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Subscribe!Indiana Jones and the Lowered Expectations of Aging Storytellers
Monday, June 16, 2008
I was born in 1974, which means that the summer Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hit the screens, I was 10, the perfect age to appreciate -- indeed, adore -- that film. I saw it in the theaters six times. I wanted to be Indiana Jones -- I even received, for my birthday that summer, an official Indiana Jones fedora, which I wore pretty much constantly until I tragically lost it at the end of the summer (evidence is mixed as to where/when I lost it, but one theory is that I left it at the theater at viewing #6). I would have loved a bullwhip as well, but my parents wisely drew the line at weaponry, though I was able to find some rope in the garage that I could coil up through my belt loop.
People in my generation -- Generation X, as it has so condescendingly been labeled -- have been put in an odd position the last few years by Hollywood and its marketing, money-craving genius. First a few years ago, with the dreadful new Star Wars trilogy, and now this summer, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we are being granted the unusual opportunity to relive (or at least revisit) the experience of seeing the films that we so adored as children (or at least newer sequels/prequels to such films). This has proven to be rather "illuminating," to borrow the line from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- an experience both fun and depressing. Kind of like growing up.
It is hard to overestimate the impact that Star Wars and Indiana Jones had on the collective childhood of Generation X. I do not think I was unusual in that I owned nearly all the Star Wars toys and spent countless hours with them, imagining new stories and adventures for Luke and Han, silently (or loudly) creating my own sequels in the backyards and family rooms of my family and friends. Indy didn't have the same relentless toy marketing as Star Wars, but damn those films were awesome -- I am somewhat unusual in my generation in that I liked the Indy movies even more than Star Wars. In addition to my fedora and makeshift bullwhip, I collected the Topps trading cards for Temple of Doom, I memorized all the film's lines, I owned the John Williams score on cassette and listened to it so much that even today I can hum you the entire film. Indy and Star Wars were the stories my generation was raised on, the atheistic religion we were baptised into, the background against which all other stories would be judged -- and our own stories would be created. When I was encouraged to enter a creative writing contest in the sixth grade, I wrote an Indiana Jones adventure. I lost the contest. But I probably had more fun than the winner did.
Of course, such naked adulation only sets you up for disappointment. Five years later, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade hit the theaters, I saw it on opening day (an early matinee, just after getting out of my last day of ninth grade, a terrible year for growing up). I thought the movie was lousy. It lacked the cool darkness of Temple of Doom, which had so appealed to my preadolescent mind; worse, it had replaced young Short Round, the sidekick with whom I had so identified, with Sean Connery's doddering old Henry Jones. And I was flabbergasted at the dogfight sequence in which Indy guns down two German planes -- hadn't we been told, in Temple of Doom, that Indy didn't know how to fly? Such narrative inconsistency stunned me. Only when I saw Last Crusade for a second time (a few days later) did I change my mind and realize, hey, that's a pretty good flick. The action sequences were as well orchestrated as the first two films', the lines were great, Indy kicked butt, and I wound up seeing Last Crusade at least two more times on the screen. I didn't run around with a fedora and fake whip anymore (hey, I was 15 now; even if I'd still wanted to wear the fedora -- which I probably did -- I knew I would have gotten my ass kicked). But at least I felt that Spielberg hadn't let me down.
And so, 24 years after Temple of Doom (and 19 years after the most recent Indy adventure), Spielberg & Lucas & Ford have graced us with installment four. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last week, and I was underwhelmed. My wife liked it, but -- and she might disagree with me on this -- she never loved Temple of Doom the way I did. Maybe I was only repeating the experience of seeing The Last Crusade in '89, setting myself up for disappointment. Maybe I just wasn't in the proper mindset. But the dialogue seemed leaden, Ford seemed bored (which is even worse than seeming old), the CGI special effects were downright goofy (did we really need anthropomorphic ground hogs, or magic monkeys, or an amada of killer ants?), and too many sets looked like the half-hearted Hollywood stage sets that they surely were. It felt like the masterminds of the first three films were going through the motions, eager to cash their million-dollar checks. But maybe not. Maybe the fault was mine: for being older, for not being 10 anymore, however much Hollywood would like me to remain a bright-eyed ten-year-old forever.
The fact is, it is impossible for me, now, to love a movie as much as the ten-year-old me loved Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even some of the critics who have given lukewarm or negative reviews to the new film still say that at least it was better than Temple of Doom. Indeed, many critics and fans claim that Temple of Doom was the worst of the Indy films, but the fact remains that I was 10 when I first saw it and I will never be 10 again, therefore no sequel can possibly do it justice. When I watch Temple of Doom these days (which I do at least every few years), I do see that the plot is as threadbare and ridiculous as Crystal Skull's, that the action sequences are full of events that defy the laws of physics (leaping out of a plummeting airplane and landing on an inflatable raft? not to mention the entire mining car chase scene), that the heroine is a sexist stereotype and that, yes, wow, there are some pretty icky racial stereotypes throughout the film. But the 10 year-old me was deliriously, gloriously blind to such flaws.
So even while I make note of all Temple of Doom's flaws, it is impossible for me to view it with fully adult eyes -- I know the darn thing so well and equate it so strongly with that period of my childhood that I can't give it a sober assesment. It's like being asked how pretty you think your mother is compared to other women her age. Um, how can I judge that, and how is my judgment fair? The re-creation of the Indy and Star Wars films puts us Gen Xers in an unusual position -- even if the new movies are indeed as good as or even better than some of the earlier ones, they can never seem that way to us, because they're still kid films, and we're not kids anymore. Just as I can't watch Temple of Doom with fully adult eyes, I couldn't watch Crystal Skull with kid eyes either. Sitting through the new movie is less like watching a new film and more like watching an old home video of the 10-year-old me: it's awkward and embarrassing, and I cringe now and then, thinking, "Wow, did I really look like that? Think like that? Dream like that?"
