Oil!

I read Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!” after being thoroughly impressed by the film ‘There Will be Blood’ which got a few Oscar nods and won Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar for his amazing performance. If you loved the movie, don’t make the same mistake that I made in expecting the book to be ANYTHING like the movie. With the exception of a few primary characters and Oil as a common ground, the book and movie were about as different as [insert brilliant simile here].

While the book was entertaining, it was more of a social (Social?) commentary on the times during the early 1900’s into the first world war. Deemed as a ‘classic tale of greed’ the book spun a tale of Capitalism vs Socialism and Communism with primary characters being often referred to as ‘red sympathizers.’ With an overall hokey outlook and moderate story, the only part that I found ‘blogworthy’ was a snip from the first chapter where the young main character talks about the joys of a road trip with his father:

Any boy will tell you that this is glorious. Whoopie! you bet! Sailing along up there close to the clouds, with an engine full of power, magically harnessed, subject to the faintest pressure from the ball of your foot. The power of ninety horses-think of that! Suppose you had had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping around the side of a mountain, wouldn’t that make your pulses jump? And this magic ribbon of concrete laid out for you, winding here and there, feeling its way upward with hardly a variation of grade, taking off the shoulder of a mountain, cutting straight through the apex of another, diving into the black belly of a third; twisting, turning, tilting inward on the outside curves, tilting outward on the inside curves, so that you were always balanced, always safe – and with a white painted line marking the centre, so that you always knew exactly where you had a right to be – what magic had done all this?

I couldn’t agree more, my young Socialist.

South of the Border, West of the Sun (More Murakami)

I finally got around to reading another Murakmi book and was, yet again, amazed at the elegance and simplicity in his writing. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but please read on at your own risk if you haven’t read it yet.

Random Titles

I’ve had a chance in the last month or so to catch up on some reading I’ve been meaning to do.

I just finished Orwell’s 1984, something that I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time. I don’t have the capacity at the moment to go into just what this novel meant to me, but I have to say that I was quite impressed and thoroughly amazed at how true the sentiments reign over fifty years after the novel was written. The overtones and warning cast by 1984 still ring true to this day, and are, if anything, even more applicable now than in 1949.

I also had a chance to read Richard Matheson’s I am Legend. I’m not usually one for novels typically cast as horror (although, as I write this, I realize that my book shelf is full of Anne Rice and Stephen King, so that may be a bit of a misleading statement) but I was spellbound by this short novel from the moment I opened the first page until the truly spectacular final sentence. I’m interested to see how the screenplay starring Will Smith plays out. The novel is a very dark, evenly paced tale with flashes of intensity. Read it, and read it all the way through.

My favorite of the books I read, though, was by far Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. While this title didn’t hold any revelations, or social epiphanies for me, I found the book amazingly well written. It re-awoke inside of me a lust for travel, and particularly travel back to my home state of Alaska. It is a great story following the true life story of Chris McCandless as he travels North America ending up in the woods of Alaska – ending, quite literally, when his body is found by moose hunters in the great white north. The book is being adapted into a movie by Sean Penn and is set to release very soon. I, for one, am really looking forward to it.

Reading Into the Wild prompted me to re-read a few of my old favorites of Jack London – Call of the Wild and Sea Wolf – both amazing books in and of themselves, but neither as amazing or raw as I remember them being when I first read them as a child.

I also picked up a few novels that while well written, I really found little interest in and put in a similar category as Kite Runner – somewhat well written, and certainly having it’s place in the face of modern writing, just not something I find particularly touching or worth reading again – those were The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. The Road was written in a truly unique style, never using any names for characters, and had some interesting touches on where society could end up; all told through a truly touching story of a father and son as they strive for hope against oppressive odds. Unique, and interesting, but ultimately nothing special in my book. The Secret Life of Bees, on the other hand, was a great story, but I didn’t find it to be good writing, nor particularly moving or unique.

One of my guilty pleasures of reading is the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre, but it’s something that I have a hard time finding good titles and authors to choose from. One of my all time favorites is Neuromancer by William Gibson. His writing style was raw and fresh at the time, and his melding of science, technology, and society came together as something truly remarkable. I’ve read a few of his recent novels though and have been thoroughly unimpressed. I “read” the audio book Pattern Recognition and was unimpressed, but chalked it up to being watered down because of the medium. I then, in the hopes of discovering something great, picked up his latest novel Spook Country and was again thoroughly unimpressed. I found the novel utterly forgettable, holding nothing of the intense raw & fast paced writing that first drew me to him, and in it’s place a slow paced, dry novel that barely reaches to the edges of today’s technology, let alone the future.

