For All You Fans of Stephen King

I'd recommend this article in the Los Angeles Review of Books.  In it, critic Dwight Allen tries to overcome his lifelong resistance to the writings of Stephen King.  Spoiler That is Not Really A Spoiler Alert: he fails.

The comments below the article (almost all of them aggrieved) are almost better than the piece itself.  I found Allen's article fairly mild and un-snobbish, all things considered; his readers, apparently, did NOT.

I have no real horse in the race.  I've never read any of King's writing, but that's only because horror and ANCIANT do not mix.  I still can barely sit through The Shining, and I'm told that the movie is much less scary than the book.  I have been a little confused, in the last few years, by the New Yorker's insistent championing of King's writings, but not to the point of actually caring.

The core problem, I think, with Allen's argument is his valorization of literary fiction.  The percentage of all fiction, in any genre, written in America in any given year that's actually good--whatever 'good' means--is maybe 10%.  Doesn't matter if it's literary fiction, horror, of sci-fi; excellence is rare--as rare if you're reading Franzen than if you are reading King.  Maybe more so.  Allen, however, seems to want to encourage all the lover of King's novels to turn instead to Zadie Smith, where true pleasure and enlightenment awaits.  That is not a winning argument.  White Teeth is not--it can't be--better than The Stand.  Nor is Freedom.  If you want to say: abjure Stephen King and read Trollope, or Sebald, or Penelope Fitzgerald, okay.  There, I can go with you.  But at least make it a contest.

Anyway, it's worth a read.

"Lord have mercy, Yes..."

"So You Think You Can Dance" has chosen the twenty contestants who will appear on the show this season.  Thank God, that Cyrus "Glitch" Spenser of the Dragon House dance crew in Atlanta was one of the twenty.  (For performance by his roommate, see below).

The people in the audience cheering for him in this clip, by the way: they're his competition.  In theory at least, they should be cheering for him to fail.  Except that there's no way anyone could cheer for this guy to fail--he's too damn good.  Also, he might call his fellow aliens to start bombarding the planet.

"It is not unlike beef...."

I'm listening to Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers right now.  I can't recommend it highly enough. It's hard to do justice to Trollope in a brief excerpt; his genius manifests itself over pages and chapters, not in paragraphs.  Nevertheless, I strongly encourage you to read this book.  The following is part of the chapter that introduces the novel's central villain, Mr Slope:

Mr Slope is tall, and not ill made. His feet and hands are large, as has ever been the case, with all his family, but he has a broad chest and wide shoulders to carry off these excrescences, and on the whole his figure is good. His countenance, however, is not specially prepossessing. His hair is lank, and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision, and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. He wears no whiskers, and is always punctiliously shaven. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef,--beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy, and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced straight and well-formed; though I myself should have liked it better if it did not possess a somewhat spongy, porous appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red coloured cork.

"..and we move around like tigers on vaseline..."

The first 45 seconds is people talking, but then the guy starts to dance.  And it is incredible.  Having watched this now a dozen times I'm still not entirely convinced this person is an actual human male.

Jack White Concert Review

The wife and I go to see music once a year at most.  Last year we saw The Dead Weather; this year we saw Jack White.  The common link is my wife's semi-obsession with Mr White.  Apparently she has frequent dreams in which we both move to Nashville (I think I get to go), somehow run into Jack somewhere around town, and all become friends.  So.  I don't know what to make of that, but it doesn't sound promising, does it?

White played a few nights ago at the Wiltern and so we dressed up like young people and left the valley. On a weeknight.  Which is basically, for us, the equivalent of dropping acid, hijacking a yacht, and spending a month cruising the Dalmatian coast.

The show was not bad.  White has a likable stage presence and he's obviously a gifted musician.  He also looks remarkably like Edward Scissorhands.  His tour is in support of his first solo album, Blunderbuss, which is made up, apparently, of songs he's been writing over the last several years.