A friend of mine says summer action blockbusters like Crystal Skull are great so long as you "check your mind at the door" and have fun with it, but I've never known how to do this. My brain is kind of attached to the rest of me, to my capacity for wonder and excitement and thrills. I tell stories for a living, so I like to think I have a pretty healthy and vibrant inner child, but that still isn't enough to inoculate me against the kinds of gaping plot holes and clunky dialogue that might have washed over my younger self.
Just as a slightly older generation of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem drew its childhood inspiration from Spiderman and Hulk comics, Indy was huge in my formative storytelling brain. I can't help wondering how different a writer I might be if I hadn't been raised on the Indy films, and whether that's a good or bad thing. Even today, I'm typing this sentence beneath the watchful gaze of my framed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster, which has been at my side throughout the writing of my first two novels (the second one coming soon to a bookstore near you, as the previews say). In it, Indy's holding a machete and standing in a temple entrance, looking not so much tough or angry as ready. Ready for whatever obstacles might come his way: stampeding Thugees, Chinese mafia, sophomore year of high school, first dates, college. He might not be the same guy after he's been confronted by and somehow survived these various cliffhangers, and his past might not make as much sense in a more adult future, but I'm still glad he let me tag along as his sidekick.
link to this | File: Films
People in my generation -- Generation X, as it has so condescendingly been labeled -- have been put in an odd position the last few years by Hollywood and its marketing, money-craving genius. First a few years ago, with the dreadful new Star Wars trilogy, and now this summer, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we are being granted the unusual opportunity to relive (or at least revisit) the experience of seeing the films that we so adored as children (or at least newer sequels/prequels to such films). This has proven to be rather "illuminating," to borrow the line from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- an experience both fun and depressing. Kind of like growing up.
It is hard to overestimate the impact that Star Wars and Indiana Jones had on the collective childhood of Generation X. I do not think I was unusual in that I owned nearly all the Star Wars toys and spent countless hours with them, imagining new stories and adventures for Luke and Han, silently (or loudly) creating my own sequels in the backyards and family rooms of my family and friends. Indy didn't have the same relentless toy marketing as Star Wars, but damn those films were awesome -- I am somewhat unusual in my generation in that I liked the Indy movies even more than Star Wars. In addition to my fedora and makeshift bullwhip, I collected the Topps trading cards for Temple of Doom, I memorized all the film's lines, I owned the John Williams score on cassette and listened to it so much that even today I can hum you the entire film. Indy and Star Wars were the stories my generation was raised on, the atheistic religion we were baptised into, the background against which all other stories would be judged -- and our own stories would be created. When I was encouraged to enter a creative writing contest in the sixth grade, I wrote an Indiana Jones adventure. I lost the contest. But I probably had more fun than the winner did.
Of course, such naked adulation only sets you up for disappointment. Five years later, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade hit the theaters, I saw it on opening day (an early matinee, just after getting out of my last day of ninth grade, a terrible year for growing up). I thought the movie was lousy. It lacked the cool darkness of Temple of Doom, which had so appealed to my preadolescent mind; worse, it had replaced young Short Round, the sidekick with whom I had so identified, with Sean Connery's doddering old Henry Jones. And I was flabbergasted at the dogfight sequence in which Indy guns down two German planes -- hadn't we been told, in Temple of Doom, that Indy didn't know how to fly? Such narrative inconsistency stunned me. Only when I saw Last Crusade for a second time (a few days later) did I change my mind and realize, hey, that's a pretty good flick. The action sequences were as well orchestrated as the first two films', the lines were great, Indy kicked butt, and I wound up seeing Last Crusade at least two more times on the screen. I didn't run around with a fedora and fake whip anymore (hey, I was 15 now; even if I'd still wanted to wear the fedora -- which I probably did -- I knew I would have gotten my ass kicked). But at least I felt that Spielberg hadn't let me down.
And so, 24 years after Temple of Doom (and 19 years after the most recent Indy adventure), Spielberg & Lucas & Ford have graced us with installment four. I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last week, and I was underwhelmed. My wife liked it, but -- and she might disagree with me on this -- she never loved Temple of Doom the way I did. Maybe I was only repeating the experience of seeing The Last Crusade in '89, setting myself up for disappointment. Maybe I just wasn't in the proper mindset. But the dialogue seemed leaden, Ford seemed bored (which is even worse than seeming old), the CGI special effects were downright goofy (did we really need anthropomorphic ground hogs, or magic monkeys, or an amada of killer ants?), and too many sets looked like the half-hearted Hollywood stage sets that they surely were. It felt like the masterminds of the first three films were going through the motions, eager to cash their million-dollar checks. But maybe not. Maybe the fault was mine: for being older, for not being 10 anymore, however much Hollywood would like me to remain a bright-eyed ten-year-old forever.
