Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001)

I have not been doing much book-type reading this month. I did just finish Life of Pi, the Booker-prize-winning book about the boy and the tiger who on a lifeboat in the Pacific. Not my cup of tea, really. I kept thinking there was something missing. The story is reasonably entertaining but not a page turner. The descriptions of life at sea are sometimes interesting, but never fully believable, by which I don't mean that I want to literally believe, but I was never wrapped up in them, never lost the feeling that behind this writing was a guy doing some good old-fashioned library research. For instance, this is a line right at the beginning of the book that bugged me like crazy:

I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada.

Now, I am quite sure -- or at least very willing to believe, without having any personal knowledge of the fact -- that Mr. Martel has been to India, either to research this book or previously for unrelated reasons. Maybe he lived half his life there, for all I know. What I do know: I have never been to India or its surrounding nations and I could have written that passage. In fact, I think it's quite close to what I would write if I were asked to imagine an Indian person, and tell me what he would miss about India, given your own completely superficial knowledge of the area. Well gee, it's hotter there than here, Indian food is awesome, Hindus worship cows and let them roam the streets, and don't they have that inexplicable love of Bollywood musicals and cricket? Yeah, those are things an Indian guy would like that are not so available here in Canada. There's no detail, absolutely nothing personal. The only thing that comes close is the crows cawing, and that's not much.

Really, though, the central weakness is a lack of internality. Pi is a very reflective, and hyper religious, little boy, but his internal reflections are all incredibly flat. He tells you he prays. He tells you he misses his (presumed dead) mother, father and brother. But these facts don't do anything to him, or to us. They're just there. There's a funny scene before the shipwreck where Pi's Hindu, Christian and Muslim mentors converge on him and his parents. The parents are shocked that he's religious at all. The three wise men fight over who Pi really belongs to. But, on the boat, it doesn't change anything, except that in addition to fishing and catching water, he prays. And sometimes thinks of God's greatness when, for instance, he sees lightning. But it all felt so surface. I imagine others feel differently, since it appears to be a pretty popular book.

Where it's best is in the descriptions of the tiger, Richard Parker, like so:

Richard Parker was tougher than I was in the face of these fish, and far more efficient. He raised himself and went about blocking, swiping and biting all the fish he could. Many were eaten live and whole, struggling wings beating in his mouth. It was a dazzling display of might and speed. Actually, it was not so much the speed that was impressive as the pure animal confidence, the total absorption in the moment. Such a mix of ease and concentration, such a being-in-the-present, would be the envy of the highest yogis.

There are also many plays on words: when he was 'tougher than I was in the face of these fish' he's using the idiomatic expression to echo the moment half a page earlier where Pi was hit in the face by a flying fish, and freaked out rather than eating it (he thought the fish was actually Richard Parker's giant paw smacking him and cried out something to the effect of, 'take me now'). I can often enjoy a play on words, so a few points for that.

Overall, I didn't enjoy reading it. I didn't feel happy while I was reading, I felt I was getting through with it. The ending was a bit stronger than the rest, though. It caused me to briefly reflect on what had come before. That's always a good thing in a book.

Science stories

It strikes me as particularly wonderful fun to be a writer with a solid enough reputation for a publisher to enable him to travel the world interviewing scientists and visiting museums and parks of interest over the course of several years, as Bill Bryson must have been when he set off to write A Short History of Nearly Everything (2006). It doesn't seem to have been based on any particular aptitude or knowledge of the field, either. By his own proud account, Bryson knew almost nothing at all about any field of science, let alone all of them, before he started this book about nearly all of what he thought was most interesting of the history of science in a few different fields: astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology, mostly. 

