You Don't Love Me Yet

Jonathan Lethem, 2006

Two things:

1. OK, here's how it goes. Fiction itself is probably 10,000 years old, since the first story embellishment took place around a hunting campfire. Written verse is half that old, and the novel is only a couple of hundred years old and may or may not itself be dying out (pity the poor best-selling poets of yore). Music follows a somewhat parallel history, with written music being even younger than written fiction, the "group" being hundreds of years old, and the rock group only fifty or sixty years old (although you could make a case the "combo" is older yet.) There hasn't been a huge amount of time to digest the two forms and see what can be done with them in the salad dressing bottle of art (although each may be more fleeting than we suspect, so time's a wastin'). So if you ask me a question about whether you should dance about architecture, I say, go ahead, just because it appears to be an impossible task doesn't mean it can't be done. And thus we come to the question of writers trying to capture the rock group on paper, which without the benefit of audio would seem to require some extremely special gifts. (One notes parenthetically that the number of really good movies about rock groups (real or fictive), which have the benefit of being able to provide audiated audio instead of merely imagined audio, is an extremely small number.) The writer being afflicted as she or he is by attention to language, in such a work the lyrics of songs immediately begin to take an importance outsized with their actual importance in the viscera of a rock band. The factorialized relationships possible with a nice little four- or five-person group certainly make for a tantalizing challenge for the novelist, and one would hope that this multi-faceted aspect of the life of a group -- a hydra of a social construct well beyond the merely binary complexities (even if serially) of, say, a romance -- would eventually attract some kind of interesting narrative approach. There's basically one point of view and one hero in this particular book (Lucinda), and along with the aforementioned handicap concerning lyrics, I am going to have to say nice try, but no cigar. As I said earlier, dancing about architecture isn't necessarily a bad thing, anyway. I'm still waiting; maybe something I should take a stab at so I can fall on my own sword (having done so with an axe back in the days of my own apprenticeship.)
2. I thought the character of the kangaroo was uncharacteristically underdeveloped.

The End of the End of The Sopranos

So, in full disclosure mode, I'm not much of a Sopranos fan in that I've only seen season 1 and parts of season 2, thanks to the spottiness of "free HBO weekends" on my satellite provider and a general ennui with television phenomena. While I can't say as I was a bowled over as most TV critics apparently are/were by the saga, I have enjoyed the show when I've seen it largely for its tongue-in-cheek qualities.

However, with the Grand Finale coming up this Sunday -- I would've missed that, too, had it not been for articles in every paper in the country the last few weeks, although of course I'll miss the actual finale, too, since this most assuredly is not a Free HBO weekend -- I will speak from the gentle ignorance of not having seen seasons 3-7 (and half of season 2, as long as I'm doing something else on Bravo repeat nights, you freakin' mother-crunchin' bowdlerizers). Somehow I don't think this will be much of a handicap.

As I understand it, Tony Soprano is supposed to be our modern Shakespearean anti-hero King, a bit of Lear and Macbeth and an inside joke nod to Michael Corleone. Be that as it may, it has always seemed to me like the fact that the dude is in therapy is the simultaneous linchpin and MacGuffin of the series. The basic premise of modern psychiatry is: people do have the ability to change their behavior, if not their internal workings. For the latter, with chemistry all things may yet be possible, but psychiatry will inevitably bow to neuroscience in the end, and chemistry isn't quite as sexy as psychiatry (see also Ingrid Bergmann and Gregory Peck, et alia). I don't for the life of me know how they managed to extend the schtick over eight years -- one thinks either the patient or the therapist would've seen the pointlessness of it all at some point. But I still take the basic dilemma as the heart of the show: is Tony a good guy, and if so, can he make himself become a good guy in behavior? Is it a good and evil thing, or love versus fear in the Lynchian reductio?

So, again without the benefit/curse of having seen more than a few dozen episodes, if that, I present my own proposed ending to The Sopranos:

Tony just disappears.

If you really want to provide the twists and thrills and speculation for the audience, you can enhance this disappearance with various possibilities designed to prolong the debate and leave open the possibility for a sequel (or a reunion movie a la Rescue from Gilligan's Isle). The reason for Tony's disappearance? My advice is not to suggest any of these, but all of these.

• he gets whacked. You can leave open a whole list of who-shot-JR possibilities, ranging from Carmela to Dr. Melfi and every hood in between. (Substitute AJ or Meadow if you want to get all Greek about it.)
• he gets killed as the random victim of a crime (not shown on screen, merely suggested by circumstance, say, an abandoned SUV). The point, however, might be lost on many.
• Tony becomes gradually schizophrenic during the last episode, suggesting he might have wandered off to become a crazy person and/or a philosopher-king of the hobos.
• Tony develops an interest in eastern mysticism and jokes off-handedly about giving it all up to go become a zen monk. Abandoning desire might allow Tony to walk away from having to deal with his own legacy, and it would certainly set up a cool cross-over sequel to Kung Fu.
• Tony becomes mentally well but is overwhelmed with guilt brought on by a sudden embrace of the catholicism he's claimed to follow. He commits suicide (or becomes suicidal) knowing that by taking his own life he assures his own damnation.
• Or, he just mismedicates himself now that Dr. Melfi is off the scene and possibly might commit suicide.
• Space alien abduction. Listen, if half of what I've been reading about the creative team's unconventional approach to Tony is true, alien abduction is not at all out of the question.
• He just up and leaves to go start over as a citizen someplace, sans Buddhist overtones.
• Tony just continues on forever.

