The Sound and the Fury

336 pages
Published in 1929

This is going to be a short review, because, well, I did not read the whole book. I couldn't. I wanted to, and I tried to, and I even kept it past the due date, incurring yet another fine at my local library -- I really should be buying used copies at $1.64 from half.com instead of paying $2.00 in late fees -- letting weeks pass by with the weight on my shoulders of knowing that there was something on my nightstand that I should be reading instead of watching Olympic badminton.

But I just couldn't do it.

There is no doubt about it, Faulkner is a literary genius. The Sound and the Fury is definitely on a higher plane than most works of fiction, and it is probably right that it be hailed as an American masterpiece. I mean, hell, even Sartre reviewed it, opining that "Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age. I like his art..."

Well I, unlike Sartre, do not "like his art." It was utterly incomprehensible, similar to the red, steel girder "sculptures" that seem to crop up like modern art dandelions in metropolitan areas.

I realize that the intention was to play with time, and that the story unfolds in the minds of the characters themselves, rather than being told firsthand or by an omniscient observer. After 30 pages or so I figured out that I was reading an account from a mentally handicapped person who experienced all events in the present, and I even began to decipher who the other individuals were, and how they related to which mixed-up time period. I thought that if I could push through the first chapter, I would begin to appreciate the narrative. But I was wrong. After an arduous week or two spent slogging through Benjy's tangled remembrances , the second chapter was written from the point of view of an adolescent -- but that's not really true. It was really told from inside his head. Meaning that I, the reader, was treated to run on sentences, random thoughts unrelated to the events at hand, inventive punctuation, and little back-story to help stake this jumble down.

It was just too damn hard to get into.

I'm sorry Faulkner, but I'll never know the true story of why Quentin kills himself, how Benjy ends up castrated, or who impregnates Caddy, but after almost a month and with only 100 pages down, I just don't care anymore. You're officially on the short list of famous-authors-I-can't-bear-to-read, previously populated only with Joyce and Tolstoy.

Congratulations.

The Kingdom (2007)

Peter Berg is misunderstood. Either by me, or by the people who market his films.

Take Friday Night Lights, which, in my estimation, is simply the greatest sport film to ever grace the silver screen. To me, it was a brutal examination of the extent to which sports have taken over the average American's life, serving as a proxy for all of the worthwhile things that we aren't achieving and allowing us to deal with the quiet desperation of our insulated lives. If it isn't that far reaching, it seemed at least to be a condemnation of the tenor that high school football has reached in Texas, where coaches make more than any three teachers combined and the stadium could easily serve an NCAA team.

However, if you watch the trailer that Universal Studios put together to sell the DVD, all you see is the same ol' feel good sports movie that debuts every year around Christmas time (e.g. Miracle, Remember the Titans, The Mighty Ducks, etc.)

And then we have The Kingdom.

Yesterday I stopped by my local red box with the somewhat unfounded hope that it might contain something I wanted to see. It didn't, so I settled for The Kingdom, a Berg movie that was marketed like this:



After seeing this trailer several times last year, I fully expected to hate The Kingdom, because it looked like every other action movie ever made -- intended to stoke U.S. fears of the "other," while convincing us that there's no geopolitical problem that a good ass-kicking can't solve.

Instead, Berg served up a decently taut movie that only flirted with absolutes, gave us a sympathetic Muslim hero, delivered what I thought was a great tongue-in-cheek performance by Jamie Foxx as the all-American hero (I hope that was what was intended,) and finished on the disheartening note that all of the bullet firing and Arab-killing that we witnessed over the course of the movie just might have made the problem of terrorism worse, rather than solving it.

I won't go too far with my praise, as this movie was far from perfect. The Kingdom was at its best while showing the orphans that were created on both sides of the battle scenes. It was at its worst when portraying the Saudi male as a witless chauvinist who assumed that all women wished to be swathed in pink at all times. The story line and detective work are also depressingly straightforward (gee, do you think Abu Hamza was behind the explosions? And who would have guessed that the story arc might take us back to the neighborhood of Suweidi?)

