and I think he'll only get better as time passes.

Flight styles itself like Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone crossed with a Kurt Vonnegut novel, but without the whimsy. This is a dark book that makes no bones about the intensity of its subject matter. Alexie says it loud and clear: White people fucked Native Americans up first, but Native Americans have also fucked themselves up. Who's to blame? Where does this cycle end?

Zits is Alexie's antagonist. He's smart and funny but he's been delivered a shit deal in life with a dead mother and a father who ran out on him the day he was born. Zits bounces from foster home to foster home and occasionally prison with seeming aimlessness, but we soon see that beneath the cratered skin, there is a rage quietly seething. After hooking up with a white cellmate during a stint in "kid jail," Zits begins developing a political and historical consciousness that culminates with him marching into a bank: a paintball gun in one pocket, a real .45 in the other. As he draws the guns and gets ready to shoot, he blacks out and wakes up in Red River, Idaho in 1970 in the body of a burly white cop. And---to whorishly cop some Vonnegut---so it goes.

Like Boyden, Alexie attempts to re-create historical situations---although he does it much more quickly and in fragments due to the nature of Zits' predicament. Most effective is the scene where Zits finds himself in the body of an elderly white Indian tracker in the 19th century. The battle that follows is more visceral and immediate than many of the war scenes in Boyden's novel. There's a lot of high points like this in the book but it's also really uneven. Alexie's super-blunt style is both exciting and off-putting: After a certain point, I started to get sick of Zits yelling at me through the pages. At the same time, there's no denying that what he's witnessing through these various bodies is affecting. It's 2007 and native Americans and Canadians are still living in third-world conditions, shouldering the burden of a heavy past and the continued platitudes of politicians. (Ahemcough, Stephen Harper!) Alexie is an able and entertaining guide through these worlds. I just wish he was a little more subtle in his methods. In that regard, he could certainly use a lesson from Joseph Boyden. But Alexie also shows a fearlessness that Boyden doesn't quite attain in Three Day Road, and in that sense, Alexie's hammer-over-the-head approach has resonated longer with me.