Monday morning haiku: April 5

Spring barges in like
a petulant pubescent
with a heart of gold

Not a book report

I'm back among the Workers these days, the curious folk who live in the building where I am sometimes called upon to build documents for money. I try not to show up too early, so that they will be up and breakfasted before my arrival.

Many of the people I used to know among them are no longer there. This financial crisis thingie has hit and hit hard. There have been layoffs, and a few times those remaining have been asked to accept a decrease in pay to help ensure the short-term stability of the company. Today was one such day. This makes me fear for my own situation there, which is temporary anyway. It also makes me feel quite sad for the situation in which the Workers find themselves.

I heard on television that unemployment is always a "lagging indicator" in tough economic times, which is meant to indicate that it takes longer to stabilize than the actual crisis. This isn't much comfort.

So I find myself a bit melancholic this Monday evening. Hoping a good night's sleep will take care of some of that. If not, perhaps I will devour a sheet cake.

*****

I've been thinking about the 100 Books/100 Films thing, and am now convinced that I would rather saw off my foot than attempt to write 200 posts like the one I posted Sunday. To say nothing of asking anyone to pop in and slog through such posts. The reasonable thing to do would be to publish a few lumped together every week or so, focusing on highlights and lowlights. I except I'll do a book or film all on its lonesome from time to time, but only in such cases where I genuinely had something to say or a strong response.

Bear with me, I am still figuring things out.

This also means I can blog like a normal person more often, without it getting buried in what would be a new review every two days or so. I find I am looking forward to doing some normal posts.

*****

The lists I am going by, incidentally (the AFI Top 100 Films and the Modern Library Top 100 Books), are not meant to imply that I necessarily endorse their choices for the cream of their respective crops. Any two people would have wildly varying lists, and there are a number on these lists which I might rank higher or lower or omit in favor of another selection.

The main thing is that they are concrete lists, and each have many selections which I have never experienced for one reason or another. The books one, in particular, intrigues me with a nice blend of things I know I enjoyed, things I have always meant to read, and things I had never heard of before. And, yeah, a few I know already are clunkers.

A note about the Top 100 recaps

They need to be shorter. I'll try harder with the next one.

Top 100 Books - #100: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. 1918, 520 pages.

*****

So last night I finished up The Magnificent Ambersons a little after one, and then spent about 90 minutes wringing out a rather wordy reaction to it, before recalling—with my cursor hovering over the "publish" button—that I am not a book critic.

I think this little project of mine will go a lot more smoothly for both of us, Blogreader, if I confine myself to my own experiences with the book, rather than 100 somewhat disjointed book reports. After all, this project was never intended to be a cosmic make-up exam for all the book reports I failed to complete in school.

*****

Books.

Honestly, that was my main thought when I decided to tackle this list. To color it in a bit, you should imagine me saying that with a sideways grin and a pirate's glint in my eye.

I love books, of course. I've been reading since before I can remember, and I have some pretty old memories. I have spent most of my life voraciously devouring anything readable in my path. But a curious thing happened a couple of years ago when I made the conscious decision to write: I all but stopped reading at the same time. I just sort of fell out of the habit. At first, I suspect it was because I was struggling to find my voice, and didn't want a bunch of other voices clouding me as I did so, but even when I stopped writing, I only read actual books occasionally. This made me a bit sad.

The list is not only my way back into my blog, but also a rekindling of a lifelong passion.

*****

The Magnificent Ambersons, it turns out, is only barely in print. Unable to locate a copy that was less than $15, and being quite cash-poor at the moment, I was pretty delighted to find a scanned copy for free over at Google Books. I was a bit daunted as well, as I've never attempted to read a book on my laptop before. At 520 pages, Ambersons promised a lot of quality time with glasses and screen.

It was not, frankly, an experience I would like to repeat. I like the feel of a book, and the fact that I can move it around, move myself around while reading it. I like that I cannot check my email on it, or read what various people are making for dinner on Facebook. I'm certainly no Luddite, but a good old analog book makes a world of sense to me.

I'm not sure how long it took me to plow through The Magnificent Ambersons. It was 520 pages, sure, but some rather generous typesetting leads me to conclude it would be less than half that under normal, contemporary publishing rules. I took quite a few breaks to do other things, and each new pair of pages took a few seconds to fully resolve, and I still managed to get through in far less than 12 hours. My guess is about four or five hours of concentrated reading.

