So I Re-read The Hobbit

And yes, it’s still good.

I first read it when I was maybe eight years old — actually I think I read a graphic novel version first, but that’s not really the point — and I’m not sure I’ve reread it even once since then, which is surprising because I love to reread. I had the basic plot down pretty well, except the occasional mis-remembering who said what, but I was shocked at how different the narration was then I remember. I’m guessing this is because I have read The Lord of the Rings at least twice since then, and everything in that book is grave, grave business. But the voice in Hobbit is downright playful. I say voice because the narrative I shows up relatively frequently — (To italicize “I”, highlight “I” and press command-I) — which fits in nicely when you think about it as written by Bilbo, even though he therefore refers to himself in the third-person throughout.

There were the occasional bits that stood out unpleasantly mostly because they didn’t jibe completely with what Tolkien put down in Lord of the Rings, and that book was so carefully constructed to make sense in a set world where everything fits together — also, Wikipedia calls the collected works of Tolkien and his son to be a “legendarium,” a great word. Apparently he regretted this later in life, kicking himself over naming the Thorin company of dwarves goofy Norse-sounding names like Ori Dori and Nori or Bifur Bofur and Bombur because they didn’t work comfortably with his extensive genealogies in the appendices of Lord of the Rings.

Oh fucking well. It’s still a good book. Good enough to get me excited about the movie adaptation, even though I’m still a little leery. Good enough that I don’t really mind that I spent Sunday and Monday reading it as opposed to doing my own writing. That’s worth something, to me anyway.

Did You Like “Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things?”

Then take a good taste of “Mitt Romney Standing on Things.“

At one of the two bars I frequent — this one slightly divier than the other — they show KDKA local news every night. In that one half-hour I see on average 3 or 4 political advertisements, and I only see a positive one every few outings. It’s fucking exhausting. So when I get to see something like that Slate photo collection, I try to really treasure it. It has nothing to do with politics, platforms, polling, or other “p” words, it just highlights some of the goofiness that makes everything more bearable. It’s really tiring to be serious all of the time.

I also wrote a blog entry for the store yesterday about “Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors Porch Day” yesterday, which is apparently a thing. Imagine if you will hundreds of people waking up this morning to find squash littering their porches. Doesn’t that warm your heart just a little?

Well, the World’s Ending

Pretty much as soon as the Internet happened to me today I was confronted with this:

“RESIDENTS IN RICHMOND. NORTH RICHMOND AND SAN PABLO. ARE ADVISED
TO SHELTER IN PLACE. GO INSIDE. CLOSE ALL WINDOWS AND DOORS. TURN
OFF ALL HEATERS. AIR CONDITIONERS AND FANS. IF NOT USING THE
FIREPLACE. CLOSE FIREPLACE DAMPERS AND VENTS. AND COVER CRACKS
AROUND DOORS AND WINDOWS WITH TAPE OR DAMPED TOWELS. MEDIA NEWS
NETWORKS WILL CONTINUE TO CARRY UPDATED EMERGENCY INFORMATION.
STAY OFF THE TELEPHONE UNLESS YOU HAVE A LIFE THREATENING
EMERGENCY.”

As it turns out, a Chevron refinery in the Bay Area was leaking diesel in the wee hours of this morning, and around 6:30 the diesel  ignited, spewing huge amounts of oil and diesel smoke into the sky and prompting the “shelter in place” warning that I saw.

The fuck is this shit, man? Really? We can’t go two days between a mass murder and a disaster that while it may not have huge lasting effects is incredibly frightening to me? And people wonder why all I want to do is drink and watch soccer. This is deeply exhausting, bearing witness to this that I have  functionally zero power to do anything about. I barely had any time to enjoy the whole landing-on-Mars thing.

So Much Going On at Two in the Morning

Last night I was receiving two sets of texts.

The first was from my girlfriend, whom I had been planning to see that night. It didn’t work out for the evening and I was certainly a part of why the plans fell though. So the two of us were making sure neither of us were actually too upset. It’s a new enough relationship that we are still treading softly around each other.

The second set of texts was from my best friend, whom I met in Philadelphia when we were two or three. I don’t have internet in my new apartment yet, so he was forwarding me second by second updates on the progress of the Mars Curiosity lander, which landed in a 96-mile diameter crater that contained a mountain — over three miles high — that may be able to tell a geological story about the evolution of Mars.

