Lost In Translation

The Wind In The Willows-100

I haven't read this classic, but Salon's Gary Kamiya's tribute to it makes me want to read it, then I can finally understand Mr. Toad's Wild ride at Disneyland:

...and if Mole and Rat are idealized reflections of the grown-up author and his grown-up problems, then Toad is its major key, its glittering color, its childish heart. The combination is audacious and bizarre, but the book's two facets somehow complement each other perfectly. Mole and Rat learn from their mistakes, grasp the meaning of friendship, come to understand their limitations. That's all well and good, but rather grown-up. The antidote to this seriousness is someone who never learns anything, who never understands anything, who never regrets anything, who lives for the moment. The antidote is Toad.

Toad was present at the creation -- in fact, he was the creation. "The Wind in the Willows" started out as bedtime stories Grahame told to his son, Alastair, and the first version was probably only about Toad, according to Green. Toad's story is the one everyone remembers. How could you not? His picaresque adventures, from his unhappy career as a motor-car thief, fraudulent washerwoman and horse trader to the mock-Homeric "Return of Ulysses" chapter in which he and his friends creep through a secret tunnel to surprise the weasels who have usurped his house, appeal to the universal desire to humbug everybody and get away with it, to rise straight to heaven on the gas of one's own ego.

Toad is one of the great comic characters in all of literature, a descendant of the braggart soldiers of Roman literature and the pompous cuckolds of commedia del'arte, the little blowhard brother of Falstaff and Don Quixote. Armed with invincible vanity, a complete lack of impulse control and a remarkably empty head, Toad is the consummate scenery-gobbler, a baked ham on legs who seizes the stage and never lets another character get a word in edgewise. Like cartoon characters who spring magically back to life after they have been folded, spindled and mutilated, Toad's delicious appeal is that he always comes back, as gloriously stupid and lovable as ever: He cannot be anything but Toad. As Grahame told someone who inquired if Toad ever really changed, "Of course Toad never really reformed; he was by nature incapable of it."

New Cult Cannon: Reservoir Dogs

One of my favorite Tarantino films, Reservoir Dogs, gets the AV Club New Cult Canon treatment:

Reservoir Dogs opens with what would become a Tarantino signature: The idea that bad guys, in the time between jobs, blab about the same banal shit the rest of us do, albeit in a much more colorful way. Sitting over breakfast with a table full of gangsters, there's Tarantino himself as Mr. Brown, theorizing (convincingly) that the Madonna hit "Like A Virgin" is not about "a sensitive girl who meets a nice fella" (that's "True Blue"), but about a John Holmes-type making a promiscuous girl feel the sweet pain of virginity all over again. That segues into an argument over tipping, prompted by the sniveling Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), who refuses to throw in a buck like everyone else, because he doesn't believe waitresses deserve extra money just for doing their jobs. Mr. Pink is obstinate in the face of reason until bossman Lawrence Tierney, with his gravelly voice and hulking frame, brings him in line: "C'mon, you. Cough up a buck, you cheap bastard."

Nothing said in the opening scene figures in later, not even in some obscure metaphorical way. Tarantino does make the most of an opportunity to introduce his characters, who have convened on a day leading up to a jewelry heist, and won't be seen together again until they meet at a warehouse rendezvous after the botched robbery. But the film would still make sense without the scene, which is just as much about Tarantino delivering a statement of intent that's carried him through to this day. Having these gangsters riff on Madonna and tipping establishes his characters and films as products of popular culture, reflections more of a movie-addled brain than of the far-less-exciting world outside of it. Some tag him as a rip-off artist, but he's really a collagist, cutting and pasting phrases, references, and styles from the past into something new, infused with his own distinct sensibility and unmistakable voice.

Made for just over $1 million, Reservoir Dogs is a classic example of turning budgetary liabilities into creative assets. A heist movie without the heist, the film takes place mostly in one location, the warehouse, and deals alternately with the lead-up and the aftermath. The limited space gives it the intensity of theater, and the interweaving of flashbacks and present-day confrontations make the robbery itself come together in the imagination better than it might have had Tarantino splurged on a Michael Mann setpiece. As with much of Tarantino's work, the heist-without-the-heist conceit isn't unprecedented, nor is the structure—Stanley Kubrick'sThe Killing, also a model of low-budget resourcefulness, was his acknowledged influence—but he always manages to stay on the right side of the line between homage and rip-off.