Despite its flaws, The Kingdom kept me entertained and even engaged my cerebral cortex at times, which is more than I can say for many of the movies I've seen lately (ahem, Vanatage Point.) The DVD even came with an interactive time line based on the opening credits of the movie which explores the history of Saudi Arabia and the complex reality of its relation to Wahhabism, oil and the United States.

After this, I may actually need to give Peter Berg's Hancock a chance -- it could turn out that what the trailers made look like a gimmicky, facile popcorn movie is actually a commentary on the emasculation of the consumerist male.

Or maybe not.

To a God Unknown (John Steinbeck)

240 pages
Published in 1933

Although it runs only 240 pages (compare that to East of Eden at 601 pages), To a God Unknown was the project which took Steinbeck the longest to complete. It was only his second full-length novel, and he worked on it over a period of five years, nearly scrapping it on more than one occasion. And despite all of his revisions and efforts he just did not succeed in making it a great piece of literature.

Now don't get me wrong -- it is still in an entirely different league than the pulpy kind of garbage that sells by the cartload at the grocery checkout line, and it should have been more obvious to the critics of the day that this young author had great potential. But ultimately To a God Unknown is an example of a writer overreaching, straining to attain lofty heights and instead painfully falling short.

It was actually reassuring to me -- as one of the 295 million aspiring authors in the United States -- to see that someone with as much talent as Steinbeck could also struggle to find himself. In fact, this novel taught me a few good lessons:

1) Not all projects or ideas are created equal. To a God Unknown sprang out of a play that one of Steinbeck's friends had written in college. Being a young and inexperienced author, Steinbeck may have thought it would be easier to build on an existing storyline and set of characters, despite the fact that the source itself did not receive many accolades. But the kernel of the story was just lacking something. I have no doubt that Steinbeck greatly improved it in his version, but a plot focusing on a farmer who reverts to pantheism and ultimately sacrifices his own blood to feed the drought-ridden land simply does not resonate with the average person,* no matter how talented Steinbeck himself was. It's the literary equivalent to Christopher Nolan's film, Insomnia, which also showed that all the talent in the world can't make up for a weak story line, even if it is well executed. Before pouring five years of his life into a story that was fundamentally flawed, Steinbeck would have been well-advised to spend more time elaborating a better premise.

2) Establishing your voice is crucial. Even the most casual fan knows that Steinbeck's books generally take place in the Salinas region of California, and that his works are populated by the most common of people. In To a god Unknown he is still honing this voice, and makes the ill-fated decision to focus on a character who is larger than life. Joseph (modeled after the biblical figure) is a man who nobody -- not his wife, brothers, or ultimately the readers -- can relate to, because he is intentionally designed to be more. He has feelings and desires that the average person cannot relate to, and his behavior and beliefs are, at times, simply inexplicable. It wasn't until Steinbeck discovered his ability to relate to the common man with his next novel, Tortilla Flat, a story about wine-drinking, fun-loving paisanos in Monterey, California, that he achieved critical success.

3) To succeed at being an author, you have to WORK. Those were an incredibly trying five years for Steinbeck, during which time he weathered many setbacks and rejections. We have the benefit of hindsight to know that it all turned out well in the end, but for the young author he had no way of knowing that he would ever succeed. His first novel, Cup of Gold, had hardly sold at all, and for five long years he divided his time between trying to sharpen a story which would ultimately defeat him, and trying to sell a story he was faltering with to publishers who had no faith in him. If he had not slogged through this book and seen its publication (and subsequent lack of success) and still been willing to push onward, the world would never have known Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, or The Winter of our Discontent.

Ultimately I would love to be responsible for a failure as great as To a God Unknown. It is easy to follow the link from this novel, with its tragedy and gritty earthiness, to Steinbeck's masterpieces. But, somewhat ironically, this novel does a better job at illuminating the enormous character of Steinbeck than it does at interesting the reader in the artificial and ambiguous Joseph Wayne.





[*Now that I've written it up in this single sentence I'm feeling a little more intrigued by it -- maybe I can kind of understand the allure it held for Steinbeck, even if in the end it was inperfectable.]

Vantage Point (2008)

So I just finished watching "Vantage Point," and I wanted to suggest a few more titles: how about Asinine Point, Plot Hole Point, Contrived Point, or even good ol' Stupidity Point? Not good enough? How about Convoluted Point, Reliant on Ridiculous Directing Point, or Completely Implausible Point?