It's a bit of a traveling freak show approach to scientific exposition: come see the amazing, the horrifying, the terrifying 'world of science' shack. This way has its pluses. I was greatly disturbed but also titillated to read about ancient eight-foot-long millipedes, raccoons the sizes of cars and rhinoceroses the size of suburban mansions. Apparently, were so big because in the days when mammals were just beginning their reign of the earth, our atmosphere was more highly oxygenated than it is now, and more oxygen means things grow bigger). I especially like -- in a frightened sort of way -- thinking about these raccoons etc because it lends a new aura of plausibility to some fantasy movie animals (I won't get into the specific television show that I had in mind; my excessive consumption of bad tv can wait for another day). Bryson also spends a lot of time informing the uninformed of all the many ways in which we might (all) die, and the many ways in which the universe is a more disquieting if not more downright terrifying surrounding than we'd imagined. This makes the book quite fun. But there's a lot of it that is silly: as an intro to cellular activity, Bryson takes you into the cell only to tell you that it is a "nightmareish" place because things move around so fast that if a human being were shrunk and put inside the cell, it would get pushed around a lot. Is that really relevant to anything?

Bryson declares very happily in the introduction that five or six years before the publication of this book, he knew almost nothing about the physical sciences: "I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar..." and so on, which he seems to think is actually a reason for him to be the writer of this book. Indeed, his profession of ignorance is reproduced, in large letters, on the back of the book. But why should knowing nothing make you the person for the job? He seems to imply that it's because the books by scientists that he encountered when he was a kid were boring, though he does acknowledge that once he started looking into it, he found several wonderful popularizers of science already out there. Bryson doesn't inspire confidence as a purveyor of information. How can a man who knew nothing two years earlier suddenly have become an expert on what he describes as "nearly everything"?

One habit in particular that I find annoying is how complacent he is about current scientific facts. He has a very enjoyable way of showing how stupid and mistaken about nearly everything scientists of various orders were in the past, and he'll tell you when something is still "unknown", but if the scientists say it's so, then Bryson is glad to agree with them. So, you get a frequent recurrence of phrases such as "we now know." It feels very strange to hear someone talking expansively about all the absolutely ridiculous false consensuses scientists arrived at in the past, before reverting to a happy, facile view of "the facts." In addition to the "we now knows"s, there are quite a number of "it will be some time before we understand"s. It would have been helpful to this book if Bryson had read some Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, along with his geneticists and geologists, to stop some of his delusions about the onward march of science.

Am I just harping on the lack of rigorousness for something that was never meant to be rigorous? But some of it really annoys me. Bryson at some point calls Stephen Jay Gould "ever scrupulous" as though this were an insult -- something to the effect of, one whose over-cautiousness leads to the dashing of cute but apocryphal anecdotes.

And even though it is impressive that he managed, in so short a time, to get enough of an understanding of such a variety of subjects as to be able to write about them, every so often he makes statements that, to be blunt, seem idiotic. For example:

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events -- frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals -- that are mostly impossible now. It was a period, in other words, when frigidity was much on people's minds. So we may perhaps excuse nineteenth-century geologists for being slow to realize that the world they lived in was in fact balmy compared with former epochs, and that much of the land around them had been shaped by crushing glaciers and cold that would wreck even a frost fair.

Why, Bill, would the fact of the temperature being colder than it would be a hundred years later make it harder for someone to imagine that at some point in the past, things had been colder still? I could as easily imagine a journalist a hundred years from now hypothesizing that because the 20th century was comparatively cold, it was easy for scientists to imagine ancient Ice Ages. It's a bit of a throwaway and it isn't central to his explanations, but it and its many brothers in this book irk me.

Bryson's cutesy style is sometimes enjoyable: I liked the description of my head as "one big oil bon-bon" for the thousands of mites living in my pillow. And he finds useful ways of describing things such as the fact that for the average pillow, which is apparently six years old (if this is a nation- or culture-specific average, it is not told to us), about one-tenth of its weight is from dead skin, mites living and dead, and mite dung. But when I say finds I mean finds, not creates -- this was someone else's example first. And despite my many irritations, it is a pleasant, if superficial, read about a bunch of different branches of science.

