Bedside reading

Bedside reading

The great Thomas McGuane. Talking to David Abrams:

I haven't looked at Ninety-Two in the Shade since I wrote it. You know, when I was done with Ninety-Two in the Shade, I felt very complete. I had worked on it so intensely, I could recite the book. I've had no particular inclination to look at it again, however.

Interviewed in The Paris Review:

McGUANE

...I had been successful in creating for myself a sheltered situation in which to function in this very narrow way I felt I wanted to function, which was to be a literary person who was not bothered very much by the outside world. My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely. My nickname during that period was "the White Knight," which suggests a certain level of overkill in my judgment of those around me.

INTERVIEWER

What sorts of things had led you to develop this white-knight image?

McGUANE

Fear of failure. I was afflicted with whatever it takes to get people fanatically devoted to what they're doing. I was a pain in the ass. But I desperately wanted to be a good writer. My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, everyday. I thought that was the deal. I still think that's the deal.

From the New Yorker:

Q: There's something almost cinematic about the way you capture most of a life in a series of very quick scenes from it. Were you thinking of movies when you wrote this?

A: I'm not a moviegoer. I grew up in a town without a cinema and never caught the habit, though I have worked in the movies. I stole this narrative strategy from Muhammad Ali: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." It works if you have to cover ground in limited space. One of the limitations of "dirty realism" is that you can't budge. If you're a genius like Raymond Carver or his precursor Harold Pinter such confinement is an advantage. But, for many of their successors, it's claustrophobic.

Mark Kamine discusses McGuane's work at Believer:

McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly.

The Blue Hammer is one of the best books in the Lew Archer detective series by author Ross Macdonald AKA Kenneth Millar.

Bedside reading

Bedside reading

Not writing in restaurants

For a writer reading on holiday is like letting somebody else drive. You try to relax but your foot's hovering on an imaginary brake. Clutching my fists on my knees as the Riviera shot by I saw this, from David Mamet's A Whore's Profession (1985):

When the meaning of the script is unclear in the theater, the actors and director usually assume that the author know what he or she was doing, and they reapply themselves to understanding the script.

In the movies if the meaning and worth of the script is not immediately obvious, everyone assumes the writer has failed.

I've had conversations like that. Nice fire engine: does it have to be so red?

Also on the pile was Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies (2005), the first Auster I've read since... Moon Palace, I think. Here he is pulling his usual stunt:

"What's your name?"
"Tom," Tom said.
"Of course. Tom Wood. I know all about you. In the middle of life's journey, I lost my way in a dark wood. But you're too ignorant to know that. You're one of those little men who can't see the forest for the trees."

This technique breaks a rule, for me. He shows you the thing, then he tells you he's shown you the thing, and he even breaks down the symbolism for you, exposing the already apparent aptronymn (wood = forest = forest for the trees). Look at the red fire engine, it's so red, red like fire, it's a red fire engine.

To me the narrator should be like Kate Moss: never complain, never explain. But Auster's Auster-like first person always explains. I don't mind, however. That's his style.

Bedside reading

Bedside reading, 1975 #2

I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:

Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.

Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:

Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.

Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.

You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

Bedside reading

Pattern recognition

Writers may not be more self-aware than anyone else but they keep better records. A body of work is the snail's trail of sensibility. But artists are as limited in their capacity for change as anyone else: no matter what they observe they will continue to make the same mistakes. This is one reason why writers tend towards melancholy: they have the data but can do nothing with it.

All by way of saying I've been reading the pulps again and trying not to drive a mental red-pen through words and sections. I finally -- finally -- made it through Dragon Tattoo. I love the images from the book and the film and I'm looking forward to Fincher remake and yes, it's sold a billion copies but boy does it creak. Pointless to rail against it, not least of all because the author is dead, but stroke of luck that the killer mastermind forgot to shut the door... The oversight would not embarrass Henning Mankell, who writes very well about Wallander drinking coffee and eating a sandwich; fairly well about the everyday nature of police investigations and terribly about crimes themselves. But Raymond Chandler's Playback is one of my favourite crime novels and that made no sense at all, so I have to give Mankell a pass... Now I'm back to Richard Price and Lush Life. Clockers was an OCD Adam 12. Maybe Lush Life will be the same. But I'm into it because of its dialogue and detailing.