Since the closing credits boldly declare authorship of this insipid film, I thought I'd repeat that information here so that you can make sure to avoid films written or directed by this dimwitted duo:

Directed by Pete Travis
Written by Barry Levy

Oh, what? You've never heard of Pete Travis? Why, he directed such gems as "Omargh" and "The Jury." I suppose I can forgive you for not knowing of his prior work, since all 5 of his previous pieces were for the small screen, the most recent having aired 4 YEARS AGO. So I guess Hollywood was giving a down-on-his-luck director a chance here, but surely they would team him up with a veteran writer, right? I mean Barry Levyis well known for his previous work on....nothing? Barry Levy had never written anything prior to this movie? What the hell is this?

I'm beginning to see what's going on here. This movie was more complicated than I thought -- the conspiracy even spills over into the writer and director. How else could a team who have never made a single feature length movie get tapped for a production that includes two Oscar nominees, Dennis Quaid and Sigourney Weaver, and the 2006 winner for Best Actor, Forrest Whitaker?

This must all be part of the same terrorist plot that included a CNN camerman (who we never hear about after his two lines of terrible Spanish until the point when a fellow terrorist inexplicably shoots him, nor do we know why he was part of the team in the first place), a secret service agent (the secret service is known for recruiting foreign nationals who are also terrorists to work the president's detail), an unwilling former "special forces" man who is willing to kill 30+ innocent people in order to save his brother (don't bother trying to find an explanation about this back story), and a suave terrorist leader who has a cell phone that remotely controls a sniper rifle that somehow made it into the "cleared" building overlooking the plaza where the President is speaking. Or his double. Or whatever.

Apparently the real terrorist plot involves making the American movie-going public dumber, or maybe frustrating us so much that we kill ourselves en masse. Maybe it was meant to single handly stop the viewers from ever paying to see a movie again, thereby contributing to the crumbling of our economy. I mean, why else would they depict a cadre of Secret Service agents that was concerned enough about an anonymous threat to the President's life that they sent a double to speak for him at an important political summit, but this same group of secret service agents merely glances casually out the window when a suicide bomber blows himself up in the lobby of the President's hotel -- taking no further action than to admonish the President to "step away from the window."

Why else would they have Forrest Whitaker's character be the fattest guy in the film, but still make him capable of filming every significant event of the terrorist plot on his handycam -- a feat which requires that he consistently outrun the police, the terrorists, the secret service and even a speeding ambulance?

Why else would they bring all of the plot threads back to a single point at the end of the show, with the only legitimate coordination of this incredible piece of happenstance being a whispered, "meet me at the underpass," spoken to only 1 of the 10 people that miraculously end up at this featureless spot on the highway at the exact same time.

This was a stupid movie masquerading as a smart one by seeming to deal with complex political issues, mixing in current events and unnecessarily complicating the plot by re-presenting the first 15 minutes from multiple perspectives (not vantage points). That wily writer/terrorist Levy thought that we wouldn't figure out his evil plot if he threw in technical terms like "POTUS" and "GSW," and director/terrorist Travis hoped we might give up and just let this cinematic affront wash over our non-firing cerebellums after watching Forrest Whitaker bend the space time continuum, with each of his lumbering steps carry him the equivalent of a football field. But with more than 755,000 people on the terrorist watch list, including Nelson Mandela and Cat Stevens, I can't imagine that Homeland Security will ever let us hear from Travis and Levy again. That is, unless this conspiracy runs deeper than I thought...

The Moon is Down (John Steinbeck)

112 pages
published in 1942

There is no attempt to hide the fact that "The Moon is Down" is a work of wartime propaganda. Steinbeck worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the early days of World War II, and was asked, or decided himself, to write a piece of propaganda that would bolster resistance movements among U.S. allies. This was just after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for the Grapes of Wrath in 1940.

According to the forward of the edition I read, Steinbeck initially wrote his story of a resistance movement set in an American town (something like Red Dawn, I suppose), but was asked to revise it because the OSS did not want to demoralize Americans by positing the possibility of defeat. Steinbeck changed the setting to an undisclosed location, although it is pretty clear that it is meant to be northern Europe, maybe Norway.