I had no preconceptions heading in. Like a handful of others on the Top 100 list, it was one I had no real awareness of before I sat down to read it. I had some foggy recollections of a film version floating around in my head, but nothing to do with plot or characters or even when it had originally been published. (The film version, it turns out, was an Orson Welles Joint [as I believe he called his works] from 1942 which would have also been on my Top 100 Films list had I opted for the list from 1998 rather than the one from 2007.)

I hoped, of course, that our Ambersons were going to be a troupe of trapeze performers or magicians or something (perhaps with a mischevious pet monkey?), but instead found rather quickly that they are the richest family in a town which is already, in the opening lines, threatening to become a city.

Tarkington wastes no time establishing that the Ambersons are...uh...magnificent. He cleverly uses that word or a variation no fewer than four times in his opening paragraph, even while he is qualifying the term and explaining that such things are relative. Then he ditches his charges and goes on about fashion styles and buildings and popular songs for a while.

The opening, largely Amberson-less chapter contains some lovely, wryly humorous odes to the town. It also contains the first of several passages which are not especially kind to anyone with a different skin tone or national origin. I won't dwell on this, as the book came out in 1918, and it's hardly fair to judge such passages by the standards of today. They were a bit distracting when they did crop up, but largely because they pop up out of nowhere from time to time and have virtually nothing to do with the main plot.

There is a dark mirror of the opening passage much later in the book, where we once again leave the Ambersons for a bit and see what happens to the town over the passage of some time. These sections, although powerful, pulled me right out of the book. Suddenly, the narrator has all sorts of opinions about everything, which is a sharp contrast to the main body of the book. And since his opinions coincide with our protagonist, who is also clearly our antagonist, it felt like a bit much.

I'm sure there's something interesting that I haven't quite caught in the fact that almost none of the major characters in the book still carry the name "Amberson." George and his mother are Ambersons by blood, but their last name is Minafer. I kind of took this, in addition to all the opening magnificence-qualifying, as a sign that the inevitable downhill run of our poor Ambersons begins long before that mansion has a chance to decay.

Also, as a side note: If you are writing a book with exactly six main characters—three men and three women—try not to name two of the men George. It's just creating problems for yourself. Especially in a book with "Ambersons" right there in the title, when your main George is a Minafer and the secondary George is named George Amberson. I dunno. Just seems like an odd choice.

So anyway: Main George is sort of a prick in his callow youth and there are many in the town, we are told repeatedly, who would like nothing more than to see him receive his comeuppance. I have to count Tarkington among those rooting against George to some degree, as the plot which unfolds involves him growing up and making some pretty horrible decisions over the course of a couple of impetuous days. He imagines himself as Hamlet in one of the darker passages late in the book, attempting to project some nobility on his actions, which will end up costing most of our characters—including himself—any chance they had for happiness.

*****

Yeah. Spoiler alert, I guess. The book is nearly a century old, though, so I don't feel cripplingly bad about it.

*****

I had some problems with the characterizations. Many of them are a bit two-dimensional, acting within their prescribed attributes and possessing no others. But this is a town, or a world, or a time when all of the characters have met the only person they will ever love romantically before they turn 20, and nothing that ever happens in their lives can alter these original loves. Which implies pretty strongly that none of them are capable of any change in other areas either, except by force, which happens to Main George late in the book. That most of the dialogue is of the "I shall now proclaim to you the things that I currently think and feel" variety doesn't help. I want to peg a lot of this on the time in which the book was written, but given that Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain all came before Tarkington, and never seemed to have much trouble creating characters that have the power to feel real and move me, I can't blame all of it on the times.

At its heart, The Magnificent Ambersons is about a boy who learns far too late how to be a man. Indeed, once he has burned down the lives of more than a few of our main characters, he is still stubbornly committed to his belief that he has acted rightly. It is only years later, once the family fortunes are revealed to be so much quicksilver in a nest of cracks (to borrow a phrase from the book), that he engages himself to take care of his aunt and assume responsibility for something beyond his own whims.