In between I've been re-watching The Killing. The series has such a great setup that it can only be let down by the resolution. Not unlike the unravelling of a cheery Danish sweater... And dipping back into Twin Peaks, Hitchcock... And Californication. Nothing will be as good as Hank's first season so that's the one I return to. Again. The same decisions, the same mistakes over and over, the accrual of which becomes the author's style.

Bedside reading

Bedside reading, 1970 (Get your ass to Mars)

You can't judge a book by its cover but you sure get an idea of what the publisher was thinking. Another childhood birthday present, from 1970, Captain W.E. Johns' Return to Mars, swiftly repackaged for boys who had enjoyed Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. But even for a younger reader the discrepancies between these possible futures and the Captain's world of tomorrow became all too apparent. To summarise:

Professor Brane, 'Tiger' Clinton, his son Rex and the Professor's butler, Judkins, travel back to Mars.

Still, nice pic. (More vintage W.E. Johns covers here.)

The colonialist vision of space lives on in Avatar and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, now filmed as John Carter. And manservants? Said Michael Fassbender of his role in Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus:

"I play a 'butler.'"

Bedside reading, 1975

On my eleventh birthday one of my presents was the mass-market edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I was already familiar with the short stories and I loved the character of Sherlock Holmes, his coldness balanced in no small part by Sydney Paget's illustrations for the Strand Magazine. (You will observe, Watson, the detective's profile in Paget's own features.)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most popular Holmes mysteries, although the mystery is solved early on. In his forward to the little 1975 paperback John Fowles (yes, him) attributes the novel's success to its supernatural element: "One thing Doyle must have seen at once . . . was that he had at last found an 'enemy' far more profound and horrifying than any mere human criminal. The Hound is the primeval force behind Moriarty: not just one form that evil takes, but the very soul of the thing."

But although it may be the most famous Holmes novel, the detective is absent for most of the story, hiding out in the moors and wandering around in disguise. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had become bored with his creation and killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Later, forced by loathsome success to reanimate him, the author chose instead to shape the narrative around Watson.

When I first read The Hound of Baskervilles, Holmes' absence was confusing to me. I decided that it must simply be a rule for detective novels that the central character was not there; only later when I got around to reading Fowles' forward and afterword was I educated. (Boys never read the instructions.) Nowadays I indulge in my own authorial contrariness, and it's become my mantra that the main character or even the narrator should be mysterious, covered up, or missing.

Bedside reading

Bedside reading

Liquidamber by Chris Bell, available in print and ebook.

A diary of crossed lines

Donald Rumsfeld has a memoir out. Early reviews say it dodges the questions and shunts responsibility until the very end, so in that respect it sounds true to the politician. Writes Lyric Winik:

Yet detractors and supporters alike say that on a personal level Don Rumsfeld is warm, funny, and generous. He is not a petty gossip, like Henry Kissinger.

Is anyone a petty gossip like Henry Kissinger? From The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:

Nixon was often on the phone with Kissinger for fifteen minutes or longer. The President was repetitive, sometimes taking minutes to come to a point.. Kissinger occasionally came out of his office after such calls. 'Who was taking that?' he would ask. One of the four women stationed in the small outer office would raise her hand. 'Wasn't that the worst thing you ever heard in your life?' Kissinger would ask. [p. 191]

... Kissinger seemed singularly obsessed with his own prestige and image. If he had long list of telephone messages, he would often call back Nancy Maginnes first, then Governor Rockefeller, then movie stars and celebrities and then the President... He assigned his aides the distasteful job of heading off negative stories and lodging complaints about those that made it into print. The job was especially difficult because the offending stories were often true; Kissinger himself was, at times, the unwitting source. He let information slip as he courted Washington's most influential journalists. [pp. 193-194]

If you have some long afternoons to kill I (once more) recommend Bradley Graham's By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld (Public Affairs, 804pp). The day I lugged that puppy out of the bookstore was the day I admitted my obsession. Now offline, here's an original Muse Lounge entry on Rumsfeld, fighting and so on:

Hitting others

Boxing doesn't seem real anymore. The fighters are real and their punches break bones but the bouts that Don King books and is paid for are so strategic and limited that the outcome surprises nobody except for the chumps who place their bets. For newcomers to the sport, Don is the guy with a Bride of Frankenstein hair-do grinning at the camera and waving the little American flags like a puppeteer trying to cheer up a sick child.

