An Uncomfortable Question

In Andy Warhol Was A Hoarder, author Claudia Kalb examines the lives of various historical figures and consults with psychologists and mental health experts to search for an understanding of how those figures were fueled by ailments that medical science did not yet fully understand (and, in some cases, still doesn't). From Warhol's hoarding, to Marilyn Monroe's borderline personality disorder, to Howard Hughes' OCD, Kalb provides compelling cases for what they might be diagnosed with according to the DSM-5. The book probably falls short of perfect analysis, but it's also a lot higher than typical pop psychology, treating its subjects with sensitivity and sympathy.

One of the sections I found most striking was the chapter on architect Frank Lloyd Wright, about whom I knew nothing going in. But reading Kalb's analysis of the man, an examination of narcissistic personality disorder, I found myself drawing comparisons that I had no business drawing, not least because those comparisons immediately seemed too... facile? Too obvious? One of those, probably. Kalb writes: "Impertinent, pioneering, and dramatic, Wright embraced his ego throughout his life, used it to get ahead and promoted it to the world without an ounce of modesty."

A bit further on, discussing Wright's less-than-reliable autobiography, she says: "Rewriting one's past is characteristic of narcissistic people, who become adept at embellishing life stories to enhance their self-image. What matters is that Wright's account is the truth that he fashioned and wished others to believe."

Later, she lays out the checklist for NPD: "a grandiose sense of self-importance; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love... ; a need for excessive admiration; a sense of entitlement; exploitative behavior in relationships; a lack of empathy..." To name just a few.

Where could I possibly be going with this?

The comparison between Wright and Donald Trump, a thatch-roofed bologna loaf, is not a perfect one-to-one. Kalb cites Wright's son, John, in noting that "money didn't have value, other than getting [Wright] what he wanted." For Trump, however, money is everything--both the means and the end to anything a person might pursue. Also, Wright could be cold, even cruel, toward his children; John reported that, while working for his father, Wright Senior would deduct from John's salary everything that his son had cost him throughout his life, "including obstetrics." Trump, on the other hand, adores his children. Although that adoration does sometimes express itself in inappropriate and horrifying ways.

And yet. Both Wright and Trump are builders. They both revel in self-promotion. They've even both set up, ahem, schools to spread their wisdom to future generations. At Wright's Taliesin, "apprentices took part in running the day-to-day operations of the 200-acre estate... They hoed the fields, tended the manure pit, cooked meals, did laundry, hauled stones, cut trees, and built their own lodging. There was no formal instruction; instead, apprentices were awarded the opportunity to work alongside Wright in his studio. The annual price tag for this privilege was steep. Initially set at $650--more than Ivy League tuition--it quickly grew to $1,100." At Trump University... well, maybe I should reserve judgment until the lawsuit is finished.

Now, the Goldwater Rule exists for a reason. And I am not a trained psychologist. And I have not spoken with professional mental health experts, as Kalb did. And truth be told, I can only spell "psychiatry" with the help of spellcheck. So for me to try to analyze a man I have never met is not so much 'irresponsible and unethical' as it is 'dumb and pointless.' But as someone who thinks about these subjects far more than is healthy, I can say that I've reached a very uncomfortable conundrum.

In his delightful book, How To Fight Presidents, Dan O'Brien puts forward that "Only a person with an unfathomably huge ego and an off-the-charts level of blind self-confidence and an insatiable hunger for control could look at America, in all of her enormity, with all of her complexity, with all of her beauty and flaws and strength and power, and say, 'Yeah. I should be put in charge of that.'" And in my review of that book, I wrote, "Presidents are insane. We need them to be or we'd have no one else willing to do the job." I bought O'Brien's assertion. I still kinda do. So where does that leave me vis-a-vis Trump, who so energetically embodies that assertion?

Feeling a sudden need to take a very long shower, it seems to me that the best way to analyze Trump by O'Brien's standard would be to call him overqualified for the presidency. I know, I know: gross. But it's a pill that might be worth swallowing. Because that's a diagnosis that I feel comfortable applying. And if we believe that all he really wants is the attention, maybe in this case we should give the baby his bottle.

Infomocracy

"You would think, with all the access to Information, that people would pay more attention to what their governments do in other centenals, but you know what they say: you can give a voter Information, but you can't make him think."
--Malka Older, Infomocracy

In a semi-distant future, a social mega-network named Information provides the infrastructure for people to do seemingly everything, from business to play to politics. Using one of the global micro-democracy's decennial elections as a stage, author Malka Older follows a handful of political operatives and social network bureaucrats to examine the intersections of information and democracy and what humanity does at those intersections.

As a guy who loves information and people having access to that information, I find Information (a kind of Facebook-Wikipedia hybrid for everyone and everything) to be bloody fantastic. As a guy who loves privacy and the scrupulous use of information, I find Information to be bloody scary. That dichotomy is something that Older explores in Infomocracy's better touches. In an early scene, one of our lead characters, Ken, a political operative whose principles appear to be flagging, checks the personal Information of a flight attendant who has allowed some of her Information to be public. While he doesn't pick up much beyond what is public, another lead character, Mishima, an agent for Information, frequently uses her considerable skill and access to peruse Information in a way that someone like Ken would never think to. In a smaller, more personal story, where the stakes didn't have to be--literally--worldwide, there would be room for Older to explore this tension between the usefulness and creepiness of near-unlimited Information.

Such a story might also give us more time with Mishima, a fantastically drawn character who, in less-skilled hands, might've become a competence porn figure. Her hyper-competence and workaholic nature are balanced by her mistrust and paranoia, faults that she not only possesses but acknowledges (if only to herself and, later, to Ken) in a refreshing take on an old trope.

Information, like information, is neither good nor bad but can and is used for both. Its indispensability makes it both revered and distrusted, depending on which character Older is working with. It doesn't matter so much what types of information one makes available, it's who's using it. And why. With a tool so big and necessary, the micro-democracy, and therefore the world, is ripe for hi-jacking.

In an election year, you'd think--or at least I had thought--that the micro-democracy and election-hacking would be the most intriguing items. Curiously, this wasn't the case. The idea and execution of the elections were interesting, but the shadowy machinations were a bit too shadowy. It would help to know what the stakes are: who the political parties are (policies, like some characters, are sometimes only briefly outlined) and what the characters behind the conspiracies stand to gain or lose. The techno-thriller that takes up the last act of the book loses momentum because I know that I should be outraged by the scheming (and in theory, I am--election-hacking is bad) but my level of investment was not what it might have been.

Still, Older has constructed a wonderfully flawed and detailed society. And there were clearly a lot of details left on the cutting room floor, such as how the world gave itself over to the micro-democracy and how Information managed to become the conduit for that democracy (the theme of "who's really in charge here" is a nicely subtle one throughout the book). Having had experience rendering too much exposition, I appreciate Older's wisdom in not bothering to explain everything.

Indeed, she seems to want to share a lot more. By giving us a world-spanning, high-stakes, high-concept sci-fi thriller, she leaves us with the broad strokes, sacrificing some of the juicy detail that might be better provided from an on-the-ground viewpoint of someone living in the micro-democracy, under Information. More time with someone like Doumaine, an under-utilized character who is working to undermine the micro-democracy until he mostly disappears for the second half, would give us a new take on Older's society, fleshing it out. If Infomocracy has one flaw, it's that there's too much to show and too little space to do it in. But maybe that's what the sequel will be for.

Grade: A-

In Which I Look Awkward on Camera

As part of my partnership with aois21, here is the first of several promotional videos for Nos Populus and The Half-Drunken Scribe. For regular readers, there's not a lot here that's new, but you get to see my t-shirt with its stretched-out collar and hear my Tracey Ullman-era Homer Simpson voice* talking about my writing. And blinking... so much blinking.

My apologies to aois21 for not having prepared for this any better. I could've at least worn a decent shirt. I can't take myself anywhere. If I had prepared more, I would've had more to say, but I'm not all that eloquent when on the spot. I tend to just let syllables fall out of my mouth and hope for the best.