Or possibly, the book is about the gradual decay of a statue of Neptune. Or it could be about how unbelievably dirty cities are, and how they tinge and destroy the beauty of formerly great Midwestern towns, erasing the names of those who built it in the first place and replacing them with foreigners and strangers. Mr Tarkington makes it plain that much of the "progress" that came about near the turn of the century—when automobiles began to replace horses with their dirty, dirty dirtiness and their noisy noises—is just another knife plunged into the wholesome and decent world that certainly existed up until then. Except, of course, that—aside from the narrator, who clearly believes this to be the case—the only one who seems to be on that side of the argument is our petulant man-child hero-villain.

*****

So, yeah: a bit of a mixed bag. It was a brisk enough read. There was quite a bit roiling underneath the main narrative which seemed contradictory to me, but, for what it was, I found I enjoyed the ride. Overall, I'd probably give it a solid C.

The "reading on a laptop" aspect was a bit distracting. I also had no idea how many pages were left, which proved a bit of a drag in the last hundred pages, when the end of every chapter felt for all the world like the book was over, and then I'd click to be sure, and...nope. Yeah, I could have scrolled down to see how many pages there were, but I was so sure I was close to the end that I didn't bother.

I feel like I probably missed a lot of stuff in this one, which may have been partially due to my own eagerness to get started on the project without a clear understanding of what it is, exactly, I am doing. The idea of getting a book read and posted served as both a motivator and a distraction in this instance.

There was a lot of very good stuff in this book, and I suspect my writing mostly about the aspects I didn't buy into or enjoy stems from feeling like I didn't really get this one. The mere fact that it's provoking a lot of thought is a decent sign that the book was a success, and I do not begrudge it its Pulitzer or anything.

*****

I expect I will get better at this as I progress, but please feel free to leave suggestions in the comments if there was something you would have liked me to touch on, or something you would have preferred I didn't bother with. Not promising I will take all suggestions, of course, but I'll certainly read them and ponder them.

*****

Tarkington was from Indianapolis, which is almost certainly the town he's describing in this book. My only exposure to Tarkington before this was references from Kurt Vonnegut, also from Indianapolis, who seemed to truly admire Tarkington. Between this fact and my own shaky grasp of the book I just read, I think it is quite likely that I might revisit this book later in the project.

*****

Next up is #99, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, which was apparently banned in the U.S. when first published in 1955. From what I can glean from the back cover, it seems to be a "wildly funny" bawdy romp through postwar Ireland, which sounds about as different from The Magnificent Ambersons as I might hope. There seems to be a dearth of humorous novels on the list in general, so I'll be trying to embrace the levity when I can.

A mildly massive undertaking

Hello, again, Blogreader.

In the couple of years since I last kept this blog regularly, I have often thought about keeping it again. The various attempts are still preserved below, carcasses of decent intentions made laughable with the benefit of hindsight.

What happened, primarily, was that I felt I had little to say, and I had begun to believe that the majority of my writing was below the standards I had thought to keep myself to. I had, more or less, tired of my own voice. And so I retreated, waiting for some magical event to restore my confidence or my words.

No such magic materialized. Waiting for magic, it turns out, is not a great way to get moving.

In the process, having removed myself from my self-prescribed writing practice area, I stopped writing entirely. I made some furtive attempts at fiction in the time I was away, but found myself frustrated that my writing muscles—having been mostly dormant for so long—were not capable of producing in the way I wanted them to.

Since what I would still primarily like to do is write and write, you can see where this was a problem. And worse, it was a problem that fueled itself. It would be an exaggeration to say I thought of returning here daily, but I don't think it's a stretch to say I thought of it every few days, at least. And then, failing to do so, I continued to not exercise, to not write, which only served to make me feel that I had less to say.

All of this preamble is merely my best attempt to explain why I have not been here. It is not, however, the point of this post.

*****

I have found, you see, a gimmick. Today, I thought of a way to trick myself onto writing more regularly, while simultaneously enriching my knowledge of certain things, and checking some stuff off of my to-do list.

Anyway, my intention is this: Over the course of the next year, I intend to work through the top 100 books and films as rated by The Modern Library and the American Film Institute, respectively. Basically, starting around February 1st, I will begin at the bottom of the list and work my way north to #1. I'd like to finish this within 2010, but if necessary, I'll allow the project to go a full year.

