Monday, September 28, 2009
Berlin --> Prague, 2001
Hitchens zings Franken, Stewart, and Colbert
[Their material] certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke....Stewart, too, has something of a fat-target problem, and seems partly unaware of this problem’s source in his own need to please an audience that has a limited range of reference. In Naked Pictures of Famous People, when he decides to lampoon Larry King—who in any context is a barn-door-size target—he still manages to make the attack too broad. There’s no slight nudge, but a huge dig in the ribs. It needs to be “Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview.” And Hitler has to be a guest who has been helped by therapy to become more of a people person. Here’s his opening reply to King’s welcome to the show.
HITLER: (biting into a bagel) First of all, Larry, I don’t know what I was so afraid of. These are delicious!!!At whose expense, I wonder, are those three (count them!) exclamation marks? Who is afraid that who will miss what point?
...
But [Franken who has a powerful wit] is barely even funny when funny is all he is trying to be. See if the following causes you to smile. It’s taken from his inaugural address, on page 223 of Why Not Me?
As the Mandingo buck, Mede, says in the movie after he has been brought to James Mason’s plantation to be used as breeding stock, “Massa, it beez wrong to sell a nigger like a plow horse.” He’s right. It does beez wrong. It beez very wrong. These words are as true today as when Ken Norton said them twenty-six short years ago. And I am here today to say that it was wrong to hunt escaped slaves down on horseback; it was wrong to boil slaves alive; and it was wrong to sell a black woman merely because her breasts had grown too droopy.Jeepers. Of course the “irony” is that the passage is supposed to make you cringe a bit, but this crucially lowered and degraded definition of what is ironic is accidentally confessed a touch later on in the same book, when Franken is writing in his own voice:
“Ironic distance” is not [Al] Gore’s problem. Not that he doesn’t have a well-developed sense of irony. He actually has a terrific sense of humor.See, there’s your problem. A sense of irony is to be carefully, indeed strictly, distinguished from the possession of a funny bone. Irony is not air-quote finger-marks, as if to say “Just kidding” when in fact one is not quite kidding. (Does anyone ever say “Just kidding” when in fact only kidding?) Bathos is not irony, though Franken and Stewart and Colbert seem unaware of this. Irony usually partakes of some element of the unintended consequence.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Chicago Half Marathon
Local bands were situated every couple of miles along the course. Around mile 10 three Asian guys and a white drummer were playing proggy metal. A mile later a pretty girl with an acoustic band was covering Waterfalls by TLC. Michael Jackson's best stuff was being played on sound systems all over the course. The music made me want to spend energy even though I was dog tired.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Fermata
The happiness of the book runs against the grain of my character, but it's an undeniably great piece of fiction. Baker is a virtuosic writer. His writing is informal but intricate and atomically precise. Effort is necessary to parse his best descriptions, but the effort is rewarded when the image created by the writing comes into focus. Baker's description of the french braid of the woman who has caught Arno's eye packs a big payoff:
An account of towels spinning in a washing machine exhausts the reader before giving up its reward:
Just after starting the autobiography, Arno articulates the main challenge that writing poses for me (aside from coming up with something interesting to say):
it is just as hard to write during a Fermation as it is in real time. You still must dole out all the things you have to say one by one, when what you want of course is to say them all at once. But I am going to give it a try. (Chapter 1).
The money shot at the end of the first piece of rot is unforgettable. The female character, Marian the Librarian, has mounted a dildo to the floor of a delivery truck and fucks it as the truck bounces over a country road while the driver looks on ecstatically:
During Arno's second work of rot, Marian the Librarian persuades a teenaged girl to take a shit while the girl sucks off her boyfriend in Marian's garden:
While catching and disposing of the turd, Marian is squatting over an antique platter to which was mounted a dildo inserted into Marian's anus. El oh el.
I happen to know, from a three-week assignment in the research department of Kilmer Pharmaceuticals ..., that biochemists routinely use the centrifuge ... to spin down, or "pellet," lengths of DNA in order to purify or clean them. And everything in the mind--that final triumph of protein chemistry--is likewise in helpless motion, afloat, diffuse, impure, unwilling to commit to precipitation: only an artificially induced pensive force of hundreds of thousands of gravities can spin down some intelligible fraction of one's true past self, one's frustratingly polydisperse personality, into a pellet of print.
Baker does not explicitly complete the analogy between the centrifugal force that pulls water out of laundry and makes DNA pellet and the force that allows Arno to spin down his past into a coherent narrative. In the reality of the reader, Baker himself is the spinning force that creates Arno's narrative. In the world of the book, what is the force turning Arno's past into a narrative? I think it is Arno's consciousness. The book is a celebration of the mind.
Mad Drunken Americans in the Mighty Land
Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent. (Part One, Chapter 8).
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast ... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (Part Five).
Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. (Part Three, Chapter 3).