BOOK(s): Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son ~ Michael Chabon & Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace ~ Ayelet Waldman
It made sense to read these essay collections co-currently. Chabon and Waldman are married, were recently were profiled in the NY Times Styles section, and also named one among the “annoying literary lovebirds” by Gawker. There are so many reasons I should loathe them: their charming Craftsman-style house in Berkeley, their four hip kids, their literary fame and fortune, the fact that Waldmen writes a lot about parenting. However, Chabon is one of my favorite modern authors (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite books, ever), and I admire that Waldman admitted in a NYT “Modern Love” column that not only did she still have mad, passionate sex with her husband, she loved him more than her kids, and was able to defend herself after being savaged by every media outlet, mommy, and mommyblogger in the known universe. Seriously, it pissed off a lot of women, but I think it’s a beautifully written essay, where she compares her husband to the sun and her children to the moons. I don’t begrudge her for loving her husband more than her kids one bit. In fact, I think that’s the reason my parents have been married 50+ years.
Still, I must admit that I preferred Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs because we share many of the same interests (e.g. comics, music, reading). He includes essays about all of these topics, along with the bris of his first son, the early death of David Foster Wallace, and how upon entering the MFA program at UC-Irvine at age 22 he was clearly a “little shit”: “Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the mid-sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age. Because I was a bright and would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzsche.” As a graduate school survivor, I knew many of these “little shits” from seminars, constantly playing the game of “my academic wang is bigger than your academic wang, and you sitting over there, since you don’t even have an academic wang, just an academic gash, your opinion on the subject at hand means absolutely nothing”.
I also enjoyed “Verging”, where Chabon recounts sleeping with a 35-year-old friend of his mother when he was 15, and “The Splendors of Crap”, an appreciation of vintage crappy kid entertainment, and how his kid’s crap entertainment differs from his (and is vastly inferior.)
While Chabon’s collection focuses on all aspects of his masculinity - as a son, as a brother, as a single man, as a husband, as a father - Waldman’s Bad Mother is almost entirely mom-focused. While I would normally find this vomitous as a committed childfree person, I enjoyed the collection. Most likely this is because Waldman didn’t write about how cute her kids’ bodily functions are, but about the ugly truths of parenting instead, without being all “Dooce-y” about it. Waldman is a writer (and probably developed the skills from her years as a lawyer), not just a blogger who happened to hit it big and get a book contract.
Waldman’s best essay in Bad Mother is “Breast is Best”, a call to action of how women need to stop judging each other’s childcare choices straight to their faces without having all the facts. She recounts an incident while standing in like at a bakery, giving her infant son a bottle. The woman standing behind her scolded her for not breastfeeding. Waldman, exhausted, broke into tears and explained that it was breastmilk, but she had to feed him from a bottle because of her son’s palate abnormality. “What is it about parenting that allows us to indulge our inner scold? Normally most of us don’t feel particularly threatened about the choices other people make. You live in a split-level ranch, I live in a Craftsman bungalow. I might like your house more than yours - I might even tell a friend I think your house is ugly - but I’d never stop you on the street and tell you to do something about your aluminum siding.”
Another good selection is “Tech Support”, in which she examines the way pregnancy and parenting online were so much different in 1997 as opposed to 2007. In 1997 Waldman participated on a private listserv with about 50 other women due in the month of June; all used their full names when posting. By the time she started writing a column on Salon in 2005, web discourse had completely devolved, something she attributes in part to the ability to hide behind screen monikers and non-identifiable e-mail addresses (like Gmail or Hotmail). Now that there’s no more reliance on “official” e-mail address (like those with .edu or .gov), it’s so much easier to criticize people for their choices. The most painful essay is “Rocketship”, her story about terminating a pregnancy after a genetic abnormality - which may or may have not have manifested itself into physical, mental, and developmental defects after birth - was detected with amniocentesis. After hours of reading and internet research, she finds herself debating “how much defect” she could handle: “I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate - physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet - I bet there are parents in the world who’d be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn’t go there.”
Yes, I probably should find Chabon and Waldman annoying and smug. But these collections are just so well done (especially Chabon’s, but then again I may be a bit biased) that I’ll just reserve my literary-related hatred for talentless, flash-in-the-pan bloggers with cushy, unnecessary book contracts.
Sequential Art Month for NaBloPoMo on SPCHQ!
