The New York Times has an article up (with photos!) here on the filming of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning sci-fi novel The Road. Now if only the Coen brothers were directing . . .
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Joss Me Around a Bit
Sticking with our new theme, I had to post the brand spanking new trailer to Dollhouse, Joss Whedon's new show for FOX starring Eliza Dushku and Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from Battlestar). Here's hoping FOX decides to give this show a proper chance. Whedon's last show, the brilliant Firefly, was bounced around a bunch of different time slots because of the World Series and then promptly canceled. Looks like Dollhouse is gonna get a better shot - it will be following 24, and they have already greenlighted 9 episodes.
Mao II - Don DeLillo
Harold Bloom, the nation's top literary critic and Sterling Professor at Yale, groups Don DeLillo with Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Phillip Roth as the best writers in America today, and after reading my third DeLillo tome - Mao II - it is hard to argue with that assessment. (Bloom worth checking out - read this column skewering hacks like Stephen King and JK Rowling.) I was first introduced to DeLillo with Underworld, and if you aren't familiar with that book and it's reputation and influence, I would wholeheartedly recommend giving it a go - it will be one of the few books published in the last 25 years that will be required reading a hundred years from now. Mao II is not a sprawling, thousand page postmodern epic like Underworld, but in it's own way it is just as powerful.
The plot revolves around a reclusive Salinger/Pynchon type, the aptly named Bill Gray, and his desire to escape his latest, failed novel. A photo shoot, his first ever, with a fetching photographer obsessed with his books brings about a crises of conscience in the writer, and he descends into a world of political violence, kidnappings, and terrorism. Like his other works, the plot is a loop. We open with a Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and close with a tank-ushered Beirut wedding. A literary palindrome. But the novel revolves around crowds, images, and collective consciousness. In fact, the prologue's last sentence is "The future belongs to crowds."
It is hard to argue with that assessment, and Gray, who we can only assume is a thinly veiled DeLillo, spends a good deal of the novel pontificating and ruminating - quite eloquently - on just that. We have throngs attending Khomeni's funeral, throngs of homeless in New York City, throngs of soccer hooligans crushed to death, throngs of corpses at various terrorist attacks, peppered throughout the novel to illustrate just how meaningless the individual has become in modern society. A kidnapped Swiss poet provides the engine for Gray's foray into terrorism. Gray agrees to travel to London for a poetry reading on behalf of the kidnapped poet, held in Beirut, but a bomb threat postpones the reading and Gray finds himself inexorably pulled towards the Middle East to negotiate the poet's release, via Athens and Cyprus.
Delillo's prose is ridiculous. It is easy to bask in his sentence structure and wordplay, alone worth the price of the novel. However, it is the substance of the novel's message which make it a classic. Terrorism has replaced art. It has hijacked the collective consciousness, become the only meaningful art. The writer is dead. "The novel used to feed our search for meaning," says Gray, our only form of "secular transcendence." But we have been pushed, collectively, "toward something larger, darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere . . . we don't need the novel . . . we don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need reports and predictions and warnings." This was written before 9/11, by the way. The writer's place in society has been usurped by terrorists - "The state should want to kill all writers . . . every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere." Of course, now terrorists are hunted, their ideas threaten power. Gray's thirst to taste that romance and leverage terrorist wield now, stolen from his pen, leads to his downfall. Of course the plot itself mirrors this ideology - Brita, the photographer that spurs Gray's venture out into the world at the beginning of the novel, has abandoned her obsession of writers and embraced terrorists by the end of the novel.
Yeah, I spent my last post bitching about politics my last post and here I am devouring maybe the most political novel I have read since All The King's Men, but the writing and the message in this book are simply too powerful to pass up. The world we live in today, constantly connected, constantly and instantly "analyzed, and relentlessly documented and dissected- this is the world Delillo is scared of, and it is here. Definitely a book worth reading.
