I kind of want this book.

Catch-22

I'm back from DC, after being blissfully disconnected from all manner of electronical technology.  No TV, no internet, and I'm not even sure where my cell phone is now.  I guess I should charge it and rejoin planet earth.  But thanks so much for the comments on the last post, guys.  It gave me a good place to start.

We came home after 6 days to find that the cats were still alive, thank god.  I was worried all week, even though I left them with enough food and water and litter to accommodate a small colony of cats.  Baskerville actually took advantage of the free-for-all and got really fat.  I had no idea one cat could put on so much weight in a week!  I can almost hear him grunt when he jumps up to the bathroom sink.  Ah well, we'll work on that.  Maybe I should take him out jogging.

I finished reading Catch-22 this morning.  It's one of those books that, despite being a practically sparkling display of wit and brilliance, took me a long time to finish.  I have very little interest in  "war" books, as I have very little interest in war as a fictional backdrop.  But this one wasn't so much about the war as it was about a world in which war was necessarily a part.    The island of Pianosa was a microcosm for larger systems, and the mysteriously sane-looking inhabitants were totally cuckooed out of their minds, but only in the way a large group of people (say, a nation-state) would parade that insanity with total confidence in themselves, the sort of confidence that could only come from being blissfully free of reality checks, or anyone powerful enough to give them one.

Yossarian is a well-earned protagonist, and had he been placed in any other book, he might have just blended in.  But he operates as you'd think any normal person would, which makes him an aberration in the world of Catch-22.  He exudes the sort of cool-headed self-interest that seems so God-given, so natural, and he is the only person who does it without remorse or subterfuge.  The perfect Yossarian statement, I think, was "Whoever wants me dead is my enemy, I don't care what side he's on", and he reacts in his unshakeable sensibility, with perfect horror, at his own commanding officers.

There is irony at every turn, and it operates in a near-fractal pattern, with broad strokes of plot deftly striking against each other, down to the tiniest remarks found on any page.  

Maybe that's why I had a hard time getting through the book.   Most stories waddle along inconspicuously until they glow, then the glow fades and you're drifting again.  You get the feeling that those little spots of glow are exactly what the story was written for, as if everything else was designed to build blurrily up to this one peak of clarity, this one bright dazzle of brilliance that tells you everything you ever wanted to know or feel about life and more.   Those bright spots accentuate the dimmer ones.  If you can believe it, Catch-22 was all bright, and that's why it got tiresome from time to time.  I couldn't handle the constant clever derring-dos between the officers, the prostitutes, the facts, the gentle, subtle, narrative interjections.  There was virtually no plot beyond the same three or four rehashed disagreements.

Milo Minderbender is the perfect satire of mindless capitalism.  His introductory chapter was one of my favorite parts of the book.  Among other things he buys German aircraft, then leases them back to the Germans, sells out his own squadron's location, then tries to sell chocolate covered cotton while he attends the funeral of people who died in the attack.  He sells secrets and equipment to both sides, and somehow he's still tolerated because he's the best businessman who ever lived.  It's boggling.

The end of the book was interesting, mainly because I wasn't expecting it to have an "end" at all.  One of the most unstructured, uniformly composed books I've ever read somehow managed to read a conclusion.  Yossarian reveals himself in the plainest way to actually have a bit of a deeper, philosophical grievance against the war and the warmongers when he finally does something contrary to his self interest basically just to shaft the man.  He really, honestly, lives on the highest plain of moral reason, though his actions seem simple.  In the end, he is neither a sheep nor a egocentrist, adrift in a world constructed to receive only those who are both.

The Birth of a Frontier

So, I spent all night cleaning apartment because me and the fiance are leaving for DC this morning. I finally finished around 6:30, which leaves me with exactly thirty minutes before I have to leave to run last minute errands downtown. (Jamaica Plain downtown, not Boston downtown). Instead of sleeping, which I find futile under these conditions, I decided to eat little pieces of cheese and read some stuff that FreePress sent me:

In Move to Digital TV, Confusion is in the Air, NY Times

For once, I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that the government, the FCC, and other commercial networks are doing a pretty decent job of informing people about the switch . Although, when I read that most people think that this switch requires them to start buying cable or satellite service, I did narrow my eyes a little at Comcast, whose commercials are vague and slightly condescending enough to nudge people in that direction.

The reason there is still great confusion is quite simple: it's really confusing. I get that. It's also more or less unprecendented, and when you try to do something different and universal, the average joe-shmoe is slow on the uptake, no matter how many times you blast it into his face. It's not his fault, or anyone's. Technology is generally intimidating for middle-aged rug salesmen who just wants to watch CSI after work, because he's generally not interested unless he has to be.

My question is not in the logistics. I know that Feb 17th will be the second coming of hell (whatever that is) for a lot of people. My question is why.

Really, why this government mandated switch? I have no idea. To be fair, I haven't done much digging, but I thought I would pose the question to the masses, because my friends are smarter than the internet.

Another interesting thing of note. When the digital transition was announced, analogue TVs disappeared off the shelf. Whooosh, gone. It's not like they stopped ordering new analogue TVs wholesale, they vanquished them entirely.

What happens now, to those empty airwaves? They don't just disappear. This, I am very very interested in. I feel like it would be a rogue playground for all the basement pirates, a beautiful oasis of DIY indie love, or at least for one dreamer's second. It will probably be quickly snatched up by some one else, some one big, but...who? I don't think for a second that the government is about to let that newly whitewashed airwave frontier go to waste.

