EL TOJO

The Martin Amis Experience

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:21:22 -0800

Martin Amis

Experience: A Memoir; Martin Amis

In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.

Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.

Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).

Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.

*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Didion

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:54:11 -0700

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Joan Didion

Joan Didion wades though counterculture, kitsch, California, and the far reaches of the United States in a collection of essays. By day, she is just another white-lipped, red-eyed, fragile poet, teetering continually on the verge of fashionable neurotic panic attack, but by night, she strips off her weaknesses and flexes her iron fist - confident, articulate (sometimes painfully so), and incisive to a fault .

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a strange read for me. I'd only caught glimpses of it during all my cheaply xeroxed Freshman English Class packets, and I wasn't really wild about what I saw. Luckily, those essays seem to be the most anemic of the bunch, pandering to all of Didion's vices as an author:
pedantic in her eternal search for greater depth, unabashedly florid and excessive in her prose, and indecisive - at her worst openly wrong - in her conclusions.

Didion walks a tightrope throughout her book; her writing always warring on the edge between an overindulgent preciousness and easy parody, and an artist's dedication to delicacy. Several of her essays fall short - meandering and bled of all meaning - but when she hits her pitch, she roars, load, powerful, intelligent and deadly eloquent*. Her politics also inhabit a strange limbo. While her views are open enough to scare away the more strident members of the social Right, they also carry a surprising amount of old-fashioned morality, as confessed by Didion herself several times over. She views her subjects with a certain kind of kindness - as seen in her warm-hearted and unbiased approach to the waning counterculture movement in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Yet, unbiased means just that, and she is willing to unleash a scathingly honesty - completely devoid of any mean-heartedness, and still brimming with tenderness towards her subjects, yet unwilling to mask their faults.

Luckily, these gems outnumber some of her more woolly-minded and convoluted essays, and make Slouching Towards Bethlehem an intricately written, complex collection.

* Special gold stars go to the last segments of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", the entirety of "On Self Respect", and also all of "Goodbye to All That." I want to xerox them en masse and roll around in them. Or, in a less creepy world, drop them from planes like evangelical napalm! Either one works.

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Frank McCourt's Greatest Hits

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sat, 26 May 2007 21:48:58 -0700

The library's copy of Angela's Ashes is dog-eared beyond repair. That's how I roll. (PS: This man has never met a conjunction he didn't like.)

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. [pg. 11]

The rain drove us into the church - our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers, and candles.
Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain. [pg. 12]

Not until late December did they take Male to St. Paul's Church to be baptized and named Francis after his father's father and the lovely saint of Assisi. Angela wanted to give him a middle name, Munchin, after the patron saint of Limerick but Malachy said over his dead body. No son of his would have a Limerick name. It's hard enough going through life with one name. Sticking on middle names was an atrocious American habit and there was no need for a second name when you're christened after the man from Assisi. [pg. 17]

This maddened Malachy again and he wanted to jump at the priest for calling the child some class of a Protestant. The priest said, Quiet, man, you're in God's house, and when Malachy said, God's house, my arse, he was thrown out on Court Street because you can't say arse in God's house. [pg. 18]

The ship pulled away from the dock. Mam said, That's the Statue of Liberty and that's Ellis Island where all the immigrants came in. Then she leaned over the side and vomited and the wind from the Atlantic blew it all over us and other happy people admiring the view. Passengers cursed and ran, seagulls came from all over the harbor and Mam hung limp and pale on the ship's rail. [pg. 46]

The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. [pg. 113]

He'll go to the cinema the rest of his life, sit next to girls from lanes and do dirty things like an expert. He loves his mother but he'll never get married for fear he might have a wife in and out of the lunatic asylum. What's the use of getting married when you can sit in cinemas and do dirty things with girls from lanes who don't care what they do because they already did it with their brothers. [pg. 117]

