30 Before 30: Lawrence of Arabia

Watching Lawrence of Arabia, one of the great films I picked as part of my 30 Before 30. left me surprisingly cold.

In part, I blame the pacing. Clearly, my modern sensibility can't handle a 4+ hour movie, and that's way too long for Carol to take in a single sitting. It took us three sessions to watch the whole movie.

But the second piece, the part I find counter-intuitively disturbing, is how post-modern the film felt. Lawrence achieves super-human heights rallying the Arabs to oppose the Turks and their German allies. He also endures tremendous lows, trying and failing to forge a Western democracy among the tribes, not anticipating their cruelty to each other or their conquered foes in the prison camp, and encouraging their lowest impulses in "taking no prisoners" when faced with the retreating marauders (who had committed war crimes of their own).

What disturbed me was how little insight we have into Lawrence. We see the things he does, but that tells us almost nothing of the man and his motives. Is he a supreme egotist, a genius, a lunatic? We can guess, but we know nothing definitively. And perhaps that dates the film- that David Lean was unwilling to fictionalize further in his epic biopic. What makes it hard for me to approach is that, in fiction, this is precisely the kind of story I treasure.

The cinematography was, of course, stunning. I can see the wide pan approach echoed in everything from Lord of the Rings to Inception. But, given modern access to images from around the globe, the cinematography can't be the main draw for me. The story, the characters, have to win out. And in Lawrence of Arabia, I couldn't quite decide if I was watching the story of a hero.

Ban All the Classic Books

And the Washington Post for the win:

“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!”

Moby Dick

 

Review: Ulysses by James Joyces

This is not so much a review of Ulysses (since I've already written about it twice in the last few weeks) as an effort to sum up my feelings as I finished it.

Because I think Ulysses is just about three people whose lives are a mess.

Stephen Dedalus, the young man with life before him but who is unsure of how to grasp it. His friends are unreliable, his finances are in shambles, and he's unable to bring any of his great ideas to fruition.

Leopold Bloom, the older man whose marriage is falling apart because he cannot communicate with his wife. He indulges his appetites (physical, sexual, imaginative) as a way to mask the lack of control he has over his life.

Molly Bloom, left cold by her husband's refusal to sleep with her in the ten years since their son's death.

When Carol and I last re-organized our bookcases, we split most of the fiction between "Lonely Men" and "Awesome Women" because, tongue in cheek, it seems like these could encapsulate all fiction. But here is a book that epitomizes the lonely men. Neither Bloom nor Dedalus can speak their feels to the important people in their lives. Dedalus would not kneel to pray at his mother's deathbed and now she is gone, and his father is too distant. Bloom still grieves for his infant son and cannot come to Molly's bed, and so their marriage dies.

These emotionally stunted men have no examples to draw on, no one to show them a better way of life. But, in Ulysses, Molly is no better off. When she's finally given the room to speak in the book (which is to say, when she is silent and dreaming because she never does really say what she is thinking out loud), she is a whirl of memories and mixed emotions. She is guilty, but she feels (I think, rightly) forced into her action by a decade of Bloom's inaction and grief.

And that's my overwhelming impression of Ulysses: it is a portrait of grief, of the greatness lost to three people who, despite all the words swirling in their heads, can't really speak to the people who care about them.

Seeing the Strings

It's no secret I dislike Dickens because Dickens hates a loose end, so everything ties up nice and neat.

And that's the worst, when you can see the strings that connect the characters to the author. Michael Crichton was guilty of it, too (it seemed like his novels were thrilling for 280 pages, and then he remembered that he promised his editor he'd wrap it up in 300 pages, so the novel just stopped).

Saturday night I saw a one act play (For the Record by Bernie Appugliese at the Oakland Center for the Arts) that was all loose ends. And it was fantastic.

Board Games I Love: Ticket to Ride

I really didn't think I'd love Ticket to Ride. We bought it, played it a couple times, and then we tossed it in the back of the closet because it didn't do enough the things we love in games: interaction and competition.

Ticket to Ride is a race game: you have a handful of secret tasks to complete by traveling from point A to point B. Since you don't want everyone to know where you're trying to go (so they don't snatch up all the tracks that provide an easy way to get there) it's a game of silently collecting the cards you need to complete your tracks.

In silence, it is very different from my favorite games. In Settlers of Catan, you're free to trade resources, so there's a natural conversation around what different players need and what they must mean they're trying to achieve. Strategic games like Samurai Swords or Risk naturally involve a fair amount of diplomacy, with all the intrinsic deals, pleas and betrayals. Both kinds of conversation lend an urgency to every turn.

Ticket to Ride is helped by the fact that each turn is phenomenally short: you may draw cards to build with or build, never both. So, in theory, you make your plans while everyone else takes their turn.

As we've played (and re-played) I've come to appreciate how silence adds a different sort of tension. The waiting and not knowing compounds the stress of having your way blocked and having to scramble for alternate routes, especially in the 4 or 5 player version.

Are there games you've played you came to love after giving them a second chance?

The Sound and the Fury

How often do you put off reading a book because it is intimidating? You've been told it's great so often that you find yourself "saving" it for when you're ready.

According to The Modern Library, The Sound and the Fury is the best book of the 20th century that I've never tried to read. So I read it, and I wonder why I felt intimidated for so long.

