Recently in Lit Category

When I'm not setting overstuffed boats of prose adrift on these pages, I am occasionally reminded that this thing is actually meant to be a blog. As such, it is honour-bound to pay tribute to a few of the ancient traditions of the medium, established by our once and future kings in a neolithic age of model railway clubs tinkering with supercomputers. I refer of course to the year-end "best of" post. So, I'll bite. I'll give you some lists. My weekly distraction of presenting a radio show devoted to the musical arts has already produced a not-stressed-about-enough plain-old top ten albums of the year list, so I won't retread that here. Let's try a few other things out.

The James McNulty Awards for Excellence in Television

1. The Wire drawing to a close. Say what you will about the relative strength of the newspaper arc relative to previous seasons, but for a show that promised to be the greatest television show ever made, we were not let down -- it finished as so much more than that. It wasn't about cops. It wasn't in the end even about The City, which I'd thought it was for the first few years. It was about hope, about systems, about order, dignity, dreams and change; it was about humanity, about the sheer brutal fucking hopelessness and futility that comes with trying to live and be part of this world. It was pretty funny too. I shan't spoil for those unfinished, but the final scene between Michael and Dookie may just be the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen. For those entirely Wire virginal, perhaps because too many people have told you how excellent it is and that means you'll never watch it, don't be stupid. Get thee to a downloadery now.
2. The part in the first episode of the new Knight Rider series where the hot young leads strip to their underwear inside KITT, even before the opening credits. After KITT has changed both into and back from a GM pick-up truck. And just after they've been hit by a missile, after escaping from a tuxedo party in "Foreign Consulate, USA". To quote sassy nerd chick back at sassy control bunker full of sassy blinking lights: "Things just got interesting!"
3. David Simon and Ed Burns get a second nod for what was, in the end, an underappreciated series, Generation Kill. This mini-series managed a tough balancing act, presenting a scathing assessment of the early stages of the Iraq war and its planning, while being fair and loving and fiercely proud of the troops on the ground, be they racist fuckup redneck shits or genuinely good sensitive guys lost in a desert far from moral ground. They are the people that were sent there to die. For long-stretches of episodes, nothing happens except the talking of crap. And then things go crazy. And then more crap is talked. We stay frosty, we wait. I'm naive in the art of warfare, I'll admit, but this felt so much more real, immediate and important than any of the hundreds of preachy message films released on same topic by Hollywood this year.
4. Lost not just jumping the Dharma-branded shark but sucking it into a space-time vortex and moving it somewhere where we'll never find it. Season four was glorious and silly and not at all concerned any more for the impatient, or those who don't feel like googling theoretical physicists. As it should never have been.
5. 24: "Redemption", in which JACK BAUER saves Africa in two hours with no help from those pesky UN-ocrats who just won't think of the CHILDREN. See particularly JACK BAUER using Crocodile Dundee-style animal-taming hypnosis against a wild-eyed child soldier.
6. Jimmy Smits on Dexter. The third season of everybody's favourite good-guy serial killer show got mixed reviews -- I loved it, but mostly because I spent the entire season trying to figure out just what the hell was going on with Smits' completely nutso performance. It can be tough to play against everything Michael C. Hall has brought to the title role, but Smits went punch for punch and scalpel blade for scalpel blade.

I have fallen in love with my Complete New Yorker. It's been sitting on the shelf for a year or so, rarely used as the constant swapping of DVDs was so annoying. But then, through a clever hack, I managed to get it installed on a little USB hard drive, and now, with speed like ninja, I have a searchable, indexed archive of the entire output of The New Yorker at my fingertips.

I realised I was in love last night when searching for anything written by Philip Gourevitch, author of the extraordinary We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. I hadn't heard of him but the first few chapters of that book have floored me, and he seemed like the kind of guy that would have written for the New Yorker. He had, and I began to rummage through his pieces. Then, next to a rather excellent true crime piece of his (in best Capote tradition), I noticed the first page of an Art Spiegelman strip about his underappreciation of Charles M Schultz.

From there I was on a joyful journey through Spiegelman's contributions to the magazine, some of them as dark and extraordinary as Maus, some of them riffing geeky journeys through the history of underloved comic characters (Plastic Man, anybody?) that Michael Chabon would be proud of. Somewhere in the early nineties, I came across a simple two-page strip, an interview presented as comic, Spiegelman in conversation with Maurice Sendak. Somehow, those two pages manage to encompass everything that makes both its author and its subject great--fantastic wild things creeping from the corners of the frame and the corners of the dialogue, rooted in the blunt simplicity and straightforward dialogue that made Maus a transcendent, shattering work.

I'm long gone now, past Updike's book reviews and heading towards Pauline Kael. On a little hard drive, the size of my Moleskine notebook (and hey, here's a nice idea), sits some of the most extraordinary creative output of the last century. And I've only just begun.

Technorati Tags: new yorker, sendak, spiegelman

And now it's Kurt Vonnegut's turn. Rest in peace, my man. The web will be flooding with obituaries within hours so I shan't fill the church with more unnecessary words (shall donate some to your nominated charity, instead). None of them could compare to yours.

I wanted to link to a wonderful old interview between he and George Plimpton (and others) in the Paris Review but they appear to have taken it down and replaced it with just a little teaser instead. If you can find the whole thing, let me know, it's a marvellous piece.