It’s an amazing juxtaposition. Something that feels so incredibly important in my own, small life — and is important to my small life, don’t get me wrong — directly in contrast with one of the most impressive feats that our species has ever undertaken, that is, sending a probe the size of a subcompact car to drive around on a planet hundreds of thousands of miles away. Let me shuffle them together right quick:

“It’s moving at about 11,700 MPH. They’ve started prep for touchdown. Boosters shutting down and software starting up.”

“I’m glad you had a good night, I’m going to bed now.”

“12,850 MPH and climbing because of Mars pulling it in. Probably about one minute until entry.”

“Ok hon. Sleep well.”

“This is the start of seven minutes in hell that is the landing for the rover.”

“Are you happy with me?”

“It’s as heated as it will be. At top speed. Experiencing eleven G’s. It’s talking to the satellite Odyssey and NASA is receiving telemetry.”

“I am. Sometimes I don’t feel like you are with me. But I like you.”

“I think at this point it is on autopilot. NASA has no control. Everything is going according to plan.”

“Why don’t you feel like that.”

“Fifteen KM altitude. Parachute has deployed. Deceleration has begun. 150 meters per second. Nine KM. 86 meters per second. Four KM.”

“Cause I thought you were upset with me today.”

“Powered flight has begun. One KM up. 50 meters per second. 500 meters. 59 meters. Being lowered. Final touch… almost there.”

“Even if I was upset that doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I’m very very happy. And I want you to be happy.”

“Touchdown confirmed! Safe on Mars. It’s down and still talking to Odyssey. Images are coming though. The first images taken by Curiosity are though. They can see a wheel and confirm it is in the correct position on Mars.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I want you to be happy too.”

Christ What Have I Gotten Myself Into

Last week I ran into an acquaintance of mine — at a bar, because, yeah — and ended up drinking with him and two of his friends for a few hours. He’s a writer, and a good one: he’s published two books, one of nonfiction and one of poetry, has been included in a couple of collections in the lovely company of people like Jamaica Kincaid, John Edgar Wideman, and Lee Gutkind, and has written for publications like Pittsburgh Magazine, McSweeney’s, Mental Floss, and more. We drank, considerably, and had wonderful and wide-ranging conversation. At some point, we decided to each send around 10,000 words this coming Tuesday, and we’ll meet back up a week later to talk about what we’ve written.

The following morning I had a variety of thoughts as I walked to work:

1. Did I just network?

2. Holy shit I have to write another 4,000 in the next week. (I had, unfortunately, overestimated how much I had of this particular piece when all was typed up and collected.)

3. Was I really the only person at that table under 30?

4. What if my 10,000 words really, really suck?

5. If I don’t do this I’m gonna hate myself.

So there it is. I still have another couple thousand words to write in the next four days — though thankfully I have Monday and Tuesday off from work — but I am taking a proactive step and that feels good. Of course at this very moment I’m sitting and writing about this as opposed to actually writing, but it seems inevitable that I put everything off till the true deadline. It’s kind of my style.

If nothing else, I got two free books out of the evening. Both of the guys who will be reading with me have published novels and gave me copies. Christ what have I gotten myself into.

Writing about Cursing When You Can’t Curse

This will be brief. When I was in Philadelphia last week for a night, before going Ithaca, I read an article about a trial in England about racism and vulgarity on the football pitch. Apparently Chelsea captain John Terry, in the midst of an on-field exchange of shit talk with Anton Ferdinand, used the adjective “black” while calling Ferdinand all sorts of offensive things. An off-duty cop witnessed it, and Mr. Terry was arrested.

I’ll pause here to say I know nothing about the state of racism in the United Kingdom and I am not making an argument as to whether or not Terry should have been arrested or convicted.

Instead, I just want to clip some paragraphs from the Times article to show how hilariously goofy it is to have to edit an incredibly vulgar court transcript to make it printable in the Times. A large portion of the article is mutilated quotes from Terry and Ferdinand about the context in which the alleged racist remark was made. For instance:

“According to accounts the players gave in court and the transcript of an interview Mr. Terry gave to the police, the encounter began when Mr. Terry angered Mr. Ferdinand by failing to return a ball that had gone out of bounds.

Mr. Ferdinand then tauntingly reminded Mr. Terry that he had, to paraphrase, illicitly slept with the girlfriend of Wayne Bridge, another player.”