To invent or not to invent

The mixed collection of short stories and essays Barrel Fever (1994) is David Sedaris's first published book, which may explain why he hadn't settled yet on a genre. The unevenness of the material may explain why he subsequently settled on the essay as his form, rather than fiction -- though I guess that five volumes later, in 2010, he felt it was safe to return to fiction with Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which is described as a collection of animal-related humorous short stories, not a description that entices me. The short stories in Barrel Fever almost all revolve around characters who are angry, stupid, violent, delusional and/or grotesque. Especially violent. No reason why these characteristics should make for less good fiction, but the stories are very repetitive; it's a lot about the revenge fantasies and so on of these grotesque morons, whose emotions are unsubtly drawn and whose actions don't tend to go anywhere much beyond just being ugly and mean. After the twelve stories come four essays, which are incredibly funny and interesting. SantaLand Diaries, in which Sedaris describes working as a holiday elf in a department store, is both fucking hilarious and actually revelatory about what people get up to when they work as seasonal in-store entertainment. These essays, in fact, appeal to me a lot more than the other full book of essays that I read of his, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In Barrel Fever Sedaris is a guy living in weird circumstances and taking weird odd jobs. In When You Are Engulfed he's this well-to-do guy who travels the world first-class and tells you about it.

V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

This is a fabulous book but not necessarily one I'd recommend to other people. Because it has no plot, very little by way of character, no moral dilemmas. Mostly, it has scenery. Scenery, and a few reflections on the humans that emerge from the scenery. To read it requires a certain diligence, and an appreciation for tininess of detail. That tininess of detail should be a problem may strike you as the idea of a fool and a lover of bad books, but the thing here is that tiny details are almost all you get. Tiny details and big insights: in that way it reminded me of A la recherche. I would guess that smarter & more well-read people have made this comparison, but I'm not going to bother finding out. Other than the scenery and lack of identifiable substance, one thing that reminded me of Proust was the love of linguistic misunderstanding on the part of the little people: one old man tells him something is an "old wise tale," and he loves that; another is a local habit of calling the place where you put dead leaves the refuge instead of refuse (they call all refuse refuge, but it has its most poetic echo when it's the garden refuge). Incidentally, in addition to the lack of plot there is paucity of character -- leaving you with what, you might want to know; as I said, it leaves you with foliage and dirt roads.

In the beginning, there is nothing but the foliage and the roads and the flowers and a garden belonging to someone named Jack, who we are told almost nothing about except that at some point he dies after which his wife moves away and the garden is paved over. After reading about a hundred pages, I wrote the following:

It slows your heartbeat. Or it makes me feel that i must exert control and slow my heart because otherwise I will never be able to keep pace with the writing, will run on ahead and lose the book entirely. And that happens a lot, even though it's not a difficult book, or -- not a book of difficult sentences, but in the description following description of country landscape for forty pages almost nonstop, my eyes glaze over. That makes it sound like a bad book but by some weird trick it manages to avoid being one. I'm not a huge fan of lengthy description ever, and of natural scenery least of all, but here I am drawn in by it, for several reasons: firstly, the heartbeat thing. I can't think of another book that's made me thoughtful of my heartrate and in addition, reading it allows me to calm everything down, almost like a meditation. Secondly, it's completely unlike anything I've read before and might be significantly different than anything ever written. Who the hell writes about scenery for seventy pages? Thirdly, I do feel like he's quite extraordinarily sensitive, our narator. Sometimes it takes him awhile to clue into things and he tells us all about that -- mostly as it relates to farm landscapes and gardens, for instance which flowers grow in which seasons, he only learned that after several years (who cares? and yet!) but he's alive to every detail of his surroundings, including human ones, and reads much significance into a man driving a certain car or a woman tying her shirt into a knot. 

(disliking the aesthetics of block quoting myself, but finding this otherwise to be visually confusing).

