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Best "Best Of" List of 2005

The A.V. Club's "Least Essential Albums of 2005."

Best category in best "Best of" list of 2005:  Least Essential Album By An Actor.

Thesaurus Rex: What I Hate About Updike

“a penis with a thesaurus”

That’s how one female non-admirer summarizes the Bard of Shillington in a David Foster Wallace essay.

The essay is both devastating and fair-minded. Foster Wallace acknowledges the line by line strength of the prose, and the three novels he picks out for praise–The Poorhouse Fair, Of The Farm, and The Centaur–would be the ones I would pick out, too.  (I’ve read a couple of dozen Updike volumes.)  I would only add this and the first point is just an over-subtle reiteration of Foster Wallace’s thesis:   

1.  I think Updike’s misogyny is a subset of his misanthropy which is itself, I think, really an indifference. He has remained an only child. He didn’t mention the names of his children in his memoir and, since Martin Amis has pointed out that one can tell from Updike’s books the differences between his first and second wives’ pubic hair, reticience doesn’t seem to be the issue.

2.   If you care about language, you can write great sketches and stories. But to write great novels you need to care about people. A Winona friend of mine said that he didn’t much like Rabbit Run because of the inconsistency of the language. Updike has never loved the world quite as much as he loved his perceptions of the world and I think, over time, this fatigues his prose.

3. At some point, your limitations as a person become your limitations as a writer. This is a sobering thought. I once made a list of my character defects and ran out of room. Annoyingly, one of my character defects is bad penmanship.

4. This kind of irradiation of a writer sounds like a dismissal but it is, I think, a distillation. The same thing happened to Hemingway, yet we still read the stories and The Sun Also Rises. The criticism blows away the lesser works and leaves enough standing–the pre 1970 short stories, the essays and criticism, a few novels–to make for several distinguished careers.  I think Foster Wallace's fear is that the Rabbit novels are going to be what last, because of their ambition. That would be awful. 

Sentencing Guidelines: On What Updike Taught Me.

I received The Complete New Yorker on DVD for Christmas, a gift which so suggested the possibility of a year of play that it felt like a gift from my childhood. It also gave me another reason to consider John Updike, who I quoted last Thursday.

Updike taught me the power of the created sentence. Read most of what tumbles off of the printing press or appears on computer screens on any given day and you will find that the journey from the subject to the predicate has the numbness of a commute. And even the authors I loved before I encountered Updike—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Kerouac–invoked a kind of movie that could float above the particulars of the prose.

Reading the early stories and sketches, I learned that verbs could be engines and adjectives could be epiphanies. And Updike rewarded your close attention by paying close attention to the world. He taught me that precision is reverence.  (And by precision, I mean an attempt to deftly capture what something really is, not the inefficient legalistic mincing that passes off as precision.) Each word was a reward. The truly transparent style is a waste of time.

Tomorrow: The Downside of Updike.

Flakey

Link: Make-a-Flake - A snowflake maker by Barkley Evergreen & Partners Interactive. The great thing about snowflakes: how the most jagged, snaggled, shardy cutting is transformed into symmetry, delicacy, and complexity. 

MurderBall: Hoping Skills

Reality TV cross-breeds the game show with the soap opera, with the prizes now given for the most photogenic manipulations. In the few shows that I’ve watched everyone appears to be simultaneously petty and pompous. Evidently, reality contains neither humor nor kindness.   

Reality Cinema is another matter.  Some of my favorite movies of the last ten years have been documentaries: The Buena Vista Social Club, Little Dieter Wants to Fly, Spellbound, and, most recently, Murderball.

Murderball was the original name of Wheelchair Rugby, in which quadriplegics attempt to advance a ball over the endline of a basketball court. Players are given points based on how much limb control they’ve retained, which is based on where their necks snapped. At any given time, a team can only have so many cumulative points on the floor. 

The movie isn’t a kitten poster. Crashes eject players out of chairs. One of the main characters is resentful, toxically competitive, and given to platitudes. But it is this grit that gives inspiration its traction. 

No fictional movie could evaporate whininess like this; no fictional work could incite this kind of gratefulness. It is something that those of us who write memoir, which is often dismissed as whining, should think about. 