And then:

“Mr. Terry responded with a different gesture meant to suggest, he explained, that ‘Anton had bad breath.’ (He clarified the point in court, saying that he did not mean it literally and that Mr. Ferdinand’s breath, in fact, ‘didn’t smell.’) [...]  As the argument on the field became more heated, Mr. Terry at one point compared Mr. Ferdinand to male genitalia, and then to female genitalia, in consecutive sentences.

“Most of these constituted “handbags,” or “normal verbal exchanges between the players,” Mr. Terry told the police, according to the transcript. These types of things, the players said, include calling other players fat, or taunting them about how their mothers like to have sex with people in other cities.”

The New York Times, everyone.

All I Am Doing is Pouting That There’s No Tennis Today (Well, Not All)

I’m also reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and wondering why I’m not as excited about it as I have been about Vonnegut in the past. I guess its more overtly political than I’m used to. I think Fountainhead perverted my acceptance of political messages in fiction. Vonnegut is overtly political in much of Man Without a Country, but being nonfiction I don’t care so much. Mother Night was about Nazis, ostensibly, but less about the obviously horrendous politics and policy of Nazis — because who needs a novel to tell you that Nazis are bad — and more about personal responsibility. Writing fiction about politics seems to invite you into the same pitfalls as writing period-piece fiction, it ties any message or emotional content to a context that by definition can’t be as universal. It’s not that I disagree with the things Vonnegut’s trying to say but I don’t feel like I’m learning anything new. I don’t particularly care for being a part of a choir being preached to.

Let me start over. I just finished reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and I wonder why I’m not as excited about it as I have been about Vonnegut in the past. Rosewater, the character not the novel, is yurodivy I guess. I haven’t read The Idiot, and probably should, but I’m gonna go ahead and make a broad statement about this type of fiction anyway. A novel about a yurodivy should either: 1. Allow the correctness of the yurodivy be revealed over the course of the novel, or 2. Have a sizable portion of the narrative not be about how correct the yurodivy is. Rosewater, the novel not the character, sets up the character as correct right off the bat. Or is this just because I’m used to Vonnegut’s political ideals and read his stuff in the wrong order? What if I read Rosewater before Man Without a Country? The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the content about the Rhode Island Rosewaters — this is the part of the narrative that’s not about the correctness of the yurodivy — but Vonnegut after a fashion simply stops talking about them. These are his roundest characters and then poof! he abandons them.

I am, sadly, disappointed.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Context of Other People

I think it’s pretty funny that over the last week I’ve read four quality Paris Review interviews — Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez — and of the four the writer whose prose stays closest to reality is Hunter Thompson.

The Garcia Marquez interview was interesting to me in two ways; first because it had cool tidbits about the man and his manner of writing and second when viewed in juxtaposition with the other interviews. For instance, one of my favorite throwaway quote from the Bradbury interview was a wonderful sex joke about short stories versus novels:  ”The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.” So naturally I thought it was really funny when today I read: “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph… At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.” Both are pretty good points — although Bradbury’s was much funnier — and they stand there diametric opposites. I’m not trying to say it’s weird that two great writers have completely different styles or approaches to writing, just that the proximity of my finding the two quotes is entertaining.

And yet, I think there are arguments that can be made to say Bradbury and Garcia Marquez are surprisingly similar writers despite the massive differences in cultural context. In the interview, the interviewer asks Garcia Marquez about the style he used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to convey the fantastic and natural. Apparently he got it from the stories that his grandmother used to tell him. “What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” And when I paused to think about it, maybe five minutes ago, I can say that Bradbury uses a similar brick-faced prose to describe the fantastic in his stories. Again I’m thinking of “The Veldt,” and oh, “The Happiness Machine” from Dandelion Wine. I just remembered a conversation with my mom from years ago, trying to decide if magical realism was a uniquely Latin American phenomenon; my first and best guess at a non-Latin novel in that style was Dandelion Wine. It’s time to reread that.

One last thing, one more quote. I like it because it does two things. Garcia Marquez is talking about his transition from journalism to fiction — though it wasn’t a full or permanent transition:

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”

First, the statement that Kafka showed Garcia Marquez that he was “allowed” to write things like that warms the cockles of my fucking heart. Writers like Garcia Marquez did the exact same thing for me, and it feels wonderful when titans are shown to only be so big when viewed at the right angles.