Sunday's middleweight title bout between French challenger Morrade Hakkar and American incumbent Bernard Hopkins was promoted as a Rocky III-style metaphor for national tensions during the current Iraqi conflict. Hakkar literally skipped and ran around the ring for the entire first round until the veangeful champion closed in and whupped him. And so the crowds did cheer.

But the better metaphor, grimly, was to be found in the bout New Zealanders were watching before that, when our own David Tua went up for the second time against Hasim Rahman. If hanging off the other guy like a woozy lover and sandbagging him to an unsatisfying draw is boxing, Rahman is a world beater. Tua was less frustrated by his opponent's long arms than he was by Lennox Lewis's. Clearly exhausted from throwing big blows, he still produced surprising volleys late in the game to try and break Rahman's saggy dominance, but never quite succeeded.

The two great learning moments came in round six, when Tua connected a humdinger and Rahman looked goosed (Tua was still too tired to close) and in the last round when Rahman raised his arms and declared himself the winner about 15 seconds before the final bell. You don't do that to boys from South Auckland, and Tua lashed out at Rahman like he was going to kill him. Really and properly.

As a casual observer I haven't seen that sort of blood anger in Tua before; the last time it surfaced in a Don King bout, it was in Mike Tyson. A pissed-off and disrespected Tua is a truly shit-scary prospect: how long will he be allowed to remain the nice guy? For his career's sake, not long, Don King must be hoping; but personally I hope Tua stays the patently good-natured fellow he seems to be.

Likewise the war, which we all hoped would be savagely rapid but also do kind of nice things for people, whether they be shoeless Iraqi conscripts or Dick Cheney's pals at cocktail hour. Now however, about ten days in, matters are taking more familiar shape, and the war of liberation has become a fight more or less like the others we have known, read about or watched: a slow slog compromised by surprising nastiness, with a predetermined but unsatisfying result looming, and a guy everyone pays but nobody likes waving the flag.

And once again - the boxing metaphor stretched to nanofilament width here - the fools are the ones watching and laying their bets. Viewers are not happy to find out what those great looking weapons really get up to, and they are shocked to see that women and children are dying. I'm cynical about these reactions insofar as the reverse implication is that young or middle-aged men dying is somehow by the by. Practically nobody signs up to die. (Even some of the 9/11 hijackers didn't know suicide was part of the deal.)

Now we're in the thick of a recognisably war-shaped war the press can get down to the fundamentals of who's shot what, and apportioning blame. The Iraq conflict is a self-declared battle of technology: not a proving ground, but a living, killing strategy based on new ideas like unmanned drones and software that anticipates the food, fuel and ordnance needs of a sprawling, highly ambulatory fighting force.

It is a mantra of battle to never advance beyond your supply lines. Logistics are as dangerous as the other guy, as Custer and Rommel both found out. Rather than ignoring the supply-line maxim, the strategy for fighting in Iraq is actually based on refuting it, calling as it does on 150,000 troops (less than half used to mop up the shell-shocked enemy in Kuwait) to move very, very quickly around the Iraqis, isolate them and pick them off during or after the entry into Baghdad.

Although the theory is now associated with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it's been around a while. It's been called things like "21st century" and "modern" warfare, and seems, broadly, to be a logical response to the popular history of Vietnam where a superior but traditional armed force was successfully resisted by more mobile guerrilla-style fighters.

Whether or not it works is in the future tense. But we are already hearing an echo of Vietnam in Washington. The media are tut-tutting and spokespersons are clearing their throats in order to speak up about what the strategy ought to have been. There's a sense that Rumsfeld is being set up, and you can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

In a recent (March 30) CNN-broadcast press conference Rumsfeld defended the strategy and attacked the press for the way they were reporting the war. Around the same time there was an announcement that the U.S. would be sending an additional 100,000 troops to Iraq.

Insisting on confidence, attacking the press, and escalation: it's a one-two-three combination. Although Rumsfeld's situation is different, the mood of the fight reminds me of Robert McNamara, another moderniser of military strategy later hung out to dry.