I'll probably definitely think of some more footnotes later but just to start: I was glib in talking about the difficulty of making politics seem more absurd than they are. I'd shudder if I heard that kind of oversimplification coming out of someone else. So if I can be given a chance to explain (which, hey, I have been): Congress is terrible. We all agree? Good, moving on. No, I don't choose difficult targets. But my fear while writing Nos Populus was that transcribing real speeches and documenting real events (which might've been possible in this context) wouldn't have translated and probably would've come off boring, instead of clownish and nauseating. So I decided to amplify the inanity that already was/is, subsequently creating more work for myself.

Second, in an upcoming video, I mention Sinclair Lewis as an influence. For completeness' sake, this is the book that first sparked the idea that would become Nos Populus, an influence I've mentioned before. Sad to say, that book is not one of Lewis' best (there's a reason it was out of print for so many years). Instead, I'd suggest starting with Main Street, a book that got Lewis into some trouble, forcing him to create the fictional city of Zenith, Winnemac, so he could have a setting for his yarns that didn't offend the thin-skinned reading public of the 1920s (we're bigger than that now). 

That's it for now. More videos to come.

*The voice was initially based on Walter Matthau, but it always sounded to me like Matthau talking into a dimwit filter. Which, in a way...

How To Fight Presidents

"The desire to be president is a currently undiagnosed but very specific form of insanity. Only a person with an unfathomably huge ego and an off-the-charts level of blind self-confidence and an insatiable hunger for control could look at America, in all of her enormity, with all of her complexity, with all of her beauty and flaws and strength and power, and say, "Yeah. I should be in charge of that." Only a lunatic would look at a job where you get slandered and scrutinized and attacked by the media and sometimes even assassinated and say, 'Sign me up!'"
--Daniel O'Brien, How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country

The worst aspect of school is that I don't get much time to read for pleasure. I mean, I do still read for pleasure. I just feel guilty about it in a way that I didn't before.

With How To Fight Presidents, Cracked's Dan O'Brien has constructed a better written, more entertaining counterpoint to Christopher Hitchens' assertion about voters getting the mad, narcissistic politicians they deserve. Not in the sense that Hitchens was wrong, just that we might as well embrace the inevitable. As long as this land has a job with that much responsibility and people who are "crazy ambitious and obsessed with power to an unhealthy degree," this is the system we're going to have. Not that this is always a good thing--and O'Brien is quick to lambast the likes of Van Buren, Fillmore, and Buchanan--but at least it's sometimes an entertaining thing. In the long run. You know, after we've had time to process their horrific insanity.

Unfortunately, that process takes so long that by the time we've done it, we've also thoroughly sanitized these men (all men, so far--I wonder if part of the appeal of a female president is to see if the insanity manifests any differently). By the time we're ready to learn about an historic figure, we've eliminated all of the worthwhile information, shamefully cutting the most savory chunks of history from our cultural awareness. By bringing tidbits such as Zachary Taylor's bizarre cherry-fueled death to the masses in digestible form, O'Brien is truly doing the Lord's work.

O'Brien highlights a lot of facts about presidents that the dutiful nerd already knows. Like Andrew Jackson's crazed duel lust (that is, a lust for dueling and violence more generally). Or William Howard Taft and the bathtub. Or the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was basically President Batman, while his fifth cousin, Franklin Delano, was Iron Man (making James Madison... Ant Man? O'Brien never says).

However, I was less familiar with Calvin Coolidge's Norman Batesian disposition. Or John Quincy Adams' disturbing fondness for literal self-flagellation. And while I could've surmised LBJ's dick-centric egotism (who couldn't have?), O'Brien presents a few juicy more details to back that up (okay, I'll give you one: Johnson would casually pee on secret service agents' legs when it was a convenient solution).

If any of these revelations are surprising, it's only because of the aforementioned sanitized history that we were all fed in school. We get the dull falsehood about George Washington and the cherry tree, not the discomforting admission that Washington enjoyed being shot at while in battle. This is the most demanding, scrutinized, personally devastating job on the planet and not only do these men think they can do the job, they think they can get a majority of the electorate to agree with them.

Presidents are insane. We need them to be or we'd have no one else willing to do the job. It's our solemn, patriotic duty to enjoy the ride.

Grade: A-

Slow Getting Up

"I am meat, traded to the highest bidder: the only bidder. Fine, I'll be your meat. I'll be whatever you want me to be. Just give me a helmet."
--Nate Jackson, Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival From The Bottom Of The Pile

Last fall, I watched PBS' League of Denial. I didn't do the swearing-off football thing. I didn't tell myself I'd never see the sport the same way again. But I did predict that it would be harder for me to watch football and ignore what I had already sort of known: that these men kill themselves and each other for my fleeting pleasure. I had said and written as much myself prior to that. But after absorbing League of Denial, I now had too much human evidence bouncing around in my skull to go back to how things used to be. I may still watch, but with different eyes, I told myself.

Ten days later, I was apoplectic over the Bears' chronic inability to stop allowing easy first downs (that was the game at Washington, for anyone keeping score).

In Slow Getting Up, former NFL role-player Nate Jackson gives a first-hand account of how injuries took him from middle-of-the-road receiver to formerly-serviceable tight end. And how, even toward the end, he couldn't quite face the obvious warning signs that his dream (a word he uses a lot) was dead.

"I still believe in the beauty of the game. This above all else is true. But to be a fly on the wall, or to be [Jackson's rehab trainer] Derek, is to be struck in the face with how delusional a man scorned by his lover can be. Here I am telling him all the reasons why I hate her, in between sets of an exercise specifically designed to lead me back into her arms. I am sick."

That first sentence is easy to overlook. Football, like any decent sport (not you, curling), is beautiful. It just happens to have a staggering human toll. I tell myself that the players know what they sign up for, that they take it as a job hazard. But even with the possible (major) exception of what players know about concussions and other head injuries, Jackson's story indicates that a player can't possibly account for everything his body will endure. We worry about the obviously gruesome injuries (like Navarro Bowman's during Sunday's NFC Championship game). But who anticipates Nate Jackson tearing nearly every muscle in his groin clean off the bone? And in a universe where "there simply isn't time to pay attention to the individual athlete's body," where things move "too quickly for... conscientious objections to keep pace," how often are other, more minor injuries allowed to fester and conspire with other injuries to dismantle world class athletes?

For the record, Jackson never suffers a concussion and credits this miracle to the shortness of his career, writing of guys with longer tenures in the game, "they stay healthy longer, play more, smash skulls more, die younger." I guess if you have to choose one or the other...

Jackson was a notch above the average NFL'er: one of the guys you don't think about, the guys whose short rides give us that unglamorous statistic that says the average NFL career is about three years long. Three years of service (closer to eight, in Jackson's case), with a body degraded a decade or more beyond normal because of a commitment to the game they love. And it their commitment. It's only for the fans in the sense that they have to say it's about us. It's their competitiveness that straps on the helmet, not the fans. We just benefit. The owners do, too.

It's not fair to compare our blindness to theirs. For Jackson and his compatriots, the destruction is so much more intimate. It's not us at a training camp in Arizona, making one last Hail Mary attempt (I see what I did there) at a career via the short-lived United Football League, running a standard fade route and feeling his hamstring explode one last time. We get to keep on watching from a distance. And now so does Jackson. He has no regrets about pursuing his dream. And he shouldn't. Anyway, it's not like he could convince a younger version of himself not to go through with it. They all think of themselves as invincible, the same way others view them as disposable, the same way fans view them as an abstracted combination of the two. And so the games go on, distracting us from... themselves.

I haven't gotten round to watching the game differently, as I predicted. At least, that new eye hasn't developed the way I thought it would. But seeing guys like Nate Jackson as something other than invincible, disposable meat, put on this planet for my entertainment, is a start.

I wonder if that'll make the games too hard to watch.