Second, In One Hundred Years and even more so in Autumn of the Patriarch Garcia Marquez plays around with time, turning around to tell stories concurrent with ones we just read, jumping forward to name a future that he has yet to build to, and so on and so forth. The quote does this too. It starts as a man in 1981 remembering his first experience with Kafka, when he was twenty years younger. But the way that he phrases the last sentence of the quote sounds like it comes directly from the man in his twenties — the man in 1981 did start writing a long time ago, the phrase would be “a much longer time ago” or something similar. Of course it could just be a translation mistake, which would be much less entertaining.

Hunter Thompson Was Never Really That Old

The Paris Review interview with Hunter Thompson.

A friend of mine once told me that my brother and I were the only people she knew who dropped the “S.” from Hunter Thompson’s name. I don’t really know why I do that. I’ve caught myself referring to him simply as “Hunter” once or twice recently and I feel like a douche whenever I do it.

Anyway, the interview: While I am, again, having fun reading these interviews, I still haven’t gotten as much out of one as I did from the Bradbury interview. Like I said about the Vonnegut, it might have something to do with how familiar I am with the writer before the interview. While I love Bradbury’s writing, I really didn’t know much about him as a person; Vonnegut’s nonfiction is intensely personal, and I know more about Hunter Thompson than any other writer I can think of. I’ve read tons of his letters, the majority of his published output (maybe only 55%, but still a majority — the man wrote a ton.) So I didn’t get too much new information from the interview. I do wonder if that was because it took place in 2000 — Thompson didn’t have the final straws of September 11th and the Bush reelection that finally broke his spirit, but he was slowing down, it felt. He recites his beginnings in Louisville and Eglin AFB, and I use the word recite here specifically.

The most entertaining part of the interview, for me, was about his love of deadlines. He loved the push at the end, and it makes sense when you consider that his first “gonzo” work, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” was a lead followed by pages torn out of his notebooks, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas falls apart into transcripts from his tape recorder at one point. He tells a story about writing a eulogy for Allen Ginsberg that Johnny Depp read for him at the funeral; he got it to Depp a half hour before Depp was due on stage, and most of it’s insults and fabrication. It’s quite tender. Too long to reproduce verbatim, but if you click the link it’s about 3/4 of the way down the page. Definitely worth it.

Two quotes:

On writers who say they can’t work drunk or high: “They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, “Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

On the writing process:

Interviewer: “Are there any mnemonic devices that get you going once a deadline is upon you—sharpening pencils, music that you put on, a special place to sit?”

Thompson: “Bestiality films.”

Interviews with Old Men

I’ve been having fun reading “Art of Fiction” interviews from the Paris Review. Two days ago I started with Ray Bradbury, because of course I’ve been all about him in the week following his death. The man just seemed so happy, and a large portion of the interview was conducted in 2010, after his stroke and the death of his wife, at age 89. Anyone who can still be that genuinely happy at that age after those events is someone who deserves a bit or a lot of your respect. My favorite quote, about why he tends to write short stories instead of novels: “ The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.”

Bradbury also apparently didn’t like Vonnegut — it was mutual — and this honestly surprised to me. “I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems.” He didn’t elaborate too much on it, but I got the impression that he is dismissive of Vonnegut because of his general darkness the same way that Bradbury has apparently gotten shit for being overly optimistic. The funny part is I think that Bradbury can be just as dark as Vonnegut — ever read “The Veldt,” from The Illustrated Man? — and Vonnegut has flashes of incredible happiness mixed in with his horribly, horribly sad writing.

So what do I do? I go ahead and read Vonnegut’s Paris Review interview. (I think that sentence was based on a joke from the movie High Fidelity. Remember when he sleeps with Marie de Salle?) Bradbury did have a point when he said Vonnegut has terrible problems, but hearing him — reading him, rather — his sadness is so flat, and he accepts it so effortlessly, that it can also come off as dispassion. The first chunk of the interview is about his WWII experiences, which I’m relatively familiar with through Slaughterhouse V and various things he’s written about the book. I might not have been quite as impressed with the interview because I’m more familiar with Vonnegut outside of his books than Bradbury, but there were still some gems in there I’d like to share.

On his theory of writing: “It was stated by Paul Engle—the founder of the Writers Workshop at Iowa. He told me that, if the workshop ever got a building of its own, these words should be inscribed over the entrance: ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’”

On literature today being less pervasive than in previous eras: “There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass or readers. I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”

On love in stories and novels: “I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.”

On Slaughterhouse Vbeing considered obscene: “My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene. I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse Five?”

On that note, I’m done for the day. Next up: Pablo Neruda and his translator W.S. Merwin in two separate interviews. Oh, and Hunter Thompson, of course.