The fact is, it is impossible for me, now, to love a movie as much as the ten-year-old me loved Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Even some of the critics who have given lukewarm or negative reviews to the new film still say that at least it was better than Temple of Doom. Indeed, many critics and fans claim that Temple of Doom was the worst of the Indy films, but the fact remains that I was 10 when I first saw it and I will never be 10 again, therefore no sequel can possibly do it justice. When I watch Temple of Doom these days (which I do at least every few years), I do see that the plot is as threadbare and ridiculous as Crystal Skull's, that the action sequences are full of events that defy the laws of physics (leaping out of a plummeting airplane and landing on an inflatable raft? not to mention the entire mining car chase scene), that the heroine is a sexist stereotype and that, yes, wow, there are some pretty icky racial stereotypes throughout the film. But the 10 year-old me was deliriously, gloriously blind to such flaws.
So even while I make note of all Temple of Doom's flaws, it is impossible for me to view it with fully adult eyes -- I know the darn thing so well and equate it so strongly with that period of my childhood that I can't give it a sober assesment. It's like being asked how pretty you think your mother is compared to other women her age. Um, how can I judge that, and how is my judgment fair? The re-creation of the Indy and Star Wars films puts us Gen Xers in an unusual position -- even if the new movies are indeed as good as or even better than some of the earlier ones, they can never seem that way to us, because they're still kid films, and we're not kids anymore. Just as I can't watch Temple of Doom with fully adult eyes, I couldn't watch Crystal Skull with kid eyes either. Sitting through the new movie is less like watching a new film and more like watching an old home video of the 10-year-old me: it's awkward and embarrassing, and I cringe now and then, thinking, "Wow, did I really look like that? Think like that? Dream like that?"
A friend of mine says summer action blockbusters like Crystal Skull are great so long as you "check your mind at the door" and have fun with it, but I've never known how to do this. My brain is kind of attached to the rest of me, to my capacity for wonder and excitement and thrills. I tell stories for a living, so I like to think I have a pretty healthy and vibrant inner child, but that still isn't enough to inoculate me against the kinds of gaping plot holes and clunky dialogue that might have washed over my younger self.
Just as a slightly older generation of writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem drew its childhood inspiration from Spiderman and Hulk comics, Indy was huge in my formative storytelling brain. I can't help wondering how different a writer I might be if I hadn't been raised on the Indy films, and whether that's a good or bad thing. Even today, I'm typing this sentence beneath the watchful gaze of my framed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom poster, which has been at my side throughout the writing of my first two novels (the second one coming soon to a bookstore near you, as the previews say). In it, Indy's holding a machete and standing in a temple entrance, looking not so much tough or angry as ready. Ready for whatever obstacles might come his way: stampeding Thugees, Chinese mafia, sophomore year of high school, first dates, college. He might not be the same guy after he's been confronted by and somehow survived these various cliffhangers, and his past might not make as much sense in a more adult future, but I'm still glad he let me tag along as his sidekick.
link to this | File: Films
My Summer Reading Picks
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Someone recently asked me if I had any "summer reading" picks, which got me to thinking of the whole concept of a Summer Read, or a Beach Read. People tend to think of trips to the beach (or any other vacation) as the time to pick up something trashy, or fun, or simple, or lesser than what one might ordinarily read. Which goes a long way toward explaining the kinds of books you'll usually find at airport kiosks. But I'm the guy who was once teased for taking The Brothers Karamazov to the beach, so I'm not your typical beach reader. I just enjoy reading novels too much -- and feel too aware of all the great books out there that I haven't gotten to yet -- to want to waste my time with O is For Overdone or something like that.
(And hey, I do have my guilty reading pleasures -- anyone who's as big a sports fan as I am spends way, way too much time reading about sports online. So don't think I'm trying to act all superior here. I too enjoy reading good junk, just not when it comes to novels.)
So, with those disclaimers dispensed with, if someone nonetheless asked me for some Summer Reading picks, here's what I'd recommend. I've broken them into two groups: Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better, and Books That Are Really Short:
Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better
There seems to be a growing subgenre out there of literary authors taking the basic ideas of hardboiled detective fiction and doing something crazy with it. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Citizen Vince, or The Zero, by Jess Walter. My new favorite writer. Citizen Vince is about a smalltime New York hood who's been relocated to Spokane, WA, as part of the Witness Protection Program. In the days leading up to the 1980 Carter/Reagan elections, he is given his first-ever voter ID card as part of his new identity; meanwhile, he begins to fear that the mob has tracked him down. He becomes obsessed with both national politics and his own survival in a funny, entertaining story that would be particularly good to read in this election-year summer. Walter is a writer who deserves a lot more attention -- extremely readable yet brilliant, with characters you want to hang out with all day, at the beach or wherever. And if you like Citizen Vince and/or want something a tad more challenging and thought-provoking, I highly recommend The Zero, Walter's latest, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Sort of a cross between the film Memento and 9/11, it follows a police detective with serious memory problems who finds himself entangled with a shadowy government antiterror agency just after 9/11 -- he has gaps in his memory, so he keeps "appearing" in scenes but can't remember what he's supposed to do in them. Funny, smart, awesome.
Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem. A man with Tourette's Syndrome tries to investigate the murder of his friend and mentor, who was a smalltime Brooklyn gangster. As you can imagine, it is difficult to stealthily dig for clues when your condition requires you to shout "Eat me, Bailey!" every now and then. I, like many people, first "discovered" Lethem with this book, and I'm so glad I did.
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. In a somewhat alternate reality, elevator inspectors are as important as cops. When an elevator crashes on the shift of the world's first black female elevator inspector, she needs to investigate who is framing her and why. A clever racial allegory and a darn good yarn.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Not much to say about this mega-best-seller that hasn't already been said. It's a 1940s style noir detective story set in a hypothetical present that imagines what would have happened if Alaska, rather than Israel, had become the post-WWII homeland for the Jews. The Coen Brothers are already slated to direct it, according to various Internet sites whose reliability I can't in any way vouch for.