The band was fine, the songs were okay.  My takeaway was that White needs other people who are creatively potent as himself to be in contact with.  He has innate musical talent--he's one of those people that if you invented a new instrument tomorrow, he could play it well by next week--but his songwriting skills have yet to really blossom.  He works mostly in fairly standards--blues or three-chord, I/IV/V, single basic repeated riff-driven songs.  That's nothing wrong with any of that, but I don't get the sense, watching him, that he's pushing his own creative boundaries.  What he needs is a collaborator who's as talented as he is, someone who'll challenge him to be better than he has been before.

A few nights before the concert, The Last Waltz had been on TV, and when I watched Jack White the person I thought off was Rick Danko.  They're both talented musicians; they both play many instruments well; and they both have a genuine rock oddness to them.  They're not trying to seem eccentric, they really are eccentric.  The difference is that Danko, for whatever reason, joined his talents--for some amount of time anyway--with other people as equally talented and strong-willed as himself.  The result was at least two masterpiece albums.  White, on the other hand, keeps finding projects where he's the alpha dog.  The resulting music is what I imagine Rick Danko's solo albums probably sound like.  They're fine; they're not devoid of interest, but they're not special.  White could be special--I think.  But not on his own.

Predictions and Random Thoughts

Predictions

1) The Spurs over the Heat, in six games, in the NBA finals.

2) Bringing Tebow to the Jets was a bad idea.  Massive problems will result.  The Jets will finish 8-8.  Rex Ryan's job will be in jeopardy. (Not all due to Tebow, of course.  But he's going to exacerbate an already-bad situation).

3) Even though they're down against the Devils, I like the Rangers to win not only this series, but to beat the Kings in the Stanley Cup.  Even though I'm rooting for the Kings.  The only LA team worth rooting for.

Random Thoughts

Veep on HBO is exactly what I feared it would be.  Cynicism masquerading as wit.  Worse, cynicism masquerading as wisdom.  No surprise, I guess given that two of the main producers are the ever-bilious and horrible Frank Rich, and the guy behind In The Loop.  It's the same problem I have, in some ways, with Mad Men.  Making every character on a show base and selfish is just as shallow and unconvincing as making every character a noble, selfless would-be saint (see The West Wing).  Humans aren't always, only motivated by fear, careerism, and selfishness.  It's irksome.  

Also irksome, though for many different reason, in the much-ballyhooed Girls, also on HBO.  I don't yet know what I think of this show.  It goes from impressing to bothering the living hell out of me every time I watch it.  One of its core problems, I think, is that the suffering of its main character, Hannah, rarely transcends her own place and time.  We sometimes feel for her, but we rarely feel _with_ her.  At least, I rarely do.  And, I don't get why every single sex scene in the entire show has to strive to attain the maximum level of cringe-inducing awkwardness.  Jury's still out, I guess.  My favorite moment in it so far has been the scene between Hannah and her now-gay ex-boyfriend.  THAT was funny-and also, somewhat moving.  Wish the show had more of that.

Van The Man

Despite the sneering disdain of my New York Intellectual friend ASWOBA, Astral Weeks remains one of my most beloved rock (rock-jazz?) albums.  On that subject, I highly recommend this excellent appreciation of Morrison's work.  It contains, among other things, a fascinating list of Morrison clips avialable on YouTube (which I am off to check out).  A sample: 

I recently edited a book titled The Neuroscience of Preference. Unsurprisingly, this got me reflecting on my own preferences. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that few have endured the ebb and flow of time. In fact I often experience what I suspect is a common phenomenon: private embarrassment at these temporal disjunctions in taste. A recent example was seeing a model of car that I owned in the late 1970s. At the time it seemed desirable and the essence of modernity. What presented itself to my eyes all these years later was nothing short of a hideous box awkwardly balanced on four wheels. When it comes to preferences, an awful lot of them are evanescent, a fact that is perennially exploited by the fashion industry.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that there are some constants. For me, one of these is an enduring passion for the music of Van Morrison. No other human voice has such power to arrest my attention and compel me to listen. This is a preference that has endured for more than 40 years.

Of Course. Who Wouldn't?

"Bertie, you're extraordinary," she said.

