Ah, Christmas. You always manage to destroy every single one of my routines, and you ask me to spend way too much time with family, but at least I get a lot of reading done.
58. Hey Nostradamus! – Douglas Coupland
I always feel like I should like Douglas Coupland more than I do, given that the he’s often pegged as the definer of my generation. I did enjoy JPod, at least until the self-insertion and the lists of numbers and words that dominated the second half and turned what looked like it was going to be a good weekend of reading into barely an hour’s entertainment and left me feeling ripped off more than possibly any book I’ve ever read. And I’ll admit right here that I’ve never read Generation X; it’s on my loose mental to-read list, but every time I see it in a shop I’m put off by both the garish pink cover and the page:cost ratio.
Hey Nostradamus! I picked up in a cheapy bin, and tore through in a couple of days. And I honestly can’t say that I felt very much for it at all.
It’s not that it lacked emotional punch – because it had that. I felt sad for all these people and for the places they’d come to in their lives. But that wasn’t really enough. It was trying, I think, to use these sad personal stories to create something larger – to offer comment on religion and family and adolescence and love and the media, but that comment felt very incoherent and vague.
Now, not all books need to have a ‘message’. This could have worked as just a story of some people who were hugely affected by this horrible tragedy and what that did to their lives, but – and I may well be reading it wrong – I don’t think that was what Coupland was going for.
I think this was supposed to be a commentary, but the story just got away from him and became something else and the message got lost in there. Narratively, it feels a little over the map. Subplots are introduced and then dropped, while things that aren’t given all that much attention end up being critically important, and things that do get a lot of attention end up feeling like time-wasting sideplots. And the ending – where characters get paired off seemingly at random – just feels a little too plucked from thin air.
Structurally, the story is broken up into four sections, each narrated by a different character and each covering a different period of time, with some crossover. Coupland also finds the need to break the fourth wall throughout the book; Characters stop telling the story at points to say that they were writing “this” and then something happened and they put it down and now here’s what happened next, as though these are diaries, except that they’re not, and except that the thing that happens when they put the writing down always manages to be directly relevant to the exact point of the story they’re at. It’s all very hamfisted and distracting and unnecessary.
By drawing attention to this as a book, rather than as a story that I am being drawn into, Coupland manages to completely break the spell that, as a storyteller, he should be casting. The meta scuppered any emotional attachment I was building up, and made me question the reasons the story was being told in the first place (because really, Jason – this is not a bombshell you really want to be dropping on your nephews in writing, and certainly not without first discussing it with their mother).
For all its flaws, Hey, Nostradamus! isn’t a bad read, if very frustrating. It’s just trying too hard to be something that it’s not.
59. John Dies At The End – David Wong
I don’t usually do this, but when I finished this book, I went and checked out the Amazon reviews, mostly because I was just so unusually unsure of what to make of it. The first thing that struck me was just how many friends David Wong has on the internet, and how … irritatingly protective … they are of him. Which kind of worries me a little bit, to be honest. Because, well, I may be about to enrage them.
John Dies at the End is not a bad book. It’s just an incredibly uneven one. Sometimes, it’s a really good, enjoyable read and I could rollick happily through fifty pages in one sitting without blinking. At other times, unfortunately, it’s just a turgid, impenetrable mess.
David Wong is up against it here. Comic horror isn’t the easiest genre to nail without descending into eye-rolling silliness, and, really, writing about hallucinations is not without its risks either. You’re trying to take your reader on a journey into something that by definition, doesn’t really make any sense. To do so takes a lot of skill. And I just don’t think Wong has that skill.
Nor has he really nailed that whole comic horror thing. This book manages to be simultaneously not scary and not particularly funny. There are some jokes, and they sometimes work, but mostly the ‘funny’ seems to be coming from attempts at off-the-wall weird, and most of the off-the-wall weird just comes across as trying a little too hard to be off-the-wall weird.
Now, the second thing I learned from reading the Amazon reviews was that John Dies at the End started life as an online serialized story. Which explains a hell of a lot, because as an online series, I see how John Dies At The End could work.