In The Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt. If you liked the movie Michael Clayton, you'll love this. It doesn't fit into the pseudo-hardboiled genre like the above books, but I wanted to give it a shout-out anyway. This first novel follows a number of lawyers, novice and veteran, ethical and shady, in a bigtime D.C. law firm as they get involved in two major cases. That sounds like a standard thriller, but what puts this far outside of Grisham or Turow territory is the attention paid to the different characters and their dilemmas, as well as Roosevelt's keen eye for exposing the sad ironies and moral tragedies inherent in the modern practice of law.
Books That Are Really Short
There is something to be said for being able to write a powerful, intelligent, artistic work in only 200 pages or so. I haven't come anywhere close myself. Also, there is something to be said for having a (physically) lightweight book in your beach bag or hiking sack or carry-on. Here are some that get it done with minimal blathering:
Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney. With so much '80s nostalgia in the air, it's a wonder this one isn't back on the bestseller lists. This is a seminal first novel about a young man losing his bearings in NYC, before novels about young men losing their bearings in NYC became standard requirements for writers who have MFAs and live in Brooklyn. And it's one of the only books I've read in a single plane flight.
The Passion, or Sexing The Cherry, by Jeannette Winterson. I haven't read her in years, but Winterson's first two novels are gorgeous stories that meld fairy tales with examinations of love and gender and history. I'm willing to bet Jonathan Safran Foer is a huge fan (and that is in no way a shot against Mr. Foer).
Anything Written By George Saunders. I can't even begin to describe how cool his short stories are, so I won't try.
The Committments, by Roddy Doyle. The best novel about music ever written. It's about a group of teens who form a soul covers band in 1980s Dublin. Hilarious, raunchy, and so, so smart about music and what it means to people. And you can read it in about the time it would take you to listen to Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club four times.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Guaranteed to win you as many weird looks at the beach as The Brothers Karamazov, but at only 1/10th the weight! Plus, it has a murder on the beach! If you want to mix existentialism with your mai-tai, this is it.
Happy Summer, everyone!
link to this | File: Book Reviews
(And hey, I do have my guilty reading pleasures -- anyone who's as big a sports fan as I am spends way, way too much time reading about sports online. So don't think I'm trying to act all superior here. I too enjoy reading good junk, just not when it comes to novels.)
So, with those disclaimers dispensed with, if someone nonetheless asked me for some Summer Reading picks, here's what I'd recommend. I've broken them into two groups: Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better, and Books That Are Really Short:
Books That Are Sort of Like Thrillers, Only Way Better
There seems to be a growing subgenre out there of literary authors taking the basic ideas of hardboiled detective fiction and doing something crazy with it. Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Citizen Vince, or The Zero, by Jess Walter. My new favorite writer. Citizen Vince is about a smalltime New York hood who's been relocated to Spokane, WA, as part of the Witness Protection Program. In the days leading up to the 1980 Carter/Reagan elections, he is given his first-ever voter ID card as part of his new identity; meanwhile, he begins to fear that the mob has tracked him down. He becomes obsessed with both national politics and his own survival in a funny, entertaining story that would be particularly good to read in this election-year summer. Walter is a writer who deserves a lot more attention -- extremely readable yet brilliant, with characters you want to hang out with all day, at the beach or wherever. And if you like Citizen Vince and/or want something a tad more challenging and thought-provoking, I highly recommend The Zero, Walter's latest, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Sort of a cross between the film Memento and 9/11, it follows a police detective with serious memory problems who finds himself entangled with a shadowy government antiterror agency just after 9/11 -- he has gaps in his memory, so he keeps "appearing" in scenes but can't remember what he's supposed to do in them. Funny, smart, awesome.
Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem. A man with Tourette's Syndrome tries to investigate the murder of his friend and mentor, who was a smalltime Brooklyn gangster. As you can imagine, it is difficult to stealthily dig for clues when your condition requires you to shout "Eat me, Bailey!" every now and then. I, like many people, first "discovered" Lethem with this book, and I'm so glad I did.
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead. In a somewhat alternate reality, elevator inspectors are as important as cops. When an elevator crashes on the shift of the world's first black female elevator inspector, she needs to investigate who is framing her and why. A clever racial allegory and a darn good yarn.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Not much to say about this mega-best-seller that hasn't already been said. It's a 1940s style noir detective story set in a hypothetical present that imagines what would have happened if Alaska, rather than Israel, had become the post-WWII homeland for the Jews. The Coen Brothers are already slated to direct it, according to various Internet sites whose reliability I can't in any way vouch for.
In The Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt. If you liked the movie Michael Clayton, you'll love this. It doesn't fit into the pseudo-hardboiled genre like the above books, but I wanted to give it a shout-out anyway. This first novel follows a number of lawyers, novice and veteran, ethical and shady, in a bigtime D.C. law firm as they get involved in two major cases. That sounds like a standard thriller, but what puts this far outside of Grisham or Turow territory is the attention paid to the different characters and their dilemmas, as well as Roosevelt's keen eye for exposing the sad ironies and moral tragedies inherent in the modern practice of law.
Books That Are Really Short
There is something to be said for being able to write a powerful, intelligent, artistic work in only 200 pages or so. I haven't come anywhere close myself. Also, there is something to be said for having a (physically) lightweight book in your beach bag or hiking sack or carry-on. Here are some that get it done with minimal blathering:
Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney. With so much '80s nostalgia in the air, it's a wonder this one isn't back on the bestseller lists. This is a seminal first novel about a young man losing his bearings in NYC, before novels about young men losing their bearings in NYC became standard requirements for writers who have MFAs and live in Brooklyn. And it's one of the only books I've read in a single plane flight.
