The Quickening -- Michelle Hoover.

See?  Told you.  Two posts in a row about books I have read.  Again, this is more for me than you, dear readers, but if you want to come along for the ride I figure why not?  

And yes, readership is hovering around 12 per piece on a book.  But you know who else had 12 followers?  Jesus.  I am not trying to invite comparisons, I'm not about to turn water into wine (though what a trick that would be!).  I'm just saying maybe having 12 readers isn't so bad.  

So anyway....The Quickening.  This is a book by Michelle Hoover that is based sort of on her own great grandmother's life.  It features two women and their families trying to eek out a living somewhere in the midwest prior to and during the Great Depression, Enidinia and Mary.  Enidinia and her stoic but kind husband Frank seem more suited to the life, being thankful for what they have and being willing to do without;  Mary by turns is restless and bored, her husband Jack a volatile man, the marriage off to a bad start when Jack realized that Mary wasn't a virgin due to what sounds like an assault she suffered from a local boy when she was younger.  

It is not a happy book.  Tragedy seems to be mostly what Enidina and Frank are able to harvest from the ground, what with the stillbirth of two children and a death of a third later.  They are left with one daughter who leaves the farm as soon as possible.  The climax of the book comes with the death of the third, a son, Donny, during a horse riding accident on Mary's farm;  the boy was trying to ride a horse he had no business riding, and that horse had been whipped into a frenzy by Mary's illegitimate son Kyle; whose father is the local preacher, the fruits of a one-time fling on the Pastor's cot in the Church basement.  Enidinia, crazed with grief, ends up cremating the body of her son in the fields, starting a massive fire that threatens to destroy her farm.  Oddly enough after that event Enidinia and Frank weather the last years of The Great Depression well, the fields yielding grand harvests.  Thus they are ostracized from the people of the town, thinking perhaps they made a pact with the Devil.  Meanwhile Mary tries to shift the blame of the accident to Enidina.  Later, when Enidina lays dying and is trying to write her recollections in a notebook, Mary re-surfaces as her nurse...

Yeah, you kind of guessed it, maybe:  it's a lot of book for a scant 214 pages.  Thus its kind of hard to find a message in the book, in the story.  Enidina is clearly the character we are to be sympathetic towards, but in the end you kind of feel bad for Mary - her life has been marked by shame in a way that isn't fair, and it seems her actions are in part to shift that weight off of her soul, and to avoid snaring Kyle's soul in it as well.  

But aside from that I really can't make heads or tails of the novel.  

But it is still a powerful book, emotionally.  The writing is sparse, the imagery is vivid.  It is like looking at good piece of contemporary art - it doesn't really mean anything, but it leaves you with a powerful emotion. That is what I've been trying to pay attention to.  It is unfortunate that that emotion is one of deep, impending doom, and of meaninglessness itself...

Fun.

 

    

So Anyway.... John Cleese.

So I'm going to try to make a better effort this year of writing about the books I read.  It's not particularly popular (average traffic for book reports is kind of low these days), but after four years here this blog needs a reason for existence, and I suppose I can think of nothing better than letters.  I'm sure there will still be plenty of random crazy make-em-ups, but for now I think this is where I want to be, etching my thoughts on what I have read permanently into the ether.  I hope I can at least do it in a way that is entertaining to....someone.

One bonus of this is that it will help me remember what I have read, and what I thought of it.  I have an incredibly ability to read through something and then instantly delete it from memory.

So Anyway....I mentioned the other day that my favorite Jon Stewart moment involved John Cleese.  Well, Mr. Cleese was there to hawk his book "So Anyway...." which is a memoir spanning the time from his birth through the very very start of Monty Python.

I enjoyed it, but I think that's mainly because I am a huge John Cleese fan so I'm going to enjoy anything he does.  That being said I am not sure it was really very good.  It was funny in parts (particularly when John remembers his childhood) and some of the digressions are truly interesting.

But the book drags a big when John goes to Cambridge and joins the Footlights, and it never really find the same energy.  John Cleese is a funny man; but reading about people trying to be funny just isn't....funny.

And I suppose it isn't supposed to be, and Cleese himself will be the first to tell you it is impossible to make something 100% funny - you just do the best you can.  But I think the other reason it drags is that there is no real sense of adversity.  The most marvelous thing about Cleese is that he sort of fell into show-business, he naturally found it and it kind of found him.  It's one of those outlier cases were a man with extraordinarily talent happens to be in the right place at the right time.  It's a wonderful story, but it maybe isn't the most interesting one.

What's more, it feels incomplete.  I found myself enjoying it simply because I am a John Cleese fan, but I desperately want to here more.  This almost feels like it should be first of a two or three volume set.  I'd like to hear Cleese talk about filming The Holy Grail or being on set with Life of Brian.  I'd like to hear about writing Fawlty Towers and sharing cricket scores with Baranard Bradley.  And sure....tell me why "A Fish Called Wanda" is so great, and maybe I will give it a second chance.