Master of Atlantis

I have to say that I was really impressed by the first two Charles Portis books I read, Dog of the South and Norwood, so I recently ordered the rest of his back catalogue. Master of Atlantis is the first of those books I’ve read. I have to admit this one was a little more difficult to get into at the start with all the talk of occults, conspiracy societies, and secret societies, which are things that I have little interest in. In some ways, Portis is the master of creating portraits of American eccentrics in their full form unlike any other writer that comes to mind. Moreover, Portis knows these types well and does an excellent send up and once you get going with Portis it is always a wild ride. I particularly liked his parody of a senate hearing-funny stuff. It is not as funny as Dog of the South, but well worth the time spent reading-all in all it is very entertaining. 

The Year In Music 2008

I don't follow music enough to have a truly definitive list, but there were several great releases this year and I don't think my numbering system is completely accurate since I got some releases much earlier in the year and others just recently. The selections are probably interchangeable at every spot.  A couple of releases that I got recently, Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, might have been rated higher had I more chances to listen to them-so maybe they should be rated higher.  

Also I want to mention NPR's "All Songs Considered" Podcast- for all the music lovers. And I always enjoy reading the AV Club's end of the year overall definitive best music list and individual writers' lists, I suggest that you check them out.

Anyway, here's my list:

1) Death Cab For Cutie  "Narrow Stairs": this based mostly on the strength of three songs:"Cath...", "No Sunlight," and "You Can Do Better Than Me."

2) Vampire Weekend, "Vampire Weekend": perhaps a bit limited in the scope of their sunny afro-pop genre,but there was a time when I couldn't stop listening to it. "Oxford Comma" is one of my favorite songs of the year.

3) Drive By Truckers, "Brighter Than Creation's Dark": is pretty solid for a 17 song release. My two favorite tracks are: "The Home Front" and "Home Field Advantage."

4) Calexico, "Carried To Dust": these guys always have solid releases and "Slowness" is also on the list as one of my favorite songs of the year.

5) Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, "Cardinology": this one was a more of a grower for me, but Adams year in and year out can write worthy and memorable songs like "Born Into The Light" and "cobwebs."

6) Fleet Foxes, "Fleet Foxes": another standout Seattle band on Sub Pop is slowly becoming one of my favorite releases. "Ragged Wood" is one of the best songs of the year.

7) Bon Iver, "For Emma, For Ever Ago": recorded in the backwoods of Wisconsin this brooding album also has a brilliant song of the year candidate in "RE: Stacks."

8) Jenny Lewis, "Acid Tongue": not as good as her latest with Rilo Kiley or her first solo record, but this one still has some great tracks: "Acid Tongue," "Godspeed," and "Carpetbaggers."

9) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "Dig!!!Lazarus Dig!!!: the man is still making music that matters.

10) The Walkmen, "You & Me": this one could rise up easily, but "Canadian Girl" is in running for song of the year as well.

Some other worthy releases include: TV on the Radio, "Dear Science," Old 97s "Blame It on Gravity," Robert Forester "The Evangelist," Elvis Costello "Momofuku," Portishead "Third," Cat Power "Jukebox," and Sun Kil Moon "April."

Time To Watch Dexter

There's a great article in Slate that praises the virtues of everybody's favorite serial killer, Dexter. Michael C. Hall's performance is remarkable.  I think my only beef with the show is that the supporting characters are pretty thinly drawn in comparison the darkly complex Dexter. Get on the bandwagon:

Showtime's Dexter, which finishes its third season on Sunday, inherits cable TV's complex-hero tradition and takes it a step further. If Sopranos-generation cable put us in moral check, Dexter pushes us to checkmate. The Sopranos got us to relate to a mobster, The Wire to enlightened drug-dealers and rogue cops; but Dexter somehow gets us rooting for a full-on serial killer—and hoping he never gets caught.

You can't help but recoil from Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a stone-cold killer who plastic-wraps his murder rooms with the mechanical precision of a die-cutter. But you can't help but love him, too. He may be a serial killer, but he's a rational serial killer, one with a strict code: He only goes after killers who've slipped through the justice system.

Most Likely To Succeed

Malcolm Gladwell takes on the teaching issue. I basically agree with a lot of the things he says about teacher sand teaching, but it is unlikely there will be any radical reform because the Teacher's union is too strong.  I think teachers ought to become more professionalized as they progress with additional pay to keep the best and brightest around. Here's what Gladwell has to say in a piece from The New Yorker:

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Spring Snow

Yukio Mishima is considered one of the literary giants of modern Japanese literature, but up until now I have read only two of his books: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (which I read in college and I can barely remember) and The Golden Pavilion-which I thought was impressive. I have started on his famous Sea of Fertility teratology with Spring Snow.  It is interesting in the details he presents of modern Japanese life after the Japan-Russo War, which brought Japan into prominence as a world power. But it is also essentially a simple love story. The main character Kiyoaki has a doomed love affair with Satoko who is betrothed to the Emperor’s son. I’m curious as to where the second volume, Runaway Horses, will go with the story or themes of the individual in conflict with society/deference to the emperor. 

