Away!

Tomorrow, Brady and I start out on a roadtrip to Omaha, Nebraska, where we will crash at our uncle’s place and engage in 6 days of manly-man activity, like laughing at an assortment of crude humour, treating his cat to the sights, sounds, and odors of three large males in a small apartment, and visiting every used book store in Omaha and Lincoln. Luckily, Brady and I now have my newish Saturn LX300 in which to make the trip west, so we can at least travel in a bit of style.

The downside to the issue is that Allison and I will be separated for a period not less than three weeks, as when I get back on Sunday the 31st, she starts her last and final year of summer band camp, and when that ends on August 5th, her family is dragging her out east until the 11th on a “vacation” to look at battlefields. Part of me knows that it could certainly be much worse than three weeks: my brother and his sweetheart have been/will be, in the course of a little over a year, be separated by a semester of Costa Rica, a summer of Washington D.C., and a semester of Germany. If they can do it, well, so can we.

Still. Anyway, long story short, this weblog will obviously be inactive for the week, since I doubt very much I will have any access to the internet while on vacation. Tune in next week; same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

§698 · July 24, 2005 · 2 comments ·

Night of the Avenging Blowfish

Night of the Avenging Blowfish Night of the Avenging Blowfish by John Welter
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Year: 1994
Pages: 304

The subtitle for Night of the Avenging Blowfish is “A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat.” This should immediately tell you something about the nature of the book; not quite slapstick, but populated with enough characters straight out of Seinfeld (except not as contrived and banal) and delivered with enough one-liners to make me laugh out loud. Consider this:

My pen ran out of ink. In the chair next to me, Yamato was reaching inside his coat pockets and his shirt pocket and then his pants pockets to find a pen so he could take notes during the briefing.

“Do you have an extra pen?” Yamato said.

“Use this,” I said, handing him my pen.

Yamato tried writing something on his pad, then frowned at me and said, “This is out of ink.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t want it.”

“Do you have a pen that works?” Yamato asked.

“That one works. It just doesn’t have any ink in it,” I said.

Having just finished the book, I can say definitively that it was good or bad or weak or rushed or any adjective but “fascinating.” In a way, Welter’s writing style reminds me of my own when I was 16. Certainly, he’s much better at it than I am, but the style of narration he chose for the novel is the sort that routinely wanders off into a discussion of something completely unrelated to the plot. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but at times can be just as random and stultifying.

The plot of the novel centers around Doyle Coldiron, a slacker Secret Service agent who allows the president to be fed Spam, and is completely batshit crazy for a married woman named Natelle who works in the White House. He and his Secret Service buddies play a game of baseball in the dark; Yamato falls for a militant vegetarian; Doyle ponders just what a “beguine” is. But by far, the locus of the plot is the troubled relationship between Doyle and Natelle, as well as their insecurities and sexualities. By the end of the novel, I had the feeling that Night of the Avenging Blowfish, despite its whimsical airs, was a very serious love story in a wrapper of wry humor and a plethora of light-hearted literary references. But damned if the love story doesn’t manage to be engaging, and most of all, not trite. I would have liked to see it fleshed out (ha!) even further, but at the frantic pace that the story (especially the dialog) moves along, anything more than the ≈300 pages it was.

It’s not a hard read at all, and is enjoyable despite my mixed feelings. If you want a quick break between drier reads, here’s one for your list.

§697 · July 22, 2005 · 3 comments · Tags:

Please believe

On the failure of one small community in achieving its own ill-defined dreams and/or goals… and we were an army of dead women and men, shuffling pointless across and thru this glorious new century w/ all its interactive toys, internet prattle, electrified restraining harnesses, billion-dollar death rays and refined, irrational, and terminal economies of blood, misery and slow fucking doom? And please know, or already understand, that this record is so fucking useless as a one way transmission, like all one-way transmissions need to cease forever for sure, in this already-existing mess of radiation, electricity and noise and clamor and lies… and&so and but some time somewhere some tiny action took root maybe, and none of us never heard about it yet, and the earth did its slow twirl in spite of? And so we all woke up hungover, &always still more tired of, or more spooked or scared, and barely shuffled thru a little bit more? And while we were sleeping they even took our neighbourhoods away, and everything turned into Disneyland and marionettes and chipboard and spit? No more lovely aimless strolls allowed, no more long wandering nights all burning w/ possibility, wonder, or joy- not here no, not w/ the flashing copcar light show and park curfews and the whole “Yeah you can live here, but you can’t live here, I mean you can pay yr. rent and to&fro a little but that’s about all bub, and don’t you forget it hawhawhwwaw”? and we learned the rules way too well, and they altered the way we felt and lived and breathed even? And what about the story of us all abandoning each other, because we were too self-involved to figure out how alone we all really felt mostly nearly all the time? (Meaning that we all treated each other reallyreallyreally badly, man)? (And crafted our own neurotic soap operas w/ our boring sad couplings and irony, television and cocktails?) And anyways so might as well get used to the smell? And we gathered in compromised halls that reeked of failure, distance, and self-alienation? And so we never really met? Manifested the ruined dreams that didn’t have to be ruined at all? And never figured out how to counter all the bland agents of recuperation, who stole our buck-fifty-nine an hour? (And would you believe us if we told you that we built a machine that’ll bring down all their fucking satellites the fuck down?) And the arguments for&against were never complicated but were certainly fucking complex? And we crafted slack fact ions, and made believe that we were seditionaries, but were too easily moved or else did not ever move at all? And never stormed the gates or walls? But crafted clumsy things w/ our hands, and those things were important to us, those clumsy abstracted towers and minurets we crafted w/ our own worried hands? And built our own confused belief systems, which were endlessly and crucially beautiful in their small stubborn tangles of loss, worry, faith, and need? And made small gestures w/ our hands or eyes that were endless redeeming, and made us all sometimes almost believe in saints and/or angels? And daydreamed endless about living a little more quietly or a little bit louder for awhile? And almost always strived for a little more engagement w/ this falling/fallen world? Or hardened our resolve sometimes and bent our heads and backs into the task at hand and dug and built or erected? Or transmitted occasional epiphanies or urgent fears w/ photocopiers, silkscreens and CDR’s? And found answers sometimes in the empty places, like gangs of birds flying out of dead buildings, beneath the sun’s blind white hole? Like trees growing thru fences or an abandoned jar filled w/ a summer’s worth of rusty water out there behind the place where the heavy rains roll? And found hope in the idea of the futile gesture? And manifested sometimes w/ bricks in our hands? And built something here in spite of and will not let them take it from us so easily? So please o please, let’s please figure out soon what exactly we can build here on this parched and fallow ground. (Knowing all along, that sooner or later their bulldozers will come and tear it all down…) (But we can build it in spite of, and leave dusty notes about our journeys behind…) And resistance grew from tender places, and we fought the good fight whenever it staggered down our lonesome, twisted roads…

§693 · July 21, 2005 · 1 comment ·

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 1984
Pages: 400

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance carries with it 25 years of critical acclaim, and no small amount of criticism. My brother enjoyed it (in fact, it was his copy that I borrowed), but then he’s always had more patience for reading of that sort. Last year, I researched Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, which looks to reconcile the mystic traditions of the Far East with our modern-day notions of metaphysics and the western world’s scientific approach to understanding reality. My conclusions were not favorable to Mr. Capra. Thus, when faced with yet another philosophical inquiry into the union of an eastern outlook (sort of; Pirsig deals with lots of different philosophies, but tends to return to Buddhism more often than not) with the more secular approach popular in the 60s (the setting of the narrative, one of 4 threads that make up the novel).

Pirsig’s claim to fame is his “Metaphysics of Quality,” a strange mix of monism, Taoism, and a bit of Plato’s Forms. It’s all nonsense, if you ask me, and old nonsense at that: Pirsig renounces dualistic worldviews (subjective/objective) for differing manifestations of the same essence (“Quality”). A serious inquiry into it (described as “one of the first indigenous forms of Zen Buddhism to appear in the United States”) can be found at the site of Anthony McWatt. I happen to be of the belief that Buddhism is a quaint way of describing nothing at all except for giving a spiritual gloss to other vapid philosophies. Hey, Buddhism is trendy: Richard Gere’s doing it, right? And Kabbalah, too, now that Madonna Esther is doing it. In fact, the only guy who can’t seem to get a break is Tom Cruise, but I guess than eastern mysticism is still a great deal more reputable than galactic overlords.