In the first section, I thought, it's like he's describing the writer's life with the writing cut out of it. What's left? Long walks in which the village is observed. Then, in the second of the five sections, he introduces the writer as a young man setting off from Trinidad for England, and explains how his character became fractured -- too influenced by colonialist writerly ideals to allow for his own experience to be important, his life and his idea of himself as a writer were at odds, and so he had two parts of himself: his life and his ideas, off in separate directions. So, that seemed like a pretty great novelistic play to me -- first get me to wonder, where is the rest of this man, this writer who seems empty, and then talk about how he became empty. One thing I was uncertain about is that he goes on to say that he became whole again, seemingly prior to the period of his life in which he's walking on these country roads looking at these flowers and trees. Anyhow, I was very taken by the idea and manifestation of this fracture.

The main character exists but almost doesn't exist. He lives somewhere but for the first fifty pages we have no idea why or how he came to be there. Then he reveals that he is a writer, which explains partly, by inference, how his life seems to consist entirely of going for long solitary walks near Stonehenge. We still don't know why he's living there, but given how lost we were before, it feels like a big advance. Also, characters who we know are important from the way he stresses them, get sick and die before the narrator's done more than said a friendly hello when they drive past him on his long solitary walks. So how are they important? This is the suspense born of the strange writing style, which sounds unsuspenseful but hooked me.

With some books it's hard not to think of them as somewhat autobiographical, and I always try to refrain from that. Here, it's almost impossible not to think of this as writing from the author's life. It's another way in which it resembles A la recherche. Partly it is the lack of character exploration -- creating the character appears not to have interested the author, allowing the inference that he doesn't feel interested because he already knows himself so well. In any case, as this unfocused entry must make apparent, the book caused me to reflect at length on many large themes. If you can do that without character or plot, then why employ either of those tired old narrative stratagems? But I hope I've also explained why I would be careful about who I recommend the book to: it's a slow read and nothing happens and the wondrous insight will be missed if the reader doesn't very carefully sift through all the details of garden fences and rose bushes. However, I will read more Naipaul in the near future.

Carnage

Yasmina Reza's 2006 play, Le Dieu du carnage just finished its scheduled four-week run and week of extra performances at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde (in case you were thinking I might write a review of a play in time for it to be useful to someone). I saw Art in London about ten years ago and really loved it. Art is one of those plays in which nothing happens: three friends stand on stage talking about a painting one of them bought, a very expensive all-white canvas. I don't remember it being deep or revolutionary in its message, but it was a bit of intellectualish entertainment. Le Dieu du carnage seemed to promise a similar experience: four people in a living room, in real time. And I laughed a lot during the performance. There are some good jokes and the four actors were amazing, and brought out all the comedy in the text and possibly more.

They were so funny, in fact, that my neighbour wondered afterwards whether the content might have come to us as more substantial if the buffoonery had been toned down a little by the director (Lorraine Pintal, also the artistic director of the TNM, who I'm a bit dubious about; the productions she directs never seem to be among my favourite of the season). Because one was left with a feeling that although the play appears to be giving you all sorts of witty reflections on life, there is no wittiness and no reflection left when the curtain falls. It's all just jokes. I did genuinely find it funny, and disagreed with an unknown man, friend of my neighbour, who claimed that people laughed too readily, because they had been primed to think it was an outstandingly funny show.

There's an extremely naturalistic on-stage vomiting scene, which I enjoyed. There's the four high-culture snobs and then the vomit, all over the front of the stage, through the uptight lady's hands, which cover her mouth the entire time she's spewing, as though she could hold it back and save some dignity. She fully gives up on that idea later on, and lets loose more than any of the others after awhile. There were also some funny dramatizations of a few things: the woman driven nuts by her husband's cell phone, which he never turns off, the couple who are totally freaked out about vomit getting on their special out-of-print art show catalogue, the mother who wants to come across as calm and neutral but is really seething at the other little boy and wants not only for him to apologize to her son but to be able to lecture him herself, face to face, in a formally agreed-to meeting.