The Passion, or Sexing The Cherry, by Jeannette Winterson. I haven't read her in years, but Winterson's first two novels are gorgeous stories that meld fairy tales with examinations of love and gender and history. I'm willing to bet Jonathan Safran Foer is a huge fan (and that is in no way a shot against Mr. Foer).
Anything Written By George Saunders. I can't even begin to describe how cool his short stories are, so I won't try.
The Committments, by Roddy Doyle. The best novel about music ever written. It's about a group of teens who form a soul covers band in 1980s Dublin. Hilarious, raunchy, and so, so smart about music and what it means to people. And you can read it in about the time it would take you to listen to Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club four times.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Guaranteed to win you as many weird looks at the beach as The Brothers Karamazov, but at only 1/10th the weight! Plus, it has a murder on the beach! If you want to mix existentialism with your mai-tai, this is it.
Happy Summer, everyone!
link to this | File: Book Reviews
Me on TV
Friday, April 25, 2008
OK, as promised, here's a link to my first-ever TV interview. The fine news anchors of WIVB, Buffalo's CBS affiliate, chose my book as their April choice for their monthly book club.
I happened to be in Upstate New York to take part in the "Tale for Three Counties" community reads project, so I met anchors Lisa Scott and Victoria Hong at a coffeeshop and chatted about the book. A surreal experience indeed. People trying to enjoy their cappucinos kept looking over at us with expressions like, "Who's that guy who thinks he's so important?" I felt kind of bad about that, as it felt very much like the coffeeshop I frequent here in DC, and I'm sure I would have given the same looks if someone had shown up with a video camera and microphones. They do serve up a damn fine cappuccino at Cafe Aroma, so if you're ever in Buffalo and need to kill some time and get a nice buzz going, that's your place.
Whenever I see incredibly friendly and energetic morning anchors on TV, I assume that they can't possibly be that energetic and friendly in real life, off camera, and that it's all an act. Well, I'm happy to report that they really are that energetic and friendly, or at least Lisa and Victoria were. And, in a relatively rare event with book/media things, they'd even read the book! And liked it! (Authors quickly get used to doing interviews with radio or magazine folks who clearly haven't read it and are only working off notes based on the book blurbs; that's just the way it usually works, so it was refreshing and flattering to be interviewed by people who'd actually read the thing.)
I haven't watched the interview myself yet, as it seems kind of narcissistic, but I suppose I will eventually. Hopefully I didn't look at the camera, or play with my hair too much.
link to this | File:
I happened to be in Upstate New York to take part in the "Tale for Three Counties" community reads project, so I met anchors Lisa Scott and Victoria Hong at a coffeeshop and chatted about the book. A surreal experience indeed. People trying to enjoy their cappucinos kept looking over at us with expressions like, "Who's that guy who thinks he's so important?" I felt kind of bad about that, as it felt very much like the coffeeshop I frequent here in DC, and I'm sure I would have given the same looks if someone had shown up with a video camera and microphones. They do serve up a damn fine cappuccino at Cafe Aroma, so if you're ever in Buffalo and need to kill some time and get a nice buzz going, that's your place.
Whenever I see incredibly friendly and energetic morning anchors on TV, I assume that they can't possibly be that energetic and friendly in real life, off camera, and that it's all an act. Well, I'm happy to report that they really are that energetic and friendly, or at least Lisa and Victoria were. And, in a relatively rare event with book/media things, they'd even read the book! And liked it! (Authors quickly get used to doing interviews with radio or magazine folks who clearly haven't read it and are only working off notes based on the book blurbs; that's just the way it usually works, so it was refreshing and flattering to be interviewed by people who'd actually read the thing.)
I haven't watched the interview myself yet, as it seems kind of narcissistic, but I suppose I will eventually. Hopefully I didn't look at the camera, or play with my hair too much.
link to this | File:
Operation Warrior Library
Thursday, April 17, 2008
What do soldiers read? Pretty much anything they can get their hands on, I've been told, as they don't have many options. Usually that means magazines, as English-language books in Iraq and Afghanistan are fairly scarce.
But a few writers and publishers are doing their part to increase the supply of good reading material among our troops abroad. It all started with a certain Col. George Reynolds, an avid reader who was one of the first people to send an email via my Web site (which you too can do by clicking here). Col. Reynolds also sent an email to a buddy of mine, Paul Malmont, whose action-packed first novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, tells the tale of 1930s pulp fiction writers who get caught in a wild pulp tale of their own (it's a Book About Writers for people who don't read Books About Writers). After corresponding with the Colonel, Paul had a great idea: Why not send a box of his novels to troops in Iraq? And why not talk other writers into doing the same thing? By coordinating with the good Colonel, this is what happened. As a result, a dozen or so writers (at my last counting, but I could be way off) have sent off boxes of their books, and a number of publishers have ante-ed up as well.
So, if you're a writer, consider contributing by sending an email to Paul -- he's the contact for this awesome endeavor, which the Army anointed with the official and totally cool name of Operation Warrior Library. And if you're a reader, email a writer you like and ask him or her to contribute. (Other contributors include such personal favorites of mine as Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold.) It's a great, nonpolitical way to support our men and women who are out there risking their lives. Whether you're an Obamamaniac who wants the troops brought home today or a McCainiac who wants to leave them there another 100 years, sending them some quality reading material will, hopefully, provide them with some amount of respite from their challenging days and nights.
