I regret to report that I am still not through UNDER THE DOME. However, I’m getting closer. In the meantime, I had an interesting conversation that got me thinking about how I’ve changed as a reader, and seem to be slowing down as I get older. I was talking to a friend who asked if I was reading anything good, and I replied something along the lines of, ”Well, I’m reading UNDER THE DOME and it’s not bad so far, but I’m not sure where it’s going, and if I’ll like the ending or not.’ and they kind of coughed and asked how long it was. I said it was about as long as The Stand and they nodded, and said it had taken them a while to read that, and the conversation dropped into one of those awkward lulls where someone realizes the other person isn’t exactly a fan of the author/musician/whoever that is being talked up.

Anyway, after the conversation was over, I suddenly realized that I had read The Stand in about a week when I was a teenager, in one fevered burst of consumption. I’m also pretty sure I finished reading IT in about two weeks, maybe two and a half, and It has taken me twice as long to get two thirds of the way through UNDER THE DOME, which is comparable in length. The slow-down isn’t because I’m not enjoying myself, the book, as it is an engaging page-turner—the conclusion I’m left to come to is that I’ve slowed down as a reader. I’m sure I used to read much faster than I do—it might just be nostalgia, but I remember sitting down and getting through some books that I really enjoyed as a ten or eleven year old kid, in just a day or two. It’s not just that I have more to do as an adult—this is back when I had school, other activities, would be out running around the neighborhood—i had just as many distractions then as I do now, apart from the internet. I think that it simply takes me longer to process what’s on the page. I’m sort of curious as to whether or not this is something I should be worried about, as I’m only in my early thirties, and the list of books I’d like to read seems to grow longer, rather than shorter, every year. If I have an ever-increasing number of books to read, and it’s taking me steadily longer to finish each book that I do complete, something is going to have to give, and it’s not going to be pretty.

The worst part of this sneaking suspicion is that it doesn’t just apply to books I haven’t yet read—meaning that books I’ve already read, but would like to reread again, are even more likely to slow me down. For instance, i’ve been thinking about going back and rereading some of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories this Summer, and I’m kind of worried that I’ll get bogged down and won’t be able enjoy them as much. On the other hand, I could be blowing this all out of proportion, and it could just be that years of heavy internet use have simply damaged my ability to focus on the printed page in the way I used to be able to! At least I haven’t tired of my BLADE RUNNER DVD yet…..

In the meantime, I’m working my way through other novels. And what I find is that it’s always refreshing to pick up a book by a writer you’ve never read, but who often seems to be mentioned in glowingly positive terms, and find yourself enjoying the story they’ve put together. More than that, to find the book not quite like anything else you’ve read before, here in an age where libraries can be downloaded in an afternoon, could be construed as a minor (and very entertaining) miracle. At the same time, it’s strangely bittersweet, and once you start enjoying the book, you find yourself muttering (perhaps in a voice that’s supposed to be the book’s) ‘what took you so long, dummy?’

This was the case with Motherless Brooklyn, an award-winning, and much-acclaimed novel published in 1999 that I’ve heard mentioned a fair bit over the years, but never got around to reading, possibly because author Jonathan Lethem seems to be one of those sorts that everyone agrees is really good. (For example, I’ve had the same problem with Michael Chabon–everyone I read or talked to seem to agree how great he was, so I, in my counter-intuitive way, decided because everyone already liked his stuff, I’d avoid it and try to read something different, until I picked up The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a year and a half ago or so, and was bowled over. The moral of this story is that I can be a bit slow to recognize a good thing, sometimes.)

