Books: Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme

Everything I said about Barthelme's Forty Stories here applies, except 50% more. The two best stories are (the completely weird but wonderful) Me and Miss Mandible and (somehow less weird but equally wonderful) The Great Hug. One is long and one is short, but they both can and should be read.

A good lot of the other stories (e.g. Will You Tell Me?, The Emerald, The School, I Bought a Little City, A City of Churches) are interesting, at least in part, if a bit weird, confusing, distant, or surreal. They may warrant perusal if you have nothing better to do, or need some exposure to the outside of the box.

And some stories (Alice, Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning, Paraguay, Eugenie Grandet, A Manual For Sons, Aria, How I Write My Songs, etc.) are basically unreadable and offer no prize for your labors. They should be avoided at all costs, lest you decide that all modern literature should be thrown out the window, and pledge from hereon to read nothing but Dickens.

Books: The End of the Story, by Lydia Davis

Only three or four pages in, I knew that I was going to hate this book. I was on the fence about reading it in the first place, it being from a female author, and on the topics of memory, loss, and love (a dangerous and boggy territory for any writer, but for women in particular). In fact, because I had no recollection of how this book made its way onto my reading list (the person I thought recommended it has denied ever even hearing the name Lydia Davis, much less recommending this, her first novel; nor did it come, where some crappier recommendations have, from Slate, to which I pay much too much attention, but which hasn't mentioned Davis since I began reading it), I considered, after the first 40 pages, to add it to the short list of books I'd started but didn't finish. I could see that I wasn't going to get a thing out of it, except an evening lost. So, being myself, I decided to call the evening lost, power through, and finish the goddamned thing then and there.

It wasn't until I sat down to blog this morning that I found out that Davis, the tedious, insecure, neurotic, depressive, and ugly (sorry, low blow I know) creator of this sad, lonely diary parading itself as a novel is not only a McSweeny's author (really, there is no way; I refuse to believe it), and not only a successful translator (the creator of newly acclaimed Proust), but the ex-wife of Paul Auster (really?!), and, to top it all off, a recipient of a bloody MacArthur genius grant. If she's a genius, I'm MacArthur.

Okay okay okay. So what, exactly, about this book fills me with such disdain? Davis takes advantage of the post-modern tendency toward self-consciousness and, rather than building up a riveting, wry, impressive, shocking edifice only to tear it down and build it again from the pieces, as regularly do writers like Barth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Eggers, etc. (all men, it's true, but I can't help that), she catalogs her fretting about wanting to write, and calls that collected fretting a novel. Devils advocates will argue that Eggers frets aplenty in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—beginning in the very introduction!—but I shoot back to them that it's not the same. Eggers' fretting works to propel the story; many things happen in A Heartbreaking Work. In The End of the Story, nothing happens. Paragraph after paragraph describe Davis' painstaking process: "I don't know why I need to reconstruct all this. . ."; "I have tried to find a good order, but my thoughts are not orderly. . ."; "I am trying to separate out a few pages to add to the novel and I want to put them together in one box, but I'm not sure how to label the box. . ."; "And every idea had to be written down so that I would not forget it, even though I knew that later some of these ideas wouldn't seem worth remembering." Lady, here's a hint: none of these ideas are worth remembering. They're not worth writing down. They're not even ideas! Buy a goddamned remote control and turn off the inner monologue!

Perhaps this is what happens when you spend too much time with (fussy, self-obsessed, neurasthenic) Proust. He, too, is on my short list of books I began and never finished, but I intend to finish not only the half-read Swann's Way, but also the entire seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdue. Perhaps I'll try Davis' translation, since I didn't have much luck with Scott Moncrieff. Perhaps she'll redeem herself.

