Calling out the Bullshit

DS gave me this essay by Jonathan Franzen to read, and I thought it was fabulous. I recommend it. I've never read Franzen's work because I was afraid I'd encounter the post-modern headaches he so aptly rails against in the piece. After this, I think I'm more willing to give him a try.

Here are my favorite parts:

Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves. Fiction is also conservative and conventional, because the structure of its market is relatively democratic (novelists make a living one book at a time, bringing pleasure to large audiences), and because a novel asks for ten or twenty hours of solitary attentiveness from each member of its audience. You can walk past a painting fifty times before you begin to appreciate it. You can drift in and out of a Bartok sonata until its structures dawn on you, but a difficult novel just sits there on your shelf unread — unless you happen to be a student, in which case you're obliged to turn the pages of Woolf and Beckett. This may make you a better reader. But to wrest the novel away from its original owner, the bourgeois reader, requires strenuous effort from theoreticians. And once literature and its criticism become co-dependent the fallacies set in.

For example, the Fallacy of Capture, as in the frequent praise of "Finnegans Wake" for its "capturing" of human consciousness, or in the justification of "J R" 's longueurs by its "capture" of an elusive "postwar American reality"; as if a novel were primarily an ethnographic recording, as if the point of reading fiction were not to go fishing but to admire somebody else's catch. Or the Fallacy of the Symphonic, in which a book's motifs and voices are described as "washing over" the reader in orchestral fashion; as if, when you're reading "J R," its pages just turn themselves, words wafting up into your head like arpeggios. Or the Fallacy of Art Historicism, a pedagogical convenience borrowed from the moneyed world of visual art, where a work's value substantially depends on its novelty; as if fiction were as formally free as painting, as if what makes "The Great Gatsby" and "O Pioneers!" good novels were primarily their technical innovations. Or the epidemic Fallacy of the Stupid Reader, implicit in every modern "aesthetics of difficulty," wherein difficulty is a "strategy" to protect art from cooptation and the purpose of this art is to "upset" or "compel" or "challenge" or "subvert" or "scar" the unsuspecting reader; as if the writer's audience somehow consisted, again and again, of Charlie Browns running to kick Lucy's football; as if it were a virtue in a novelist to be the kind of boor who propagandizes at friendly social gatherings.

And near the end:

I know the pleasures of a book aren't always easy. I expect to work; I want to work. It's also in my Protestant nature, however, to expect some reward for this work. And, although critics can give me pastoral guidance as I seek this reward, ultimately I think each individual is alone with his or her conscience. As a reader, I seek a direct personal relationship with art. The books I love, the books on which my faith in literature rests, are the ones with which I can have this kind of relationship.

Obligatory Tree of Life Post

I'm going to try to make this free of spoilers. I don't think it's possible to spoil this movie, though. Just don't walk out after the first 45 minutes.

Okay, so I saw The Tree of Life this past Tuesday. Right off the bat, I just have to say that the cinemotagraphy is amazing. It looks specacular. The movie itself is the culmination of Mallick's films. Everything was there: religion, man vs. the universe, voiceover, hands running through wheat, good vs. evil, shots of the sun, shots looking up at the trees. And it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

But my thoughts on it haven't yet settled. At first, I thought that the parts about the dawn of the universe didn't mesh well or have a coherent message with the parts centering around Jack's family. But as I've had some distance from it, it is clearly one of the many contrasting pairs Mallick sets up in the film.
The very personal and subjective pain of losing a close family member, contrasted with the expanse of the universe
Father vs. Mother
Grace vs. Nature
Future vs. Present
Past vs. Present
Preparing for and sculpting the future, as opposed to letting things come, letting things happen
Evil vs. Good
The meting out of love (when deemed appropriate) vs. unconditional and ever-present love
Brother vs. brother

These were just a few of the themes that I felt and picked up on while watching the film. There were two specific impressions that have really resonated with me, though.

First, when it came to the Waco, TX scenes, so much reminded me of my own family and my own childhood. I am the eldest child, and I, too, felt a strange relationship to my younger siblings, both a strong love for and a certain jealousy of their presence. We were also physically disciplined (something I have no problem with), but later in my parents' marriage my dad became more abusive (something I have a huge problem with); my mom was also silently indignant about this, as Jack's mother was, but couldn't do much to stop it. Then there were some religious aspects of the film that really hit home. All of those questions were ones I had asked of God myself in some intensely personal, trying, and scary times. There is fear and awe and doubt mixed up in those moments, just as they were expertly portrayed in the movie.

The second thought that I just can't shake about this film is the similarities between it and East of Eden by John Steinbeck, one of my favorite books. East of Eden is just as beautiful, if not more so, and the juxtapositions between the beauty and wide open space of the west with the author's detailed family histories and personal memories recall Mallick's struggle to comprehend humanity and existence. Both works also allude to biblical references throughout. The book also centers around the relationships between brothers (there are at least three sets of siblings in the book, two of which feature brothers competing for love and acceptance), just as The Tree of Life spends time showing differences between the two brothers and the desire to be "good."