Anyhow, yes, apparently after reading Motherless Brooklyn, the reason why everybody says good things about Jonathan Lethem’s writing is that his writing is terrific! The narrative is a detective story, of sorts. Specifically the sort that is a murder mystery, with a first-person narrator who many of the characters (and the reader) manage to underestimate throughout the tale, and who doles out information about his life in New York City as the story progresses, gradually widening our understanding about what’s happening. The important thing here is that Lethem plays fair-he doesn’t cheat. Everything, by the last chapter, makes sense in the good way. The way where you want to go back and read the book again, this time with the knowledge of what’s actually going on. I’m not sure if Lethem has written other mysteries, or if his other novels have different focuses, but if he wanted to, he could clearly do an excellent series of detective books. I’d read them. And that’s the second point here. Not only does Lethem have that gift of playing fair–constructing a plot that’s full of well-earned surprises that seem natural at the time, but make sense in hindsight, he makes it entertaining. His descriptions are vivid, and just half-cocked enough to keep the book feeling a bit breezier than it might otherwise be. And his narrator/protagonist, the tourettes-afflicted orphan Lionel Essrog, a large, hulking man who’s investigating the murder of his patron Frank Minna, is a vivid, fully-realized character, whose inner conflicts (his melancholy recollection of trying to own a cat, for instance) are the cherry on the sundae of the novel. At just over three hundred pages, Motherless Brooklyn never really slows down to catch its breath. Now that I’ve read it, I have two main conclusions: One is understanding what all those people were talking about when they said nice things about Jonathan Lethem’s writing, all those years. The second is kicking myself for taking so long to pick up one of his books.

How about the fact that it’s mid-winter, and, although we’re closing in on Spring, the pile of unread books on the bedside table keeps getting bigger and bigger. Fantasy novels, crime thrillers, literature, graphic novels—I’m still working my way through Stephen King’s Under the Dome, which is taking longer than I expected (I seem to be slowing down in my old age. I’m pretty sure I read The Stand in a week and a half when I was younger. It’s not that Under the Dome is a bad book, it just takes me longer to turn the pages these days), and I’ve made the decision to try and get my hands on a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Why? That’s a good question. I guess, since 2008, when the financial crisis hit, and lots of people started suddenly losing their jobs and/or houses and/or savings, I suddenly, (like a lot of people) became much more interested in the business section of the paper (yes, I still read the paper. And I don’t have a kindle! Dinosaur, I am) and in the months since that uncomfortable Fall, I’ve become, in my own layman-ish way, a more avid reader of arguments over who caused that, or what caused this, or why capitalism is doomed to fail after getting us into this mess, or why capitalism is the only thing that will save us from this mess. There’s a lot to take in, and invariably, different people seem to namedrop Adam Smith’s landmark tome in varying argumentative ways, usually to try and prove to the readers that the other guys are wrong.

With that in mind, it seems like a good idea to actually try and crack the Adam Smith open, and see what it is he actually said, that people are still arguing over a hundred years later, so vigorously. The only problem is that Wealth of Nations is a very thick book (most ‘portable’ editions range at about six hundred pages) and I’m somewhat intimidated of cracking it open and getting sucked in, perhaps at the expense of all those other books currently piling up in my backlog. I’d better finish the King first, otherwise this is going to turn into a column where I talk about books I’ve not yet read, but am going to finish someday, honest, and nobody wants to read that. Maybe I should stick with comics. Did you guys hear that Captain America’s alive again? Just in time for the upcoming Hollywood movie! (I bet they’ll get Sam Worthington to play him). Anyhow, tune in next week, where I’ll either have completed Under the Dome, or I’ll have another handful of new books I haven’t yet read, and the molehill will have become a mountain!

[Correlating with the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 2010 Winter Nights Film Series, ZapTown will be publishing essays each week on the films that will be shown in the series.  The museum will be presenting Touch Of Evil on Friday, January 29, with special guest actor, director, and author Peter Bogdanovich. The show at 7 p.m. - $15 Public/ $10 Members/ $11 students with ID. For a full schedule, visit the IMA's website (http://www.imamuseum.org/toby) or our Lead Story on The Toby (http://www.zaptownmag.com/2009/12/lets-go-out-to-the-movies-the-toby - film schedule is located at the bottom of the article).]