Grade: B+

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Loss is the standard trajectory. Something appears in the world--a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent--with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it's going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell... Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity."
--Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

When you put on a convincing enough show, you run the risk of deluding yourself. I'm not talking about telling a lie so often that you begin to believe it. No, the show is the thing you put on to enhance reality (a halftime show at a football game, say) or distract yourself from that reality (the football game itself). The problem is, between the two, there's not much left to enhance or distract from and, after a point, the reality and the show become indistinguishable. And we cannot acknowledge the show, lest risking that it all come crashing down. Whole economies are built on the fantastical puff we've constructed: war, business, Hollywood. The show is what makes the world go round. Best to stay the course. So Ben Fountain slyly demonstrates in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

When Bravo Company become national heroes via a video captured by a Fox News imbed, they're given the star treatment and a victory tour through the States... just before being sent back to Iraq. The pomp and circumstance provide ample rumination material for 19-year-old Billy Lynn, whose real world experiences boil down to the war and the things he did to get sent to the war. That relative inexperience--along with one hell of a hangover--notwithstanding, Billy demonstrates impressive observational skills and possesses a fine ear for bullshit, if only because he hears it often enough.

Two days before redeployment Billy and the Bravos are the props guests of Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones Norm Oglesby at a Thanksgiving game. America's heroes (for the time being), hosted by America's team (hahahaha), enjoying America's game (so appropriately war-like that Billy wonders why we don't send the players--"well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat"--to fight the war). The Bravos, being late-teenaged/early twenties, are hungover, party-ready horndogs, preferring (given their druthers) a lack of sophistication. That's precisely what's charming--and human--about each of them. But to the nation they are icons, heroes that America is starved for in the age of terror. Never the twain shall meet, save for a brief subjection to a gross, confusing, and exploitative halftime show that opens a couple of the Bravos up to the early stages of PTSD. In America, the more garish and over-saturated an event is, the less open it is to doubts of patriotism.

Between exploring the bowels of the immense Texas Stadium, receiving showy receptions from the wealthy attendees, and witnessing the clunky process of acquiring a movie deal, Billy gets a crash course in how most things seem to be coated in a thin layer of bullshit. Once again, that's not to be confused with lies. Everyone in the book is refreshingly honest. Bullshit is the constant in Billy Lynn. That and the most pointless kind of capitalism. The concourses of Texas Stadium are as much a shopping center as a sports venue. Combined with the airports and arenas and hotels that the Bravos pass through, America comes off as little more than "a mall with a country attached," as Billy observes. Young Billy is barely able to process the psychic onslaught at Texas Stadium. Everything has a listed value and nearly everything is for sale and "nothing looks quite so real as a fake." That's the sweet spot of bullshit. 

It's hard to peg a solid chronology in Billy Lynn. George W. Bush is still president and the Cowboys still play at Texas Stadium (the reader pines for what Fountain might've done in describing the monstrous carnival that is that stadium's replacement) and not only is the war still raging, it hasn't gone to hell yet. Admirers tell the Bravos totally straight-faced that the public supports the war (though we must account for some of the aforementioned showmanship). Anyway, we're probably looking at mid-2000s, a time when the Iraq War seemed a semi-reasonable idea when argued by the right people. It wasn't so much a war built on lies as it was built on bullshit. And we're not smarter than we were ten years ago, we've just wiped those layers clean. Mostly.

Buttressed by some truly lovely writing ("the manager himself, a slender, oleaginous fellow with the unctuous patter of an undertaker murmuring pickup lines in a bar"), Fountain lays out an American experience that's soul-punchingly honest, if a little hard to remember through the fog of... whatever we've been doing since. Candy Crush, probably.

I don't know if anyone will remember the minutiae or the day-to-day psychology of that era. Billy Lynn offers a decent entry-point into all that (for anyone with the stomach for it), but it would be unfair to say that's all it is. Billy Lynn is about America, Iraq War or no. And it will happen again. There will always be a Billy Lynn, just as there will always be a Norm Oglesby. All that will change are the nouns. At least we get good stories out of them.

Grade: A

The Disaster Artist

"I'll do my own project and it will be better than everybody else. You think this movie we just saw was tragedy? No. Not even close. I will make tragedy. People will see my project and... you know what? They will not sleep for two weeks. They will be completely shocked. You watch."
-- Tommy Wiseau, per The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell 

I'm not going to try to explain The Room. Because I can't. Anyone who claims they can adequately explain the film in less time than it takes to watch it is lying. But as a psychological case study meets film-making how-not-to crash course, The Disaster Artist is worthwhile. At the very least, it's entertaining.

Greg Sestero is a struggling actor and much-too loyal and forgiving friend, which, combined, help to explain how a good-hearted guy with potential and a wild dream fell into the orbit of Tommy Wiseau and thenceforth into The Room. First brought on as a line producer, Sestero eventually inherits the role of "the Mark," best friend and cuckold-maker to Wiseau's protagonist "Johnny." With ghostwriter Tom Bissell, Sestero spins a yarn of the inept production of a bad movie and a decade-long friendship with the incomprehensible Wiseau. 

Alternating chapters are dedicated to Sestero's stop-start acting career. These chapters make for a decent story and the reader feels for his frustrations, but they are fraught with a burning question: Where's Tommy?

Luckily, Tommy is never more than a page or two away from calling Sestero, or showing up at the apartment he's let to Sestero, or moving in with Sestero. All the while, Wiseau manipulates the poor kid (at least twenty years his junior, though no one's totally sure of Wiseau's true age, likely not even Wiseau himself) into hanging out with him--and no one else, ever--or indulging him in his self-evidently awful "feature movie" project. These traits--the manipulation, the neediness, the pitiable misconceptions about himself and the world around him--veer from funny to sad to terrifying at a pace that leaves the reader marveling at Sestero's hardiness.

The world has plenty of people who exhibit these behaviors, of course, but few of them have a bank account that an uncircumspect teller would describe as "a bottomless pit." However and whenever he attained his fortune (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is an exiled heir to the Habsburg throne, allowed to keep his money in exchange for never returning to Austria), he has been insulated from ever having to embrace anything like reality. Sestero calls The Room a testament to "unrelenting drive and determination," proof that a dream--however ill-concieved--can be made real. But it helps a lot when you're able to put up six million dollars of your own money to ensure that that dream is realized.

And by all appearances, Wiseau believed that The Room would be a genuine masterpiece, a modern day Sunset Boulevard, a comparison Sestero makes in regard to his relationship with Wiseau, except that Norma Desmond's pretensions to talent and fame weren't entirely delusional. It's hard to know what he'd make of this book. Or the title. But when his film continues to make money hand over fist, it's hard to tell him otherwise. It's not Avatar, but people on multiple continents continue to line up to see The Room--and convince their friends to join them--in a way they don't for films that they think are well-made. Blame my generation's love affair with irony (though I'd argue that many people's love for The Room punches straight through irony, passing into total sincerity), but Tommy Wiseau has done very well for himself, if not for the reasons he might think.

There's a lost chance toward the end of Disaster Artist, when the world premiere of The Room brings Wiseau's dream to life, to explain how that first small, cobbled together audience interpreted the film and how it shifted from that into the cult hit acknowledged in the introduction. All we get is a beaming, tearful Wiseau and a dashed-off "proud of you, buddy" from a guy who's spent the previous 300 pages catering to everything that the cult is dying know. But maybe that's not Sestero's story to tell. As he observes, "The magic of The Room derives from one thing: no one interprets the world the way Tommy Wiseau does."

Wiseau is a perfect little mystery: an indeterminate origin, an unfounded self-confidence, a palpable disconnect with human experience; the money might help explain those last two things but where did that come from? Sestero takes a stab at unpacking the mystery, outfitting Wiseau with a thin biography informed by vague, sparse, and largely unverifiable facts. This biography does provide an plausible source for The Room's funding, but the explanation for how that money was generated is not a tidy one, by Sestero's admission.