Technorati Tags: vonnegut

The electric whine of a reversing Mini in the laneway. Something I haven't heard in a few months. I used to hate that noise. Now it's oddly nostalgic; a wistful reverse. The back door's been hacked to bits by somebody attempting to break in. All they succeeded in doing was busting the lock so bad it now doesn't open at all. The neighbours weren't so lucky. But then, this place was done over good and proper not six months ago, surely I deserve a little respite, at least until I get around to paying the insurance.

Poverty is relative, this I know. But right now I am relatively poor. Day old bread rather than new loaves. That sort of level. A day of quiet pain and riding fast on empty roads, letting the wind blast salt from the face. Watching drunken remembrance on Northbridge streets, and feeling guilty for sugar like maybe it was cocaine. But I have a plan, I have ways of making things work.

Bocce around Hyde Park--and afternoons curled up in bed trying to make some kind of sense of Neal Stephenson--made for recuperative public holiday weekend. Watched The Virgin Suicides again and got wildly jealous of Sofia Coppola's precocious brilliance. She may just be the great American filmmaker of this decade (which, let's not forget, is half-over, and thus we can start making such calls). When they write the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls of the 00s, she'll have a solid role. It'll probably mostly be about Charlie Kaufman's neuroses and Vin Diesel's shiny pate, though. And then Manhattan showed up on Foxtel this morning and I got to thinking about the genius of Woody Allen (and how I preferred his brand of genius to the Fellini on the other channel). And thought I'd write about it later.

Maybe I'm coming to Neal Stephenson too late, and I'm afraid of losing my cyberpunk props for even whispering this, but I think I don't like Snow Crash. At least, not the first 50 or so pages. It's all too obvious, too pre-programmed for geek love. Sexxy samurai swords and car chases and hackers swigging beer in warehouses while jacked into VR worlds where they rule as gods. A hero with the surname Protagonist. I'm scratching hard to find the soul beneath the perfect, flawless surfaces of Stephenson's world. I've been assured by many that it's there, but I fear I have made a mistake. Best, surely, to never have read it and presumed it great, than to have read it and thought it ordinary, somewhat less than electric?

I'll keep digging, but my reading queue grows beyond control--I must read Jack London, Vandana Shiva, Brian Aldiss, a great book on the science of cats, and an extraordinary book by Ray Bradbury on writing uncovered by a loving soul who knew that it needed to find its way to me. Because I have a plan.

With the global American ideological offensive, the fundamental insight of Graham Greene's The Quiet American is more relevant than ever: We witness the resurgence of the figure of the "quiet American," a naive, benevolent agent who sincerely wants to bring democracy and Western freedom. It is just that his intentions totally misfire, or, as Greene put it: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

-- Slavoj Žižek, The Not-So-Quiet American

Everybody's favourite eccentric bearded Slovenian weighing in on the American Empire brings us right back to what may be the most defining book of the past half century. I remember grubby photocopies of that book being shoved into my hand on Saigon street corners, a proud souvenir of the city's greatest attraction - its dark, bleak past. The comparison of Bush to Pyle is an extraordinary one, and an extraordinarily useful one, for those who struggle to understand exactly how Team America sleeps at night. That it just can't be--please let it not just be--pure evil.

The Quiet American is the story of the slow, but painfully inevitable descent into hell that was Vietnam, written while it was still peering over the edge (an edge I will return to later). America was not at the center of its descent so much as being those tracks on the roller coaster that pull you slowly to the precipice. Maybe at that stage they're not directly harming you. They're not pushing you down. But they're leading you to a place where all you can do is scream your bloody lungs out. Pyle means well. He believes his bombs help the country he is slowly growing to love. They need democracy, they need freedom. Even if the risk is that they all end up dead. The Quiet American not only utterly nailed and presaged everything that was to ensue on the Me kong Delta (even that vague feeling that one day, after the slaughter, tourists may come and buy lighters refashioned from old grenades), but did a better job than any other book has of finding some sort of explanation for this American century. And Žižek points this out, and I say yes of course, Bush is Pyle and Pyle is Bush. So let's all sit on the hotel terrace, scotch in hand, and wonder a little about this world that's exploding at our feet.

Songs for the doomed

But with the throttle screwed on, there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhileration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left, and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

-- Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

And so Hunter S. Thompson shuffles off this mortal coil. Or, rather, kind of exploded his head off of it. You know, I never thought Hunter would go that way when he finally drove off down the proud highway - too darn stubborn and arrogant for that kind of thing. Thompson always knew the world was fucked, and was always angry about it. What changed? Why now? Had he finally given up on a country run by "a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers"? One who "hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and is no fun at all"? His writing on the last campaign trail was increasingly dejected but never downbeat. Perhaps he looked into the abyss, the downward spiral of dumbness, and saw no point. Or maybe his rocking chair got too creaky. Maybe he ran out of acid. Maybe the drugs stopped working. Maybe he finally remembered what happened in that hotel room. He's always been somewhere near the edge. He came closer to describing it than most. He is one of the ones who have gone over. A thousand people will write that sentence today, but how could we not? He finally, decisively, chose between now and later.

Playing, now and loudly, and perhaps aptly, is The Arcade Fire, and the extraordinary album Funeral. This one's for you, you flag-draped misanthrope, you gun-toting gonzo. It's for you and your attorney. Go guzzle it, go enjoy it, go see it melt into your feet. The world made more sense with you in it, even if your world, your America, made little sense even to yourself.