The boys in Leamy's don't want Fintan praying for them and they threaten to give him a good fong in the arse if they catch him praying for them. He says he wants to be a saint when he grows up, which is ridiculous because you can't be a saint till you're dead. He says our grandchildren will be praying to his picture. One big boy says, My grandchildren will piss on your picture, and Fintan just smiles. His sister ran away to England when she was seventeen and everyone knows he wears her blouse at home and curls his hair with hot iron tongs every Saturday night so that he'll look gorgeous at Mass on Sunday. If he meets you going to Mass he'll say, Isn't my hair gorgeous, Frankie? He loves that word, gorgeous, and no other boy will ever use it. [pg. 156]

She slams the door in our faces. We don't know what to do till Billy Campbell says, We'll go back to St. Joseph's and pray that from now on everyone in Mickey Spellacy's family will die in the middle of the summer and he'll never get a day off from school for the rest of his life.
One of our prayers is surely powerful because next summer Mickey himself is carried off by the galloping consumption and he doesn't get a day off from school and that will surely teach him a lesson. [pg. 172]

Grandma is there to help and she says, That's right, no hope in heaven for the infant that's not baptized.
Bridey says it would be a hard God that would do the likes of that.
He has to be hard, says Grandma, otherwise you'd have all kinds of babies clamorin' to get into heaven, Protestants an' everything, an' why should they get in after what they did to use for eight hundred years? [pg. 182]

He tilts over on the chair and farts and smiles to himself and I know now I'm going to get better because a doctor would never fart in the presence of a dying boy. [pg. 192]

I feel sad over the bad thing but I can't back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can't say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head. [pg. 210]

'Tis my son, sir. He has two bad eyes.
Oh, by God, he does, woman. They're desperate-looking eyes altogether. They look like two rising suns. The Japs could use him on their flag, ha ha ha. [pg. 226]

I get under the cows and squirt the milk into Alphie's mouth till he's full and throws it up. Farmers chase us till they see how small Michael and Alphie are. Malachy laughs at the farmers. He says, Hit me now with the child in me arms. [pg. 247]

And Mrs. Purcell says, Do you know what, Frankie?
What, Mrs. Purcell?
That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman. [pg. 275]

Everything is damp and musty and Laman Griffin snores over our heads. There are no stairs in this house and that means no angel ever on the seventh step.

But I'm twelve going on thirteen and I might be too old for angels. [pg. 278]

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it's a fortnight since my last confession.
And what have you done since then, my child?
I hit my brother, I went on the mooch from school, I lied to my mother.
Yes, my child, and what else?
I- I- I did dirty things, Father.
Ah, my child, was that with yourself or with another or with some class of beast?
Some class of beast. I never heard of a sin like that before. This priest must be from the country and if he is he's opening up new worlds to me. [pg. 293]

He said it was very awkward hopping up on the bike with his thing sticking out but if you cycle very fast and think of the sufferings of the Virgin Mary you'll go soft in no time. [pg. 315]

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THE BLOOD OF STRANGERS; Huyler

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:51:27 -0700

The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine

THE BLOOD OF STRANGERS; Frank Huyler, MD

Despite his fancy doctorate degree, Huyler still writes like a seventeen year old lit-major who owns an acoustic guitar and knows like 8 chords, man. Still! His stories, thanks to his gory and lurid occupation, are more interesting and the book is thin.

Also? If medical literature is to be believed, every single one of your brilliant doctors is certifiable. The rest of your doctors are incompetent boobs who should be fired immediately.

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ANGELA'S ASHES; McCourt

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:31:48 -0700

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

ANGELA'S ASHES; Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt lives in Limerick, Ireland, dire poverty, and to tell the tale. His story is beautifully written, and you fat American's with your nine course meals and NAAFA will never be able to match his accomplishments.

The Ireland of Frank McCourt has never seen a leprechaun in its entire tormented 800 year history, but it has seen sorrow and poverty and the English. McCourt's Ireland is desperately proud, desperately poor, desperately pious, and just plain desperate; without a dependable navigator, Ireland is all uncomfortable sob-story and weepy heart, and Angela's Ashes would read like 368 pages of a Feed the Children Marathon, but with McCourt at the steering wheel Ireland gets the opportunity to be bittersweet and funny.

