Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor

Some could say that in high school I may have had an unhealthy relationship with the Evil Dead movies. I'm not totally sure why? Sure, I named my childhood dog Raimi, and I drove all night one Thanksgiving to visit the ruined remains of the first Evil Dead cabin in Tennessee, and  I've went to see Bruce Campbell speak on several occasions over the course of only a few years (once even flying from Boston to Baltimore only to sadly realize Campbell's meet-n-greet was sold out forcing Paulie and myself to finagled our way into a costume contest he was judging instead). But these are normal activities of any healthy teenager, right? 

Ok, so I may have had an unhealthy fanatical obsession with these films and their creators. But these films had such a positive impact on my life. They helped me form certain friendships, encouraged me to go to film school, and inspired me to achieve the career I currently have (OK, writing commercials might not be my dream career, but it's a start dammit!). 

While I'm not as ravenous of a fan of Evil Dead or Bruce Campbell as I used to be (meaning I'm not staying up until 2am on a school night to tape a late night showing of Mindwarp on VHS), these films/creators still hold a very dear place in my heart. So when I heard word that Bruce Campbell's latest memoir came out this past fall, I was all in on it. 

First, let's rewind the clock to 2001. 

Campbell's first book was called If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, and it was an excellent memoir. In it, he mostly discusses his rise into becoming an actor and all the work that went on during the early parts of his career -- in this case, mostly the Evil Dead films. It was really interesting to hear tales from what went on making those movies. The innovation used to create a cult-favorite horror film with no money. And it's even more interesting to think that so many people who worked on these seemingly insignificant films are now creative leaders in Hollywood. Who knew?!

Now let's skip back to the present.

Campbell's third book (second memoir) comes out called Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor. Here I would think we would have tales about what it's been like now that he's a well-established actor. Or what it's been like to watch Sam Raimi grow up to helm the Spider-Man films and break box office records or do a seven-season stint on Burn Notice or return as Ash in the new Evil Dead TV show. And, yeah, that stuff is all there. But not covered in the same depth that I would have hoped for. 

The fact is, this book skips around pretty quickly throughout the second half of his career and fails to capture all the stories and anecdotes that I loved from his first book. It's not bad, mind you. Just different than what I expected. Hell, nearly a third of this book talks about life as a homeowner in rural Medford, Oregon. Parts about him harvesting lavender or learning how to spread gravel on his dirt road kind of seemed a little unnecessary. Campbell's wit is still interwoven even through the non-acting parts of his memoir -- like discussing the burdens of homeowners ship and trying to get a second phone line installed when you live in the middle of fucking nowhere -- but you can't help but feel like he's holding out on you. 

By the time I actually get to the content I'm truly excited about (reconnecting with Raimi, bringing Ash back to life, etc.), the stories feel incredibly rushed. (Shrug.) It's not bad. Just not what I was hoping for. I know there are more stories there, stories that would likely come out when you go see him do a Q&A somewhere, but I just need to find a way to be satisfied with what I got. 

Unless you're a ravenous Evil Dead and/or Bruce Campbell fan, I wouldn't bother with this book. BUT, I would recommend If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor for even someone with a faint interest in film. Make of that what you will. 

Version Control

It's been about a month since I finished this novel that circles around the idea of time travel, but it's totally not a story about time travel! I think a month has been enough time to let dense story marinate in my brain. 

I'm not going to dance around it. I found this book boring. 

Well, it had a relatively boring plot. But peppered in between the main story arcs were really interesting and insightful commentaries on society, human interactions, and how advancing technology is shaping these elements of our lives (relationships, dating, education, etc.). These insights were the carrot on the end of the stick that helped me get through this book, as I think they are likely to be incredible accurate in terms of the world we're headed towards. Or already in.

As for the main storyline, well... it's just not for me. This is a book that is more of a slice of life kind of story. A story that follows a girl fresh out of college trying to figure her life out, and in the process of doing so uses a data app to find a man (a scientist) that will eventually become the father to her child. During this time period, we ruminate on the minutiae of  life, often times from the perspective of characters that don't even matter that much to the main story (e.g., the security guard). Version Control takes its sweet time fleshing out its characters, often pouring at lot of attention into parts of the story that I think could have easily been cut. But it's also in those sections that allow the author to add that social commentary that I found the most valuable during my reading.   

Here's the thing. When I read I story, I want conflict. Excitement. Suspense. Drama. And this book... this is really not the story where you're going to get all that. Or certainly won't find it on each of its 500 pages of content. 

If I had my way, this would have been a story about a mother who tragically loses her child, and in a desperate attempt to save her son, she breaks into a secret government facility  and steals her husband's top-secret time machine (er, sorry... Causality Violation Device) to go back in time and right the wrongs that were made. Sure, that might seem like low-hanging fruit. The path of least resistance in making this story, but I can't help it if that's what I'm drawn to. 

But author Dexter Palmer has a different story to tell. (Or maybe a different way of telling it.) It's possible this is one story that I'll find years from now had a much larger impact on me that what I currently believe it does. (I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that were true.) However, for now, I leave Version Control with a relief that it's over, and the gratitude that I've experienced it. 