For the fourth consecutive year, I’ll be participating in November’s National Blog Posting Month, a blogging alternative to National Novel Writing Month. Although there is no official theme for the month, SPCHQ’s unofficial theme will be SEQUENTIAL ART, a.k.a. comics.
So, please check Syndicate Product Covert HQ for all types of nifty information!
The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment ~ A.J. Jacobs
For this capsule review, I’m going to utilize “Radical Honesty”, a technique Jacobs tests out for 30 days in the course of his nine “experiments”: Mr. Jacobs, I did not enjoy this book at all. You have a smug, snickering writing style that perhaps is fine for an article in Esquire magazine from time to time (from whence the bulk of this book originated), but is grating and annoying en mass. I don’t care about you as a person, don’t really believe you learned anything from trying to outsource your life to India, learning to only do one task at a time, or doing all of the tasks your wife usually handles. Hopefully your sock puppeting as an attractive woman on a dating site (while utilizing your nanny to go out on the dates) exposed you a little bit to the misogyny and violent sexual hatred women face every day. But it probably didn’t. Mr. Jacobs, you’ve already read the encyclopedia and lived by the Bible for a year, maybe it’s time to give up this stunt writing and leave it to younger, fresher people. For example, The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose, one of your former interns was engaging, interesting to read, and never truly ridiculed its subjects (students of Liberty University). Roose respected his “subjects” (so to speak), you do not. In closing sir, you are an asshole.
Sequential Art: The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror 2009
Various Writers and Artists, published by Bongo
For this year’s annual Halloween comic issue, Matt Groening turned the work over to a slew of indie comic artists, and the results are often amusing and disturbing, but still a lot of fun. Features Jeffrey Brown, John Vermilyea, Tim Hensley, and other faves from the Fantagraphics, Picturebox, and Kramers Ergot collectives.
Sequential Art: Strange Tales
Various Writers and Artists, published by Marvel
Strange Tales is a 3 issue mini-series featuring indie comic artists’ takes on Marvel characters. Each oversize issue contains several self-contained stories by artists such as JamesKochalka, Dash Shaw, Johnny Ryan, Jim Rugg, and Tony Millionaire. The sole multi-part story running through all issues is Peter Bagge’s “The Incorrigible Hulk”, an amusing take on Dr. Bruce Banner. This is an awesome comic project, and hopefully will introduce indie comic artists to mainstream readers.
Music: POPULAR SONGS ~ YO LA TENGO
It pains me to write this, but the latest release from YLT is kinda… boring. And derivative. Derivative as in echoes of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” in “When It’s Dark”, and classic Motown in the opening of “If It’s True” (although there is some nice organ playing in there as well). The three epics that close the album - “More Stars Than There Are In Heaven” (9:39), “The Fireside” (11:25), and “And The Glitter is Gone” (15:24) - redeem it somewhat.
MUSIC: NOBODY CAN DANCE ~ BIG STAR
My latest Big Star bender was inspired by listening to the Sound Opinions episode exploring their classic albums #1 Record and Radio City (listen to the show here). The Big Star discography is fairly small, so this collection of studio rehearsals and a live performance is a good addition to their studio work. (Still not sure if I’m going to pick up the recently-released Keep an Eye on the Sky box set, as there’s nothing truly unheard on it.)
Music: LEAN FORWARD ~ Bottle Rockets
A fair-to-middling effort from Festus, MO’s favorite sons, more mediocre than not. The album begins strongly with “The Long Way” and “Shame on Me”, but then tries too hard to achieve a chooglin’, Allman Brothers-esque groove, and stumbles hard. The Bottle Rockets fail when they try to be timely and topical, as on “Hard Times” and the dreadful anti-war screed “Kid Next Door”. Although “Get on the Bus” is an amusing ode to the hell of public transit, the band has also lost any sense of humor they had on previous songs (e.g. “Indianapolis”, “The Bars on Fire”, “Gotta Get Up”). “Open Your Eyes” is one of the most unconvincing love songs ever, but “Slip Away” (not a Clarence Carter cover, sadly) has its charms. Overall, a disappointment from one of my well-liked bands.
