AudioShocker

I've never been one to shy away from a fight (about cultural/artistic stuff, anyway), so given Nick's better-make-up-for-everyone-else-on-the-planet-hating-this-movie inexplicably (okay, it is explicable, and well within Nick's usual taste) positive attitude towards the Wolverine movie--as much as I understand why it might make sense that I liked the movie, I still can't go back and make myself think it was better; I was entertained, mostly, but distractedly so--my initial impulse this week is to join the already-happening, seemingly inevitable conversation about the fact that Star Trek was a way better movie than Wolverine, listing such details as the fact that, despite Wolverine having a bigger opening weekend, Star Trek will certainly make more money in the long run and not experience nearly as a steep a decline in box office figures from its first to its second weekend. But I'm not going to. It's not that interesting. The movies are separate beasts. I was rather wholly satisfied by Star Trek; I think that it was a very strong "reboot" as well. I'm generally a sucker for sci-fi any way, but I did enjoy their method of clarifying why this new Star Trek was going to be different, and it didn't matter that it would be different.

Since I'm not going to talk about that stuff, I'm left in the usual bind of having not all that much to say. Thirty-one blog posts (even though at least two of those are non-posts) is a lot to come up with, especially since I try pretty hard not to repeat myself too much. Certain themes come up again and again, certainly, but you know, I try to keep it fresh... I suppose I could be preparing more, and stop writing these things at the last minute, since that technique was mostly an artifact of the strenuous schedule that I was a Graduate student maintain during the semester, and now that the semester is over and I have no class and no job I could be rededicating myself to this column. But this is neither here nor there, is it?

Once again, I'm getting the impulse to broaden what it is that I talk about in these here columns, but my concern there is that, without the confines of popular culture (however out of touch with pop I might be), I'll get even more pedantic and obtuse than I already am. Which would be a crying shame.

This, too, then, though slightly longer than the previous non-posts, is still mostly a non-post. Ugh.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #1: Slaughterhouse-Five

As much as I'm a rabid fan of several things (let's say, Mr. Show, Pierre Boulez, and the first six seasons of The Simpsons as examples), I tend to be wary of books or movies or tv shows that spawn hideous armies of obsessive nerd fans. Given that I can admit to the rabidity of several of my own fandoms, this might be easily explained away as nerd insecurity or nerd delusion, but I don't think it's that easy. Especially given the amount of easily consumable crap produced by the culture industry, the opposite impulse, to glom onto something seen as "outside" the system or typical cultural consumption seems like a fine impulse, but being contrary doesn't necessarily lead to good taste.

My own impulses, then, as a consumer are both anti-mainstream and anti-outsider. I guess that's what makes me such a negative dude about so much of what there is in the world. I've talked about this before, my notion of things being "good for good reasons," and the fact that this goodness, as I perceive it, can be separated from its mode of production. So, just as some corporate popular stuff is actually good, much of what is produced independently or "alternatively" is total crap. Which is fine. I do still prefer independent garbage to mainstream garbage (or, there's a threshold of pretension over which independent badness becomes worse than corporate badness).

So most questions come up when deciding whether or not something is "good", or more accurately, when defending said notions of "goodness" to other people. This comes up, more than with anything else, I think, for me, when discussing books (or "literature"). Case in point: I refuse to read Harry Potter. I am too cool for it, and am not gonna read a bunch of mediocre children's books just because everyone else in the damn English-speaking world is. When I announce this stance (which I guess is already outdated since the HP thing has come and gone) to some other people, they are quite incensed, the main argument against me being that its hypocritical to read so deeply into the established canon of Western literature, to take the words and attitudes of a bunch of dead white men as being worth listening to, but ignoring the attitudes of the bunch of contemporary actually living, and supposedly diverse readers of Harry Potter.

Some of those folks, especially ones that took any literary theory classes in college, and have been seduced by the watered-down nonsensical version of "postmodernism" popular at many American colleges' English departments, extend that argument further to say that the canon should be dismantled, and that I, as an "inevitably postmodernized" reader should "unlearn" the precepts of my literary forebears. But there's always a canon, always will be a canon, and there cannot not not be a canon. We can water it down if we like, but there will always be classics, or books that you have to have read to join a given discussion (to book-club Slaughterhouse-Five, it will be much easier if you have read the book); to overthrow the white patriarchal hegemonic canon is not to overthrow the canon itself, but to modify its contents.

My canon, then, would be based on books that are "good for good reasons," and I'm willing to take a wide variety of people's words for it. But wide-spread commercial success is not a model for goodness that I at all trust. And there are plenty of other books to be read instead. The choice of reading, making and managing a reading list, seems to be what gets the obsessive nerds in trouble--the people who love Kurt Vonnegut so much that they read him over and over again, etc. Which is where I come to distrust the popularity; if there's a particular aspect of Vonnegut that makes him so nerd-popular, how can I be sure that other crappier aspects of his work are being overshadowed by the disproportionate goodness of whatever "good" parts?

But I have read several of his books in the past, and liked them quite a bit. I really liked Cat's Cradle and Mother Night. I guess I had never quite gotten around to reading Slaughterhouse-Five until now because it's the most famous, most popular of his books, and I more or less knew its conceit and plot already, from having heard so much about it.

So, yeah, it's a pretty good book. I didn't like it as much as Cat's Cradle, which probably makes me a simpleton in the minds of many Vonnegut fans, but I wasn't as impressed with the getting unstuck in time thing from S-5 as I was with the Ice-9 in CC. Especially because S-5 is quite outward in its anti-warness, the fatalism common to both books is harder to swallow there, since to me it muddles the parable (this feeling of muddledness is probably what gets me labeled as a simpleton by the smarter Vonnegut fans out there (in a similar way, I will accuse the movie Donnie Darko of being muddled, to find myself being accused of not being as smart as I think I am)).

Or maybe S-5's sci-fi elements are just the wrong ones for me. I am thoroughly underwhelmed by the whole Tralfamadore thing. What am I supposed to do? I can't whelm myself on the book's behalf, just because I understand that other people really like it. I would say, though, that there's no particularly good reason for me to have not read it by now, since it only took a few hours to read. Short books have something going for them. They definitely do.

Next Week: Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

And we'll figure out a schedule for the more official "book club" entries (which mostly involves me acquiring a copy of that book Neal wants to read--gotta go join my local library).