The Room should be some kind of Kaufman-esque hoax (Half-Drunken theory: Tommy Wiseau is Andy Kaufman), but if it were a hoax, we'd know. Wouldn't we? No parody could be this perfect; we'd see the strings. There'd have to be some kind of wink to the audience. But there isn't. The Disaster Artist seals it--this movie really, somehow, was allowed to happen. Real human beings experienced and endured Tommy Wiseau in all his paranoia, poor judgment, and financial schizophrenia (sometimes a miser, sometimes spending lavishly and nonsensically).

Tommy Wiseau exists and the way he interacts with the world is every bit as bizarre as fans would suspect, while simultaneously so disappointingly benign. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve, making for an awkward obsessive whose every short coming is telegraphed. And his failure to assimilate is not through a lack of trying; at heart, he's more American than you or I. Wiseau is not a mad villain, just mad. And if The Room brings joy to audiences, he can't be a totally awful filmmaker. Just kind of an awful filmmaker.

The Room is still a terrible movie, after all.

Grade: B+

The Rag Tree: a Novel of Ireland

"I sometimes quip about the length of time it has taken to write The Rag Tree by saying, I started to write a book about war and then peace broke out... through the journey of the story's own growing pains, it became a story of a country and its people amid a historic transition." 
--D.P. Costello

The afterword to Costello's The Rag Tree: a Novel of Ireland was written at the tail end of Ireland's Celtic Tiger boom, just before the collapse. To read The Rag Tree, to reflect upon the strides that Western Europe's whipping boy has made in the last century (as the reader will), and then to stick the knife of mentioning the more recent troubles would require the mind and soul of a right little shit.

After all, so much of Ireland's charm has roots in indefinable magic and whimsey. Breathtaking vistas, the liveliness of ancient Celtic traditions, pubs. Sure, this can sometimes end up looking like, as one character in The Rag Tree puts it, "Paddyland. Planet Ireland. Every castle and historic site has a ticket booth and fence thrown around it. Where's the giant mouse with the green ears?" And that exploitation is a shame. But if one of the steps to casting off the weight of 800 years of exploitation (and one too many borderline offensive homages on St. Patrick's Day) is to indulge in a little of your own, it seems churlish to blame the Irish when that fabled magic begins to work for them for the first time in a millennium.

Such is the hope of the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) at the outset of The Rag Tree. He hopes to ensure Ireland's future prosperity through his Eire Nua referendum, an initiative that some see as a threat to Ireland's past, not to mention its freedom and independence. It's to Costello's credit that he never pointedly chooses a side on Eire Nua (though the reader can safely guess). Even the outcome of the roundabout plot to reunite Northern Ireland with the independent Republic is wisely left open-ended. In a winding story (all Irish stories are winding ones) about a country long cleaved by warfare and oppression, offering clear answers would be insulting.

The worst that can be said of The Rag Tree is that the plot seems too often driven by coincidence. Or, if not coincidence, then a mysterious, god-like conspirator calling himself "the Blackbird." It doesn't matter much either way: if you mind coincidence, you'll have a few problems with the Blackbird, as well. And normally I'd have been among the detractors of such a plot device. But here again we see the inexorable pull of Ireland and its stories: a little bit of luck and a whole lot of whimsey that will draw the reader in, whether the reader wants to be or not (actually, The Rag Tree puts a rather grim spin on traditional whimsey; I call it "grimsey").

Example: I spent much of the book telling myself that Mattie Joe Treacy's spiritual protector--a pooka in the form of a raven who goes by "Brian"--didn't exist outside the mind of the mildly-disturbed and often drunken Treacy. After a while, I decided that Brian did exist, but as a series of transient ravens that followed Treacy, though never actually speaking to the man. And by the end, I was forced to give in. Brian was a tad too charming for me and if he wanted to exist in the otherwise real, understandable world of The Rag Tree, who am I to stop him?

You can approach Irish legends with whatever eye-rolling skepticism you choose, but stubbornly holding onto that just makes you an asshole. It's not unlike dismissing the magic of Disneyland. A Disneyland with considerably more Guinness and whiskey.

Grade: B+

Video Games and Story-Telling

L.A. Noire came out a couple of years ago to well-deserved good reviews. After running out of Uncanny Valley jokes, the player discovers that the graphics of L.A. Noire are as mesmerizing as they are groundbreaking (how many games can produce gag reels?). And the experience of roaming through post-war Los Angeles is intoxicating--almost enough to guise the fact that the driving seems interminable. And the tone; my God, the tone. Unhelpful though this phrase often is, L.A. Noire is a unique experience.

I like Raymond Chandler novels and a host of other noir-related and -inspired works, so it may seem as though I'm gushing about something I was bound to love (that co-developer Rockstar Games was then coming off Red Dead Redemption was just sweet, sweet frosting). Except... I didn't love it. The above praise runs right alongside my apprehensions about the game, the things that make me hesitant to pop the disk back into my X-Box (and then the second disk... and then the third).

L.A.P.D. Detective Cole Phelps is a miserably dull antagonist, easily out-shown by insurance fraud investigator Jack Kelso. The cases, particularly on the homicide desk, quickly prove frustrating as it becomes obvious that Phelps is being strong-armed by his superiors against the player's will (more on that later). I also don't care for procedurals, which L.A. Noire unapologetically is; this is partly a personal thing, but the best noir-ish pulp fiction is as much about quirky character moments and shaggy dog yarns as it is about the mystery.

This is not a review of L.A. Noire. No one's interested in that in 2013, including me (though I'd probably give it a B/B+). My point is that every so often I play or remember a game that gets me thinking: what makes video games work, from a storytelling perspective? More importantly, what makes the cinematic ambitions of the medium fall flat? And I'm talking specifically about the story-driven games. The Angry Birds and the Fruit Ninjas, for all their addictive properties, can't be properly judged on the same metric.

Literature (novels, short stories... you know what literature is) excels at intimate character-building: motivation, psychology, thoughts. The best novels dig deep into an idea and use slowly-developed details to create a textured whole. Other storytelling mediums can do this, but not as comprehensively. Where a story on the page may relatively lack for immediacy and clear character dynamics, it still reigns as the best medium for case study-type stories.

Television, at its best, takes the long-form format of the novel and uses it to deliver detailed character relationships and paced, intricate plotting. The really good ones explore characters and themes at length and in depth over one or more seasons (Game of Thrones comes to mind, of course, but remember that David Simon conceived The Wire as a kind of "novel for television").

Film combines all of these into a condensed run-time and go to work with rarely subtle manipulation. It rewards spectacle and sweeping scope. Some will moan about the bullying nature of the medium, but when done successfully, it's hard to complain. If the first ten minutes of Up don't devastate you, I'm not totally sure you're human. And while the last 45 minutes of Argo seemed to count off every suspense cliche in the book (yes, there is a book of suspense cliches), damned if it wasn't effective.

Video games can perform elements of all of these but they tend to lack the strong narrative thrust. There is no Dickens or Kubrick to take the player from point A to point B exactly when and how he wants to.

Roger Ebert suffered a rare lapse into ill-informed shooting off at the hip a few years back when he said that video games could never be art. To his credit, he walked the statement back (kind of). And though the original statement was short-sighted, there's some truth there. Games require a certain degree of player agency. Too little agency and the player might as well be watching a movie. Too much and there's little to no room for the developer to tell the story he wants. The developer can add music, but has little guarantee that the cues will sync up as perfectly as they do in film. He can add interior monologue, but the player may choose to skip it (and will complain if she doesn't have that option). He can create a complex, engaging lead character, but at some point the player must be allowed to put her own stamp on that character.

And he can try to force a story in a given direction, but as games have evolved into sandboxes and as they've engineered morality systems, it becomes harder and harder to tell a story honestly. If the developer's desired story needs a character to be a good, upstanding person, it falls apart if the player decides to be an immoral monster, whose only aim was to "dominate the game." To end a story in this fashion, you have to supply a series of potential good-evil-medium alternate endings and every player can tell that that was all you did.