Past Essays on ZapTown:

The Blue Angel
Nashville
Arsenic And Old Lace

There’s a certain temptation to be glib and say they don’t make movies like Touch of Evil anymore, but that’s not entirely accurate. They’ve never really made movies like Touch of Evil, and watching it, especially for first time viewers, the film remains a unique example of what can be done with the thriller genre. Although it is widely considered a classic today, the movie was heavily cut by the studio before being released in theaters in 1958, much to the chagrin of writer-director-costar Orson Welles. The version being screened, and with which contemporary audiences should be familiar, is not the ’studio cut’, but rather one that has been painstakingly recreated based on available footage, inserts, and Welles’ own impassioned notes to the studio when he originally found out they were going to edit the picture (He wrote a 58-page memo!) Ergo, the movie that exists today is not the movie that lucky theatergoers got to see in 1958—but it’s as close to the movie that they were supposed to see as possible!

The film itself, which Welles originally seems to have hoped would be a comeback picture, was largely ignored by audiences on its initial release—it was apparently paired with a film called The Female Animal, which ran as the Headliner to ‘Evil’s ‘B’ picture, but seems today to be largely forgotten. History is funny, that way. Despite the struggle that Welles went through to bring his vision to the screen, and his frustration with the film business, the work itself is timeless, in the way all good movies are-not in any glib sense, but simply that the story of Welles and Heston’s characters, and their linked fates, seems to grow more, rather than less, relevant as time marches on. Watching the film fifty years later, one can easily play the game of trying to spot its influence on American cinema and directors of all stripes, from Scorsese (The famous opening shot, that begins with a bomb being placed in the trunk of a car, builds and builds in one long, smooth tracking shot as it follows Charleton Heston and Janet Leigh across the border, and culminates in an explosion) to the Coen Brothers (It’s not hard to imagine Coen mainstay Jon Polito as the bewigged and bedevilled Mexican mob boss Grandi, if he were available at the time). Furthermore, the film’s singular mix of black comedy and pathos is undeniably well-managed, with Welles switching between the two moods with ease, often within the same scene, never really letting the audience (conditioned by a multitude of pulp thrillers beforehand), relax. Although Welles had great support in carrying out this balancing act in the form of a terrific score crafted by Henry Mancini, the film’s tension between the ridiculous and the tragic is best personified in the two lead performances, Charlton Heston’s heroic Mexican detective, and his corrupt counterpart from the American side of the border, played by the writer-director himself. Heston glides gracefully from being the butt of a joke to traditional detective heroics with a remarkable, self-deprecating aplomb, and Welles’ own performance as Quinlan, silently raging over his years in the trenches, is fascinating to watch–by the film’s climax he has become both sympathetic and monsterous. Welles had not yet developed the full beard that would define his image in his later years, but he was already a large, bulky man when he made this movie, and he used his weight for maximum effect on screen, looming over his victims like a mountain of a man, with a craggy, worn face that he seems to have lit and shot in the most unflattering angles possible-making himself an effective counterpoint to Heston’s grace and energy.

It is, I hope, not spoiling any of the plot’s twists to describe the climax of this movie in further detail, set as it is against a decaying industrial landscape, with Welles’ detective, bemoaning his bad fortune in life as he passes underneath a towering oil derrick. The derrick, filmed in vivid close-up, looms high above him and his partner as they head to their final destination, remaining still and silent, a symbol of wealth and industry that seems teasingly close and yet eternally remote from Quinlan and his world. These final scenes of Touch of Evil are a masterstroke, in that they manage to provide the thriller with a satisfying ‘happy ending’ while maintaining a sense of cynicism (or perhaps, shattered idealism) about the way the world is. It is telling, of course, that while the film’s conclusion has the hero defeating the villain and being reunited with his loved one, the focus of the director (and by extension, the audience) has moved on by that point to another character, who gives their own, sharply different judgement of what all all the expressions of human indignity and frustration we have been party to might mean.

We are moving further away from the 20^th century every day, but it is because of the ghosts raised in movies such as   that Orson Welles haunts us still. This film is an enduring testament to his power, both as a technical filmmaker, and as a man who understood the strange nooks and crannies that exist inside the human spirit. And more than that, it is a terrific time at the movies. See it if you can.