"Eh?  How do you mean, extraordinary?"

"All this nonsense you have been talking, trying to reconcile me and D'Arcy.  Not that I don't admire you for it.  I think it's rather wonderful of you.  But then everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you're the soul of kindness and generosity."

Well, I was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable to estimate the quality of these fowls' intelligence, but she had spoken as if they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about to ask her who the hell she meant by 'everybody,' when she resumed.

"You want to marry me yourself, don't you?"

I had to take another mouthful of the substance in the bottle before I could speak.  One of those difficult questions to answer.

"Oh, rather," I said, for I was anxious to make the evening a success.  "Of course.  Who wouldn't?"

Sebald Is As Good As Advertised

But the more I labored on this project over several months the more pitiful did the results seem.  I was increasingly overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz, at the mere thought of opening the bundles of papers and looking through the endless reams I had written in the course of the years.  Yet reading and writing, he added, had always been his favorite occupation.  How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.  But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, that I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed.  If at times some kind of self-deception nonetheless made me feel that I had done a good day's work, then as soon as I glanced at the page next morning I was sure to find the most appalling mistakes, inconsistencies, and lapses staring at me from the paper.  How much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.  Soon I could not even venture on the first step.  Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths.

The SAT is Tomorrow. That Affects None of You, I Know

Sorry for the long radio silence.  I've been teaching and writing, mostly the latter.  The wife and I are going on a mini vacation to the Napa Valley next weekend, and I'm trying to reach a certain writing threshhold before then.  For the last two weeks it seemed impossible that I was going to meet that threshold, but something good seems to have happened finally and it's looking sunny.

I'll try to take some photos in Napa and do another foodie write-up.  We're going to The French Laundry, which should be a highlight.  Also going to stay at place with a nice pool and view and so forth, so it should be relaxing.  Not that I ever really relax.  But, I should be less anxious, at least.

More to come, soon, I trust...

Time to Play?

This article about married, middle-aged men who attend "My Little Pony" fan conventions is a memorable read.  Sample:

Isn’t there something a little weird about grown men playing with rainbow-hued ponies? Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, doesn’t think so. She says, “They’re just a fan base revisiting childhood and some of the things they have left behind” — and, in some cases, the things they didn’t get a chance to experience the first time around, such as brushing a pony’s synthetic mane. 

It’s escapist in a positive way, she says: “It really is just different ways people have of fulfilling these very fundamental human needs.” 

For all his flamboyant pony shirts, R.S. has received surprisingly little flak. “I would’ve thought it was weird — I did think it was weird, when my friend first told me about it,” R.S. says. “But no one cares.” And if he ever did feel ostracized? He shrugs and spreads his hands. “Haters gonna hate, you know?”

For Johannes

I then went down the hall to join Madeline Bassett...

"Oh Bertie," she said in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, "you ought not to be here!"

....She went on, looking at me as if I were a rabbit which she was expecing shortly to turn into a gnome.

"Why did you come? Oh, I know what you are going to say. You felt that, cost what it might, you had to see me again, just once. You could not resist the urge to take away with you one last memory which you could cherish down the lonely years. Oh, Bertie, you remind me of Rudel."

The name was new to me.

"Rudel?"

"The Seigneur Geoffrey Rudel, Prince of Blaye-en-Saintonge."

I shook my head.

"Never met him, I'm afraid. Pal of yours?"

"He lived in the Middle Ages. He was a great poet. And he fell in love with the wife of the Lord of Tripoli."

I stirred uneasily. I hoped she was going to keep it clean.

"For years he loved her, and at last he could resist no longer. He took ship to Tripoli, and his servants carried him ashore."

"Not feeling so good?" I said, groping. "Rough crossing?"

"He was dying. Of love."

"Oh, ah."

"They bore him to Lady Melisande's presence on a litter, and he had just strength enough to reach out and touch her hand. Then he died."

She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight up from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued.

"Terrific," I said, feeling I had to say something, though personally I didn't think the story a patch on the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter. Different, of course, if one had known the chap.