The perfect way to set this up: you could show Tony in his final scene, say, at the edge of a cliff, with a masked gunman sneaking up behind him, an airline ticket to Tibet in Tony's left hand and a rosary in his left, a spilled bottle of pills at his feet, while a terrorist-hijacked plane plummets from 30,000 feet directly towards Tony and a mysterious glowing light in the sky swells.

I don't mean to be glib. I do think just having the character disappear, without explanation but with many possibilities, is the appropriate way of resolving by not resolving this issue of whether somebody can truly change or not by force of will.

Further, it will put a delicious ambiguity on the end that comes to all. The void left by Tony's disappearance -- one without closure -- will be filled with chaos and will only underscore the decline and fall of the mafia, Tony himself, and the American century. Not even to mention the Paramus Mall.

In any event, simply disappearing at the end of an artfully-planned-to-end saga is the ultimate post-post-modern post-irony ironic touch. After all, in the days when series were simply cancelled, and didn't write themselves out of existence like so many Escher self-portraits, that's what happened to heroes and audiences alike. They were left hanging in limbo, forever, and had to move on to something else with the wonder about what it all meant left deliberately unaddressed. Which, again, would seem to me to be more than a mere metaphor for life on earth.

At least, that's what some poor Media Studies PhD candidate is going to write in a decade or so.

The Chorus vs. The Echo Chamber

Forty Signs of Rain
Fifty Degrees Below
Sixty Days and Counting
The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinson

I've recently finished the 40-50-60 trilogy from Kim Stanley Robinson with the kind of reluctant anticipation of one who was given a paperback of the first book without foreknowledge that it was part of a set. In the particular instance, the three books are very much on the installment plan, with a dramatic pause of sorts separating one from two and two from three, but without much in the way of plot resolution.

Therein lies the rub, the pebble in the shoe of the author who is trying to make an entertaining infonovel on a Really Big issue that just happens to have science as its theme and scientists as its heroes (OK, a couple of scientiests, a Dalai Lama figure or two, and a politician who is married to a scientist and who really wants to be a scientist if only he weren't such a political guy who was devoted to being a stay at home dad). I'm a fan of fiction about science, which isn't at all the same thing as science fiction either by genre conventions or topic matter, but it may be one of those genres whose oxymoronic characteristic prevent the authoring of even a single decent book. It's as if one took a longish New Yorker article on a scientific topic and tried to jazz it up with some fictionalized characters.

The 40-50-60 trilogy really revolves around Frank Vanderwal, a sociobiologist who has been tempted by fate and misfortune away from his beloved SoCal to Washington DC to work for the National Science Foundation. Without giving away the main plot point -- OK, here it is, Global Warming is REAL and upon us, you forced it out of me -- let's just say it's hard to work in a lot of action hero adventurism in the Michael Crichton right-winger mode for a thoughtful nuanced middle-aged geek. Not that Robinson doesn't try: he lets Frank become a wild homeless man by day, White House aide by night, wielding a prehistoric home for self-defense while plotting out massive global interventions to save humanity from its own bad self. (The positive glorification of homelessness as the ultimate low-carbon lifestyle in an industrialized society is one of the more bizarrre bits of wish-fulfillment in this alternatively apocalyptic and hopelessly optimistic saga.) Throw in a mystery woman fighting deep dark secret spook agencies set to steal elections on behalf of big oil Republicans who, yes, becomes instantly attracted to him for an attempt at a sort of 'Enemy of the State' contrapunto, you've got the 21st Century Action Man science hero guy.

I should say parenthetically that the character I identified most with was Charlie, the stay at home Dad who really didn't want to go back to work, although in his case his boss ends up being President of the United States and forces his hand, and his child may be the reincarnation of a Tibetan Lama. You think you have problems balancing work and home, eh? Ha!

So the long and short of this is it's more or less a failure as a dramatic novel -- way too wordy and heavy on exegesis of the whole the planet is in serious trouble now stuff. But as agitprop, I proclaim it a success, since it was just entertaining enough and the characters compelling enough to convince me to get to the end of the trilogy, and at the end while I was annoyed with all the happy endings and sunsets (literally) for the charactrs I was, in fact, panicked about global warming and hypersensitive for weeks on end about my own carbon footprint. Such that I am left grasping at whether some energy-efficient light bulbs and their noxious mercury waste are in balance better than my seasonal-affective-disorder-friendly incandescents. At least, I'm remembering to turn off unused lights more frequently after reading it. So, job well done, Mr. Robinson.