Online, you’re not, usually, asking someone to sit down for hours and read a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You’re asking for chunks of their time, now and then, and it’s very possible for people to come into the story in a non-linear fashion. I’d imagine writing fiction online is more like writing a TV series than it is a novel: each post akin to an episode of TV, needing to be satisfying enough to stand up on its own while working well with the rest of the season.
Novels just aren’t like that. They need to tell a complete, cohesive story, and they need to read as one solid body of work. No-one ever comes into a novel at Chapter six, decides that one is really good and goes back to the start. No-one just skips a chapter because they weren’t around that week. Sometimes a reader will get through five pages in a sitting, sometimes a hundred – setting their own pace. For a novel to succeed, it needs to allow for that.
John Dies At The End might have been a fun thing to write online, with the format giving the writer a good way to throw a whole mess of ideas at the world within a loose framework and see what sticks. It would probably have been an enjoyable thing to read online too, but, as a book, it just doesn’t work.
Which is a shame, because when the writing is good and the ideas are coherent, this is a really enjoyable read. Unfortunately, that’s not the case often enough, or for long enough, to get me to say it was any good.
60. Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
Rumour has it that Tales of the City also started life in serialized form, but it works in a completely different way to John Dies at the End. Tales of the City feels very episodic, with its short little chapters, but with overarching themes and storylines that keep the reader engaged throughout. It’s also a very easy read, written in very straightforward fashion, and I raced through it in a day.
Tales of the City is set in 1970’s San Francisco – possibly the gayest place on earth, complete with a fondness of mustaches and fag hags and liberal quantities of drugs consumed by anyone and everyone – and very page exudes such a strong sense of time and place.
Maupin leaves a lot out in his storytelling. Description is mostly very spare, in favour of great chunks of dialogue, so the book feels very chatty, but, at times, you feel like you’re missing out on the kind of context that would usually be forthcoming. Some of that is deliberate, allowing for a few ‘big reveals’, but it can feel like being at the pub with two friends who’ve known each other for much, much longer than you’ve known either of them – sometimes the conversation gets away from you.
To his credit, Maupin doesn’t play games with his reveals. There’s the usual soapy reliance on coincidence, but it’s mostly handled without these big, heavy-handed scenes where characters run into each other in some unlikely place and start screaming about all sorts of personal things on a street corner. In fact, most of the big emotional conversations take place off-screen, as it were, and we just hear of them afterward. The overall effect is very gossipy, like that aforementioned trip to the pub. Mostly it’s fun, but sometimes you learn things you really would rather you hadn’t, or you find yourself all too interested in the gory details of someone else’s personal life, or too amused at what is really another’s misfortune. You’ll be enjoying yourself, and then suddenly feeling guilty for being there at all.
There are some narrative missteps: a couple of the storylines reach a little too far in the direction of over-the-top cheesy, and some are just not fleshed out as well as I would have liked them to be, but given that this is the first in a series, there’s nothing to say they won’t be down the line.
It’s gossipy and soapy and oh-so-frothy, but Tales of the City also a series of very successful character studies, and an insight into how and why we create (and destroy) the relationships that we do. I liked a lot of things about this book but, overall, I didn’t love it – and the only reason I can point to is that post-gossip guilt. I don’t know that I’ll be back for the sequels.
Guilty Pleasures
Feeling bad for feeling good.
The term ‘guilty pleasure’ is, when stripped of its most commonly ascribed context, perhaps best suited to describing an affair, or taking a stolen car for a joyride: something that makes you feel good, but that you should probably feel bad about, at least a little bit. It’s a naughty cigarette after a few drinks, long after you’ve quit, or laughing when you see someone trip over their own feet, or sending that ‘oh my god, what is she wearing?!’ email about your co-worker and sometimes friend; you enjoy it, but you also feel bad, because it’s not really very nice, and probably there’s that person that you know that if you told them you did that, they might think a teeny bit less of you, if only for a minute.
It’s when it’s applied to pop culture that the very idea of a guilty pleasure become problematic – suggesting, as it does, that you should feel bad for enjoying something, as though that enjoyment is somehow damaging to you or to someone else. Incidentally, it’s the same when applied to food. Cheese? Not a guilty pleasure. Just a pleasure. Sure, if you eat a whole wheel of double brie, you’ll likely feel bad – gassy and bloated and queasy and slightly greasy, even – but that’s just your body reacting to the excess influx of lactose. Have a salad and it’ll all even out.