McCourt elevates this memoir from simply another book capitalizing on another depressing childhood to a story that is bitterly funny. It takes a special kind of narrative voice to move a memoir - to make it rise above glurge and self-absorption, to make it readable and even fun - and McCourt has it in spades. Is he sometimes ineffective? Yes. Is he sometimes unsympathetic? Yes. Does he abuse run on sentences? Hell yes. But he always has a grip on the reader's attention, and has the dual gift of: (a) a subtle but hilarious sense of humor and (b) the ability to sometimes knock a sentence (or a sentence that is a paragraph long) out of the park. Furthermore, McCourt is grimly empty of self-pity which means his Limerick and all its people remain mean, cruel, capriciously kind, and very, very complex.

All these elements put-together means that I am of course thrilled with this book and will use words like provocative, touching, heart-rending, and beautiful to prove it. I will also molest McCourt's precise prose without shame and try to pillage his style. This will not work and I will throw myself into the sciences and alcoholism.

ADDENDUM: Ok, so the book sort of sagged towards the end. The thing is, with a memoir there's not much to keep you chugging along. And with a memoir about abject poverty instead of, say, Roald Dahl's smashing times with the RAF, it's not so much a question of AND THEN DID FRANK RISE OUT OF THE SLUMS AND KILL HEINRICH HIMMLER WITH A JET PLANE but NOW WHAT KIND OF TERRIBLE THIRD WORLD INFECTION DID FRANK PICK UP? This, admittedly, is not enough to keep my miniscule attention span. Also, the end of the book has a lot more sex (or the 'excitement' as McCourt likes to call it), which I would normally cheer on but: (a) first of all, the man calls it the 'excitement' which is about as randy and exciting as a woman referring to her coochie as a 'flower', no; and (b) I had the misfortune of looking at the book jacket and saw McCourt's craggy 60 year old face peering at me through his enormous bushy eyebrows and the thought of him hooking up on a couch pretty much ruined everything. In short, McCourt's way of describing sex pretty much has all the appeal of your Grandpa talking about the nice O-ree-ental woman he met and bedded during his tour of Asia against the Japs and Hitler.

This section is long and really pretty irrelevant towards my overall enjoyment of the book, but STILL IT WAS BOTHERING ME.

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Grab Bag (2AM)

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:51:36 -0700

THE WHITEBOY MUSIC PROJECT

13 Bitches Ain't Shit

Ben Folds

Bitches Ain't Shit
DEF: (1) Dr. Dre's anthem to the ladies. At times incomprehensible, but always dirty, and always ready to shove a dick down any indignant bitch's craw. (2) Ben Folds white bread, archly ironic, archly lame cover of said anthem. Commonly known as a godsend for lameass nerds who can't rap, can't dance, but have had twelve years experience learning classical piano.

Synonyms:

07 Boyz N the Hood

THE WOUNDED BOOKLIST
The three signs of certain death: (1) Read for class, (2) Hazy apathy, (3) Never reviewed or summarized; a recipe for almost immediate, literary amnesia. For the most part, not overwhelmingly bad. In fact, sometimes insightful and even, emotionally involving. But, hey, laziness combined with a roiling spring term will do that. To the incinerating heap, my good friends. Burn baby burn. Disco inferno.

Complications, Atul Gawande. A-. A grade that would kill Gawande, but it's nothing personal. Well-written, self-conscious, complex, and intelligent. Also earns a gold star for managing to simultaneously indoctrinate the field of Medicine into the ranks of the saints while also pissing all over its integrity.

Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder. B+. In which Paul Farmer shows us that being a motivated, hard-working, but most of all, influential idealist isn't mutually exclusive from being a raging, clap-infested dickbag. The book becomes tolerable because of Kidder's mixed feelings about Farmer. Kidder is never the fanboy, but still admires Farmer for his efforts and his successes, fairly. What elevates the book beyond salivating hero-worship is the fact that, at times, you feel that Kidder just wants to lay off and slug Farmer in the teeth. I like that. Gold stars for everybody except the dewy-eyed champions of the world.

Breathing for a Living, Laura Rothenburg. B-. A nineteen year old chronicles her struggles with her ultimately fatal cystic fibrosis. Rothenburg is always extraordinarily self-aware and analyzing. She sometimes dips into self-obsession but hey, the girl's nineteen and terminal. She's allowed luxuries we aren't. She's a good and often sympathetic narrator who veers between self-pity and confidence, but usually manages to remain sincere without becoming maudlin. It's a fast, compact read, but unfortunately, pretty forgettable.

Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison. A. Dorothy Allison sings the blues. The book jacket cover talks about the sexual and physical abuse suffered by seven-year-old narrator Bone at the hands of her stepfather. But Allison is an overachiever and has written the most bitter, loathing love-song to the poor, proud, hardscrabble, hillbilly South. An effortless, pained Southern drawl narrates the novel which concludes in one of the most acerbic, yet perfect endings I've read in a while.

Go Ask Alice, Anonymous. C. Open up your internet browser and sift through Livejournal. Hit a journal with lots of x's in the title, and preferable the word: a. broken, b. angel, c. crimson, or d. all of the above. Read it. It's your lucky day. You've been able to read a more fascinating version of Go Ask Alice for free!

Anonymous narrator "Alice" is self-pitying, self-obsessed, and grossly unaware of her cloying, noxious personality. A question for the ages: is Go Ask Alice at its worst when it is (A) comparing sex with "unicorns and rainbows" [I AM NOT KIDDING] or (b) ranting on and on about the Establishment. No seriously. The Establishment. Only salvageable for the rare moments of keen self-loathing - if only so we can root someone on. Go Alice! Hate yourself! We're behind you one hundred percent! Keep the hate alive! And the Editor's Note at the end which comes as a either a slap in the face or a pat on the back, depending on your mood.

THE REC
>bounce/oz The go-to source for music to bounce your ass to/music to french to. Fuck your indie shit, and start shaking that ass. The alpha and omega of music blogs.

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COURTESY OF PRICEY UNIVERSITY EDUTAINMENT

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:27:46 -0800

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

STARRING Andie MacDowell's bloated FUPA and invading gums. In which Steven Soderbergh confuses long shots, eye-roll-inducing stilted dialogue, hilariously acrobatic and unappealing sex-scenes (featuring, no kidding, a potted plant), and WHIPLASH character development with beautiful enlightenment and touching humanity.

Spent most of the two hours thinking that, by god (A) FROM ONE TO SEXY, THIS MOVIE IS A DOUBLE-BAGGER. WHY IS SEX EVEN IN THE TITLE. UGH, NO MORE CLOSE UPS ON JAMES SPADER'S LEIF-GARRET STYLE MULLET. ANDIE MACDOWELL, ARE YOU PREGNANT? NO. DON'T WEAR THAT. I'M SERIOUS. (B) Wh-why did she do that? What does that even mean? (C) It has to get better. I'll just stay for five more minutes. (D) That's. It. What.

Emergency!: True Stories From The Nation's ERs (Emergency!)

EMERGENCY!; Mark Brown

Doctors and nurses in emergency rooms around the United States phone in their greatest hits. A word of advice: don't quit your day job, honey. None of the contributors have exactly been honing their narrative skill and it shows. Lots of gushing, sanguine B-grade melodrama. Lots of overly pleased arch-irony, with enough wink-wink, see-I-subtly-did-there nudging going on. The sole redeeming factor? The stories. Skip the ones about the gruesome emotional trauma of losing a child and go straight for the anecdotes about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Lurid and loving it.

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RUNNING WITH SCISSORS; Burroughs

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:01:08 -0800

A WARNING: I SPENT THE LAST 200 PAGES OF THIS BOOK CHANTING "KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF" TO A BOY WHO HAD BEEN RAPED BY A 30 YEAR OLD PEDOPHILE. SO. YOU KNOW WHERE I STAND IN TERMS OF OVERWHELMING SYMPATHY, ETC.

Running with Scissors: A Memoir

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS; Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs' biological parents are headcases, so he is shuttled off to live at his mother's psychiatrist's house. There, he has a crazy, traumatic childhood that is much, much crazier and more traumatic than yours. And he has a published memoir to prove it.

To understand Running with Scissors, think PostSecret, think Todd Browning's Freaks, think of 120 Days of Sodom, think Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul, think of every English major with a hard on for David Sedaris. Ready? So am I.