Further Reading:

Bogdanovich, Peter and Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “This Is Orson Welles” (Da Capo Press, 1998).

Naremore, James, “The Magic World Of Orson Welles” (Southern Methodist University Press, 1989).

Munby, Jonathan, “Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil ( University Of Chicago Press: 1999).

Conrad, Peter, “Orsen Welles: The Stories Of His Life (Faber & Faber: 2004).

Naremore, James, “More Than Night: Film Noir In Its Context” (University of California Press: 2008).

Hirsch, Foster, “The Dark Side Of The Screen: Film Noir (Da Capo Press: 2008).

Julius Caesar.

(This was my actual reaction at the time, too. An awkward silence, followed by me repeating what he’d just said, to make sure we were on the same page, which led to him being confused as to why I was confused, leading to me hastily pointed out, that, hang on, Julius Caesar wasn’t a fictional character, he was a historic one, he’d been a real Roman general and changed the world and everything, and choosing real people was cheating, maaaan….) The end result of all of this was  my buddy staring at me like I’d just grown antlers and telling me that he had no idea what I was talking about, everybody knew that Julius Caesar had been made up by Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s greatest creation. It’s an exchange that really did happen, honest. (I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if it didn’t). If only Wikipedia had existed at the time. As it was, I didn’t think to point out that Shakespeare had written several of his most popular plays about real monarchs, and that Richard III, Henry V, et al, weren’t fictional characters either, but still—thinking of that power, of Shakespeare’s ability to take a real situation, a real individual, and write about him with such authority that down through the decades and the centuries, in the minds of certain individuals, his portrait of Shakespeare would literally replace the real record. The sort-of-friend who gave me the answer was an intelligent individual, fairly well-read. He legitimately thought that Julius Caesar was a fictional character. And so, Fiction can change the way we look at the world around us. In a negative sense, it can lull us into believing things that aren’t true, or confusing misinformation with reality. With assuming that someone who really existed never did, was just made up by an exceptionally-gifted playwright. But in its positive side, it can give us ideas that we never might have stumbled across otherwise, nurture our own creativity and give us hope and understanding of the common experiences that we all share as human beings.

The last decade has been a rough time for many people—after the heralding of the ‘end of history’, new problems erupted, and many people find themselves as bad or worse off than they were ten years ago. If there has been progress, many people feel it has left them behind. Now, more than ever, we need good stories. And hope. That’s one reason why I keep reading, and am looking forward to another decade full of good books. Here’s hoping the upcoming New Year treats you kindly. Thanks for being there.

Purely in the interest of scientific curiosity.

The #1 best-selling BOOK (not to be confused with a Kindle, on the other hand) on Amazon.com right now is Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue which appears to have knocked Dan Brown off the #1 slot. The book is currently selling for around fifteen dollars. If I wanted to ride the zeitgeist, it would be a good choice, but the ‘kindle edition’  isn’t being released until December 26. It’s listed at twelve dollars. So, in exchange for getting rid of the physical book and all its properties, the reader saves….three dollars.

Then again, I guess if I was really concerned about cost, I could always try to use  the library.

It’s not that surprising that the big political memoirs often get a lot of attention, but I’d argue that, even if you’re passionate about the individual who wrote the book, they’re still, as a genre, a bit of a drag. Why? Because they’re written for the moment, often by politicians and/or ghostwriters who are trying to get a certain message across in the moment, aimed at that figure’s base. As one gets further away from the moment of their publication, they become less and less relevant except as historical artifacts, what some famous person wanted to attach their name to when they were gathering money for a presidential run, or how they felt about their first term, or why they wanted to insert a plank for health care into their party platform, or why they were as shocked as anybody when they found out there were no WMD’s.

I’ve always kind of imagined books as a sort of time capsule of ideas. Open the cover, the story’s there. Close the cover, the story goes back to sleep, waiting for someone to come along and find it, down the road. Good stories transcend time and space. Don Quixote. Lord of the Rings. Watership Down. Cosmos. A Tale of Two Cities. Walden. They may be anchored in time, but they transmit someone’s ideas of what it was like, there for a moment, to readers who are separated by time and space, by fate and chance. A book that’s written, or co-written by a politician, aimed at a very specific audience has none of that power–and most of them have very short shelf lives.  That being said, the reviews that are popping up, both positive and negative, of Sarah Palin’s book are interesting, and provide a pretty wide spectrum of how people relate to her public figurehood.  I guess that’s the silver lining.