I don't mind a show that does nothing other than deliver good jokes (though I confess, I might not like it as much as I'd like to think I like it; I tend to require a bit of meat if I'm going to enjoy myself for more than a few minutes -- and I think most people do). The only disappointment here is that the play sets itself up as a thinker's comedy: the characters ask, do we ever do things for anyone other than ourselves, really? and discuss the savagery of childhood, and the falseness of something they keep referring to as civilization. The premise, two couples getting together to discuss the fact that one of their sons has hit the other one in the face with a stick, is a good one. And she brings in good elements. But to raise all these potentially interesting questions and then go nowhere with them creates a dissatisfaction that needn't have been there if there hadn't been the pretension of probing major themes. Nonetheless, it was a very enjoyable evening.

"So few of the upper classes go into politics these days, you've all got to stick together."

I read Alan Clark's Diaries (1993; surprisingly in its twenty-sixth impression by 2001) on the recommendation of my esteemed brother-in-law. In fairness to him, I did ask for a book that described the political process in Britain (as quasi-research for a piece of fiction that I'm writing). It's a pretty entertaining read. Clark's funny and he's a kind of a horrible person, which can make it more interesting to know what he thinks about other people.

Alan Clark was a member of the British Parliament who lived in a house/castle with a moat around it. He's a super duper snob (see the title quote, actually uttered to him by his wife but quoted approvingly in his diary) and generally hilariously arrogant politician, who was in government under Margaret Thatcher, who he refers to as the Lady, reverentially. One way in which this book offers great insight into what goes on in Parliament is that he's generally frank about the kinds of jobs that people usually act polite about, for instance he writes about being a Minister:

As for the Dept, I never want to go through its doors again. Total shit-heap, bored blue. Strained and befuddled by all the paper work. Fuck them. 

That's when he's at the Department of Employment. While he's there, one gets the impression he might just be in politics for the glory. All he wants is to be Secretary of State, the big leagues. Though when he gets transferred to the Ministry of Defence he's actually quite passionate and knowledgeable about the material. He's still incredibly pissed that he's not Secretary of State for Defence and spends a lot of time trying to undermine the guy who is.

With all of his personal and unidealistic ambitions, he does give an interesting view of how intensely petty big-time politics is, really. Here's a pretty good summation of the world at least as Clark describes it:

[P]olicies are neither determined or evolved on a simple assessment of National, or even Party, interest. Personal motives -- ambition, mischief making, a view to possible obligations and opportunities in the future, sometimes raw vindictiveness -- all come into it.

Some of this may be his own outlook, but he makes a pretty strong case that this is true for almost everyone in the Conservative Party (he doesn't talk about the Opposition much). I shouldn't be surprised, I realize. I knew it was all cynical positioning that drove politics, but I guess I thought it would be more on the level of trying to get power for one's own party. But no, it's all just about vanity and revenge. On the vanity front, Clark excels. Maybe many people's diaries reveal them to be more smug than they'd have admitted in public (though of course he oversaw the publication of these documents, as is clear from the absolutely idiotic footnotes explaining about family dogs and cars owned by his father etc). He really just loves himself. A lot of it is about how he's getting old but is still so athletic and amazing and everyone else his age looks at least thirty years older than him. He is unabashedly lecherous with twenty-year-old girls and at some point makes some remark to the effect that if he were poor, he'd probably have been arrested for harassment or rape long before.

Even though he comes off as funny and smart, I wouldn't even want to have a beer with this guy, is how gross he is. He bemoans the degradation of the class system. I'm trying to figure out on what earthly basis one could lament that other than self-interest? He writes this, which seems like a lame non-excuse:

I fear that the police have abandoned their old class allegiances. Indeed many of them seem to carry monstrous chips, and actually to enjoy harassing soft targets. And where has it got them? Simply widened the circle of those who resent and mistrust the police. Two or three stabbed every day and the assailants usually discharged by the Magistrates.