The book is a bit more concerned with fate and intertwining stories, as a book is so well-suited to do, but both pieces end (explicitly or implicitly) with what I interpreted as a choice. Both writers asked "why him?" with a certain amount of guilt, and I think Steinbeck provided not an answer but a choice -- an obligation -- to keep going. Although my fellow moviegoers, SM and DS, disagreed with me about the ending of the film, I saw it as a sign of freedom from the burden of grief, permission to keep going: Timshel, "thou mayest." He is the only one left to do something with his life, and he has the permission, he should do so without guilt.

These are just some reactions that have been going through my head in the past 4 days. I think I need to see the film again to really hammer down whether the questions Mallick posed were answered or if they need answers at all. DS was pretty adamant that this was one of the finest films he'd ever seen, and that there was no conclusion to be drawn from the impressionistic portrait. Maybe it's just my desire for outlines and closure, but I think there's more to this than not being able to fully interpret it, and I think we're allowed to judge the piece if it doesn't end up coalescing into anything substantial. I'll let you know if I figure anything else out.

A Post for JK: The List Issue

Some people hate lists. Admittedly, as I peruse my Google Reader every morning, the Top 5s or Top 10s give off a faint waft of desperation, a thinly-veiled call for more traffic on a website before they go all out and post a video. We all have to admit, though, that the ploy works. People are interested in spite of themselves.

Of course there are others who thrive on lists. This is my camp. There is so much information one can gather about yourself and others from a list-making session with friends. My favorite lists are those that smack of sharply personal preference, the ones that hint at an involved back-story or require an impassioned defense. I also enjoy the time capsule dimension of list-making; like Rob in High Fidelity (also, Rob's creator, Nick Hornby), I recognize the value of grooming one's lists and keeping them updated with one's current state of mind. They are always cumulative of your experiences until that point -- what you choose to remember and what you have since forgotten -- which is so interesting to think about: is the new roster a complete overhaul from the last? When did this element become a mainstay for nostalgia's sake as opposed to an earnest addition? Sometimes I like looking back on them to see what my limits were at the time or where I'd been. Sometimes it's a more tangible manifestation of my interests. I've encapsulated my current views below. There is no order to these rankings, and they are all subject to change, of course.

My top 5 books thus far (no order)
In the Heart of the Sea
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
East of Eden
The Once and Future King
Lord of the Flies
HM: A Farewell to Arms

Top 5 favorite authors
John Steinbeck
Jack Kerouac
Michael Chabon
J.D. Salinger
Doris Kearns Goodwin

My favorite movies of all time thus far (no order)
Pather Panchali (India, dir. Satyajit Ray, 1955)
The Passenger (Italy, dir. Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
Apocalypse Now (USA, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Les Enfants du Paradis (France, dir. Marcel Carné, 1945)
Bringing Up Baby (USA, dir. Howard Hawks, 1938)
Breaking Away (USA, dir. Peter Yates, 1979)

Top 5 favorite cinematographers
Vittorio Storaro
Ellen Kuras
Haskell Wexler
Robert Elswit
Ernest Dickerson
HM: Subatra Mitra, Roger Deakins

Top 5 favorite bands of the 1990s (no order)
Alice in Chains
Soundgarden
Built to Spill
Beck
Radiohead
HM: The Sea and Cake, Stone Temple Pilots

Top 5 favorite contemporary bands
The National
OK Go
Vampire Weekend
The Black Keys
Spoon
HM: Animal Collective (but they haven't put out anything new since 2009, and I didn't like MPP nearly as much as anything they'd put out previously) and Wolf Parade

Top 5 favorite contemporary artists that aren't bands
Santigold
LCD Soundsystem
Jill Scott
Erykah Badu
Mayer Hawthorne

Top 10 favorite albums of all time
Graceland - Paul Simon
Kind of Blue - Miles Davis
A Love Supreme - John Coltrane
Kid A - Radiohead
The Band - The Band
Brothers and Sisters - Allman Brothers Band
Feels - Animal Collective
Rumours - Fleetwood Mac
Billy Breathes - Phish
Weezer (Blue) - Weezer
Note: there's no Beatles album here for fear that the debate would turn into a completely separate post. There's a Beatles album for whatever mood I'm in: looking for all killer, no filler pop? Rubber Soul. A crazy awesome wannabe concept album? Sgt. Pepper. A great transitional album into the world of weird? Revolver. The problem with these judging and ranking these albums for me is the trade off between albums of all 4-star songs, like Rubber Soul, or an album full of plenty of 5-star songs among a glut of 3-star songs. It's a long debate, and I don't want to get into it...yet.

Favorite opening tracks
All I Want - Joni Mitchell - Blue
The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon - Graceland
Airbag - Radiohead - OK Computer
Everything in Its Right Place - Radiohead - Kid A
The Song Remains the Same - Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy
The King of Carrot Flowers Pt 1. - Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Poppies - Marcy Playground - Marcy Playground
Angel - Massive Attack - Mezzanine
Taxman - Beatles - Revolver
Pt. 1: Acknowledgment - John Coltrane - A Love Supreme

Favorite closing tracks
Turn Into Something - Animal Collective - Feels
A Day in the Life - The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper
Sweet Lil Gal - Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker
Pt. 3: Pursuance/Pt. 4: Psalm - John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles - Revolver

Top 5 favorite Beatles songs
Rain
Paperback Writer
It's All Too Much
Dear Prudence
Don't Let Me Down

Feel free to challenge me on any of these. What's on your favorites lists?