We all have our biases, after all (I even know a person who only reads cookbooks!) What’s your least favorite genre?

My SECOND response though, was to think about what my own list of books I read this year would look like. Lists are an organizational tool, after all. A lot of the significance and weight we assign to them, especially the endless ‘best of the year’ lists is entirely arbitrary, and often says much about our own attentions and priorities. I’ve read a lot of books this year—was surprised to find the total was up around eighty. (This is why I don’t have time to write more columns, heh heh). Of those eighty books, a lot less then half were written by women. This has been an ongoing issue lately—I’ve been quite conscious that I seem to be reading a lot more male authors than normal, and I’m trying to get back into a place where it feels like I’m reading tomes penned by members of both sexes. One book written by a female author that I finally sat down and read, (and I’m glad I did ) was Margaret Atwood’s ORYX AND CRAKE.

Oryx and Crake is the tale of a doomed love triangle in the near future, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue and bio-engineered environmental apocalypse. It’s about our civilization being wiped out and replaced with something new. It’s narrated by a character named Snowman, who seems sympathetic, although he’s a bit of a wet blanket. Atwood seems to be using Snowman to explore where stories and myths come from, as Snowman cares for a colony of strange green survivors of the plague (a specially engineered virus that took out the humans and left their crossbreed pets). The green people are called ‘Crakers’ and as the novel jumps back and forth in time, the reader finds out they get that name from their ‘father’, a brilliant scientist named Crake who was also our intrepid narrator’s lifelong friend. His assistant, Oryx, a female presence who appears to have been lovers with both males also features as a visitor in Snowman’s thoughts.

A good chunk of the novel deals with Snowman’s existential despair and his frustration at his old, pre-plague life (from his guarded childhood, when he was called ‘Jimmy’, and the events leading up to his meeting-and losing, Oryx), but at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the itching sensation that the future society Atwood describes is not so very far removed from our own. Furthmore, about halfway through the book, the reader (this reader, at least) starts to feel that the future society, filled with corporate ‘gated communities’ and multi-player games that are half-a step removed from daily experience, kind of deserves what it gets. Crake, in the flashback scenes, begins to develop into a figure who appears unfeeling, but also seems to be the only one who’s genuinely interested in making society more peaceful or equitable. This, of course, leads to the apocalypse, which is played as almost a pitch-black joke. As a cautionary tale, Atwood’s ‘future history’ is vividly, powerfully written and although there is a cliffhanger ending that may cause some frustration (Though to be fair, it shouldn’t be any greater frustration than the ending of Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD) the novel is actually the first of a trilogy—the second, called THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD was just released in hardcover. An excellent and disturbing story, well-told. Glad I read it. Now I just need to read another dozen or so books written by women in the last eight weeks of this year and the scales will feel balanced. I have no strength to mock Publisher’s Weekly—I’m too busy with the mote in my own eye on this issue.

(And yes, I’m aware ORYX AND CRAKE is not actually a book published in 2009. What can I say? I’m really behind.)

Scary Stories to tell in the Dark collected from Folklore by Alvin Schwartz and with incredibly evocative (and eerie) black and white drawings by Stephen Gammell that look like something out of a nightmare. Arranged into sections with stories meant to scare, provide laughs, ghosts or other dangers. The very first story, about a young boy digging in his garden who finds a large (human) toe poking out of the dirt and decides to pull it up and take it home, only to be stalked by the toe’s vengeful owner, sets the tone for the rest of the book. First published in 1981, the book has apparently become a bit of a classic–it spawned two sequels, and it’s possible to get your hands on the Scary Stories Treasury which collects them in a hardcover omnibus edition. (And yes, the terrible old story about the Vindow Viper is in the collection, too).