And you might even get a cool thank you gift: After receiving a couple boxes of my novel, Col. Reynolds sent me a crisp Iraqi dinar, complete with smiling image of Saddam Hussein.
link to this | File:
But a few writers and publishers are doing their part to increase the supply of good reading material among our troops abroad. It all started with a certain Col. George Reynolds, an avid reader who was one of the first people to send an email via my Web site (which you too can do by clicking here). Col. Reynolds also sent an email to a buddy of mine, Paul Malmont, whose action-packed first novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, tells the tale of 1930s pulp fiction writers who get caught in a wild pulp tale of their own (it's a Book About Writers for people who don't read Books About Writers). After corresponding with the Colonel, Paul had a great idea: Why not send a box of his novels to troops in Iraq? And why not talk other writers into doing the same thing? By coordinating with the good Colonel, this is what happened. As a result, a dozen or so writers (at my last counting, but I could be way off) have sent off boxes of their books, and a number of publishers have ante-ed up as well.
So, if you're a writer, consider contributing by sending an email to Paul -- he's the contact for this awesome endeavor, which the Army anointed with the official and totally cool name of Operation Warrior Library. And if you're a reader, email a writer you like and ask him or her to contribute. (Other contributors include such personal favorites of mine as Glen David Gold and Alice Sebold.) It's a great, nonpolitical way to support our men and women who are out there risking their lives. Whether you're an Obamamaniac who wants the troops brought home today or a McCainiac who wants to leave them there another 100 years, sending them some quality reading material will, hopefully, provide them with some amount of respite from their challenging days and nights.
And you might even get a cool thank you gift: After receiving a couple boxes of my novel, Col. Reynolds sent me a crisp Iraqi dinar, complete with smiling image of Saddam Hussein.
link to this | File:
How Much Complexity Can You Handle?
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Interrelated Thoughts on Sacred Games, The Wire, and Everything Bad Is Good For You
(OK, I've been slacking on the blog. I have an excuse, which will interest those of you wondering about my new book: I've been busy putting some finishing touches on the manuscript, which my agent has now read and green-lighted. So after a few more edits I'll be sending it off to my editor, and then, presumably, I'll have more time to exercise my right as a 21st Century Human by blogging. So, here goes...)
I recently read Vikram Chandra's 900-page Indian cop-gangster epic Sacred Games. Good stuff. But let me note again that it was 900 pages, meaning that it finishes second only to Infinite Jest as Longest Novel By A Non-Dead Guy I've Ever Read. And honestly, if it had a different font size and a more standard use of paragraph breaks, it probably would have been 1,100 pages. (The first sign of trouble, after noticing how impressively heavy the thing is to carry around (in hardcover!), was the fact that it didn't have page headers listing the author or title, as the book designer wisely dispensed with them to buy Chandra a few extra lines per page, which probably saved them 50 pages or so.)
I really dug this book. Taking place in present-day Bombay/Mumbai, it alternately follows a humble, hardened Sikh cop (Sartaj Singh) and Bombay's number one gangsta, Ganesh Gaitonde. Most critics spent much ink noting the crazy multinational empire that Gaitonde builds, with harems in Thailand and movies in Bollywood and money laundering in the Middle East and assassination plots in London, etc, and all the attendant statements about globalization and interconnectedness. But my favorite parts of the book were the Singh (cop) chapters. Cop stories are so easy to get wrong, as there are so many cliches waiting for the ambitious writer to trip over, and I can think of few cop novels that I've really, really liked. Chandra, though, does a perfect job of following the genre conventions just enough to keep the story going while also subverting them in interesting ways. Through Singh's investigations, we get to learn about the tensions between different castes and immigrants and religions in Bombay (tensions which resonate in any country), the complicated modern relations between men and women (there's a great blackmail plot involving an affair), and the constant presence of corruption and graft (Singh is portrayed as a Good Cop partly because he only takes some bribes, which tells you something about the state of policing in India).
I might even call Sacred Games a Great Book, but a 900-page Great Book, like a great marriage, is going to have its rough patches. I eventually became bored with the Gaitonde chapters; maybe this makes me out of touch with my fellow Americans, but mobster characters (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc) don't quite do it for me. Also, the Singh chapters were told in spare but pitch-perfect third-person narration, combining an eye for detail with a heartbreaking weariness of what Singh sees around him, whereas the gangster chapters were a cockier first-person, narrated by a total egotist who I eventually got tired of. Egotists can be either superb narrators (see Nabokov) or really annoying ones, and Gaitonde seemed more the latter to me.
But the part of the book that I vacillated between admiring and disliking, and the theme of today's post, was the many many tangents and sidebars and extraneous stories. Tangents, of course, are what can make fiction so interesting and fun, but too many of them can muddle a book. And a reader's tolerance for tangents tends to decrease on page 650 or so, when we start wanting the storyteller to get on with it already. Writers constantly face choices, choices about what to put in and what to leave out. I myself struggle with this all the time. The Last Town on Earth has chapters or long sections written from at least six major characters' perspectives, so there was a lot of balancing to do, lots of balls to keep in the air at once. But readers can only handle so much before confusion or impatience set in. As a writer, I tend to gravitate toward multicharacter, multiperspective stories (my new one has at least five characters' perspectives, as of the current draft), so I can totally relate to the desire to put more in, to add something from the daughter's perspective and something from the second-cousin's perspective and hey maybe a chapter about the immigrant waiter at the restaurant down the street and something about that panhandler guy, etc. Aiming for that epic scope, trying to tell The Complete Story, to get it all down, to encompass this great big sprawling story we call Life. But as a reader, that sometimes doesn't work, and we want the writer to use his artistic judgment to choose only the characters and stories that best tell his tale. So: why this disconnect?