Take the aforementioned frustration in L.A. Noire: when a developer tries to take a gamer for a ride--the sort of emotional rollercoaster ride that might be praised in a good film or book--the gamer may resent it. Not least because she expects to be able to win the game. As far as we've come, we're still limited in our ability to explore the human experience in video games the way we do with other art forms.

Red Dead Redemption gets that compromise mostly right, by killing the main character in a cut scene mere seconds after the player is forced into an ambush (yes, L.A. Noire pulls a similar character sacrifice, and if Cole Phelps were as interesting as John Marston, I'd be talking about that). While we're on the subject of genuinely artful games, Bioshock, another personal favorite, is renowned for it's eye-sexingly gorgeous environments, a surprisingly deep examination of philosophy and human nature, and a creepy atmosphere that relies on the player's imagination to fully reveal itself. It's a refreshing example of show-don't-tell that neatly covers up the fact that 80% of the plot is killing objectivist zombies.

I'm sure every developer has Earth-shattering ideas for great, cinematic games. Hell, every gamer likely has, as well: this Cracked article showcases seven decent game ideas and explains, with an empathetic quivering infecting the prose, why those games can't happen for various reasons of mechanics and logistics. I also recommend Cracked's take on ominous trends in video games, which ends up focusing mostly on the economics of the industry. Turns out that when you expensively produce distraction-oriented entertainment that'll go to market at $60 a pop, you tend to get stingy about creativity in favor of more a stable model, helping further hinder the role of "art" in the development process.

This isn't to say there isn't art in modern gaming, but there is something eating away at me as I play games that come so close to real art and just miss it.

Reading List for the Second Term

Glenn Beck is a bubbling pustule of a hack. Here are some books to prep you for the next four years. 

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
I don't anticipate a resurgence of the Occupy movement. Even if they do return in any significant way, they were more a hapless might-have-been than the boiling cauldron of class warfare some insisted they were. And with no leader, there wasn't even a Madame Defarge to speak of. The Tea Party, on the other hand, remains because we can't have nice things. The hard right isn't softening, if their fiscal cliff (now debt ceiling) fanaticism and Sandy Hook truther schemes demonstrate anything. And while the Tea Party is not the bottom-up revolt that was the French Revolution (quite the reverse, amazingly), there remains more than a hint of misdirected anger and not so veiled threats of violence that would've given Dickens more than enough material to work with. Despite--or because of--their unpopularity, they still see themselves as righteous victims, a siege mentality that's not quite ready to break, so we will hear from them again over this next term. And they have a few ready and willing Madames Defarge to chose from.

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War - James M. McPherson
I don't want to look like I'm shitting on the spirit of 1776, because that was cool and important. But America didn't become the country we know today until we had to start killing each other instead of Brits and Native Americans. See, the Civil War never actually ended despite the awkward fact that it officially ended 148 years ago this Spring. McPherson's essays highlight not only how academia has viewed the war in the century and a half since its ostensible close, but how the nation's history and culture have been shaped by it. Particularly of note are chapters one (covering the historical revisionism and whitewashing that buttresses neo-Confederate mythology), eight (documenting the fights in Southern schools to ensure that Yankee intransigence Southern honor was taught properly, prefiguring the textbook battles of today), and sixteen (on Lincoln's dramatic use of "war powers" to expand executive control in times of emergency, something no president has done since).

Nixonland - Rick Perlstein
What the Civil War began, Nixon's Southern Strategy carved into stone. It was a cynical gambit that not only exploited the cultural divisions of the sixties, but deepened them for maximum political impact. It galvanized racial politics, launched the culture wars, and left a large chunk of the country permanently tied to the Republican Party (to the detriment of both). As Perlstein demonstrates, Nixon laid the template for everything that came after, from the self-perpetuating polarization to the modern conservative movement that is as much a profit-generating scheme as it is a political ideology. And whatever Nixon's successors wish to do to bring Americans back together, they keep finding Nixon still very much alive, gumming up the works.

I, Lucifer - Glen Duncan
This one actually has nothing to do with American politics. It's just a damn good book.

Nos Populus, however, does have something to do with American politics and is also available. You know, if you like reading your own political themes into explicitly political novels.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

"If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness."
--Patton Oswalt, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

Having never written stand-up before, I'm not sure what the difference is in writing for that versus writing for something that's meant to be read. I assume that each--done well--will have differences, as evidenced by some of the literary output of even the best comedians. George Carlin's books did little more than make me want to listen to Carlin; Napalm & Silly Putty, for example, is funny and easily heard in Carlin's voice, but seriously wants for his skill with poetic meanderings. This track record is the reason I put off reading Patton Oswalt's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland for so long. But I was wrong to do that. Ass-wrong.

In ZSW, Oswalt wisely combines biographical elements (laced with his gift for obscure pop cultural references) with one-off concepts, such as an academic examination of old hobo songs ("Hobos were, for some reason, insistent that 'oatmeal' rhymed with 'blue.'"). Doing this, no single aspect weighs down the book too much. Like the best stand-up routine, every worthwhile topic gets its own space to breath.

Among the more insightful one-offs is an examination of the personality types of teenage outcasts that gives the book its title. I won't try to lazily lay out the differences between zombies, spaceships, and wastelands here, not when Oswalt does it so perfectly (and honestly, if you were a teenage outcast, playing board games in the library during lunch, you can probably figure out who was which already). At the end, I'm probably a Wasteland. But if I'm allowed to have crossover elements, there's probably some strands of Zombie in there, too.

The biographical chapters range from the heartbreaking (Uncle Peter), to the experimental (I shit on stream-of-consciousness, but it may be the only proper way to revisit childhood snow forts), to the transcendent (if the conclusion of "The Victory Tour" isn't enough to make you pump your fist on a crowded train, I don't want you reading my blog anymore).

The last couple of chapters see Oswalt delve into his archives of writings-in-character, a gambit that might've fallen flat if deployed by a lesser talent. In these, the pseudonymous Erik Blevins and Neill Cumpston battle for the title of Most Gifted Writer to Ever Set Pen to Paper in the English Language. I won't spoil you for any of Blevins' magical, criminally-ignored film treatments,* but Cumpston probably deserves a spot of attention here, in a space that features more than it's share of mindlessly effusive film reviews. Among Cumpston's finer observations (regarding The Passion Of The Christ):

"Everyone's pissed at Jesus. They all want him dead. But this is back in Bible times, when they didn't have shotguns and chainsaws, and back then when you want to kill a superhero you have to rain two hours of whomp-ass on him and then nail him to something, sort of like a message to other superheroes. And they must have gotten the message, because there weren't any more superheroes until Superman."

I've done some gushing about Oswalt before. And that praise is re-earned here, in an entirely new way. Given the weirdest gun-to-my-head proposition I'll ever encounter, I'd choose to listen to Finest Hour, but ZSW goes a long way toward being the next best dose of Patton you'll ever be able to shoot uncut.

Grade: B+

*Actually, both "Blevin's" and "Cumpston's" work can be found online. I'll trust you to work the Google machine.

British vs. American Dystopia

The other day, a friend asked me about British writers and their fascination with dystopia. She referenced a scene in the television show Sherlock, which included an observation on CCTV cameras. That thought having been sparked (one might blame the framing of the question), a slew of synapses started firing, recalling works from Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four to Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange to V For Vendetta. These British works seem to come at a rate disproportionately greater than the dystopian output from American literature. Why?

The simple answer is that the Brits have more personal experience with dystopian hellscapes. The aforementioned surveillance cameras, the long history of British intelligence networks. There's the still barely-fresh memory of the dismantling of the Empire; all of that power--minus all but the ceremonial glory--turning inward, now bitter for what once was.

Then there's the way that British government seems to act so smoothly on matters of national security as to make our own post-9/11 measures seem like a Keystone Cops production. Americans will hyperventilate for a bit about the newest piece of Homeland Security meddling until the energy escapes our systems and we find another shiny object to focus on (seriously, though, when was the last time you heard anyone wring their hands about the full body scanners?). But the Brits, with that Keep Calm, Carry On ethos, prefer to stew in grim fascination with the creeping menace.