The plot revolves around a reclusive Salinger/Pynchon type, the aptly named Bill Gray, and his desire to escape his latest, failed novel. A photo shoot, his first ever, with a fetching photographer obsessed with his books brings about a crises of conscience in the writer, and he descends into a world of political violence, kidnappings, and terrorism. Like his other works, the plot is a loop. We open with a Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and close with a tank-ushered Beirut wedding. A literary palindrome. But the novel revolves around crowds, images, and collective consciousness. In fact, the prologue's last sentence is "The future belongs to crowds."
It is hard to argue with that assessment, and Gray, who we can only assume is a thinly veiled DeLillo, spends a good deal of the novel pontificating and ruminating - quite eloquently - on just that. We have throngs attending Khomeni's funeral, throngs of homeless in New York City, throngs of soccer hooligans crushed to death, throngs of corpses at various terrorist attacks, peppered throughout the novel to illustrate just how meaningless the individual has become in modern society. A kidnapped Swiss poet provides the engine for Gray's foray into terrorism. Gray agrees to travel to London for a poetry reading on behalf of the kidnapped poet, held in Beirut, but a bomb threat postpones the reading and Gray finds himself inexorably pulled towards the Middle East to negotiate the poet's release, via Athens and Cyprus.
Delillo's prose is ridiculous. It is easy to bask in his sentence structure and wordplay, alone worth the price of the novel. However, it is the substance of the novel's message which make it a classic. Terrorism has replaced art. It has hijacked the collective consciousness, become the only meaningful art. The writer is dead. "The novel used to feed our search for meaning," says Gray, our only form of "secular transcendence." But we have been pushed, collectively, "toward something larger, darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere . . . we don't need the novel . . . we don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need reports and predictions and warnings." This was written before 9/11, by the way. The writer's place in society has been usurped by terrorists - "The state should want to kill all writers . . . every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere." Of course, now terrorists are hunted, their ideas threaten power. Gray's thirst to taste that romance and leverage terrorist wield now, stolen from his pen, leads to his downfall. Of course the plot itself mirrors this ideology - Brita, the photographer that spurs Gray's venture out into the world at the beginning of the novel, has abandoned her obsession of writers and embraced terrorists by the end of the novel.
Yeah, I spent my last post bitching about politics my last post and here I am devouring maybe the most political novel I have read since All The King's Men, but the writing and the message in this book are simply too powerful to pass up. The world we live in today, constantly connected, constantly and instantly "analyzed, and relentlessly documented and dissected- this is the world Delillo is scared of, and it is here. Definitely a book worth reading.
This Station is Non-Operational
I have been neglecting Aristeia of late, and to be honest it has everything to do with what I was writing about. I am 28 years old, and have been following politics closely since at least the 2000 election, in which my anger over John McCain's treatment caused me to cast a vote for . . . wait for it . . . Ralph Fucking Nader. Then again in '04. Yeah, I know. At least in 2000 I could blame it on my obsession with Leon Trotsky, Mao and Che Guevara. I have no excuse for '04. Now, in 2008, I have become so thoroughly disgusted with the Swiftian atmosphere surrounding the election I refuse to follow it. Jonathan Swift, not Swift Boat - if that is what you thought, then you, too, are watching way too much cable news. It is a farce, and I am not even going to vote. I am disenfranchising myself, and I am damn proud to boot. But I seriously miss writing here, and miss the emails from the literally dozens of loyal and anonymous readers I cultivated. So we are going to shift the focus here, and I hope that it not only re-energizes my desire to share, but brings in a different crowd. All things genre, literature, pop culture, music, television, movies, some baseball - you know, the more important things in life - these are the things we will be tackling here now. I am contemplating a name change as well, so stay tuned. If you have a bookshelf full of Pynchon and Stephenson, own every season of Farscape on DVD, and are waiting patiently for the ridiculously delayed Giant Sized Astonishing X-Men#1, this will be the place for you. I hope you all enjoy, and thank you for your patience. Music today . . . how bout some At The Drive-In? My favorite modern band. We have here Rolodex Propaganda - with guest vocals by IGGY POP! - from Relationship of Command and This Night has Opened My Eyes, a Smiths cover from This Station is Non-Operational. Modern punk at it's finest.
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