I've chosen these lists somewhat arbitrarily, but I'm not sure if there's necessarily a more authoritative list in either category. The AFI list, in particular, will rob me of both British and foreign-language films. So if I find a better list before the start date, I will switch. Otherwise, I'll likely supplement from time to time with a worthy film or book which was not included on these lists.

I considered, briefly, going with Oscar winners for Best Picture, but kind of feel that would end up being a far worse representation of cinema. For one thing, those are chosen more or less in the moment. For another, they are limited to only one film per year. The AFI list, at least, has two from 1939 in the top ten. One of which, I must admit, I have never seen. Plus the fact that film existed for some time before the first Best Picture statue was presented. And, of course, some truly awful flicks have waltzed off with that award.

In each list, there are a certain number which will be revisits rather than new discoveries. I have seen an awful lot of these films before, or read these books. But I find that my appreciation of a thing is at least somewhat dependent upon my circumstances at the time, and I think that I'll gain something even from the retreads. Some of the books and films also rank among my favorites, so it'll be nice to revisit those from time to time, and see what thoughts they might provoke now.

So I'll have to average a book and a film about every three days, which doesn't sound too difficult, but will almost certainly be much tougher than I imagine it. There aren't a lot of brisk, light reads on the book list, for instance.

I'll be writing my reactions here on the blog, to each book or film, as I go. Some might go a bit beyond that. I'm curious to see how what I am reading might affect how I enjoy the film I am watching, for instance, so I expect I'll explore some of that when I have reason. I'm sure I won't enjoy every selection from either list, but that's a part of the experience as well.

Anyway, I mainly intended to say hello again, and to kick-off this project. My internal editor has not done a tremendously good job of keeping this brief, but I hope things will improve as this goes on.

I'm hopeful that, in addition to the posts related to this project, you will also be able to find the sort of quality drivel I use to churn out with such regularity. The project, however, provides me with a sort of regular assignment schedule to keep to. And I'm hopeful that we'll get into some discussions again. While I highly doubt I have any readers left from the old days, maybe some will decide to check in again and say hello, and some new folk will appear who are interested in this journey.

*****

AFI requires you to register at their site to get a copy of their list, but the Modern Library one can be found here. It's maybe worth mentioning that I will be doing the Board's List on the left, rather than the Reader's List, which is clearly weighted by people who are tremendously into their thing and little else. No disrespect to any of those people intended, but having 70% of the top ten taken up by any two authors is palpably ridiculous, and for those two to be Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard makes it clear that, at best, they were using some other criteria when voting than I would consider reasonable when trying to select the "best" novels of all time.

A Mahrathon completed

The charity marathon I did last weekend raised $600 for Heifer International, plus I think a couple of people donated directly to Heifer as well. Since my target was to raise $300, I'm calling this a success. It was also a lot more fun (most of the time) than staying at a computer for more than a solid day has any right to be.

In all, I played some 476 songs in 26.2 hours.

I donated the money this afternoon. Screen captures of the donation follow, lest anyone think I sauntered off into the night with the money.




I am planning to make this an annual event, so be on the lookout for another post next November/December with the when and where. Hopefully, it will be one of a number of posts, and not an anomaly like it was this time.

A Mahrathon

Hello, Blogreader.

Beginning today at 4:48 CST, I will be doing a charity fundraiser to benefit Heifer International. Basically, it consists of me streaming a 26.2-hour dj set over the internet.

If you would like to tune in, you can click here. It works fine through iTunes. I think it also works through Windows Media.

It'll be mainly indie music from this decade, but I'm likely to take plenty of detours backward in time as well. Probably won't stray too far in the other direction, as I'm not a huge fan of the music that'll be coming out in the future.

The money I raise will be donated to Heifer International's Eastern Uganda Umbrella Project. I think Heifer is a pretty neat group. They're international in aim, and I particularly like how they structure the gifting so that the recipients later pass on livestock, plants and training equivalent to the original gift to another needy group in the future.

To make a donation and help out, you can click the following:

Thanks for reading and/or tuning in. I promise that my next post will not ask any of you for money.