This week, I had a chance to see Bon Jovi live, for the first time in 15 years. Bon Jovi are pretty much the gold standard in so-called guilty pleasures. I believe Livin’ On A Prayer has actually topped an international guilty-pleasure poll.
Now, I am not going to try to convince you that Bon Jovi are a much better band that you think they are. You have, I’m sure, heard of them, heard a few of their songs, and come to a conclusion about them and their music all on your own.
But I will say this: as entertainers, they are very, very good at what they do. They have been doing what they do for quite a long time now, and they have it down pat. They can put on a really good show, even when working without the pyrotechnics and video screens and built-in stadium experience. They are very good at making sure that their audience is having fun, and that makes for a good time.
And the thing is that it feels effortless. They are working their butts off, but the crowd doesn’t see the wheels spinning, or feel the determination. To us, they’re having just as much fun as we are. And a big part of it is that they have reached a level of self-awareness and confidence where they don’t feel the need to be teaching the audience a lesson, or giving us what they want us to have, or pretending to be anything they’re not. They are, to put it one way, obliging. It’s quite possible that they would much rather go out there and play their latest album from start to finish, then some obscure B-side from 1992, then a cover of a Leonard Cohen song no-one knows and some experimental instrumental thing that goes for 32 minutes, but they know that what the crowd wants is Slippery When Wet – and they will give it to us without ever making it feel like it’s not 100% what they wanted to give us.
Their music appeals to some, and not to others – which is true of every single person who has made music from the beginning of time to the present day. It’s true of Mozart. It’s true of John Lennon. It’s true of Prince. It’s even true of Britney Spears. That does not make all performers and writers and composers equal. It is not an indicator of their talent, but rather an indicator of the freedom that we have to enjoy what we want to. It’s kind of awesome, when you think about it, that we all listen to music slightly differently – that there are six billion people in the world and every single one of us evaluates what we hear slightly differently, and even when we enjoy the same thing – the same band or song or album or genre – we are enjoying it for slightly different reasons.
Music is so deeply personal, and so capable of creating and evoking memories, that sometimes the reason we like a song has nothing to do with how it sounds. I appreciate, for example, Nelly’s awful Hot in Herre because it was playing the very first time I spoke to a now dear, dear friend of mine, and she did a silly little chair-dance to it that made me laugh and determine instantly that she was going to be one of my favourite people in the world. It’s a terrible song, with a terrible name, but it is indelibly part of that moment – but only to me. She has no memory of this at all, but will remind me of another song we heard when out one night that I totally missed.
I am not a music nerd. I can pick apart why I do or don’t like a book or a movie or a TV show, and discuss it with some level of intelligence and detatchment. I can not do that with music, and so I react to it completely emotionally. What that means is that my tastes are pretty eclectic, but very, very specific. Some of what I like is not what is generally considered ‘good’ music, a lot of it is based in memory, and a good chunk of it probably falls under this banner of ‘guilty pleasures’.
But … I don’t see why I should feel guilty. I am not, for example, commercially supporting ‘bad’ music while denying ‘good’ music my hard-earned cash. If anything, I am more likely to pay for something that I a) consider objectively ‘good’ and b) is released on a smaller label by a smaller band to whom each individual sale is more likely to make a difference.
Nor do I regularly subject others to the music I choose for myself. 99% of my listening is done through earphones. I am not assaulting the ears of friends, family, co-workers or strangers with objectionable music at all hours of the day and night.
And I’m certainly not listening to music that is being made to further any sort of nasty agenda. I do not listen to skinhead bands singing about the KKK. I do, on occasion, admit to enjoying songs that have a somewhat sexist message, and yes, then I do feel a little bit guilty for betraying my gender.
But feeling guilty for enjoying Toto’s Africa is akin to feeling guilty for masturbating. It’s 2010 – it’s time to embrace joy and be grateful for the freedom we have to experience it. And part of that is taking the term ‘guilty pleasure’ out the back and shooting it, once and for all.
Music
Pop (and other) Culture
cheese
Toto