Movies: Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player)

For such a famous film that I've hoped to see for so long, this was a bit of a disappointment. There's nothing wrong with the plot in and of itself (a piano player, trying to quietly restart his life after his wife commits suicide (having revealed that she jump-started his career by sleeping with his promoter) by changing his name and playing in a small bar, gets dragged into the mud thanks to his thuggish brothers, as well as the jealousy of the bar's proprietor when he starts up an affair with the waitress)—in fact, because the piano player is still alive at the end, and back at his bar piano (sans waitress, who's been shot), the plot is actually rather fresh, if something so dark, so resigned, so Kierkegaardian, can be "fresh."

Fresh, too, is Truffaut's lighting: dark, flickering, and often diagetic. When the piano player comes home late at night, the screen is practically black, lighting darkly in a few flashes until he finally switches on a lamp. And the next entrance in that scene is a bit surprising, too, even for a French film—the piano player's neighbor, a prostitute, comes over, undresses, and gets into bed next to him, showing her breasts (the breasts less surprising than the fact that she's a prostitute who regularly spends her off hours in his bed).

So what is it about the movie that leaves me wanting more? I haven't figured it out. Charles Aznavour is an unusual hero: a bit shorter, bigger of eye than the usual male lead, and his performance has a nervous twitchiness just right for the character, who is a lot less dashing, and a lot less hard-bitten than the usual noir protagonist. He is so tentative the first time he walks home with the waitress; we're surprised to see him so frisky with the prostitute (she remarks on it herself.) Perhaps its disappointing to see him live (though isn't that what we always wish for our criminal-heroes? Not that the piano player is a real criminal at all), plunking away at the keys at the piano bar as if nothing had happened at all.

Movies: She's Gotta Have It

I want to say that this is Spike Lee's best movie, but I'm unqualified to do so because I've only seen one or two others (Jungle Fever, 25th Hour, and Inside Man). It's also a bit ludicrous to say so, because it's Spike's first film out of school, and its packed full of film school pretension (um, I mean intellectualism). But it's hard to imagine that a better movie could be made, in spite of the stilted dialogue, the wooden acting, and purposely-typological characters.

I don't know that I've ever witnessed a male writer/director/actor get more closely inside the head of a woman. Maybe it's just because that woman, Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) is, like me, rather in touch with a more masculine sexuality, but it's really quite delicious to see her with her three different lovers, refusing to drop any of them because they all satisfy (entertain?) her in different ways, and in fact trying to bring them to make nice with each other over Thanksgiving dinner (it doesn't work; having tried the same thing before myself, I could have told her that).

Nola's three lovers, the preening Greer Childs, the clowning Mars Blackmon, and the romantic Jamie Overstreet each remind me of a different man I've known, in addition to representing, for Spike, a certain type of black male available to the modern black woman (even by his name, Jamie Overstreet is clearly the closest to the ideal, but even though Nola finally gives in and tries to be monogamous for him, he can't hold her). But as funny as these three men can be, Spike includes a (hysterical) montage of other men's pickup lines, their big faces in black and white arthouse framing, as they threaten to "drink her bathwater" and offer her ten inches of "prime-cut, grade-A tube steak."

Somehow, this film manages to be completely of its time (with its full-color Ailey-esque dance sequence, Nola's lesbian friend Pearl, Jamie's terrible, horrible short, tight shorts, Spike's crazy Mars getup, and the naive documentary/interview style of so many of the scenes), and yet also eternal (and still fresh, and still relevant, and still hilarious). Much can be made of the gray-rape scene (and it's done so badly, I almost wish it wasn't there), but I'll leave that to the real feminists. For me, a better movie couldn't be made.

