Tag Archives: Books

The Road (to Nowhere)

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Finished The Road not long ago.  I’d seen two other people on two different train rides also reading it; at first chalked it up to Jung’s collective unconscious, then figured these men were reading it for the same reason I was – they’d bought it discounted as I had since the book was very newly in paperback.

SPOILER ALERT!  I’d like to excerpt one of my most favorite passages from the book:

The chill wind battered their gaunt frames.  It would have played their ribs like sad xylophones were it not for the thin jackets.  The man looked out to the horizon.  Cold grayness stretched out, morbidly, like a corpse.  It was dark and cold.  The black river to the side looked still below its frozen top.  A snow fell, gray and impure.  Darkness encroached upon their grimy, gray selves.  A gray coldness darkened the evening.  The boy was cold and hungry.
Can we stop to eat?
We can’t stop to eat.
Because the bad men will find us?
Yes, they will find us.
But I’m so hungry.
You are hungry.
Okay.
Okay.

(This was not actually taken from The Road.  BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN.)

1984

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I finally finished 1984 the other day, cover-to-cover.  I’d “read” it in eleventh grade but in the end it’s all the better to have completed it for the first time now.  I think I’m better equipped to understand what Orwell was getting at, and sadly the timing couldn’t have worked out more seamlessly.  In its time, I’d say the novel was a reductio ad absurdum portent of doom, a cautionary tale, that also obliquely addressed the totalitarian governments in Europe that were in various stages of flourish in the late 1940s.  But in present-day America, the book nearly ceases to have its satirical undertones because it approaches fundamental reality, with its increasingly oppressive and invasive state scaring people into thinking a certain way, making them afraid to be human, and claiming malleable lies as infallible truth.

No Backlash for Me

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I’ve succeeded so far in avoiding the Dark Knight backlash which is now inevitable for every big movie.

Not that the media hasn’t tried, what with the Batlogo superimposed on the IMDb; and the nonsensical commercials for cable TV with the man and the two teens and the woman and the man conspicuously holding the newspaper with the “BATMAN SIGHTED” headline; and the pizza commercial featuring some of the Joker’s goons.  ‘Cause they’re all related, naturally.  It’s an organic progression from cheap pizza to damaged playboy industrialist superheroes.

I’ve done well in the way I did well last year, for a different reason – I imposed a media blackout on myself the week before the last Harry Potter book came out, so that no precocious virgin blogger nor loveless snot-nosed magazine writer who hates himself could feel important by ruining my surprise.  And what do you know, it worked, and my reading of the book that Sunday went thoroughly interrupted, save for food, and finally and temporarily the world responded in my efforts to shut it out.  (Thankfully, those days are gone.)

I like to build my own suspense with events like this.  The people who market the piss out of movies like this really have the easiest job in the world, but they make it hard on themselves by having to squeeze out every last dollar.  I can’t blame them for that, but let’s call it for what it is: selling metaphorical food to metaphorically hungry people.  At not entirely unreasonable prices, either.

I’m really hungry but it’s too late to eat.

Seating’s Reasons

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I thought Winter was the time of year to stay inside, to avoid the cold curled up with a book and a fireplace, and an ottoman, and a dog – or if you’re not in the castle of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast: a beer and a television, maybe still an ottoman and a dog.  December-January are nice months to eat more, drink more, celebrate the end of a year and the new one, and realize we’re part of an ongoing human evolution by still realizing a life in accordance with the seasons.

Caution: Spring’s gone by the wayside, Fall’s still hanging on, but I think Summer’s the next season to go.  To me it seems too damn hot to do anything outside, at least in my asphalt jungle of Astoria.  So here I sit, six months removed from winter, staying as indoors now as I did half a year ago and will again in the same.

Making It All Up

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Was thinking today how reading material can generally be lumped into two vague, seemingly mutually exclusive categories – fiction, and non-fiction.

Was soon after that finding it interesting that in what may be approximated as myth vs. fact, i.e. fiction vs. non-fiction, the member of the pair that is made up – unreal, imaginary, nonexistent, unimportant, inconsequential – is the one that gets the positive label. Fiction. What is true, what is real, what exists, what is a tangible record of an objective phenomenon which can be documented – that’s the one which has the derivative label. Non-fiction. Not… that. The umbrella genre is not called Truth, or True Stories!, or anything like that.

One might say that it’s a minute vestigial detail for which early booksellers are responsible. Seems to me that books of imaginary stories became better sellers than dry books of facts, and so the lion’s share got the square and the clearer title.

I’m gonna extend that square, give it another dimension, by taking from this little dichotomy the truth that those made-up stories, bedtime stories, the stuff daydreams are made of, are so important to the human experience that not only is it no accident that they get the original name, it is essential.