How to Talk to a Widower

“I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.”

That’s the reigning sentiment throughout Jonathan Tropper’s novel “How to Talk to a Widower.” Here’s a book that I reluctantly picked up after reading a quick review in a magazine. I started it off thinking I was reading a non-fiction book. About 3 chapters in, I was amazed at the conversational detail and descriptions of occurrences outside the scope of the main character. That’s when I looked at the cover and saw in small, yet quite visible letters, that I was reading a novel. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

Throughout the novel, the main character is consistently being set up on dates, or approached by neighbors, which turns the novel into a bit of a commentary on dating and relationships. Tropper has an interesting take on dating and initiating conversation. He writes:

…Because no matter what I’m saying, you know I’m just saying it to break the ice, so that I can ask you out, so that we can go out, and if that goes well, so that we can have sex. So basically, I go from being this nice guy with no agenda to this sleazy asshole who’s trying to sleep with you before he even knows you.

Does anyone else share that sentiment? Sure, ideally there’s someone out there who’s a friend of a friend that you’re going to meet and get along with and have something develop, but more often than not (at least in my experience) you’re shooting in the dark. I think I’m a pretty nice guy over all, but how does one get over that sleazy/slimy feeling on the initial approach?

Most of you will probably have a response similar to that of the other character in the novel:

You think maybe you’re over-thinking the whole thing a little?

To which I respond in the same manner as Doug:

That’s what I do

Another forlorn look at dating is taken in a lengthy montage:

In the weeks that follow, I have enough lousy first dates to merit a musical montage. Cue the pop song and watch Doug try on different outfits and pose in front of the full-length mirror as Claire directs him, laughing from the bed. Watch Doug escorting various attractive and semi-attractive women from central casting in and out of different restaurants and coffee shops. Fast cuts of different women seated across the table: speaking or not speaking, painstakingly scraping the dressing off a piece of Bibb lettuce, angrily underscoring some clearly salient talking point with a violent jab of her finger, weeping uncontrollably, and sucking up a seemingly endless piece of spaghetti. And then more fast cuts of Doug dropping each of these women off at their homes or apartments, shaking hands, or awkwardly jockeying back and forth between handshakes and chaste goodnight pecks, the camera lingering on them in the background to show on their faces the sad certainty of another man who won’t be calling again, and then Doug coming into focus in the foreground as he heads back to his car, his expression bated in the abject worthlessness of it all. The song choice is key here, something slow, but with a beat, a gruff smoker’s voice singing romantic lyrics laced with irony to convey the utter futility of it all; the boredom, the wasted time, the awkward beginnings and ending, the instantly forgettable, canned-date conversation, the sad, damaged lives to which he is now unwittingly privy, a song that ends in fading minor piano chords as Doug drives home with windows open, his face sadly vacant as he stared blankly at the empty road ahead.

Having read my fair share of books that seem to center around dating and relationships lately, it may seem as though my take on the process is as forlorn and worthless as the above passage illustrates. This is not the case, although I do find it so at times. I can empathize with Doug’s wonderings and feelings of simply going through the motions at times. The other side of that coin, though, is the excitement of meeting someone new, and that spark you share with another person, if only for an evening.

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed this book, aside from the fact that I found it funny, uncomfortable, emotional, and touching, was the fact that it seemed to follow a thought pattern similar to my own. As I mentioned above, the spark that you can share with someone else can be truly amazing, even if it’s only for a moment:

Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street and there’s something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and sensual and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she’ll look at you and make you whole. And then she’s gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you mourn her loss with more sadness than you’ll ever admit to.

Spot on.

The last passage that I’ll talk about here takes place in the form of a conversation between Doug’s dad and himself. He touches on how people deal with hardships in life, and I feel does a good job at embodying one of my own philosophies:

This is just your time, son, that’s all. Your time to hurt and bleed and tear apart your notion of what makes you who you are. Life knocks us all on our ass at some point. And then we get back up, and we make some change, because that’s what men do. We adapt. And when we’re done adapting, we’re better equipped to survive.

How great is that? Get back up. Make some change. Adapt, and become stronger.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Well folks, it’s been well over a month since my last post on here and I’ve read some really great books, and had a few minor adventures. I’d like to use this little forum to plug a website that I started using to track what I’m reading – goodreads.com. It’s a great way to keep track of your bookshelves and have some commentary with other people who are reading or who have read what you’re reading.