I have been told that the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury is one of the most difficult pieces of literature ever produced. As a stream-of-consciousness tour-de-force, the fist chapter ranks with Molly Bloom's 80 page sentence in Ulysses and Lily Briscoe's meditations on art in To the Lighthouse.

Careening through the thoughts of a thirty year-old with no sense of time was not easy to read, don't get me wrong. But isn't it fun to be disoriented at the beginning of a book, and then slowly to right yourself? The clues are there, most of them repeated enough times that they were recognizable when they surface in later chapters, restored to their chronological place. It wasn't all that different from watching a movie like Memento or Inception. Coast it out and pay attention; it'll all come together.

Maybe I just love puzzles too much. Because The Sound and the Fury presented such a spectacular little puzzle that when I finished the book, the first thing I wanted to do was pick it up again and re-read that first chapter.

How to Stay Present

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even

A couple weekends ago, Carol and I made a trip to Philadelphia. We spent the day with some of my oldest friends, first wandering the Philly Museum of Art (especially through the Dancing Around the Bride exhibition) and then on to lunch.

It seems silly that I made a decision to turn off my phone. It seems silly: there was literally no where on Earth I'd rather have been at that moment. It seems silly: I'm as annoyed by people on their cell phones in public places as everyone else.

But, I'm susceptible to the incessant buzz.

Is it the same sort of faulty logic that makes us think the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence? The way that constant reminders of other people's apparent happiness can make us think that the whole world is having a better time than we are?

Buying Book Reviews, or Am I Doing It Wrong?

People make money reviewing books. I knew this.

People make money posting fake reviews on websites like Amazon and Goodreads. I suppose I understood this to be true.

But people make a living doing this?

It sounds like a scam; if I put it in email format, it would get sucked into your email junk box along with the Nigerian prince and the chain letter from Aunt Martha.

But when I read about people making $28k per month, I think to myself, am I doing it wrong?

Not that I'm interested in selling out, posting fake praise, boilerplate reviews, or demanding money for a review. To consider reviewing a book, all I ask for is a copy of the book. And I've got a queue of reviews to write, including some books that, damn it, I am going to finish reading just in case the last chapter moves me in ways the first two dozen chapters haven't.

I'd like to rush to a moral judgement. I mean, seriously, Todd Rutherford and people like him seem to be savvy enough to make this buck another way. So, muddling the process of reviewing books with money is a desecration (and yes, I'm willing to invoke desecration in all its contexts; it is blasphemous, it is profane, it is a violation of the divine).

But there's a small part of me that wishes, though I'm keeping it tucked away beneath the part that swears I would never- there's a part of me that wonders:

Why didn't I think of that?

Chuck Fluxx

That's right, our Fluxx knock-off based on the tv-series Chuck is complete.
Tonight is play-testing, plus lots of pizza.

Good times in Binghamton. Happy Saturday!

Sincerity on the Internet

I spend a fair portion of my time reading, writing, thinking about writing, and talking about writing with other people.

As often as I spend talking about writing, I must spend half that time talking about often I wish I'd had thoughts of half the quality of Joe Posnanski's stray ideas. Go read his post and, if you're interested, read the article he's linked to, then come back here. I'll wait.

Who wants to expose their hearts on the Internet? Who wants to admit -- except in some deeply ironic way -- that they really and truly like something? Who wants to lay bare their enthusiasm, open it up to the boots of cynics and skeptics and snarkers? Much better to start a "Fire Rex Ryan" Web site … or poke fun at Yuni Betancourt.

I think this is the really cool thing about little kids: They don't know enough yet to be cynical or overprotective.

I'm not really big on enthusiasm. I'm a jerk, I'm cruel, and I think everything is stupid. But I can wish for sincerity. I think a part of why we (I) spend so much time pouring over our culture is because we keep trying to understand ourselves better, with a wrongheaded idea that understanding can bring back some of that child dancing at Disneyland enthusiasm for life.

I'm not sure wonder works that way. I look at authors or actors or politicians, and I see the same person over and over: a person performing for me a charade of the person they think I want to see. (I think that freedom from that kind of character performance might be a part of why I love baseball so much, and why the steroid scandal hurts so much, but that's a thought for another time). We have become (as a society) so good at parsing layers of meaning that we can't believe sincerity.

Maybe none of this is a new thought. But it can't be healthy to live in a world were we feel it's impossible to be genuine because the risk of someone else laughing would hurt too much, or where we can't afford to allow someone the chance to get a leg up in whatever rat race we're running because they've seen our soft spot.

So a little sincerity: I admire so much of what Joe Posnanski writes. I'm going to try to be like him when I grow up (see? I made that last bit ironic because it feels safer).

Why I Like Horoscopes

Actually, I only like one very specific kind of horoscope: the kind written by my friend Jane (Link).

My horoscope this week:

Capricorn (Dec. 23-Jan. 20): Listen to Close to Me by The Cure and think about what closeness really is: the smells and everyday mistakes of intimacy, the song-exchange of friendship, the warmth of breakfast. Get whichever parts of closeness you can.

I like it because it walks that fine line between generic and applicable, in a week when I've felt a little bit lost at sea. It touches both ends of the beautiful, finds a romanticism in the everyday. We all need more of that in our lives. It sidesteps the mysticism and hokeyness of traditional horoscopes.  

It was exactly what I needed to brighten my Friday afternoon.