Is he saying that because the police no longer love rich people, they're being killed on the job more often? Because that would lead right to the conclusion that it's the rich people doing the stabbing. Which would speak against them being "soft targets". Perhaps the police wouldn't feel so bad about being stabbed if only they had their love of the upper classes to cling to. But this is the kind of thinking you have to resort to when you're trying to argue for better treatment for certain individuals based on birth.

He's writing in the 1990s so it seems unlikely to me that he would believe in a genetic superiority -- or maybe he does! Some of his negative comments about Churchill made me wonder if he wasn't a Nazi sympathizer. He's definitely ambivalent about Churchill having become Prime Minister -- speaks wistfully of a coalition that failed, and wasn't the whole thing that Churchill was the one who said fight when the others said give in a la Vichy France? Mind you, he also speaks excitedly about the military victories: "showed we were going to fight, and fight rough." But in that same passage he writes, "We could have made peace at the time of the Hess mission and the world would have been completely different." Now, I'm not going to say that we could have is equivalent to I wish we had, but it sounds like the kind of statement that is at least open to positive outcomes from that world being completely different. I had no idea what the Hess mission was, so I looked it up. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, flew to Scotland in 1941 to (apparently; but there's some controversy about all of this) broker a peace with England under which Euro countries would return to own governments, with German police presence to remain, in exchange for England helping the Germans fight the Soviet Union. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia Hitler ordered planes to stop Hess on his way to Scotland, so it's not clear that Clark is correct in thinking that they could have made peace at all. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it all seems highly suspicious to me.

Conclusion: evil makes for interesting reading. Especially towards the end of the volume when there's a leadership race and Thatcher gets voted out. It's all very high drama. And despite only caring about himself, he actually really adores Thatcher, even disagrees with people who criticize her for not being of the right class. That's love, right there.

A night at the movies with facebook

Watching The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher) last night definitely made facebook feel creepy -- not that we needed a movie for that. Of course the creepy feeling is about the history that is drawn in the movie of the site's original central concept being that of exclusivity, rather than privacy, as I'd previously believed. I suppose I was naive to believe that, since I was told that I needed a school address, which struck me as definitely creepy. I didn't make my own profile, it was done for me by some American friends who insisted that this was the only way to stay in touch when we were going back to our respective schools after a summer working together. I could have questioned it more initially, but I was being swept along. And my questioning probably wouldn't have mattered, since even my most politically engaged friends are on the site now.

What the movie didn't do was make fbook founder Mark Zuckerberg seem as creepy as I thought it would from reviews and a New Yorker profile of the man himself that conveyed that he was upset about the movie portrayal. Of course it could be upsetting because you could take it as pretty embarrassing. It shows someone very interested in class status. I think the class aspect is the issue because a lot of people are trying to reach a higher status in some vein, artists, musicians, actors, kids trying to make friends. It's particularly the status of stuff like private Harvard clubs that seems inane and pompous and generally idiotic, to me and presumably to lots of others. The movie has only one voice of reason on this topic: Erika, the B.U. student who breaks up with Mark in the first scene (or maybe technically you'd call it a third scene; the movie's a little spiced up but that's the scene the movie starts on and it's chronologically first).

Other than Erika all the characters are in some way buying into extremely superficial social markers. Then again all - ALL - the other characters are men or boys. In the first half or so of the movie that point is at least made, not by characters but by general thematic highlighting, for instance of the offensiveness of the prettiness comparison game Mark creates that only includes girls' faces. But the later movie was a total let down by Sorkin et al. (he's only a co-writer but he's the only one who's oeuvre I'm familiar with and he generally tries to come off as some kind of feminist which I appreciate even though I don't always like his brand of feminism). The movie stays with all-male action and has pretty girls draped around as accessories, but no longer includes any semblance of commentary about it, which it could so easily have done - or for instance at a minimum shown us one girl programmer, instead of only the female intern at the office whose main job is to have long blond hair and skinny thighs and to do coke at parties. Also, the only girl-accessory in the movie who gets promoted to girlfriend is an insane psycho who sets someone's apartment on fire out of unprovoked jealousy.