In short, and to prevent further diatribes, I have to admit that I just didn’t care for this book. Certainly, I must also admit that my prior judgments had biased me a bit, but neither did I get the feeling that Pirsig’s new philosophy is anything great or exciting. On a rhetorical level, the story was good enough: Pirsig’s amorphous relationship with his son (who was tragically murdered in a San Francisco mugging in 1979) provided the character development necessary for a decent plot, but it was overcome with Pirsig’s babble about static patterns and his questionable alter ego, Phædrus. This is just one of those occasions where my own opinion flies in stark contrast to the literary canon (I feel the same way about Hemingway). But who knows? Many of my readers may like it.

§691 · July 19, 2005 · 6 comments · Tags:

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2005
Pages: 672

If you haven’t been living in a cave on a remote island with your eyes pinched shut and your fingers in your ears, then this book should need no introduction. I should preface this by saying that I am not the sort of rabid fan who lines up at midnight before the release date or buys deluxe editions or feels more saddened by the death of fictional characters than real people, but they are good books. I happened to get into the series before it really started on fire (I read the original British pressing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as it was called), and I happen to have a certain amount of indiginity that some of my reading choices are shared by small children.

Nevertheless, I received Half-Blood Prince on Saturday by mail (I wouldn’t be caught dead clawing my way through the slobbering hordes at Barnes & Noble), but didn’t get to read it until Sunday, as I was in the middle of Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent at the time. Rowling’s book is an easy read (as they all are), meant to be accessible to both children (though I become increasingly incredulous that small children could read or understand some of the recent additions to the series).

I search my mind for something to say about Book 6 that hasn’t been said about, for instance, Book 5, but I come up short. If Rowling is one thing, it’s consistent in her style. If you liked any of the other books, you’ll like this one just the same, even if the more fragile of you squawk and flail and weep when you read the ending. Yes, the ending is horribly sad; moreso than Order of the Phoenix, so all you drolly emotional housewives should bring your tissues closer and gird your loins.

I suppose the only complaint that I have with this iteration (like the last one) is that the plot is somewhat nebulous; it doesn’t have a central point around which things transpire. In the first book, Harry was new to Hogwarts; in the second, there was the Chamber of Secrets; in the third, Sirius Black and a variety of new world-making on Rowling’s part; in the fourth, the Tri-Wizard Tournament; in the fifth and sixth books, however, post-Voldemort, the plot is a bit of a flubby mess. Even in Order…, anyway, there is the Delores Umbridge fiasco; in Half-Blood Prince, the only book-long plot element is that of Harry suspecting Malfoy of misdeeds (what, really?) and the book’s namesake, a mysterious character called the “Half-Blood Prince.” I’ll tell you right now that nothing particularly interesting ever really comes from it. The book is named after what is largely a curious aside.

At the least, book six in the Harry Potter series does what it needs to: it moves the characters along in their personal and magical development; it fills in some previous gaps of knowledge; especially with regard to Voldemort’s past; it continues to raise the level of urgency and danger as previous books have, it adds a few more mysteries/cliffhangers; and it ends with a clear pointing [sic] toward a final climactic battle. The problem, though, is that the book does the least one would expect and no more.

And unfortunately for Rowling, she’s given herself a doozy of a mess to wrap up, and she only has one more book to do it. I’m extremely curious as to where she’ll take the story and what she’ll do after Book 7 is completed (she certainly doesn’t need to work anymore: she’s worth as much as $1 billion). I don’t need to tell you whether or not to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If you’ve bothered to read any others, you’ll read this one in due course, and no review in the world will stop you, but for what it’s worth, it’s fairly satisfying for such an easy read.

§689 · July 18, 2005 · 1 comment · Tags: ,

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