Books: The Conversions, by Harry Mathews

It seems I've come across yet another book that's far out of my league. In spite of its slim binding and thick-stock pages graced with extra white space, engaging with this book's depth is a challenge for anyone functioning with less intellectual capacity than Pynchon, Foster Wallace, or Mathews himself. The author is one fascinated by eccentricities, minutiae, anachronisms, and oddities; indeed, this semi-noirish, semi-picaresque, semi-mystery wild goose chase seems the book that Mr. Kindt would write, if Mr. Kindt were to write a novel (Mr. Kindt, in case you're not sure, is the tattooed, museum-going, fish-eating man in Laird Hunt's The Exquisite, which book may have been influenced by Mathew's style, just as Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness might have; it bears a striking thematic and stylistic similarity.) Both of these contemporary novels seem closer to The Conversions than A Void, the e-less murder mystery by Mathew's friend and contemporary Georges Perec, which I read before the dahlhaus was instated, but which includes rather incredible rewrites of both The Raven and Hamlet's famous monologue without the letter "e" ("Quoth that Black Bird, 'Not Again.'") Mathew's most important influence is said to be Raymond Roussel, author of Locus Solus, a novel I've been meaning to read for years now, but can't seem to find at the library in English translation (Roussel wrote it in French).

The topic of linguistic difficulties brings me back to The Conversions. Mathews is clearly comfortable with not only his native English, but also French, Latin, and German—all of which he includes, sans translation, in his novel. And it is not only a mere line or two—no!—the entire last few pages of the book (described as Appendix, but which may, thanks to his general trickery, contain the actual completion of the story (for the last chapter offers none)) are written in German. And in case his reader is as highly-educated as he is, and is fluent in French, Latin, and German, Mathews includes a number of paragraphs sprinkled throughout the novel in non-existent languages, languages that he has made up, that, if one reads aloud, offer a flicker of hope of intelligibility, as if they were some evolved or corrupted pig-latin, but ultimately remain elusive.

It is that eluding that seems to thrill Mathews; he is not unlike the wealthy eccentric who dies at the novel's beginning, after rigging a musical worm race (I told you he was eccentric!) and sending the narrator on a quest to answer three peculiar (and multi-lingual) questions about an antique adze (and if you know what that is without consulting a dictionary, perhaps this book is for you). And yet, the bulk of the novel contains less information about the adze than digressive vignettes about other curiosities, stories told to the narrator by the people from whom he seeks information about the adze. We read about a painter who has rigged a machine in order to mechanize his color choices, and Mathews describes the apparatus and its many pipes and joints in great detail. We read the history of a scientist who discovered what he thought was a new element, called fleshmetal, which refuses to liquefy, and Mathews describes his experiments, quoting temperatures and chemicals with abundant jargon. There is a chapter about a cult-like Christian splinter, a chapter about ancient choral music, and a chapter about a group of customs officials who spend their days smoking contraband cigars and reading confiscated picture books. There is a man who uses for a doorbell a carpet of chirping crickets on his stoop, which silence themselves at the approach of a guest. And none of this fits together sensically at all. I'm afraid I am going to have to read it again, once I've learned German, relearned my Latin, picked up a bit of French, and increased my IQ.

Movies: Pépé le Moko and Quai des Orfèvres

If you are wondering whether you'd like to be a French jewel thief on the lamb, hiding out in the Algerian Casbah in 1937, Pépé le Moko can tell you that it's not a bad idea. Mysterious French women with startling bow lips and heavy-lidded eyes will brave the Casbah's dark and twisting corridors to bring you afternoon delight once you tire of your bangled gypsy woman, and every other woman in the sultry, shadowed corridors of the twisting, stone-hewn city will answer to your any whim. The cops will try to catch you, but so long as you stay inside the Casbah's protective walls, you're safe. But therein lies the rub; you'll never again be able see the streets of Paris, ride the Metro, eat frittes unguarded, and, if your heavy-lidded French lover is dragged back to a ship to Paris by her fat and wealthy husband, to follow her there will mean death.

If you are wondering whether you'd like to be an attractive chanteuse in 1947, your career held back by an awkward but loving husband, Quai des Orfèvres will instruct you against sneaking out behind hubby's back to have a dinner meeting at the home of a dirty old man who promises you a movie contract. He'll put the moves on you, and you'll have no choice but to defend yourself by breaking a champagne bottle over his head, fleeing to your grandmother's house. When your suspicious husband goes to the dirty old man's house, expecting to catch you in flagrante delicto, and instead finds the body of the old man, dead, the two of you will both be in a world of trouble, suspects of the police. Neither of you will tell the other that you were indeed at the old man's house, and the fear and frustration of lengthy questioning will tear you apart. Your husband will attempt suicide, but will luckily survive, only to find out that neither of you killed the man—it was done by an itinerant robber, who saw the door open after you had already fled the scene, and before your husband arrived. You will have learned your lesson.