Oh wait, there is one other minor girl character whose sole function isn't to provide sex or the anticipation of sex (or say, to be the secretary outside the Harvard president's office). She's a second year associate with Mark's lawyers' firm who sits in on a deposition that is one of the splice-scenes throughout the movie. Her role is completely opaque to me. I'm guessing there was more of her that mostly got cut out in post-production. She offers Mark some of her lunch (at this point we don't know she's with his side and her friendliness looks possibly like a cheap attempt by the other side to get information by luring him into a friendly interaction with a pretty chick). So, she offers lunch, which he refuses, refuses dinner, which he offers, asks a question supposedly as personal curiosity but in fact to tie up a loose end before the credits roll. She also informs him (and us) that he'll be settling the case tomorrow. I don't know why they have her in there. Surely they could have used a simpler device to tell us about the settlements (actually they do use the simpler device, they do that thing that all based on real life movies do where they give each character a little write-up epilogue).

But back to Mark's character. The reasons he doesn't come off as a bad guy are: 1) he seems like he could be fairly high on the autism spectrum, which excuses a fair amount of what would otherwise be very callous and asshole-y behaviour. He has zero intuitive understanding of friendship or courtship. 2) one might, if so inclined, feel that he has some genuine intellectual passion, that if everything else is bitterness and status-seeking, he does at least love the computer and maybe other intellectual pursuits, which I add because he's quite clever conversationally, in a pompous-nerd way. Now, the talky cleverness is something I'm particularly positively disposed towards, so maybe it's biasing me and some of his character rehabilitation is unwarranted. But I think the people who made this movie are also probably biased towards talky cleverness, so I'm inclined to see it as intended positive character drawing. 3) he's motivated by resentments and a desire to be a big man, which is lame, but the thing is, those are not unusual motivations and aren't irredeemably gross as long as they're not your only motivations (which I'm arguing they aren't, see 2) above). The reason they seem so terrible in him is really mostly that he goes after revenge and chest-puffing in such unsophisticated ways, on which see 1) above. He's definitely not suave, but he's not worse than a lot of porsche-driving dopes. 4) beyond an initial mistake with the girl-rating site, which is gross but forgivable because he's so young and stupid when it happens, the movie's misogyny can't be imputed to him. 5) unlike many movie anti-heroes, the narrative here allows the audience to believe that Mark learns or grows towards the end of the flick. Maybe the character learns a bit about the value of friends and the foolishness of trusting bad guys. Maybe the reason this seems rehabilitating is that the character is so young. In other movies the guy learns when he's 50 and has killed people and dealt dirty drugs and alienated his family and is serving a life sentence in maximum security prison, at which point you feel the learning is something but not much, because he won't have lots of opportunity for acting better.

What I'm left wondering is, did the movie's creators intend to paint a very unflattering portrait with a few wrinkles without realizing how mitigating those wrinkles are, or did they intend to create a sympathetic though problematic portrayal. I suspect it's the first one, but that might just be because I like the idea of coming to a conclusion other than the one the heavy-handed movie execs intended. Their intention should be just as unimportant as the intentions of an author or other artist, but I'm curious about what it says about them rather than about the piece. 

P.S. I'd like to replace the words audience, viewer, reader and listener with some new word like ingester or interpreter (not really replace the words, just replace my use of them). Consumer might have worked but it's too negatively connotated now and also doesn't have the active interpreting role that I'm looking for. The only trouble with ingester is it sounds so stupid.

Classical Love

Lust abounds in Euripides' tragedy Hippolytos, written in 428 B.C.E., translated by Robert Bagg in 1973. I suppose the Greeks thought it was really about being careful what you say about the gods, but what I found most illuminating was the lust.