It reminds me of Edwin Armstrong and the new days of FM Radio. David Sarnoff of RCA basically sucked him dry of all he had and drove him to suicide because he had discovered, temporarily, a product that RCA did not know how to commodify. I think it's one of the great unsung American tragedies.

Future Post! I plan to talk about zombies a little, and vampires a little more.

A Photographic Record of a Really Good Day (in reverse order)

This was not actually from that day, it was just an accident.

Alex's Christmas tree.

Alex is a person I like.

Our messy kitchen table. (we'll leave it for now)

John is a model.

Mrs. Eaves is pretty and shy.

Bob Baskerville, Esq.

Carol Chomsky

Carol Chomsky

Noam Chomsky lost his wife of 60 years yesterday.

It makes me sadder than I planned on being.

Just thought you should know.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Dir: David Fincher
Wri: Eric Roth

I was lucky to see an advanced screening of Benjamin Button (due out on Christmas - is that really a good idea?). They had all sorts of rules about not bringing in cameras, camera phones, or any sort of recording devices. I mean, they always have those rules, but they searched our bags.

But they can't stop me from writing about it, can they?

First I would have to say that this ranks among one of my favorite films ever, but I think that's because it mostly matches my particular sensiblities. I came out of the theatre completely in awe, but after the post-movie glow wore off, the imperfections rose to the surface. I don't really see myself revealing spoilers here, as it's hard to spoil a movie which has no great reveal, but the criticisms may tell you more than you want to know, so I'll leave them for the end.

I've never read Fitzgerald's short story which formed the basis of this movie, but I've heard it's surprisingly short. The movie, on the other hand, is an epic 2 hours and 45 minutes in which lots of things happen but nothing really happens. That's how I like it - why all this dependence on a strictly ordered and strategically placed chain of causality? Benjamin Button is a character study, a long, sweeping tale pocked with extraordinary bit characters, ordinary magic and the mysterious gloom of de Chirico skies, lights bleeping through ocean fog, orange-lit porches and tilt-a-whirl Southern accents.

One of my favorite books is 100 Years of Solitude, for many of the same reasons. Rather than following one man over the concrete course of a lifetime, Solitude follows an entire family from what feels like the beginning of time to the very, very end. It's a sensual sort of thing, they act like real people but they feel like gods, their lives are both petty and catasophic, characters drift in and out like ghosts through a vacant room. Many of the characters have the same name, which gets really confusing, and I have no idea how Gabriel Garcia Marquez pulled it off.

But I read an interview with Marquez once, and I'll never forget this. He said that his grandmother told stories with matter-of-fact simplicity, but the stories themselves were so impossible, and that, he felt, was the best way to treat to fantastical - to never blink, to never give pause, to never aggrandize. 100 Years is one of the definitive examples of magical realism, and Benjamin Button borrows all of its virtues.

I love it, for example, that those who know Benjamin either accept his condition unflinchingly or fail to notice it. Brad Pitt does an amazing job - I really don't think I've ever seen him do a better one. I would love to know how they did all of the age effects (does anyone know?) because it was quite a feat creating a shriveled old man with a recognizable Brad-face. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a different actor with prosthetics. He must have had body doubles, and there was certainly an abundance of full-body shots where his face was tactfully shrouded. It's just...the transition was so graceful and fluid. They've got to win some kind of award for that. Everyone said it couldn't be done, and I'm usually not one to remark on the technical details, but it's just awesome. But I digress.

The story also comes with its own Melquiades, its own pseudo-omniscient puppeteer man. There's a short, sort of anecdotal story about a blind master clock-maker who made his clock to run backwards so that he may rewind time and bring his son back alive from the Great War. It's understood that through some mythical quirk, Benjamin was affected by the clock. This is never fully explained, as well it shouldn't be. What Benjamin Button gives you is lots of pieces, some of them insignificant but meaningful (yes), some of them only important in that they were mentioned, and they must have been mentioned for a reason.

My favorite stories are like that because in the end, you hold all of the peices in the air and cross your eyes a bit, and you see a picture that you can't explain. And you know how I feel about explanations. The mind is quite capable of intuitively understanding some things before they get pared down into words, and we must never forget to trust that sense. Ironic, coming from me.

But definitely, definitely go see it. You won't get bored. Tilda Swinton will be there too!

There were problems, too. I have them in white, so just highlight if you don't mind the slightly spoilerish non-spoilers. You can still see the white text, but hey, it's indiscernible enough that you won't accidentally read something you don't want to.

1. The hummingbird that appears after a death. I agree with Ali, it's dumb. It is interesting, however that they chose a hummingbird, the only bird that can fly backwards or hover, and is completely unbound by the forward motion of flight.

2. I don't see why he had to leave Daisy in the end. His expressed reason is that he didn't want his daughter to have a child for a father, and that he didn't want Daisy to have to raise them both. That's bull. I would have believed it if he had expressed any anguish, or experienced any hardship at all in his life because of his condition, but he didn't. Before the stupid, so-called altruistic move of abandoning his wife and kid, Benjamin's life had appeared pretty consistently hunky-dory. If he really loved Daisy he would have worked it out. It seems completely improbable and unmotivated, to say the least.

3. Their 12-year-old daughter Caroline? BAD casting choice.

4. Daisy apparently gets old by wearing heavier eyeliner.

5. The Magnolia-esque aside that describes the whole process leading to Daisy getting hit by a taxi. Interesting, but sort of out-of-place. I can accept it, I guess. It was a cool sequence. It just felt tangential.

And that's my two cents.