It's much more fun to be Pépé le Moko than an attractive chanteuse, or maybe movies were just that much more spare and romantic in the 30s. Or maybe it's Algeria. Yeah, it must be Algeria.

Movies: Richard Serra: Thinking On Your Feet

Here's a documentary to demonstrate that Richard Serra is a man as tedious as his work. He offers all the big words required to have landed him the critical attention he has received since the 1960s, propelling him to his current monumental, iconographic, plop-art status (what great city doesn't have a clearly recognizable Serra sculpture, paid for with civic funds?)

Clearly missing from this (low-budget, ugly) film is the response to Serra's work by the hundreds of manual laborers who create it for him. His multi-ton sheets of steel are produced by a plant in Germany that does most of its work for airplane and shipbuilding corporations. I am terribly curious about the steelworkers' understanding of Serra's art.

Also missing is a response by Serra to the graffiti often found on his sculptures. He insists repeatedly that his work is about urban landscapes, materials, space, rather than traditional sculpture, which he likens to pictorial painting. But while society's interaction with his sculpture is then necessarily a part of that, he is mum on the sour reception of Tilted Arc, and doesn't say whether his sculptures make good walls to lean upon, or on which to write your name with spray-paint.

Finally, I found myself frustrated by a moment at which Serra implied that his work is politically-oriented. An anti-Bushie, he argued that the government's reaction to art is always against, because art expresses something that the government wants to silence. It is clear to me, though (and illustrated by the aforementioned number of municipal commissions Serra has enjoyed) that Serra's work is precisely the kind of art that governments love: it is completely silent, innocuous, "pure." It makes no statement except about perhaps chemistry or physics; it cannot be sarcastic or critical; it cannot inspire hope, or roil a revolution. It is inert. It is dead. But it is art. It is the perfect way out for a government. It is akin to a giant button by Claes Oldenburg, an ugly explosion of orange I-beams by Mark di Suvero, or a giant spider by Louise Bourgeois. It's blank, and an easy bone to throw.

I don't need my artists to be Yale-educated and to use four-syllable engineering terms. I need them to make art that affects me, in my guts. Serra has never done this, and this film fails to inspire me to give him another chance.

Movies: Tropic Thunder

Here we have another comedy that doesn't live up to its potential, thanks to the excesses of farce. To reiterate a point I've made before, I have nothing against farce per se, but instead, a certain brand of overacted farce-cum-slapstick we've seen growing more and more popular, as opposed to the more sly and witty form to be found in, say, Waiting for Godot (of course, any contemporary big budget film is going to be a far cry from the spare delight of Beckett, but I use him to mark a point on a farce continuum: a point from which we are wandering ever farther).

This is a bigger disappointment in a film coming from (the brilliant physical comedian) Ben Stiller and featuring (the shockingly capable) Robert Downey Jr. and (the almost-always delightful) Jack Black. Every quality moment is a tease that ends too soon and lapses into tediously hyperbolic absurdity. The only real crux of social relevancy in this film is Downey Jr.'s character, an Australian award-winning method actor who has undergone cosmetic surgery to play a black character in the movie within the movie (conveniently also titled Tropic Thunder). His interactions with the only other black character (an actual black) are funny and fascinating and incredibly on point at this juncture in which black culture is being completely appropriated by whites. In case anyone is thick enough to miss this, the point gets hammered home when Tom Cruise and Bill Hader, the studio head and his assistant, perform a twisted, offensive, but ungodly funny dance to a hip hop track in order to illustrate the kind of wealth which with they are tempting Stiller's character's agent (Matthew McConaughey).