Between installments of 40-50-60, though, I read the award-winning (tm) Years of Rice and Salt, in which Robinson re-encapsulates the entire history of science via an alternative history device, to whit, the entire race and culture of Western Europe is wiped off the map by the great plague of the 14th century, never to return. Instead, Muslim and Chinese civilizations expand, fettered only by a temporarily-reprieved and therefore not-entirely-weakened Native American unified society and a science-loving subcontinental culture that has a sort of Wilsonian foreign policy even while being the weakest of the major powers. So you try re-telling 800 years of history, from 1350 to the mid-21st century. What I like about this book is the challenge the author took upon himself, to use consistent characters in each re-imagined alternative historical period, from medieval Aristotileans discovering monastically-transcribed texts to a faux renaissance to a double-enlightenment to a parallel universe Union of Concerned Scientists that actually manages to quash the bomb before the Manhattan Project gets off the ground. How does he have the same cast of characters through all these years? Why, reincarnation, of course! Each episode is separated by a little bumper of life in the bardo, as the characters come together to try to figure out how they screwed up this time on the great cosmic wheel. Part of the fun is in deciphering the characters in each incarnation/chapter of the book, as the clues are only provided by the actions of the characters themselves (who change sex, status, role in the story, etc. from chapter to chapter along with their names). It's a great writer's workshop kind of exercise, and at the same time the liberating aspect of alternative history -- one can research what one wants, and make up the rest if one feels like it -- makes it easy to get resolution for each character. Since they all die in the end -- that is, the end of every single chapter -- you get all that sequelitis taken care of at once, as well as the importance of adding resolution to the characters' lives for the reader. Oh, sure, you get sort of shallow characters as a result, and the MacGuffin of the Removal of Western Civilization from the History of the world becomes less of a lesson in multicultural education than it does a description of the universalism of the rotten parts of human character. But that said, it made for a good yarn in only one volume in a way that 40-50-60 did not in three tomes.

Anyway, more power to Mr. Robinson. Michael Crichton can't even be bothered to get his science straight these days, if he ever could, even if he magically convinces the allegedly liberal Hollywood establishment to make his books into movies, which are, after all, the main vehicle for agitprop, anyway. That's always the problem with liberal science fiction, or fiction of any sort: to be a reader these days, you already have to have a somewhat flexible approach to the world, that is to say, adaptive, and on that score no matter what the literary accomplishment, it's preaching to the choir.

A Brief History of The Brief History of the Dead

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (2005)

1. A vague third-hand understanding of various ancestor-worshipping cultures' understanding of the idea that there are two levels of the after-life, one where we go as long as somebody on earth remembers us and which resembles this world, the other completely unknown.
2. An even vaguer understanding of the paradoxes of modern scientific cosmology which hold that consciousness itself actually really does direct certain aspects of reality.
3. A classic dualism of two stories seemingly unrelated, one of the "first" afterworld as it quickly empties out following the mass extinction of the human species from a modern pandemic pathogen, the other of the one surviving human on earth who is the common link between all those who 'survive' in the first afterworld.
4. An incredibly spunky female protagonist as the last-person-on-earth, fighting for survival in the antarctic winter while she fights to discover what's happened to the world.
5. Borrowing some of the structures of science fiction (global warming, genetic revolutions, near-future internet, etc.) to give it that certain sense of future-surreal near-truthiness; mixing in satiric references to the poisonous influence of corporate culture instantiated in the Coca-Cola Corporation.
6. Structurally predictable unfolding of the interconnectedness of humans through the lens of this one person, as seen through the discovery by the Undead Dead of the single thread holding them together -- in existence -- in the spunky heroine.
7. Narrative which finally gives away to two chapters of imagistic writing, of course encompassing the death of the heroine and the end of life and consciousness as we know it. This brave choice precludes this book from ever being made into a mainstream Hollywood movie, and thus earns the respect of respected respectable literary critics everywhere.
8. A Magritte-esque front cover which seems to be profound but actually could've been on the cover of a 45 RPM new wave record if the aspect had been square and not rectangular.
9. 251 pages plus one paragraph, close to the publisher's ideal of 250, to ensure said respectable respected persons will actually read to the end.
10. LITERARY GOLD!

Selling the Iraq War, the Jingle

If it says Libby, Libby, Libby
On the libel, libel, libel
You can swear it, swear it, swear it
On your Bible, Bible, Bible
Cause Karl wanted to sell the
War on Babel, Babel, Babel
Although double you em dees were
never on the table, table, table
And that Rove now laughs his ass at
the jokey, jokey, jokey
That it's Libby, Libby, Libby,
In the pokey, pokey, pokey
That's why Libby, Libby, Libby
Made the libel, libel, libel,
Now that Sunnis and the Shiites all
are tribal, tribal, tribal
And Scooter, Scooter, Scooter, is still more
liable, liable, liable
to be home sooner, sooner, sooner,
Than our US troops are able, able, able.