Apparently the press in the U.S. did not like the book because it humanized the Germans too much, presenting them as people rather than the monstrous caricatures favored in most propaganda [as an aside, isn't it interesting that it was criticized as a piece of propaganda? As if there were an acceptable form for writing propaganda that was taught in university writing courses, "Propaganda 101".]

For his portrayal of German soldiers as humans he was called naive by some critics, and later wrote in response:

It was said that I didn't know anything about war, and this is perfectly true, although how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive.

Oh, snap.

Anyway, despite the somewhat negative reaction the book received here in the U.S., it became a very important work overseas in occupied Europe, where ordinary people went to great lengths to make illegal translations and distribute thousands of copies in Norway, Denmark, Holland, France and even Italy, where merely having a copy in your possession merited the death penalty.

I'd have to say, that up there with winning the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, this kind of reaction to a short story has to be about as good as it gets for an author.

The book itself is not widely considered to be in the top tier of Steinbeck's compositions, but in my opinion it was quite good. Its strength lies in Steinbeck's ability to lay bare human nature -- the motivation behind both the occupiers and the occupied. An example of this takes place early in the book when Annie, the cook at the Mayor's house, throws boiling water at some German soldiers who are standing on her back porch -- not as a premeditated act of defiance, but merely because she is irritated by them peeking in her window while she is cooking, and in fact she "would have thrown it on anyone who cluttered up her porch." Following this action Annie gains some notoriety, and ends up playing a significant role in the movement.

As a student of political science who was seriously studied military action and resistance movements from El Salvador to South Africa, I think that "Moon" provides about as sophisticated an understanding of the difficulties of occupation as I have ever read.

Like much of Steinbeck's works, the dialogue in "Moon" often reveals too carefully the point that the author was trying to get across, and seems to unfold somewhat artificially, as if the two people in the conversation both know where it is supposed to end up. As a literary device this may not be the most sophisticated, but it is well suited to a short-story meant to inspire the everyday person. It was especially effective in the exchanges between the Mayor of the town and the Colonel in charge of the occupation. In one such exchange the Colonel admits, "We have taken on a job, haven't we?" to which the Mayor replies, "Yes, the one impossible job in the world, the one thing that can't be done...to break man's spirit permanently." As the reality of this statement is realized among the German officers, one of them become so despondent with the enormity of the task of eternal occupation that he comments "Conquest after conquest, deeper and deeper into molasses...flies conquer the flypaper. Flies capture two hundred miles of new flypaper!"

The take-away message of the book is that superior planning, numbers and technology are no match for the power of ideas among a cohesive group of men, illustrated brilliantly in the story when hundreds of single sticks of dynamite are dropped by British planes across the countryside, ensuring that the occupiers can never be comfortable again, can never let their guard down, because no matter how many people they capture or kill, every town member is a potential freedom fighter. Due to the very nature of occupying enemy territory, the Germans had set themselves up for failure from the minute that they first "defeated" the enemy and attempted to rule over them, a germane lesson 66 years later.

Steinbeck Reviews On The Way

I have long considered John Steinbeck one of my favorite authors. I mean, look at the guy -- he goes on the short list with Ernest Hemingway


as the only respected authors you'll learn about in English class that would be just as likely to beat you down as they would be to write a sonnet. Steinbeck was a man's man who dropped out of Stanford, worked as a handyman in Lake Tahoe, carried an automatic weapon on raids as a war correspondent, worked with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) and posed for cigarette ads, all while producing work which would eventually bag him a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature.


[I haven't been able to find the rest of this ad, and I have no idea what "...he comes bucking over" is referring to. It doesn't sound good.]

I came across Steinbeck at a fairly early age. Growing up my dad had a great den with bookshelves that lined the walls, and despite censoring my viewing of Punky Brewster and The Simpsons, I was given free reign of a library that spanned from Stephen King to Herman Wouk, and from John lé Carre to Alex Haley. When at age 14 or 15 I found The Winter of Our Discontent, I was totally hooked. It had just the right amount of bitterness, introspection and sex for my teenage mind, and I couldn't put it down (although after re-reading it recently I realized that I completely misinterpreted the ending the first time around.) From Discontent I went on to Cannery Row, where a Chinese man with a wicker basket turns into an eye the size of a church door, and the exploits of Mack and his fellow ne'er-do-wells introduced me to a world of drunken disorderliness and brothels that was nowhere to be found in the Hardy Boys books my friends were reading.