It's A Wonderful Walk

This morning, when it was still dark, I directed Al toward Boyd Park. The sludgy snow was white; the tracks that crossed it were grey. The evergreens have lost the lower branches on one side, so Al can walk under the trees and sniff. The effect is of a lean-to or manger.  (The homeless will sometimes us the trees as such.) In the corner of the park, the city has cast reddish holiday lights over five hardwood trees. Al only seems to give them an appreciative glance as he lifts a leg to add his own bit of color to the landscape. But he isn’t seeing what I’m seeing. If I have my half-truths right, he sees in black and white. The world for him has the restrained luminosity of a Jimmy Stewart movie.

Unreal: Attack of the Mutant Artificial Christmas Trees

Evidently I’m not the only one feeling dyspeptic this Christmas.  The National Christmas Tree Association is in a remarkably bad mood. These purveyors of real trees–or, as they put it, REAL trees–nurse a xenophobic spite toward artificial Christmas trees.  Hilariously, this takes the form of a video game in which you attempt to pelt monstrous, malignant fake trees with a snowball. Please note: the National Christmas Tree Association is not above putting elves in harm’s way. And also note: we bought not one, but two, real trees.

TALK OF THE FROWN: ON EMPATHIZING WITH SCROOGE

As Christmas approaches, I’m not in a particularly cheery mood. This, despite the fact that my work for the week is largely done, my holidays promise to be festive and serene, and that E and I spent last night watching Absolutely Fabulous on DVD.

Fortunately, when I am feeling foul-brained around Christmas, I can take comfort in sentences which John Updike wrote in December, 1963, and which are collected in his too-often overlooked Assorted Prose. 

That assassination-haunted Christmas had “the air of a birthday party carried on despite a death in the family.” Emerging from a mass at Saint Paul’s cathedral, Updike concludes a marvelous survey of 1963 New York:

Outside on the street, Christmas did seem to have solidified.  Cool sunlight was falling unruffled through the wind, and, looking at the crowds, we realized what the difference is this year. People are not determined to be jolly; they do not feel obligated to smile. From the sudden death of our young President, Americans may in time date a great physiognomic discovery: a human face may refuse, or fail, to smile and still be human.   

The point of the passage is forgiveness of others. In my gloomy narcissism, I’ve taken the point to be the indulgence of self. 

Resistance Is Utile

And with that absolutely labored pun, an update on my memoir.  Last Friday, I spoke with my lead thesis advisor about how my advisors were more helpful to me after they stopped advising me. What they gave me was time-release advice.      

In my case:

1. This is a book about x.  Y and z have been given too much play.

2. Although it describes the past, this is a book about your present self.

3. This is a book which needs to stop starting chapters with thin chronological statements.

4. This is a book which is needs to stop starting chapters with broad, static declarations.  (A campus guest, Ted Solortaroff, said that I did not yet understand the difference between a memoir and meditation.) 

But then I had to do two things:

1) walk away and let the book settle and clarify and

2) wade through it sentence by sentence. Revision is a process with the hyperspecificity and slippery interconnectedness of surgery. 

Sentence by sentence–and this emphasis on line editing was Joel Turnipseed’s advice about how to revise any book–I was able to clarify the precise relationship between theme and subtheme (the latter provided a kind of torque); I was able to figure out how to use the present without dissipating momentum; and I was able to figure out what kind of sentence the book needed, what combination of detail, heft, and movement would move the book forward. That was a matter of trial and error and then of feel.

And now I am waiting so that I can look at the book again. Upon seeing the monster I've created, I will then play video pool for six weeks and we'll be back in business.      

Minnesota-Grown Onion: Top Ten Local Music Releases

For those of us who don’t get out much anymore, the Onion has provided a review of the best 2005 local CD releases. 

I didn’t know that there was good blues being recorded in Duluth or that Electropolis plays " . . .  jazz, mostly, though with a penchant for woozy electrobleeps and noirish sax skronks, and a punk and post-rock sensibility that recalls The Lounge Lizards.”  Sounds like my cup of dissonance, although my guess is that the new Low is what I will buy.