-- Muse Lounge, Mar 31, 2003

Bedside reading

A friend lent me a book, Writing With Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes, by Steven DeRosa. Hayes worked with the director on four movies - Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. After their working relationship ended - bitchily, on Hitchcock's part - Hayes went on to write the screenplay for, amongst other things, Peyton Place - without which we would never have had Twin Peaks. DeRosa's book had me on page 10 of the introduction:

The politics of the studio system and the widening acceptance of the auteur theory downplayed the significance of the screenwriter's contribution to the art of filmmaking. Frank Capra's most successful films were all scripted by Robert Riskin, yet few people are familiar with Riskin's name. Similarly, Ernst Lubitsch collaborated with Samson Raphaelson on nine films, and John Ford collaborated with Dudley Nichols on eleven. Again, these screenwriters never received the recognition enjoyed by the "auteurs" for whom they wrote. But the director who has been most often canonised as an auteur is Hitchcock.

The first part of DeRosa's book is about the creation of the screenplay for Rear Window, based on a short story by the remarkable Cornell Woolrich. The account maps out in detail how Hayes' treatment for the film - itself based on an earlier treatment by Joshua Logan - ilustrates the basic premise of Woolrich's story - a man who thinks he has witnessed a murder - by adding characters and elements that expose and develop the plot. For instance here's Hayes on the character of Jeff's nurse Stella:

I like a character like that to act as a Greek chorus, to tell us what might happen and to go for comic relief. Because you can't have unrestrained suspense all the time.

Before coming to film Hayes worked in radio, with over 1500 scripts to his credit and a reputation as 'the fastest writer in Hollywood.'

'I would say Hitch worked with me more on To Catch A Thief than he did on Rear Window certainly. But still, he realised that I worked better if I was uninterrupted and he didn't interrupt me too much... We just discussed in general terms story and character, and he let me go and write until I finished. We did have lunches together and I'd tell him what I was doing, and he was patient enough to wait for it.'

After the screenplay was finished Hayes and Hitchock broke it down into shots together. Hayes was also on set during filming. In 2002 Hayes was interviewed about the experience by Chris Wehner:

CW: In Rear Window there isn't your typical strong villain and the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair, so how difficult was it to maintain a level of tension and suspense?

JMH: Having non-typical characters was of no real hindrance to the establishment of tension and suspense. In reality, there was a lot to work with. With a non-typical villain, you had the built-in opportunity to engage the characters in a "It couldn't be him. Could it? He's just a regular fellow" form of banter, just as much as having the protagonist limited in his physical actions helped the suspense of, "How in the world is he going to defend himself, if need be?" Writers sometimes habitually overdo it in how their characters move, act, and depict themselves. Grand flourish in a villain works for Bond movies, I suppose, but, in the world you and I live in, true villains don't act as such. At least not on any level you or I may have experienced. There's a form of everyday villainy that is largely forgotten now in cinema. And that's what audiences can align best with-what it is they see and know in everyday life.

That interview is archived on a slow-loading page here.

Bedside reading

Bedside reading

Eating about books

Over at Big Other Ryan W. Bradley has compiled a list of books to read over lunch. I can't think of how many books I've enjoyed over meals either at my desk or in pizza houses or sushi bars. Currently I'm re-reading Bob Woodward's histories of the Bush administration but before that it was Patricia Highsmith and before that a bunch of random pulp and literary titles purchased from the Oxfam shop for not very much money.

(Secondhand books are still technically illegal, right? You're not allowed to resell them. I wonder if that complaint will ever resurface or go the way of home taping, etc. I'm still careful to not purchase books by authors who are either living or living very well - say, anyone other than a best seller.)

So as a result my book collection is an index of what I was eating or drinking at the time. The stains on the pages are less varied in London than they were in Auckland. They work as a kind of index: there are many dabs Thai curry in the last chapters of Woodward's Plan of Attack. The book is a grim tale of political blandishments and peppered with ironies, such as this one from the hours leading up to the war on Iraq:

When [Bush speechwriter Michael] Gerson was finished with his corrections, he joined the president and the others, who were about 10 minutes into the Mel Gibson film Conspiracy Theory. Bush loudly summarized the plot, and during the rest of the movie made fun of it as fairly predictable.

I am the only person in the world who has not read Kitchen Confidential but I like Anthony Bourdain: if you want to read something good about food, here's his dining out diary for a few days. Suggest you eat before reading it. I've never been comfortable in expensive restaurants, a good thing given my choice of profession. Restaurants are for publishers and producers, or publishers and producers who are making nice.