Over nachos and six pints, Ben decided to make me editor-at-large at Brutish and Short. Whatever that means. I think it means, “Hey Alix, write more you lazy jerk.”
And I never thought I’d say this, but I agree with the National Post.
But I could have done without most of the first 150 pages of The Marriage Plot, which work through each of the character’s undergraduate backstory, and felt a bit like a rehash of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, without the cocaine, which was the only interesting part.
Oh snap.
Basically, this is a book about three assholes. They are 90% full of shit, and 10% right about things, which maybe is the recipe for all twenty-two-year olds. Such a huge disappointment after Middlesex, which is an absolute masterpiece – certainly kicks the shit out of anything Franzen ever wrote. The female main character in The Marriage Plot is both slightly prettier and slightly richer than everyone else – and that’s it. Not she’s prettier and richer and a raging boozehound like in Gatsby. Or prettier and richer but totally psychotic and fucked up. Nope. Just really pretty, rich, and normal. And totally fucking boring.
Too bad we’ve all been waiting nine whole years for this book. I know it must be hard to top a book like Middlesex, but you must be able to do better than this.
Yes, ambitious, talented writers will continue to exist and their writing will be great because they have read. And yes, there will remain people who have nary an interest in writing but luxuriate in an afternoon of reading. The devaluing of imagination as it departs on flights of fancy brought on by just being with yourself, this is what is changing us in profound, yet to be fully realized ways.
Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.
Due to excessive busyness, school-ness, travel-fatigue, etc., I largely avoided the 9/11 ten year hooplah. This, however, is one of the only things I read from the weekend, and it’s damn good.
Charged with looking beneath, behind and around such images, the novelist comes up against the question of what makes these particular violent deaths so very different from every other violent death. That isn’t easy to answer, and any answer you do come up with is likely to sound disrespectful, cynical, unfeeling and insufficiently solemn. A novelist may decide to push onward anyway, whether into sentimentality (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”) or smarmy self-aggrandizement (“The Good Life”), but in such cases, the results feel thin, vaguely false and meretricious. “It’s kryptonite to novelists,” a critic friend of mine once said about 9/11.
The Beekeeper’s Lament by Hannah Nordhaus is awesome. This is one of my favourite parts. Entomologist Justin Schmidt made an index ranking the pain of insects stings, and it’s quite poetic and lovely:
1.0 SWEAT BEE: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 FIRE ANT: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
1.8 BULLHORN ACACIA ANT: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 BALD-FACED HORNET: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 YELLOWJACKET: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2X HONEY BEE AND EUROPEAN HORNET: Like a match-head that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 RED HARVESTER ANT: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 PAPER WASP: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 TARANTULA HAWK: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ BULLET ANT: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.
When entomologists are also amazing writers, everybody wins.
The Game by Ken Dryden, which chronicles a week in the life of the 1978-1979 Montreal Canadians. They say it’s the greatest hockey book of all time, so I picked it up at the library, and it didn’t disappoint. He’s a great writer, rare for an athlete, especially such a good athlete, and he’s also super introspective and conflicted — which is the really interesting part considering he was the best goalie on the best team in the league and won the Stanley Cup six times in eight years. What is there to be conflicted about when you’re so awesome?
Oh, but he does ennui so well:
From the referendum on Quebec’s independence to the “son of Sam” murders, I find almost everything ‘interesting’ and if pressed for more, I offer explanations. I show that I ‘understand’ how such things happen and I go no further. But as I hold back, giving less of myself, I find that I am losing my enthusiasm for the game. In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs.
Easy, David Foster Wallace. And here he is, on playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in the late 70s vs. going there as a kid.
It was a period piece – elegant, colonial Toronto – perfectly shamelessly preserved from a time before glitter and spectacle came to the city; and came to sports… I don’t much like the Gardens now. Competing against a child’s memory, that is perhaps inevitable, but it is more than that. The building’s elegant touches are gone, but anachronistic perhaps, even in that other time, most deserved to go. It has been expanded and modernized for contemporary needs – more seats, more private boxes, a bigger press box – but I dislike the haphazard, graceless way it was done. There is a veneer of newness about it now that doesn’t quite fit. It has been stranded in an awkward transition; no longer what it was, it cannot be what it wants to be. Now after nearly fifty years, there is nothing special about it. It is just another rink; just another place to play.
When I was starting to write—in the late fifties, early sixties—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O’Connor, of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive.
ALIX: so where does one go to a beach around here?
RANDAL: the toronto beaches are all pretty damn clean
ALIX: except for all that poo in the water
RANDAL: we have some of the cleanest water in the world, yo. It’s tightly regulated and Toronto closes down the beaches at bacteria levels 3-4 times less than the ones in Cali.