So a pretty good book, but it leaves one wanting more.  Cleese could write one of the great biographies if he chose to, but something tells me we are not going to get it.  

My Favorite Jon Stewart Moment

It's funny, but as the news broke that Jon Stewart was leaving the Daily Show it felt in a way that someone had died.  Not that I feel that way, but it was just odd that my friends starting eulogizing him as if he was dead on social media.  Take heart friends - I am sure we have not seen the last of Mr. Stewart.  Be it in movies or in books or behind a camera or maybe even one day in the halls of our hallowed government I am sure we will see him again.  

My favorite Jon Stewart moment:  when he made John Cleese laugh during the interview for Cleese's recent book So, Anyway... which is a memoir of his early days, cutting his teeth at the BBC before Monty Python began.  And it was on the damndest joke too -- John Cleese had "guessed" Jon Stewart was about 65, and Jon said to John "No I ain't, I is 34 I is", and John said "Really?" and Jon said "No, I've just gotten a lot of lifts.  I have a skin ponytail in the back"....and for some reason that thing, of all things, just absolutely cracked Cleese up.  

And I'm paraphrasing of course.  It didn't really happen that way (though the skin pony tail thing was the joke). You can see it on The Daily Show website, at least for now.  But I think it meant a lot to Stewart that he was able to make John Cleese really laugh.

Who should replace Stewart?  I don't know.  I am not sure if anyone should.  I know I wouldn't want to try. But Comedy Central would be idiotic not to at least try to keep one of their great franchise programs going.  If I was them I'd try to find a clever female comedienne and let the girls take a crack at it.  Let's shake up late night a bit.  

And If Jon Stewart runs for President?  I won't vote for him.  Not unless he came to my house and gave me a dozen donuts (pretty much the running cost for my vote).  

Though you know?  For you Jon.....I'll make it a cool half dozen.  

     

Two Movies in the News -- "The Interview" and "American Sniper"

I watched the two movies that have been in the news recently:  "The Interview" and "American Sniper". Without further adieu, here is what I thought about them:

The Interview:

Watching The Interview became an epic 4 day struggle.  I made it through the first 20 minutes on day one, fell asleep on day two, made it to the actual interview in The Interview on day three, and finally finished the film on Day Four.

My two big takeaways:  the North Koreans need to develop a sense of humor, and I was glad I was able to watch this movie for free on Netflix.  I got my money's worth.

Was it funny?  Sure, in parts.  It had good special effects.  But it was also needlessly crass and just...dumb. Surely a poster-child for free speech should at least be interesting. I felt a little dumber for having watched it.

American Sniper:

Now we're talking.  I've been looking to see this movie since it came out, and I finally got my chance today. I wish I had gotten the chance to see it before it became a political football.  It's a shame that in this country we have become so commercialized that we can only express ourselves in what we consume, and have to graft our culture wars onto what is, in my opinion, a fairly nuanced film about the war.

Yes, you can complain that the movie doesn't portray Iraqis and Muslims well, and there is no mention about Abu Ghraib or other atrocities perpetrated by the American military during the war.  But I don't see why a movie about Iraq, specifically one that focuses on Chris Kyle, has to include all of those things.  There are other media, other films, that investigate those issues quite well for the person who cares enough to explore.  There shouldn't be a checkbox that you have to go down to please everyone when it's time to make a film about Iraq War; God knows you simply can't.

I know as well that there are some (Michael Moore, the aforementioned wunder-kind Seth Rogen, Bill Maher) who try to paint Chris Kyle as some kind of war loving, rascist psycho-path.  Michael Moore goes so far as to insinuate that Chris Kyle is a coward, and that the insurgents are merely just trying to defend their homes against invaders (us).  I wouldn't disagree with these liberal figureheads (though what Seth Rogen is doing in there I don't know...) that the war in Iraq was a horrible, misguided, tragic mistake.  That being said I wouldn't allow those feelings about the war to denigrate someone's service and turn him into something that he is not.  I don't like the fact that American culture is one that continues to honor violence, but in the same breath I would say I'd consider Kyle to be an American hero, not only for what he did on the battlefield but also the work he did when he finally came off with sufferers of PTSD, work that cost him his life.  In that way he himself is a casualty of this horrible war.

Enough with the politics.  As a movie itself it's really quite good.  It lacks the epic sweep of a Saving Private Ryan, but as a character study it is top notch.  We see Chris Kyle change in small, subtle ways as the war goes on and his combat tours increase, thanks to a brilliant performance by Chris Cooper.  Kyle seems human at the beginning, and human at the end when he's found his way back to his family, but during the war he gets more and more like a machine, and Cooper gives subtle hints that behind the stoic exterior the violence is starting to affect him.

Anyways, my two cents.

Reckon I'll go watch Rambo now.