If On A Winters Night A Traveler on the AudioShocker

I, like many Americans (I haven't followed this too closely, as is my promise, as always, to half-ass my interaction with anything as popular as television--though with the upcoming conversion from analogue transmission to digital, I should be losing my reception entirely in a matter of days), tuned in to most of Conan O'Brien's first week of hosting the Tonight Show. Out of curiosity, I suppose, and some loyalty to the years of my life where I was something of a Conan devotee (usual only bursts of devoutness a few months in length, correlated to a combination of TV-having and availability at the time slot in question). More loyalty to Conan the Simpsons writer, though, since the episodes that most obviously bear his mark are some of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all. Which is to say, I tuned in not necessarily hoping that it be all that funny, and mostly to see Conan sell out to old people demographics and not be nearly funny enough.

It's been okay, I guess. I've always thought the dude was a pretty good interviewer, and that seems to still be the case, and likely to hold the show together while the rest of the shit shores itself up. The only particularly disconcerting aspect to me has been Conan's habit of shouting excitingly after the crappy rock bands on his show play their crappy songs. If I was an old person, I'd never want to hear that kind of shouting.

Watching Conan, I also realized that I'd never bothered to watch Jimmy Fallon as his replacement on Late Night, so after Conan's first show I went ahead and "stuck around" to see what that shit was like. Having The Roots as his "house band," gains him some points, but Fallon is remarkably similar in my mind to Carson Daly; that is, I have no empathy with the kind of idiots and jocks or whoever that actually think the guy is funny or an appealing host. But I was watching it, figured I'd stick it out for at least the whole episode. I thought I would anyway, until Fallon got to his desk, said a special "hello" to hold-over viewers from Conan that had never seen the show before, then proceeded to pull out a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and say that the night's show was sponsored by said beverage, then continued to have a conversation with his announcer about how good the stuff was. I realize that all television is advertising, but that's a bit much, isn't it? Turned the thing off. Disinterest has become boycott.

Really, though, I can't get myself all that worked up about talk shows.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #3: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

This book is a couple decades younger than the first couple entries of the Pete Can't Believe! books, having first appeared in English in 1997 (or maybe '96), but qualifies nonetheless because of the splash that it made almost immediately. This is another example of my predisposition away from popular things: just because the book immediately garnered all this acclaim and then more or less stayed around as a known good, that didn't mean that I should read it. Or, no, I'm being to hard on myself, I'd only really barely heard of it (I Can Believe It!), and am happy to finally have read it.

It's a mythic quest starring a hapless 30 year old who starts the book unemployed and steadily becoming estranged from his wife of several years. I'll give this as advice to any book readers out there: finding books accidentally where some piece of the protagonist's life matches yours always makes for better reading. For my own well-not-quite-thirty-really but very much jobless summer, the match was great, since the passages where the narrator reports reading a book, then taking a nap, and going to the store for a small number of groceries after that struck quite close to home.

I have some sense that there were a lot of references, or homage, or outright adaptation of older Japanese tropes and mores involved in the construction of the book, but they don't necessarily distract from the book in English read by a non-expert, since the dreamlike quality of the plot carries a lot of weight on its own (I don't have any particular desire to go into any kind of cross-cultural comparisons here, at all, with do nods to all the post-colonialists out there, but I would go far as to say that I do reckon that I, in reading this, read a different novel than someone more schooled in the roots of its mystical aspects).

The protagonist is also one of those hero types that does very little. He mostly does what other people tell him to do. That's part of his problem, I suppose. What he succeeds at doing best is clubbing a guy (maybe two) with a baseball bat. Which is actually pretty cool in its own right. But since he's kind of carried along in the plot by the various characters that are introduced and help him, it strengthens that bond between reader and action, as any reader (even in Choose Your Own Adventure books) is always carried along by the plot of what they're reading (I reckon this is why so many literary theorist's want to empower readers, since all readers are ultimately powerless to words of the text they're reading).

Or maybe I just think that under the influence of entry #2 of this reading sequence, associating If on a winter night a traveler's reader-protagonist with all other readers and protagonists. Nah... the parallel is there.

For July 6th: Sharp Teeth

For August 3rd: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

So Nick? Did you wind up seeing Star Trek? Pretty good, right? Probably, like, a better movie than Wolverine was, huh? Good enough, in fact, that in the box office figures, this past weekends new should-be blockbuster release, Angels & Demons barely beat it out while Wolvie experienced his second straight weekend of precipitous decline. I wasn't about to run out to see A&D, either.