BOOK: Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life ~ John Sellers
I found the first half or so of this memoir quite compelling, especially since Sellers’ believes (as do I), that 1970 was an awesome year to be born: “But a subtler factor - and I suppose that this part applies to most Gen-X kids, not just those born in 1970 - is that we have been blessed with a prosperous shuttle run through pop-culture history. We have the good fortune of being too young to have any real memories of Watergate, Vietnam, and Tiny Tim, and too old to have been susceptible to Barney, New Kids on the Block, and the expression “gettin’ jiggy wit’ it”. The book lost my interest when it turned into specifically “How Guided By Voices Saved My Life”. While I completely understand falling in love with a band (more than I’d like to admit, actually), reading about someone else’s obsession with a disbanded band I have little interest in, about albums and songs I’ve never heard (outside of the Alien Lanes album), and how cool it was to get drunk with lead singer Robert Pollard at his house, aka the “Monument Club” got tired quickly. In addition, the use of mammoth footnotes should have started and ended with David Foster Wallace.
BOOK: Shadow of the Hedgemon ~ Orson Scott Card
Sorry OSC, I tried. I really did. Ender’s Game was interesting, Ender’s Shadow was even more compelling, but this novel about what happens to the members of Ender’s Dragon Army after the bugger war was a boring, boring, read. Full disclosure: I actually gave up halfway through and tracked down a summary of the rest of the action, which actually wasn’t much more action at all.
MUSIC: Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs
World Cafe Live, Philadelphia PA, 9/9/2009
Nice evening of 60s and 70s pop covers from a supersized Sweet (still floppy haired, though) and superskinny Hoffs (still with that Valley Girl accent), drawn mostly from their two UNDER THE COVERS albums, with “Divine Intervention” and “In Your Room” mixed in for variety. The highlight of the evening was a surprise performance of “Somewhere Along the Way” by the fictional band The Carrie Nations, from the classic film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. While I enjoyed the music and the banter, I was less than thrilled with the World Cafe Live and their NYC-level prices. Unfortunately, WCL seems to have a lock on these size shows, too small for a theater but too big for a bar or club.
BOOK: Sandman Slim ~ Richard Kadrey
I was expecting to enjoy this “supernatural urban noir” novel about escapee from hell (literally) James Stark and his revenge on those who banished him there 11 years prior, as it had the William Gibson blurb of approval on the back cover. However, even with the dirty Los Angeles setting, the interesting juxtapositions of the real and the supernatural worlds existing alongside each other, and dark bloody violence, it became a drag after about 300 pages and a chore to slog through the remaining 100 pages. This could have been a great pulpy novel if it had just been tightened up to about half its length, or even broken into a series.
Movie: PUSH
2009, Directed by Paul McGuigan
An unfortunate muddled mess of a science fiction film, re-treading the “mutants vs. normals” yet again. The unusual Hong Kong setting and the amazingly compelling Dakota Fanning made it tolerable. Side Note to the Entertainment Powers That Be: Please do not let Dakota Fanning disintegrate into a skank. She’s got so much presence, dare I say “gravitas”, that it’s impossible to keep your focus off of her. She was the only worthwhile element in War of the Worlds, and I can’t wait to see her as Cherie Currie in The Runaways next year.
Movie: GHOST TOWN
2008, Directed by David Koepp
Poster tagline: “He sees dead people. And they annoy him.” Ricky Gervais played his character well, a droll, finicky dentist who temporarily dies during a colonoscopy, gaining the power to interact with the deceased. As a fellow introvert, I found this to be a charming little movie that deserved a bigger audience, even if it did fall into the tired resolution of “unpleasant person has to help semi-dead people move on, and in the process learns something about himself”. Unfortunately, GHOST TOWN got lost in the morass of “quirky” films too big for art theaters, but too small for the multiplexes. Worth a rental or catching on cable.
BOOK: I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era ~ William Knoedelseder
Very compelling read about a scene I knew little about: stand-up comedy in Los Angeles in the 70s, which was fairly insane. This “golden era” ended after the strike against The Comedy Store in 1979, with comedians protesting for compensated performances as opposed to the unpaid “workshop” in which they had been working for years. This book is a solid investigation of the decade from the POVs of the comedians (Letterman, Leno, Richard Lewis, Tom Dressden), the club owners (Mitzi Shore of The Comedy Store, Bud Friedman of the Improv), producers and others in the entertainment business. While it’s a small detail, I also appreciate that I’m Dying Up Here is carefully indexed, something I don’t find often enough in non-fiction books such as this.