SO BAM
but yeah the water right by the harbor is shitty… full of garbage
ALIX: I”M FROM A PRISTINE ISLAND IN PARADISE a toronto beach WILL NOT
Hawksley Workman has no equivalent, American or otherwise. Most musicians can be compared to somebody — Hawksley certainly has influences, but he mangles them all together in such a way that they come out like musical compost, rich and dense with nutrients. Sometimes he sounds like Prince, sometimes he sounds like Zeppelin, sometimes like Freddy Mercury, sometimes like Katy Perry.
In parting, here’s a perfect example of what I mean when I say ‘a brave Canadian song’ — basically something Stan Rogers would stomp and sing along to if he were still alive, while Leonard Cohen sat in the corner, nodding approvingly at the lyrics:
I watched four hours of the new season of Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels last night. It’s been a pretty eventful season so far – Shannon, fed up with Gene’s bullshit philandering and groupie-loving rightfully tells him “you’re 61 fucking years old,” and that’s she gonna leave him if he doesn’t change his ways. They eventually patch things up, and take a family trip to Israel where Gene reconnects with a family he doesn’t even know he has. Obviously, Gene and Shannon are finally going to get married at the end of this season.
That’s the thing I love about this show — it’s so obviously staged to a certain point, but then is also so incredibly sincere. This is without a doubt a very loving family — you can tell by the way the kids act around their parents, and by how happy their dogs always are. My mom and I agree that the kids turned out so well because Shannon Tweed is from Newfoundland and hasn’t lost that Atlantic Canadian no-nonsense/common sense parenting style. I haven’t been keeping up with the show over the last few years, and I was so happy to catch up last night. I hope Gene gets his shit together, because Shannon is amazing and his kids really do adore him. There was a moment in one of the episodes last night where Gene was sitting alone to watch Nick sing and some groupies started sitting on the couch next him — and then Sophie came over and cleared them out with a killer look. Oh, I love Sophie.
I know it’s a reality show, and it’s probably very scripted, but I can’t help but believe what they’re selling me.
I haven’t seen Treme, and I may in fact like it, but this guy seems to be hitting the nail on the head:
It’s hard to write about music, fictionally or nonfictionally, without slipping into cliché or hyperbole or hipster-Mad Libs abstraction, which is why there are so few great rock ‘n’ roll novels and so many lousy record reviews, and why there hasn’t been a successful TV show about musicians since The Monkees (who didn’t talk about music much because they were too busy singing and/or being chased by spies who’d hidden microfilm in Davy Jones’ maracas.) But Treme‘s tendency to sashay right into these traps is frustrating, because you know Simon and his cohorts are capable of better. The Wire, which put a reporter’s-notebook premium on authentic dialogue, sometimes at the expense of clarity, would never have given lines this trite to its cops or its corner-boys. Music is a huge part of the argument Treme makes about the specialness of New Orleans culture, because you can’t taste food through your TV, so every time somebody makes an incredibly obvious statement about that specialness it undercuts the whole project.
So, I’ll miss my friend, his sax, the force of nature his sound was, his glory, his foolishness, his accomplishments, his face, his hands, his humor, his skin, his noise, his confusion, his power, his peace. But his love and his story, the story that he gave me, that he whispered in my ear, that he allowed me to tell… and that he gave to you… is gonna carry on. I’m no mystic, but the undertow, the mystery and power of Clarence and my friendship leads me to believe we must have stood together in other, older times, along other rivers, in other cities, in other fields, doing our modest version of god’s work… work that’s still unfinished. So I won’t say goodbye to my brother, I’ll simply say, see you in the next life, further on up the road, where we will once again pick up that work, and get it done.
Big Man, thank you for your kindness, your strength, your dedication, your work, your story. Thanks for the miracle… and for letting a little white boy slip through the side door of the Temple of Soul.
The two had a special relationship, which I’ve seen several journalists refer to as “an interracial bromance”. People suck sometimes.
Also, I forgot about this song, not surprising, since it’s a one-hit wonder country single from 2008. I heard it again back home, and I realized it’s one of the best love songs I’ve ever heard, about one of the best love stories I’ve ever seen. I’m a sucker for a great chorus, and not only is this one catchy, it’s a tearjerker, and not in that Alan Jackson/Keith Urban exploitative way. It’s got a big build-up, but it’s so simple, it’s so gorgeous:
And when you’re gone, I wanna go too.
I didn’t put the real music video in here, because it sucks, and it’s a part of that Nashville machine that churns out girls like this by the thousands. I wish this song had gotten more attention, and I wish the video wasn’t so god damn cheesy.