Because I'm behind the times TV-wise, I've only recently started watching Series 1 of The Wire, which has been hailed by critics as the best show in the history of television. And I can't disagree: I absolutely love it. If I didn't have a toddler and if my wife and I weren't always so tired by dinnertime, we'd try to watch a season a week. What makes the show so great? The dialogue and the realism, yeah, but mainly the characters and the complexity and the many interwoven subplots. There are at least a dozen "major" characters thus far, cops and drug dealers and cop's spouses and DA's and drug dealers' girlfriends and judges and other cops and other dealers, and I'm only on the eighth episode. The show has been called "a television novel" because of its novelistic scope, encompassing so many characters and daring to go on tangents (for example, by taking time in a random episode to show ten or fifteen minutes in the life of one of the characters we hadn't seen much of before, just to flesh him or her out, to add depth, to reveal something new). It's awesome, and addictive: I want to know more about everyone. Yay, complexity! Yay, tangents! Give us more!
In Steven Johnson's provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, he argues that societal whipping posts like TV and video games are actually making us smarter, not dumber, because they are so much more complex than they used to be. Instead of Pacman running around on a simple screen, Myst or Doom contain hundreds of secrets that need to be explored, challenging our cognitive processes. And instead of the linear storytelling and small casts of CHIPS or Starsky and Hutch, more recent TV sensations like Lost or 24 have countless subplots and dozens of characters and aren't afraid to confuse us or leave us hanging or throw out information that it might take us a whole week of water-cooler gossiping to figure out. Johnson argues that people who blindly bemoan TV and praise literature haven't noticed how far TV has come, and he makes a lot of points that intrigue and frighten me as a novelist.
Because here's the thing: Some of the aspects of The Wire that I most love are extremely difficult to pull off in fiction. Even though The Wire has been called "a TV novel," the fact is, few novels have as many characters and perspectives as The Wire has. It out-novels the novel. And it makes me wonder (or fear) whether this is a sign that TV could be (shudder) a more effective medium for complex storytelling than fiction is. Why? First of all, the visuals help: as anyone at a cocktail party or at a new job knows, we remember faces a lot better than names. So when a random, previously unimportant character wanders on screen in episode 5 and suddenly does something really important, we might not remember his name, but we do remember that he's the guy that threatened McNulty a few weeks ago. Whereas, with fiction, for example Sacred Games, when Chandra suddenly hits us on page 500-something with a 40-page chapter that's a flashback to an episode early in the life of a character whose name I don't at all recognize, because he hasn't been mentioned in hundreds of pages, I'm kind of lost, and maybe even annoyed. Second, TV and film are more social than reading; even if we don't remember who that somewhat familiar face on the TV is, we can hit pause and ask our friends, whereas reading is solitary.
(I should note that some of The Wire's extraordinary writers, like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, are also great novelists. And that, although critics and writers love The Wire, its viewership was relatively low compared to, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, so maybe viewers don't want complexity after all. Or maybe only certain kinds of viewers.)
So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I only know that, as a writer, I want to tell complex, complicated stories, and I want to go on tangents, to find a way to squeeze in this perspective and that story and this anecdote and that overlooked character. I want to get it all, even if this challenges the reader -- and maybe, if it challenges him, that very challenge will become addictive, and make the reading experience so much richer and more rewarding than a straight first-person linear tale would have been. But I have the constant fear that if I do make it too complex, if I ask too much of the reader, if I annoy him too much, he'll throw up his hands, put the book down... and just turn on his TV.
link to this | File: Book Reviews TV Writing
(OK, I've been slacking on the blog. I have an excuse, which will interest those of you wondering about my new book: I've been busy putting some finishing touches on the manuscript, which my agent has now read and green-lighted. So after a few more edits I'll be sending it off to my editor, and then, presumably, I'll have more time to exercise my right as a 21st Century Human by blogging. So, here goes...)
I recently read Vikram Chandra's 900-page Indian cop-gangster epic Sacred Games. Good stuff. But let me note again that it was 900 pages, meaning that it finishes second only to Infinite Jest as Longest Novel By A Non-Dead Guy I've Ever Read. And honestly, if it had a different font size and a more standard use of paragraph breaks, it probably would have been 1,100 pages. (The first sign of trouble, after noticing how impressively heavy the thing is to carry around (in hardcover!), was the fact that it didn't have page headers listing the author or title, as the book designer wisely dispensed with them to buy Chandra a few extra lines per page, which probably saved them 50 pages or so.)
I really dug this book. Taking place in present-day Bombay/Mumbai, it alternately follows a humble, hardened Sikh cop (Sartaj Singh) and Bombay's number one gangsta, Ganesh Gaitonde. Most critics spent much ink noting the crazy multinational empire that Gaitonde builds, with harems in Thailand and movies in Bollywood and money laundering in the Middle East and assassination plots in London, etc, and all the attendant statements about globalization and interconnectedness. But my favorite parts of the book were the Singh (cop) chapters. Cop stories are so easy to get wrong, as there are so many cliches waiting for the ambitious writer to trip over, and I can think of few cop novels that I've really, really liked. Chandra, though, does a perfect job of following the genre conventions just enough to keep the story going while also subverting them in interesting ways. Through Singh's investigations, we get to learn about the tensions between different castes and immigrants and religions in Bombay (tensions which resonate in any country), the complicated modern relations between men and women (there's a great blackmail plot involving an affair), and the constant presence of corruption and graft (Singh is portrayed as a Good Cop partly because he only takes some bribes, which tells you something about the state of policing in India).