At any rate. 

While waiting for my latest crop of books to show up from the internet, I borrowed a book by Chuck Klosterman called “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto” and was really impressed. Boiled down, it could be described as a social commentary based on pop culture as seen through the eyes of Chuck Klosterman, someone who is roughly my age, if a bit older. He does a really great job at capturing the overtones of pop culture through specific examples, citing Saved by the Bell and writing an entire chapter based on Pamela Anderson.

One of the parts of the book that I found highly amusing was his take on dating, and his “23 Questions I ask on a first date”. Some are pretty amusing, and all are great conversation starters, if a bit over the top at times. Check out one guy’s responses to his questions here. 

One of my favorite questions is this:

“You have a brain tumor. Though there is no discomfort at the moment, this tumor would unquestionably kill you in six months. However, your life can (and will) be saved by an operation; the only downside is that there will be a brutal incision to your frontal lobe. After the surgery, you will be significantly less intelligent. You will still be a fully functioning adult, but you will be less logical, you will have a terrible memory, and you will have little ability to understand complex concepts or difficult ideas. The surgery is in two weeks. How do you spend the next fourteen days?”

I like this question because of the questions that stem from it. Would you want to leave your mark on life prior to essentially losing your life? This is a similar question that was brought up in Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. (If you haven’t read it, go pick it up, it’s a quick read and well worth the effort). I won’t go into a full and complex answer to this question here, however, I’d like to think that I would do my best to come to terms with those closest to me. I think that I’d want to reconcile any thing that’s been unreconciled, and visit all of my closest friends at least one last time while I was still “myself.” Of course, I’d blog all about it here for your reading pleasure. :)

All in all, I found the book entertaining, funny, and interesting. It was a good light read that was both well thought out and well written. Check it out as a read between your next book, or while on travel.

Norwegian Wood

At the recommendation of a buddy (The same who recommended reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being) I picked up Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood which was written back in ’87 and translated from Japanese into English in 2000.

This is another novel that I was spellbound by and finished over the course of a week. It is a simple tale spanning the life of a young man as he enters college. It deals with friendship, death, loss, life, and of course, love in its many masks. Murakami fashions Toru Watanabe, the main character, in such a way that anyone can relate to him and his thoughts and feelings. His (Watanabe’s) style is akin to Holden Caulfield’s from Catcher in the Rye – something that the author coyly alludes to mid-novel that I found amusing. Where Holden came across as a loner and an outcast from society, berating those around him (the phonies), Watanabe is gentle and while still a loner, is seen as more stoic and reflective, if a bit of an outcast.

One of the issues that young Watanabe must deal with is death. He learns that

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

Something that I think we can all agree with, and have come to similar conclusions of on our own. This theory, though, applies not only to the loss of life, but to the loss of many things in this life, be they physical or psychological.

Another portion of the novel touches on depression and loss;

April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass – but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.

We cannot rush getting over something (someone) being lost to us. It does indeed pass, slowly, and on its own terms, and usually leaves a dull ache behind. I’m not sure how the masses deal with loss and despair, but I know that I tend to address it, deal with it, and either move along, or accept that whatever it was that I’d lost, or that had affected me to such a degree is now a part of me. Something that can’t be forgotten, or ‘gotten over’ or ‘moved on from’, but is rather now part of what makes me me. It is that intangible knot buried deep within, no longer raw and jagged as it once was, but there none the less; a dull ache. After a while, that ache fades and is forgotten most of the time, but as with Watanabe, there are certain triggers or tremors that remind us of that which has become a part of us.

This particular passage struck me because of the line I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. I remember a time when I was going through what was the toughest challenge I’d faced at that point in my life, and feeling just that way. I can still vividly remember going outside on a frigid December morning at the office, and unbuttoning my coat against the cold, letting the wind knife its icy fingers into me just to feel something other than the pain and loss of the situation. I challenged nature and my body to challenge me back, ‘gritting my teeth’ if you will, and letting time take its course.