DVD Round-Up

Beyond just reading novels and generally not working, not doing much of anything at all, really, I've decided to keep my internet DVD rental service within my budget, as getting a few movies a week to watch seems to take the edge off of having so many hours a day to be so painfully aware of my own uselessness (a pretty straightfoward reaction to being jobless, I reckon). So I've finally gotten around to seeing a bunch of movies that came out sometime in the past:

Once: This wasn't terrible. As much as I haven't gone for the whole singer-songwriter thing since the first half of my sophomore year of college, the music in this was okay, and the whole notion of making a small movie about making music is one way to get me to admit that not everything sucks. It's interesting to me too, 'cause I reckon this movie did well enough last year that people will be trying to repeat the success, and make more "indie-pop" musicals or whatever. But, as generally impressed as I was with this movie, I switch right back to my more usual cynical appraising as soon as I think of the idea that there would be a market for this stuff. Not that I want to dredge up any old issues of hipsters and what they ruin (see early Culturologies for the epic hipster conversation of 2008), but I'd imagine that this, if co-opted by indie-panderers, would become a style of movie which falls ever so neatly into that category of "the new sincerity," that explicitly post-ironic or anti-ironic aesthetic mush that gives cultural credence to treacle in the process of recanting its own usually heavily ironicized worldview.

Role Models: I realize that he wasn't directly involved with this movie, but I'm gonna go ahead and make the association: Judd Apatow is ruining American comedies. There's plenty to like about Role Models (not the least of which is the fact that the above-mentioned comedy-ruiner isn't actually involved). Actually, I almost went and saw this in the theaters. There are some good jokes, and Seann William Scott is a funny guy. David Wain is a funny guy. The Jesus bit from The Ten was funny enough to make seeing something with Wain and Rudd working together a reasonable thing to do. But I can't help but feel like this movie would have been funnier if certain other movies hadn't built a certain set of expectations for character arc and nerd-comfort in comedies. Maybe it's wrong to blame other movie-makers for the badness of something unrelated, but I feel like the comparison is an obvious one to make. At least we have the eminent release of The State DVDs to look forward to.

My attitude there is also influenced by having finally gotten around to seeing Pineapple Express, which was barely funny at all, and mostly bad. And Knocked Up was unwatchable. Normally, my attitude with this online-based DVD renting is that to get my money's worth, I must watch fully (not including special features or commentary tracks) everything that I rent, but I sent back Knocked Up after watching maybe its first twenty (if that) miserable minutes. And, for comparison, I did manage to watch all of

Leonard Part 6: This is a terrible movie. The only reason I managed to get through the whole thing was that the villainess was a crazy vegetarian woman who used henchmen dressed like animals, and lots of actual animals to accomplish her nefarious plots. This thing won a ton of Razzies back in '89, deservedly so. Cosby's at his worst. But it is made worthwhile because at a crucial point, Cosby defeats the head henchman by getting him to take a bite of a hotdog, which causes the henchman's head to explode (it appears to have been filled with sawdust, I guess to keep their PG rating).

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #2: If on a winter's night a traveler

This book is probably only on your radar if you went to college, and maybe even only if you studied some amount of English literature (though it was originally written in Italian, and translated into English). Why? Because it's probably one of the better examples of the kind of book which gets labeled as "postmodern" but is actually quite good. The structure is very interesting, with ten sections each being the first few pages of different novels which a character, addressed in the second person, gets involved with in interstitial chapters, in a wild international hunt for an elusive entire book.

Those of you that did study some amount of English probably see this as being indicative of the literary atmosphere in Europe after the ground-breaking critical work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, who liberated the text from the author, the reader from the author, the text from meaning, etcetera etcetera. The poor protagonist of If, then, is a kind of atavistic fellow who just wants to read a good old fashioned book, and doesn't like all this fragmentation and historicizing of the text. There's an awful lot of heady nonsense to be said/written (of course, if we're speaking post-Derrida, then everything is "writing") about If on, which is probably why I never bothered reading it until now.

Last week, I talked a little bit about the notion of the canon, and the fact that there are many different canons of work that all exist simultaneously, as different ways to sort the same set of books (the big set being something like All The Books That Are Readable By Demographic X). If on a, to its detriment, falls into the canon of books That Are Likely To Be Talked About By Annoying Lit Majors That Think They Know Something About Stuff, when, of course, they know very little. It's a reasonable stance, especially the further one gets from having been in an American college or university, to hate what's broadly called in this country "postmodernism".

But it's a really good book! I don't often go for books that use "you" like this (see Bright Lights, Big City for another--very different--example), but it works here, as its taken to such ridiculous heights as the poor Reader tries to keep a hold on any of the books he starts to read. In the end, if I were to read some sort of philsophical or theoretical aspect into If on a winter's, it'd be that it's pro-old-fashioned reading, rather than against it, and demonstrating that, as much as Barthes and his acolytes might proclaim the author's death, the reader is never all that empowered either. Language rules (the only theory that I know that actively works with this notion that language-itself yields the power in cultural works is the still-burgeoning "meme theory" which rises out of neo-Darwinism (the word "meme" was coined by heavy-hitting evolutionist Richard Dawkins, though, in anything I've read, he hasn't returned to the concept all that much).

Next Week: Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (this might actually take me more than a week to read, since its pretty thick).

For June 1st: Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly

For July 6th: Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

Other requests?