Hippolytos is an upright man who reveres the gods, except for one Aphrodite, who he despises and is outright rude to. He's contemptuous of sex and love. Aphrodite gets pissed off and decides to punish him. She accomplishes this by making Phaidra, his father's wife (though not his own mother), fall into mad crazy uncontrollable lust with him. She is so ashamed that she is driven half crazy. Finally her nurse gets the truth out of her and goes to Hippolytos. She first swears him to secrecy then propositions him on Phaidra's behalf. Hippolytos is disgusted and says no, and only keeps quiet because he made an oath and he can't break that. Phaidra is very upset at what the nurse has done. She decides the only way to save her honour is to kill herself and write a suicide note in which she says she did it because Hippolytos tried to rape her (interestingly, Hippolytos describes this later as an honourable act, even as  Theseus, his dad, banishes him for it -- I would have thought the honourable would have been undercut by the horrible lying and slander and ruining of an innocent's life, but no).

As I read the first pages, I thought I the insertion of gods' deeds into human emotions was about to start reading as false or artificial, but that was sadly underestimating Euripides. A god who instills lust in someone's soul against her will can be made to explain the human feelings and emotions just as plausibly as any naturalistic explanation. This is Phaidra, who has been acting like a madwoman for several days and refusing to tell anyone what is wrong with her:

I am being violently shoved
somewhere I must not go.
Where? My mind's going, I feel unclean,
twisted into this madness
by the brawn of a god who hates me.

Passions are foisted upon one despite what one would wish. I guess I sometimes think that there's a give and take between what we're spontaneously drawn to and what we decide. But it is more like someone's stuck their hand into you and used you like a puppet. That's what Phaidra feels and even with the personified gods the sense is totally realistic. And so the addition of the gods, rather than being an a sideshow that I had to ignore, was a brilliant highlight, causing me to reflect on what other mechanisms I could use to explain that passion, and whether it was more believable to say something like, chemicals in the brain, or biological imperative. No, "I'm being used like a sock puppet" is a much better explanation, because it gives a better sense of what it's like.

(incidentally, though I'm no real position to judge, my impression was that Bagg, who is also a poet, did a very good translation).

One problem I had with Aphrodite's ways was, why do it by tormenting Phaidra, the wife? I don't mind that Phaidra dies, I know lots of people have to die before the curtain falls and despite being one of those people who's overly squeamish about fictional violence, I'm resigned to that. But shouldn't Hippolytos' punishment for not giving her the respect she's due be that he suffers from some horrible stomach-twisting stronger-than-him passion? Not that being killed isn't a meaningful punishment and all, but Phaidra gets both. Why not have it be him? Is it part of the implicit logic of the allegory that I was conceiving above that even Aphrodite can't make someone lustful if their nature doesn't tend that way? There might be some reason why she thought it would be a crueler victory, but I can't imagine why. Maybe because he doesn't have to feel any guilt, and guilt would make him feel he deserved death, which in some way alleviates the suffering, since if he's totally innocent he just gets to feel outraged and hard done by. But that's a little disappointing. Some readers (me) might not mind if Hippolytos didn't get to feel so innocent, since he's really kind of a schmuck, prone to making speeches like this:

I'm too plain-spoken
to overwhelm a crowd
I'm more at home pursuing rigorous
enlightenment with a few wise friends.

I.e., I'm too smart to talk convincingly to a big crowd of people. Whatever, H. Is that supposed to come off as charming? That and a lot of other things he says just seem pompous. Which I guess I felt worked well with the book. He's morally upright but obnoxious, that's why he draws Aphrodite's wrath down on himself. He's not under the radar enough when he disrespects the goddess. I would have liked it if it was intimated that the other characters see he's an ass but they don't seem to, and Artemis, another goddess, thinks he's awesome (he also thinks he's awesome, describes himself as the most virtuous man on earth). But I suppose a tragic hero has to be complex, and his element of complexity is having a lame personality. Phaidra, who is the one who struggles, is the more interesting character.