Running with Scissors promises a freak show, and does it deliver. Scat, rampant infidelity, drugs, preteen groping, run-of-the-mill pedophilia, and just a whole lot of humpin'. All that happens throughout the course of Burroughs' memoir is unbelievable for the most part, but it's as entertaining as any spectacular trainwreck. In addition to the list above, think carnie geek.

Burroughs is in it for the long haul and a Pulitzer. Not content with dragging out his freakish -- let's not get timid here; and besides, Burroughs wears that word like a Purple Heart -- backstory, Burroughs wants us to acknowledge his story of amazing triumph! But he's more, much more than that. He's also got a dark, rapier wit! And what better way of expressing that except for a dry, ironic voice? Keep reaching for that rainbow, starshine.

Now, it's hard to pin the right kind of tone for a memoir. Not too detached, but not overly weepy, self-aware but not self-obsessed, and always charming. Dahl could do it, Burroughs can't. He's cloying when he wants to be moving, archly superior instead of reminscent, almost constantly self pitying -- not without cause, but that doesn't make the reading any smoother -- and never very sympathetic. He wants his humor to be blacker-than-black, but instead, comes off as over-aggressive, embellishing a story that is powerful on its own merits. His attempts at clever are so desperate, that they just come off as sleazy and manipulative. It all comes to a head in his tacky, watery-eyed, chic-techique ending, where he comes to recognize his talents as a person and a writer. All thanks to his best friend and adopted sister (read: desperate fag-hag). The orchestra swells.

And what do you call this act?

This is the shock-jock of all memoirs. If you like it, you'll like it for the twisted memoirs. If you like it for, god help me, Burroughs' narration or the people, I will take a torch to your body. So read it for the anecdotes, wash off the grime from Burroughs' perverse narrative voice, and kindly underline a beautiful adage from your sweet old grandmother: shut your fucking mouth before you make yourself look stupid.

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DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM; Sedaris

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:01:36 -0800

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim; David Sedaris

In which David Sedaris waxes lyrical about his family, friends, and existential angst, all while keeping a snappy postmodern tone. Also known as: David Sedaris writes the college essays of your wet dreams.

THE GOOD: Don't let the hipster hype fool you. Sedaris actually has a pretty keen sense of humor, and even better he's got a great arsenal of stories. While some of the beginning shorts are pretty common, Sedaris is lucky because he has one of the most dysfunctional families in the U.S. And he mines them for gold! And he's surprisingly good at it! So yes! He's got, on the whole, a wonderful narrative voice - when it's not strained, something that I'll get to later - and a beautiful train-wreck pedigree, which meant that I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. That's not saying much, but hey! I didn't want to burn it! And it was still better than the Da Vinci Code!

THE BAD: Remember when I said Sedaris had a good voice when it wasn't strained? Well, it is strained. The tragedy is that except for a few exceptions, Sedaris doesn't think you'll really get, dig, understand his wild tales unless he wrings out every bit of heartwrenching emotion from them. Which makes what should be a great set of anecdotes read like... well... Chicken Soup for the Hipster Soul. Take for example, Exhibit A: Sedaris describes stuffing his gawp with disgusting Halloween Candy to avoid sharing said candy with creepy, possibly Mormon, neighbors. Now that in and of itself is good. It's solid. And it's funny! Gold stars for everyone!

Too bad Sedaris goes on to ruin the entire thing when he builds tiny, touching anecdote into a cosmic screed about the heart of darkness... and Hershey's. OH I WAS SELFISH, LIKE ALL HUMANS WERE SELFISH, AND THE CANDY WAS DELICIOUS YET IT BURNED BLOO BLOO BLOO. BACK ME UP ON THE VIOLIN, HOLMES.

So yes, Sedaris has a tendency to... overplay his stories. I wish that he'd have the confidence in his readers to let us read into his writing on our own. His over-narration is invasive and annoying, to use polite words. And too often, he takes a beautiful anecdote and cheapens it with his hipster trash emotional shit. It's like watching a beautiful butterfly of an essay turn into.... a college app.

SO HEY, SISTER. Stop the poignancy. Just give us the sweet stories and the sweet narrative voice.

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