Maybe there's a vestigial American libertarianism at work: we understand government to be a blundering, inefficient thing. It might be a cumbersome, better-door-than-a-window type obstruction for many of us, but we're not exactly worried about a well-oiled Big Brother, are we? Only a misguided, paranoia-mongering ideologue could believe in an incompetent government that is also somehow all-powerful. But in Britain--where "socialism" is not so scary a word--they have a different relationship with government and, if asked to think about it, might nod their heads and say "yeah, I could see that happening" before shuffling on with their lives. This is the psychological aspect of it; the bit that, it seems to me, is the most decisive between American and British attitudes toward dystopia. 

See, the Brits have a greater comfort with grim subject matter and a more natural skill for dark, observational humor. Not that there aren't plenty of American artists who excel in these fields, but the subjects tend to play better with British general audiences than they do with American ones, so you get more of it over there (see Bill Hicks' success in Britain). British culture was incubated over thousands of years on a relatively small island, where there are few places to hide from the near-constant rain. The only attitude that survives something like that is: "well, what can you do?" The Brits, then have less qualms with fatalism, a concept that is anathema to most Americans. Indeed, the philosophy of fatalism--the lack of individual agency--almost rebuts the American Dream. The attempt by American culture to embrace a British-view of the dystopic has two potential outcomes:

1. (Not so likely, in my opinion) The rejection of some near-sacred American values, precipitating the collapse of moral, civic, and economic society. One must clap to keep Tinker Bell alive.
2. (Much more likely) We just won't buy it. A co-worker has commented to me that she could never enjoy dystopian works because she cannot fathom that a society would be allowed to degrade that far, that efficiently. Such a force would naturally be fought against, or crumble under its own weight, or any number of other factors that would keep a Big Brother from being so imposing.

As a dystopic tale gets moving, the Brits roll with the punches and more readily accept the premise. Americans must wonder "how was this allowed to happen?" And American stories often like to provide the answers (think on the V For Vendetta film adaptation, with its more explicit telling of the rise of neo-conservatism fascism, something Alan Moore preferred to leave to implication). I attempted similar explanations in Nos Populus, before I realized that the exposition was getting out of hand. Americans want the background, but that background takes up precious time that can better used on the story itself, a problem even the specifics-demanding reader will concede. We prefer a dystopia that shows us something more familiar.

You've probably seen this comic, outlining the differences between Orwell's fears as he explained them in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's fears, as laid out in Brave New World. They're arguments I've covered before. And I must agree, however strong my love of Orwell, that BNW is the superior dystopia. One of BNW's most intriguing conceits is the character of John the Savage, an outsider who can observe all the shallow and materialistic horror of the World State that the reader might. A British writer, authoring a classic of the genre, depicting a surviving mode of thought that rejects all the assumptions of a terrible future. It's almost enough to upend this theory of mine, if not for the fact that things don't end well for John; death is preferable to the loss of freedom and dignity--at least there's some agency in that. And interestingly, Huxley spent the last 25 years of his life living in California, attempting to attain U.S. citizenship. I'm speculating, but it seems likely that Huxley felt more at home among a less fatalistic bunch.

One can point to other exceptions. Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (which was no small influence on a teenaged-me; Lewis is still one of my favorites) is a lesser-revered work among the dystopias, largely for the aforementioned problems of exposition. Lewis does his due diligence in transforming his contemporary American polity from the New Deal to the total takeover of the Huey Long-esque Buzz Windrip. No far-flung, sci-fi speculation in this one. As with much of Lewis' work, ICHH gets most of its mileage out of broad caricatures of middle-American nastiness, a farcical formula that works for a while, but quickly starts to hit too close to home, begging on the last nerve of the reader. And while ICHH is a thorough and convincing narrative of demagoguery, one has to want to believe in the possibilities, as I did in those nauseating Patriot Act days. It should be no surprise that the book experienced a significant revival during the Bush II Administration.

The Handmaid's Tale nearly fits, too. However, 1), Margaret Atwood is Canadian and, culturally speaking, Canada has nearly as much in common with the U.K. as it does with the U.S. And 2), Handmaid is mostly notable for its feminist take on the dystopic, an angle that at times seems more relevant than what most of the rest of the genre has to offer (the stream-of-consciousness crutch notwithstanding).

The Hunger Games seems to fit the bill. But how much of it's monstrous success is owed to the fact that Katniss Everdeen is exactly what Americans want to see in that situation, or imagine themselves being: an able and eventually-willing freedom fighter. A little bit of pathos goes a long way. Though, as I've explained before, I still have not read the third book, so I'm ready to take another hit to my theory should the book end poorly enough.

I may have to concede the point on Fahrenheit 451, pending a re-reading. However, it's not like we can't accuse Bradbury of just being a crotchety old man. 

As for my own work (just for comparison; my work has not earned mention alongside these others), Nos Populus started out as a dystopia of sorts--the idea first sprouted after reading It Can't Happen Here. But those elements were ratcheted back over the drafts, as I focused more on the building of a potential dystopian society and the struggle against that construction. Some of this was because of the verisimilitude I had striven to set up; Nos Populus takes place in something of a separate time-line from our real world, but the line only split a few years ago and it remains recognizable to us. I hope. There was only so much--logically and narratively-speaking--that I could allow President Ward to do while suspending the reader's disbelief. And I had included a fair amount of exposition as it was. So we get a despot who's only a fraction as powerful as he was originally conceived, but perhaps all the more terrifying because of it--we recognize Ward.

And perhaps some of it was also my American brain getting in the way, never allowing me to slip too far into bleak paranoia and cynicism. To recognize, at the very least, that I needed readers not to throw down the book in disgust. When my friends/editors commented that the book was rather bleak, I took it as a badge of honor (no pandering crowd-pleaser, me). And yet I still found myself fixing that where I could, attempting to balance plausibility with palatability.

And it's the plausible and the palatable that mark the difference. The Brits have a different sense of the plausible when it comes to government overreach (if that phrase means anything within the dystopic realm). So, too, their stronger palate for grim fatalism, which allows for a less diluted--or alternately less labored--realization of the dystopian state. With these elements working together, their dystopic myths can stretch and grow in ways that American literature won't equal. Not that we're interested in trying to.

Orwell's Diaries

There's a thing about being an admirer of George Orwell that it's hard to acknowledge that admiration without instantly getting lumped in with the conspiracy mongers. You know, the ones who tout Nineteen Eighty-Four not as the forewarning it was intended to be, but as a threatened, point-for-point prediction of the future. Admittedly, I was one of those at one time in my life. We all have a right to be fifteen once, don't we?

The problem is that Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are required reading in many schools (and rightfully so) and so the name "Orwell" has a distinctively grim and paranoid ring for many people. There are few words so sinister as "Orwellian," a fact that might not do Orwell proud if he knew that his successors would be as powerless to halt the cynical obliteration of the English language as he was; that's the paradox of dystopic writers who remain relevant. Meanwhile, without seeking them out, few ever read Orwell's essays, many of which I would count among his best writing--some even surpassing his better novels. Here are a bunch of the essays; go nuts. They're also worth buying.

Reading Orwell's Diaries--recently published for the first time in the States--is not quite so pleasurable as reading those essays. The "Domestic Diaries" that make up large chunks of the collected works and catalog his agricultural activities near Kent and then in Hertfordshire held little interest and most entries seem to ask to be skipped.

The collection picks up during his account of the lead-up to the War, in which everyone around him seems oblivious to the oncoming crisis, even as the pub radio reports on Germany's designs on Poland in the summer of 1939. This ignorance-fueled-by-indifference flummoxes Orwell but doesn't stun him. Blindness to the inevitable--even from the sitting government--is something he's seen before. As he writes,

[Friend and writer] Stephen Spender said to me recently, "Don't you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?' I had to agree to this. Partly it is a question of not being blinded by class interests etc... but where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in... I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when I came. Since 1934 I have know war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty.