The language Steinbeck utilizes, the themes he explores and the characters that populate his works fascinate me. After struggling to find intelligent, well-written novels over my past few visits to the library I've decided to quit gambling on the unknown and instead spend the next few weeks finishing the Steinbeck canon. Because I have long since read the usual suspects (The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, etc.), I'll be focusing on some of his less well known short stories and non-fiction. I've already started, and I will say at the outset that I have been surprised at what I have found. Stay tuned.

Sigur Rós: Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

The first time I listened to Sigur Ros' new album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (With a Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly), I was laying on the ground in the dark of my daughter's room. She goes to bed early, and since my two month old boy is a yowling creature that has taken over the rest of the house, I hid myself in her room so that I could focus all of my senses on the Icelandic post-rock band's latest musical offering. Sigur Ros is one of those rare groups that actually care about the cohesive nature of an album, and I always make sure that my first listen is uninterrupted from start to finish. It was well worth it.

Like most fans, I had already heard the first track of the album, "gobbledigook," and knew to expect a looser, more natural/primal (and more marketable?) sound than the band's previous work. I admit that I was a little apprehensive about the change, since I consider the band's other three albums (don' t talk to me about von) to be such masterpieces that I expect my grandkids may well learn about them in university-level music appreciation courses alongside the works of Brahms, Smetana and Beethoven. I also knew that this was the first time that Sigur Ros had recorded an album outside of Iceland, and that they were working with Mark Ellis, a producer from the UK who has laid tracks with more mainstream bands like U2 and Smashing Pumpkins. I was not ready to see the band ditch their signature style altogether, especially not in the name of creating more "radio-friendly" compositions.

I needn't have worried -- Með suð was less a departure for the group than a celebration of their singular sound, with just enough new territory to fend off any accusations of repetition.

The album begins with such gleeful songs that I found myself staring up at the ceiling and involuntarily smiling around 2:11 of the second track. I almost broke my rule and interrupted my enjoyment to run downstairs and make my wife have a listen, despite the fact that she does not (yet) share my rapture for Sigur Ros. I only held off because I couldn't bear the thought of listening to the album through my laptop speakers (I never would have noticed what was so special about 2:11 through those tinny things), and there was no way I was going to pass over my headphones and give up my first listen to someone who once denigrated "Starálfur" as "background music."

With the fifth song, "Festival," things began to mellow a bit (at least for the initial 4:40 of that resonating marathonal inspiration), and the last half of the album cooed, soared and sighed, so much so that by the time the last notes of the album played I had run the gamut of emotions, from giddiness to sorrow, and was in awe of the flawless arrangements that the band had been good enough to collect and record for me. The songs display an expanded range for the group -- in "illgresi" Jónsi eschews his bowed guitar for an unexpected and folksy acoustic track, whereas "ára bátur" features a 67 piece orchestra and a boys choir recorded at Abbey Road's studio in the UK. The album also marks the first time that the band has recorded a song in English, although, perhaps to make up for this departure, "all alright" closes Með suð as the slowest and least accessible song on the album.

After days of being incapable of listening to anything else, it is safe to say that the group has actually succeeded in making an album that will likely capture a wider audience, if indeed that was their goal, and without sacrificing the incredible integrity of their craft, which defies the tried-and-true re-treading of trodden tracks that guides most of today's popular music.

tracklist

1. gobbledigook · 3:05 mins
2. inní mér syngur vitleysingur · 4:05 mins
3. góðan daginn · 5:15 mins
4. við spilum endalaust · 3:33 mins
5. festival · 9:24 mins
6. með suð í eyrum · 4:56 mins
7. ára bátur · 8:57 mins
8. illgresi · 4:13 mins
9. fljótavík · 3:49 mins
10. straumnes · 2:01 mins
11. all alright · 6:21 mins

For free streaming of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, check out the band's website, but don't blame me for the naked European bottoms that you will see, which come from visual artist Ryan McGinley's acclaimed "I know where the summer goes" exhibit.