Seriousness aside, the movie is packed thick with incredibly funny performances: McConaughey is Rick Peck; Nick Nolte is Vietnam Vet Four Leaf Taybeck (who never actually fought, and never actually went overseas); Steve Coogan is jerky director Damien Cockburn; Tom Cruise is assfucker studio head Les Grossman, and Danny McBride, even though I hate him, is semi-competent explosive technician Cody. I just wish that, given all that star power, I didn't find myself regularly rolling my eyes.

Books: P, by Andrew Lewis Conn

As sometimes happens, I'm not certain how P got onto my reading list, but there it was, and the New York Public Library finally provided. According the the flaps and some nonsense on the internet, the book is a Joycean (oops, haven't read Ulysses yet) Lolita, sans pedophilia but with plenty of other smut to make up for it: a tale of a thirty-something pornographer and his unexpected friendship with a precocious ten-year-old runaway girl.

This is all well and good, but it is also Conn's first novel, and it reads painstakingly so. It's rare that, when reading, I feel the author's nervous effort, his fretting, his anxiousness to just get something—anything!—on the page. Here, Conn over-experiments. It's not the Joycean wordplay that bogs down his book, but the attempt to postmodernize the form. In the middle of the book, he switches from narrative prose to screenplay. As a denouement, he shoehorns in a lengthy stream of consciousness from a character tangential to the tale.

Benji, Conn's shabby protagonist, is an aging pornographer (filmmaker and often the star of his own movies) who can't get his life back together now that the industry has moved to LA and his wife—the only love of his life—has moved there with it, leaving him behind in New York. Conn attentively draws Benji with the care of a Renaissance draughtsman; this is a fully-realized, beautifully detailed character, whom we understand through by his actions (for example, we understand the depth of his love for Penelope when he sucks the blood out of her used tampon; and if reading that horrifies you, don't read the book). Finn, the runaway girl who, at ten, is reading Nietzsche in Washington Square Park while smoking a marijuana joint, is a little less well-realized (I suppose Conn had more trouble getting in touch with his inner tween than his inner porn star). To be honest, her presence in the novel doesn't do much to illuminate Benji (our real concern), except to provide a way from him to end his three year dry spell by sleeping with her mother once he has rescued her and brought her home.

What Conn needs is a tyrannical editor, who will beat the lazy bug out of him (the screenplay section reads as if Conn originally was writing a screenplay, and then decided to write a novel instead, but got too tired of converting all the dialogue into straight prose, so instead just pasted it right into the middle) and rub out the less-important characters. The author is too sentimental, too attached to his creations, to do this on his own. P reads like a great manuscript, awaiting a fascist armed with a fistful of red pens. It's not, though, in the league of Joyce or even Safran-Foer, whom his publishers name-check as his contemporary. I don't know if it ever could be.

Movies: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)

Here is one of the stranger, more elaborate noir plots I've encountered: Moreau is Florence Carala, and her lover, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) gets stuck in an elevator just after killing her husband. He spends the night trapped; in the meantime, a young couple steals his convertible for a joyride, uses his name when they check into a motel, and then kill another couple when they're caught trying to steal their Mercedes. They skip out in the middle of the night, and the police begin searching for the killer: Julien Tavernier. Once they find him, he's hesitant to confess his alibi, since it will link him to Carala's murder. Thanks, however, to the developed photos from the miniature camera in Tavernier's glove box (both of him with Ms. Carala and of the actual killers drinking champagne with the victims), all the murders are solved.

And yet it is more a tone poem for film than a thriller. Director Malle seems to completely rely on the moody Miles Davis score to color the smoky closeups of Jeanne Moreau's face with relevant emotion, to a degree that the movie seems more an illustration of the music than the music an accompaniment to the film. The score outperforms the picture to such a degree that when the music fades away to give room for Moreau's voice (which is saddled with a clumsy, overwrought voice over), our attention flags. And though Moreau became the star, Yori Bertin, who plays the young Véronique is far more interesting, mercurial, promising, even if it's sacrilege to say so.