I might even call Sacred Games a Great Book, but a 900-page Great Book, like a great marriage, is going to have its rough patches. I eventually became bored with the Gaitonde chapters; maybe this makes me out of touch with my fellow Americans, but mobster characters (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc) don't quite do it for me. Also, the Singh chapters were told in spare but pitch-perfect third-person narration, combining an eye for detail with a heartbreaking weariness of what Singh sees around him, whereas the gangster chapters were a cockier first-person, narrated by a total egotist who I eventually got tired of. Egotists can be either superb narrators (see Nabokov) or really annoying ones, and Gaitonde seemed more the latter to me.
But the part of the book that I vacillated between admiring and disliking, and the theme of today's post, was the many many tangents and sidebars and extraneous stories. Tangents, of course, are what can make fiction so interesting and fun, but too many of them can muddle a book. And a reader's tolerance for tangents tends to decrease on page 650 or so, when we start wanting the storyteller to get on with it already. Writers constantly face choices, choices about what to put in and what to leave out. I myself struggle with this all the time. The Last Town on Earth has chapters or long sections written from at least six major characters' perspectives, so there was a lot of balancing to do, lots of balls to keep in the air at once. But readers can only handle so much before confusion or impatience set in. As a writer, I tend to gravitate toward multicharacter, multiperspective stories (my new one has at least five characters' perspectives, as of the current draft), so I can totally relate to the desire to put more in, to add something from the daughter's perspective and something from the second-cousin's perspective and hey maybe a chapter about the immigrant waiter at the restaurant down the street and something about that panhandler guy, etc. Aiming for that epic scope, trying to tell The Complete Story, to get it all down, to encompass this great big sprawling story we call Life. But as a reader, that sometimes doesn't work, and we want the writer to use his artistic judgment to choose only the characters and stories that best tell his tale. So: why this disconnect?
Because I'm behind the times TV-wise, I've only recently started watching Series 1 of The Wire, which has been hailed by critics as the best show in the history of television. And I can't disagree: I absolutely love it. If I didn't have a toddler and if my wife and I weren't always so tired by dinnertime, we'd try to watch a season a week. What makes the show so great? The dialogue and the realism, yeah, but mainly the characters and the complexity and the many interwoven subplots. There are at least a dozen "major" characters thus far, cops and drug dealers and cop's spouses and DA's and drug dealers' girlfriends and judges and other cops and other dealers, and I'm only on the eighth episode. The show has been called "a television novel" because of its novelistic scope, encompassing so many characters and daring to go on tangents (for example, by taking time in a random episode to show ten or fifteen minutes in the life of one of the characters we hadn't seen much of before, just to flesh him or her out, to add depth, to reveal something new). It's awesome, and addictive: I want to know more about everyone. Yay, complexity! Yay, tangents! Give us more!
In Steven Johnson's provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, he argues that societal whipping posts like TV and video games are actually making us smarter, not dumber, because they are so much more complex than they used to be. Instead of Pacman running around on a simple screen, Myst or Doom contain hundreds of secrets that need to be explored, challenging our cognitive processes. And instead of the linear storytelling and small casts of CHIPS or Starsky and Hutch, more recent TV sensations like Lost or 24 have countless subplots and dozens of characters and aren't afraid to confuse us or leave us hanging or throw out information that it might take us a whole week of water-cooler gossiping to figure out. Johnson argues that people who blindly bemoan TV and praise literature haven't noticed how far TV has come, and he makes a lot of points that intrigue and frighten me as a novelist.
Because here's the thing: Some of the aspects of The Wire that I most love are extremely difficult to pull off in fiction. Even though The Wire has been called "a TV novel," the fact is, few novels have as many characters and perspectives as The Wire has. It out-novels the novel. And it makes me wonder (or fear) whether this is a sign that TV could be (shudder) a more effective medium for complex storytelling than fiction is. Why? First of all, the visuals help: as anyone at a cocktail party or at a new job knows, we remember faces a lot better than names. So when a random, previously unimportant character wanders on screen in episode 5 and suddenly does something really important, we might not remember his name, but we do remember that he's the guy that threatened McNulty a few weeks ago. Whereas, with fiction, for example Sacred Games, when Chandra suddenly hits us on page 500-something with a 40-page chapter that's a flashback to an episode early in the life of a character whose name I don't at all recognize, because he hasn't been mentioned in hundreds of pages, I'm kind of lost, and maybe even annoyed. Second, TV and film are more social than reading; even if we don't remember who that somewhat familiar face on the TV is, we can hit pause and ask our friends, whereas reading is solitary.
(I should note that some of The Wire's extraordinary writers, like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, are also great novelists. And that, although critics and writers love The Wire, its viewership was relatively low compared to, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, so maybe viewers don't want complexity after all. Or maybe only certain kinds of viewers.)
So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I only know that, as a writer, I want to tell complex, complicated stories, and I want to go on tangents, to find a way to squeeze in this perspective and that story and this anecdote and that overlooked character. I want to get it all, even if this challenges the reader -- and maybe, if it challenges him, that very challenge will become addictive, and make the reading experience so much richer and more rewarding than a straight first-person linear tale would have been. But I have the constant fear that if I do make it too complex, if I ask too much of the reader, if I annoy him too much, he'll throw up his hands, put the book down... and just turn on his TV.
link to this | File: Book Reviews TV Writing