Profile: Naomi Klein

I've been a fan of Naomi Klein since reading No Logo. She has a new book out that I need to read, The Shock Doctrine, and there a really great in-depth profile of her in The New Yorker online:

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Friedman once observed that much of the time societies are too paralyzed by the “tyranny of the status quo” to accept real reform, and that only a crisis can convince people that the way things are done needs to change. This idea is not particularly controversial. But from Friedman’s words Klein concludes that the Chicago School is “a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.” Worse, Friedmanites are impatient—sometimes too impatient to sit around praying for acts of God. Natural disasters are tricky to engineer, but coups and terror are always possible. “Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era,” she writes, “which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes”—Pinochet’s in Chile, for instance, or the Argentinean junta—“were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market ‘reforms.’ ”

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory—the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

Revolutionary Road

I noticed that Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates was mentioned as a possible source for the fascinating TV show Mad Men and then I saw that a friend of mine was reading it for a book club, so I got it.  It was a fascinating read about a couple that probably shouldn’t have been married with kids, two selfish people who thought thy were better than the lives that they were leading. Of course the only possible result is tragedy. Apparently it was ahead of its time for its portrait of quite desperation in the suburbs as well as for its frank language and adult situations.  All in all it is a compelling look at the cultural impasse that took place in the transition from the 50s to the 60s.  I can see that some plot points were recycled for Mad Men as well as some of the period details: drinking and smoking, poor parenting, etc… It was a compelling story and a page-turner at that.

BONUS: James Woods re-evaluates Richard Yates' modern classic online for The New Yorker:

“Revolutionary Road” is a brilliant rewriting of “Madame Bovary,” with one signal difference—at the end of Flaubert’s novel, both Emma and Charles Bovary lose, because she commits suicide and her dull husband is utterly bereft. In Yates’s savage inversion, the wife loses but the dull husband secretly wins: though deprived of wife and children, he prospers at work, and finally secures for himself the safe, settled world that his wife died trying to dislodge. In “Revolutionary Road,” mid-century American suburban man is so maddening because he is both a rank escapist and a conservative pragmatist: he has arrogated to himself twin rights that ought to be incompatible—to dream of escape (and have adulterous affairs, like Emma Bovary), while simultaneously dreaming of timid stability, like Charles Bovary.

Yates’s novel is—in just this Flaubertian manner—both traditional and radical. Its traditionalism can be felt in the way it flourishes the artisanal virtues of structure and finish. The prose is beautifully alert and poised: “his thin mouth already moving in the curly shape of wit, as if he were rolling a small, bitter lozenge on his tongue.” The book’s form is a solid delight of symmetry and repetition. Just as April’s first pregnancy scuppered the original European escape (but didn’t really, because Frank never intended to go), so her third scuppers the later one (but doesn’t really, either, for the same reason). Frank’s father also worked at Knox. A play opens the novel, and a performance ends it, as the Wheelers’ neighbors, the Campbells, tell the new owners of the Wheelers’ house about the tragedy that has vacated the property. In the very last pages, Mrs. Givings, the appallingly eager real-estate agent who had sold the Wheelers their house, describes, to her husband, the new owners in the same language she once used to describe the Wheelers: “She’s very sweet and fun to talk to; he’s rather reserved. I think he must do something very brilliant in town.” Frank’s children, now motherless, will have the kind of parentless existence with their uncle that April Wheeler had as a child, and which, her husband felt, damaged her. So the horror begins all over again: these repetitions and circularities overlap to make the novel’s heavy plait of determinism.

Above all, the novel is nimbly prismatic. It seems to offer a familiar critique of the suburbs, of the kind we know from movies and books like “American Beauty” and “The Ice Storm,” in which the streets are amok with hysterical housewives and angry soft men. Yates himself said that he intended the novel to function as “an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties”...

NY Times & Salon Top Books For 2008

Here's the top 10 from the NY Times. Salon also has  their top books. Robert Bolano's 2666 made both lists in the fiction category as did Jane Mayer's non fiction book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

BONUS: Salon had a feature where some authors named their favorite books for the year as well.