It's this ability (elaborated upon in a rare moment of hubris) that lends some credibility to the aforementioned conspiracists, though not as much as they'll take. As a traveling journalist--the '30s saw him in the Spanish Civil War and North Africa--he was not so uniquely suited to see the world in ways his more disinterested contemporaries never would have. Combined with his journalist's understanding of human nature and his writer's imagination, it was only a matter of some effort that he was able to extrapolate the elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the world around him. Indeed, many of that book's most haunting moments are foreshadowed in the Diaries: the vague, sparse, and unreliable information regarding the War (irony of ironies: his first wife, Eileen, worked for the Censorship Department); the rampant reversing of loyalties at a moment's notice (Russia's shifting allegiances and English pols' corresponding stances deserve special attention); right down to the number of rats living in Britain (estimated at four to five million, he says).

After the War, it's back to domestic record-keeping, this time on the Scottish island of Jura. And minus a few brief, worthwhile observations from the hospital during Orwell's final illness, the Diaries return to their earlier lackluster form. It's a helpful reminder that these diaries were for Orwell's purposes--not ours (what can we do with the knowledge of how many eggs Orwell collected from his chickens?). There are a few mildly amusing anecdotes about censored acquaintances and observations on the living conditions of the rural working class (especially early in the book) in here. But they remain mostly filler, items to be skipped past on the way to Orwell's account of the war and the Blitz, which are mostly worthwhile.

As with any collected diary (as opposed to a memoir), this collection is only really recommendable if one already admires the diarist. Which, looking back, is the reason I purchased the thing.

Grade: B-

We're With Nobody

"There are still people out there who are shocked to hear that a candiates hired "an investigator," as they put it, to "smear" their opponent. So much for our belief in political transparency." 
--Alan Huffman, We're With Nobody: Two Insiders Reveal the Dark Side of American Politics

Huffman and his co-author and business partner, Michael Rejebian, could've done without the subtitle. We're With Nobody spills no dark secrets and doesn't drop any bold, 16-point fonted names. It might've been reasonable to expect those things (Rejebian and Huffman briefly discuss the crestfallen publishers who may have entertained the project only for the visceral character assassinations they were expecting). But the opposition-research men thankfully deny us that guilty pleasure and instead take us on a lighter, though significantly more thoughtful, journey.

For anyone with more than a passing interest in campaigns (I'm not sure who else would be interested in the book), We're With Nobody contains no earth-shattering revelations. Yes, there are interesting tidbits about the process of oppo-research, the roll of the Internet in that process (spoiler: it doesn't help much), and how their work will be used or mis-used by the campaigns that pay them. But many of us are already aware of the capriciousness of aspiring-pols. We can already calculate the theoretical impact of un-closeted skeletons. And we already suspect the powerful of engaging in dark misdeeds and darker obfuscations. Even when the information is new, it immediately feels like old news--a feeling Rejebian and Huffman are likely familiar with.

The book is at its most entertaining when relaying nameless anecdotes, such as the Florida politician who didn't understand why he needed researchers to look into his own background, only to end up being skewered on some long-forgotten indiscretions. These anecdotes are inter-cut with observations from the authors' twenty-odd years in the business. Observations like the American public's unnecessarily antagonistic relationship with opposition research (the book repeats itself--almost ad nauseam--on the subject of so-called "smear campaigns" being a natural--if ugly--part of open democracy); and the media's roll in disseminating--or damning--the facts upon their reveal. And the authors clearly understand the manipulative roll campaigns take with their hard-found data, adding a few touches of sympathy to their lives' work ("A police detective who gets caught tampering with evidence will likely get his case thrown out of court," Huffman writes, "but in the realm of politics, that same practice may be rewarded").

We're With Nobody is several levels above political fluff, but neither is it a hard-hitting treatise on the industry which, admittedly, might be hard to do when the authors have judiciously declined to name names. For that professionalism alone, the book is kind of remarkable. And a refresher-course on how political idealism is often pummeled by political realism--delivered with a spoonful of sugar--may be just the antidote to the coming dark days of convention season and the general election.

Grade: B

Shakespearean Board Games

 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

--Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5, 19-28

The Art of Fielding

"Literature could turn you into an asshole... it could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties."
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

One of the reasons baseball works as a metaphor for life is that baseball contains long stretches of inactivity (some call it boredom), punctuated with brief, spectacular moments that are often tricky to explain.  It's these latter moments that keep us coming back to the ballpark and carrying on through our day-to-day lives.  This presents a problem, however, when trying to describe life in an entertaining way.  Boredom is unforgivable in story-telling and inexplicable moments put the teller on a knife-edge; suspension of disbelief is one thing, but stray too far and people cry "deus ex machina."  This is why the better baseball stories use the game as a device to set events in motion, without being the focus.

Chad Harbach successfully manages this balance through most of his debut novel, The Art of Fielding.  It's appropriate that the team at the center of the action--the Westish College Harpooners--is made up of good-to-great players, most of whom will never play ball again after college; the diamonds they play on are little more than weigh stations.  Fielding chooses to depict the feel of baseball rather than the game itself--mostly depicting the minutiae of the everyday lives of the students and faculty members at Westish. 

Until the end of the book when, like any great ball game, some highly dramatic elements are needed to bring events to their close and, perhaps, give the audience something to remember.  The problem is, as discussed earlier, this doesn't work as well in story-telling.  The revelation of a character's death toward the end of a fraught, fast-paced game (which is described well but is, again, wrong for the medium--constant reminders of the score, outs, men on base, all necessary and part of the fun of the game, bog down the story) seems contrived for the sole purpose of amping up the drama and adding artificial weight to the ending.  In most stories, this wouldn't be such a big deal, except Harbach had been doing very well 'till then. 

For most of Fielding's 500+ pages, Harbach beautifully constructs not just the fictional Westish College, but its Herman Melville-centered mythology as well.  He presents a series of characters--four third-person narrators rotating like a, well, if you know baseball I don't need to say it--that all fit so naturally at Westish it's hard to imagine them anywhere else.  Most of them don't think of baseball much at all, except as the distraction it's always been meant to be.  For a few others, baseball is one mildly significant aspect of their lives  Only one, Henry Skrimshander, views the game as not even the defining aspect of himself, but as his whole life.  This kind of obsession, naturally, lends itself to self-destruction, a fate that Harbach foreshadows early:

"After the game ended, you couldn't carry your game-time emotions out into the world--you'd be put in an asylum if you did--so you went underground and purged them."

The rules and temperaments of baseball don't apply outside the game.  Mike Schwartz--who recruits Henry to Westish and someone for whom baseball is but one spinning plate--is a guy who understands this and though the demands he puts on himself are not without their own toll, his basic hardiness keeps him rolling on.  Poor, unprepared Henry on the other hand is, for reasons not explored as thoroughly as they might be (at 500+ pages, something has to give), unable to grasp this.  He functions in the non-baseball world well enough, but only because it's a bridge from game to game and season to season.  Thus, when it's mysteriously taken from him, he collapses into himself, unable to recognize or want help.  Then, when he's unexpectedly granted his dream of going pro, he opts to abandon it and to remain with at Westish, where all is familiar and his dream can be safely that.  Henry's life is at its best when it's nothing but the long moments of inactivity punctuated by the vanishing sublime. 

The trouble is, Henry takes a while to get there.  As though running out of steam while rounding third, Harbach has trouble balancing the half-dozen subplots of Fielding.  These subplots are all mostly good, but are clearly in need of one another, sometimes having trouble moving forward under their own power.  When Henry disappears from his team and his friends, the suspense of where he's run off to is riveting, but I couldn't help but think that the mini-mystery was good only while it remained a mystery--that we'd find him and the answer would underwhelm.  Sure enough, Henry's been off, being typically quiet Henry, minus the baseball.  True to character, but a bit mundane.  So it goes in the last third of Fielding.  Each of the subplots enraptures at times, but drag at others.