One of my favorite passages from the book touches on a peripheral character, describing her beauty and elegance on that particular night. How she has her own special draw and attraction;

Her small gold earrings caught the light as the taxi swayed. Her midnight blue dress seemed to have been made to match the darkness of the cab. Every now and then her thinly daubed, beautifully formed lips would quiver slightly as if she had caught herself on the verge of talking to herself. Watching her, I could see why Nagasawa had chosen her as his special companion. There were any number of women more beautiful than Hatsumi, and Nagasawa could have made any of them his. But Hatsumi had some quality that could send a tremor through your heart. It was nothing forceful. The power she exerted was a subtle thing, but it called forth deep resonances. I watched her all the way to Shibuya, and wondered, without ever finding an answer, what this emotional reverberation I was feeling could be.

The passage as a whole is fairly remarkable; you get a feeling of how the rest of the novel is written as well as the author’s ability to portray emotions – both subtle and apparent – in merely a few lines. The latter half of the final sentence sums up how new love feels. Rarely is one’s deeper attraction to someone obvious, rather, it is something new and churning within us that can’t quite be pinpointed – subtle, elegant, alluring.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, is a passage where one of the characters is describing herself and some of her wonderful traits;

…I may be a little crazy, but I’m a good kid, and honest, and I work hard, I’m kinda cute, I’ve got nice boobs, I’m a good cook, and my father left me a trust fund. I mean, I’m a real bargain, don’t you think?

I sure think so. And that’s what makes this novel so spectacular. Murakami is able to paint the spectrum of emotions and situations. On one hand, we have the earlier passage, outlining a subtle attraction, one that is shrouded and seen as if through rose colored lenses, another that is perfectly tangible and makes sense at a completely different (logical) level. One can understand the love of both characters, be they simultaneous or disparate.

At any rate. I recommend picking up a copy of Norwegian Wood at your local bookstore and having a read. Also, if you know any good, honest, hard working, cute girls with nice boobs who are a little crazy, AND can cause an emotional reverberation within me, send them my way.

 

– The Alaskan

Readings

At the recommendation of a buddy, I recently picked up Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. This is a novel first published in 1984, translated by the author from Czech. I read the book in two sittings and I could really stop describing my take after these three words: simple, beautiful, elegant; but I won’t.

Page 8 really sets things up and struck a chord within me. It’s a bit philosophical, and touches on something I think we all struggle with at times:

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

How often do we feel as though we’re trying to make the ‘best’ decision of the moment, or fully believing that what we’re doing is the right thing? Who is to say what is right, wrong, good, or bad in our day to day lives. We can strive to be the best, but at the end, we truly are like an actor going on cold, using the tools at hand to judge a situation and move forward.

This is a novel about life, love, philosophy, and some of the deeper things in life, all told through a simple tale of two lovers and their lives together through a turbulent time in and about Czech. It asks (and answers) many questions, addressing life through metaphor. One such instance is when the author begins to speak about the phenomenon of Vertigo:

…What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Read the last line again.

I may be alone in thinking this way, but how often do we yearn for the terrible? Secretly hoping for that one terrible thing to happen… just to see what happens. You imagine yourself ‘falling’ (I use falling here as an allusion to whatever it is you’re being drawn towards, whatever it is that terrifies you), and dealing with whatever the situation is. Whether it’s something terrible in the moment – like dropping your bowl of chili all over the crowded deli floor – terrible for you alone – like that blemish you’re worried about that’s probably nothing, but could turn into your everything – or terrible for the masses – something akin to a 747 blasting into your 10th floor office, or the bridge dropping out from under you as you make your commute. Vertigo.

Much of the novel is devoted to thoughts on love. Love in it’s many forms, and how love can be all encompassing, but different to every individual, even those who are ‘in love’ with one another. Kundera describes how love begins, at one point in the novel, as

the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Think back on the women you’ve loved in your life (family exempt) , and I’ll bet you can pinpoint a moment. A single moment, or a collection of events that can be described by the aforementioned. Simple, Beautiful, Elegant.

(note: being a heterosexual male, I use the term woman here, but I’m sure you concluded all on your own that the same can be applied when the sexes are reversed)

The last excerpt that I’m going to comment on talks about love again, and one of it’s many iterations – unconditional.

It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog’s life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.

With all of the thoughts, discussions, readings (bloggings), and actions, are we, in fact, demeaning the nature of love? Now I’m not saying that love should be given unconditionally forever, but can you imagine a world where people thought not of ‘does he love me enough‘ but rather ‘do I love her enough’, giving of our love unreservedly. I know that’s a watered down outlook on things, and there are more layers to ‘love’ and ‘relationships’ than there are grains of sand in the Sahara, but it’s certainly worth consideration, at least to this wayward Alaskan.