That disappointment has much to do with the fact that Harbach does so well through the first half of Fielding.  And without doing something inorganically (and laughably) explosive, the story was headed toward a kind of petering-out.  These characters that aren't always likable--but are almost always relateable--will carry on afterward (minus one).  There are no big revelations and no one has all the answers at the end.  Some characters have excelled and are better people for their struggles while others will spend a bit longer in their respective ruts--smarter but with their brightest moments behind them.  Not even Westish College athletics, having succeeded beyond anyone's most unrealistic hopes, can be sure what happens next.

But that's the ebb and flow of baseball.  And isn't good baseball always more about the journey than the final score? 

Grade: B

In Brief: Ray Bradbury

I think it's because I was never as into sci-fi as many of my friends were that I never got as into Ray Bradbury as those same friends.  In my years of a more intense kind of dystopia-fanboyism, I always felt compelled to shrug at anyone who put Fahrenheit 451 in the same league with 1984 and Brave New World.  It was good, but somehow lacked the thorough societal examination that I thought the others had done so well; or just one man's cranky, if accurate, rant against television--part of a tech-suspicious philosophy he held on to to the last.  As that part of my life faded--and as I started to recognize that Asimov was probably the most accurate predictor of the future (Huxley took silver in that race, Orwell the bronze)--I still thought of Bradbury's opus as an also-ran. 

But one of his short stories has managed to stick with me for several years.  Because it's a short story and because it's relatively easy to find and because you were probably forced to read it in high school, too, I won't recount the details of A Sound of Thunder, which doesn't have the weight of Fahrenheit, but remains lodged in my brain much more tightly.  Not for the dinosaur-hunting (though that alone might have done it), but for his simplifying of the concept of time travel and alternate timelines, a topic that many writers often seem to want to make as complicated and unapproachable as possible.  That simple, almost reductive, embrace of the complex that usually turned me off to his work (while endearing millions of people more reasonable than I), actually served to draw me in and direct me to the heart of the idea: the interconnectedness of all things and the humor, tragedy, romance and horror that are part and parcel with that connection.  And though the ending of A Sound of Thunder was probably more of a funny idea to him than a warning to us, it contained an important tie-in with his philosophy about life being "too serious to take seriously:" it's probably not worth the analysis we're inevitably going to give it.

2030: The Real Story of What Happens To America

One of my favorite anecdotes involves a young comedian running into comedy legend Albert Brooks outside a grocery store.  The young comedian stands in amazement and says, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I love your work."  Brooks replies, "Do you?  That's wonderful!  Here, have all of my change!" 

Albert Brooks' novel 2030: The Real Story of What Happens To America is not as funny as that.  It never tries to be.  What it does try to do is examine the debt crisis from the perspective of--you guessed it--the year 2030.  Brooks establishes that not only has the debt crisis has not been solved by this point, it's actually gotten much worse.  True to life, people have spent the intervening decades complaining about the debt, and making political hay out of complaining about the debt, but nothing's gotten done, aside from create a government where literally nothing can get done anymore.  I mean, really nothing getting done, not even rebuilding Los Angeles after it gets leveled by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake.  In 2030, people at first can't believe that the federal government can't do anything.  Then they remember why that is.

Brooks gets a few heartstring tugs out of the devastation, usually centering on property loss and the resulting personal debt many face, particularly the older members of the population.  Debt seems unavoidable and omnipresent at all levels, except for those lucky individuals who earned enough billions to no longer have to care, or inherited enough millions that it no longer impacts them, though they might pretend it does. 

Brooks mentions that President Matthew Bernstein, the steward and likely victim of these impossible crises, was born in the 1980s.  That makes him my age, to within half a decade, and gives him a perspective on the problems of debt and never-ending end-of-life care that are somewhere between the older generations' insistence on holding on to all they can, and younger generations' much more extreme bitterness over the fact.  And then there are the political considerations, dragging Bernstein this way and that in the resources' tug of war, while he has several other things he'd rather attend to. 


The word "boomer" is used twice in the book, once in the context of a generation soaking up resources as a matter of course while living seemingly forever, and that in a brief, emotion-driven dialogue piece.  This is one of a few minor points where Brooks ignores a serious cause for the debt problem.  Much of the potential insolvency of earned entitlements in the real world is due to the Boomers.  Not in their refusal to die (no generation can claim that desire as their own), but in their size.  Between the Greatest Generations' apparent disdain for contraceptives and new technologies keeping people alive longer, the Boomers attained--and have maintained--the prized status of demographic anomaly.  They'll brag about all that was accomplished during the sixties, forgetting that it's a lot easier to make an impact through dropping out and protesting when you and your cohorts make up that much of the population.  And their grip on power is not diminishing, as Brooks makes clear in 2030.  He satisfyingly casts the AARP as a semi-major obstacle in most attempts to alleviate the crisis; their constituency being so vast by the year 2030 that its collective eyebrow raising is understandably terrifying for democratic leaders. 

Of course, no resource is finite and that means there's a younger population getting screwed as "the olds" live longer and longer (among other things, cancer's been cured).  Given that, one could see why the younger generation would be but resentful, except to the olds, who refuse to sympathize even at the expense of their own children and grandchildren, as Brooks explicitly writes at one point (and I'd be lying if I said this kind of childish refusal to understand the plight of those born into the situation didn't strike a chord).  What starts with unconnected assaults on the olds soon grows into organized movements, requiring only leadership.  It was impossible for me not to notice the similarities between 2030's Max Leonard and Nos Populus' James Reso.  While Brooks' radical firebrand and my own do seem to share some DNA, they differ in a few key areas.  James, of course, plays a much larger role in my book than Leonard does in 2030, and they have very different motivators, though a comparable devotion to their respective work.  Leonard's radicalism is present nearly from the beginning, while James' bubbles up over time, after years of frustration.  Finally, negotiations with their presidents is better planned-for by Leonard, but ultimately handled (marginally) better by James.  Nevertheless, they share some very similar fates and resulting legacies. 

It's a testament to Brooks' fair observation of the situation (he himself is a first wave Boomer) that he never anoints a hero.  When the young refuse to engage or instead engage through terrorism, they lose any moral or practical grounds to improve their situation.  Self-serving and overpowering though the olds are, they cannot be entirely blamed if the young are not organized and reasonable in their response, which the young of 2030 are not.  In this way, 2030 reminded me of Christopher Buckley's excellent Boomsday in its depiction of an America so divided--not by ideology but by age--that the best hope of solving our problems are zany or terrifying strategies that sound effective but may never match our expectations. 

The resulting inability for anyone to do anything about the debt means that when Los Angeles is destroyed, not even China is willing to help anymore, unless the U.S. is open to a somewhat radical new arrangement.  And if you've ever heard a government official grouse about crippling debt (and you have), you can imagine the sorts of things that the government would be open to doing.  Honestly, the deal that's made with the Chinese is intriguing to me at least on an aesthetic level, even if it does seem to cement the olds' untouchable status.  And among Brooks' more potentially prescient moments (aside from a dozen or so consumer electronics he invents) is China's increasingly weary attitude toward its largest debtor giving rise to a previously unthinkable--though not necessarily offensive--outcome. 

Brooks wisely does not attempt to solve the debt crisis.  By the end of the book, with attention divided between L.A.'s rebuilding and the fallout from Max Leonard's mad scheme, the debt that had dominated the consciousnesses of everyone in the book has taken a backseat, while never truly being done away with.  At least, the conditions that created it are still present, and a new president appears ready to double-down on some of them.  The country cannot, will not shake itself free of its commitments and its debt.  Maybe by 2050. 

Grade: B+

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Afterword: On the off chance that Albert Brooks ever reads this review: Hi.  I know that I'm posting this almost exactly one year after the publication of 2030.  I'm sorry.  In my defense, I've only had this blog for about six weeks.  Also, can I have all of your change?