To Have and Have Not

This is my fourth go-round with Hemingway, and it's just not his best effort. That said, it's an experimental, short book, sort of a compilation of short stories about this boat captain smuggling contraband between Key West and Cuba. Or at least it starts out that way. What it ends up being is some sort of viewpoint-shifting slice of life story about life in the Keys during the Great Depression. It's a bit of an interesting mess. Credit to Hemingway for experimenting, you know? Nowadays a perspective-shifting novel is nothing new, but back in the 1930s maybe he was trying something really different. It doesn't quite work, doesn't really make a thematically consistent or tonally satisfying story, but I still enjoyed the highlights and the book wasn't really long enough for the mistakes to drag out much.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

I found this collection of short stories, coming in at just over 150 pages in total, very natural to "get," tonally, and yet almost impossible to describe. This is, of course, a testament to the difference between Raymond Carver's ability to express and emote through sparse language and subtext and my own inability to cram three sentences of meaningful reflection together. This is about loss and sadness, but the very quiet and understated kind, not the big dumb tearjerking melodrama and tragedy so many lesser authors might have attempted. There's a melancholy here, but a subtle one. A handful of these stories end in overt tragedy or at least heavily imply an impending loss, but most of them are just quick little slices of late nineteenth Americana. The whole thing feels like late afternoon, late summer. Not evening, not fall, but, you know. Close.

All the Pretty Horses

I struggled with this one, just like I struggled with my first McCarthy go-round in The Road. Here's what I could muster up on Goodreads, and I don't think it's one of my better or more insightful paragraphs:

Reads like a sunset. For all his talents, McCarthy's greatest strength might be how thoroughly and deeply he can paint a scene in a few simple sentences with an economical vocabulary. Can't help but imagine all those Coors commercials with Sam Elliott's voice are trying to imitate it, really. The book's a modern Western, which is to say an anti-Western, a story that pits a young man's code of cowboy ethics against the harsh realities of the world. What if Ned Stark had carried a six shooter instead of a broadsword and gone to Mexico instead of King's Landing? Yeah - this is that sort of story, giving way to "cold cruel world" nihilism without ever losing that penchant for romance and beauty on the margins of it all. It's about exposing idealism as a dangerous myth, but it's not about tearing down the ideals themselves. A perfectly fine read that might have gone down just a bit easier if McCarthy weren't fundamentally opposed to using quotation marks around his pitch-perfect dialogue. The scoundrel.

Meh. Never a good sign when all I can do is half-heartedly touch on the themes of the story less succinctly than you could pull them off of Sparknotes. Maybe McCarthy just isn't for me - but the frustrating part is, he really should be! The ideals of the American cowboy running full force into the wall that is the cold indifference of the world - that's something I can get behind, usually. And I'm not kidding when I praise the man's descriptive word-paintings. This really is some beautiful writing! Oh well - plenty more opportunities for me to get behind Cormac McCarthy, I'm sure.

Version Control

I really loved this one. It's the rare book that took me almost a month to finish not because it was a slog or a bore at all but because I was savoring its 500 pages and really letting them sink in. Sadly, trying to describe it, or even why I liked it, feels like a fruitless endeavor at this point. It just kind of sat with me right, you know? Brought up a lot of good points about the way we live today, the places we're headed, the pros and cons of always-online life in the twenty-first century. Anyway, here's my attempt on Goodreads to quickly examine and explain why I liked this book so much:

Here's one of those thought-provoking page-turners where the story's about so much more than the plot, which can be summarized more or less as, "in the near future, a less-than-happy woman accidentally messes with the spacetime continuum when she fools around with her husband's giant research project." Yeah - it's time travel. Except: it's more! So much more, from an exploration of a society designed around automated cars and always-on social media connections to some speculative wormhole theory to a deconstructed longview of dating in the online era to conversations about fate and free will. Race relations, parallel timelines, love, loss, sacrifice, regret - it's all here, like a long and twisting and excellent episode of Black Mirror. Can't imagine this is for everyone, but I absolutely loved it. So glad I chose to... commit!

Yeah, I ended with a Git pun. Fight me. (Please don't.)

This Side of Paradise

So I read Hemingway's first novel just a little while back, and figured I might as well check out Fitzgerald's debut as well. This was the fourth work of his I've read, and it's been nothing but steadily diminishing returns for me. Loved The Great Gatsby, liked Benjamin Button plenty, liked The Beautiful and  Damned enough... and only barely kind of sort of liked This Side of Paradise. What's going on here? It'd be one thing if I were reading his books in order of popularity, but no - this is probably his second-best known novel. Is it me? Is my tolerance for Fitzgerald slipping, the older I get? In this case, I actually think so, a little bit. It's not that I'm 100 years too young to have enjoyed this book. It's that I'm about five or ten years too old.

I'll explain. The book was written by Fitzgerald when he was 23 or so, and it's semi-autobiographical in nature. Which means not only was it a story about a teenager trying to find himself - rather, it was a story about a teenager trying to find himself written from the wise, old, mature viewpoint of someone who was... 23. We all mature as we age, particularly form young adulthood to middle age, gaining new perspective on everything all the time. This was actually a huge and poignant theme, at least for me, that Fitzgerlad hit on in The Beautiful and Damned. I'm not one for quotes, but Fitzgerald's so quotable, so here I go, from that book:

“It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less a moth eaten man who grinds an organ - and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory.”

(I had to look it up too, but an organ-grinder's just a street musician.) Granted, okay, Fitzgerald's only 26 at this point, when this quote is published in that book, but still - he recognizes even at 26 that by 30 he's just not going to give a shit about the romantic notions of young love and endless possibility that he had when he was 20. And now, to make you feel real old - Fitzgerald's 29 when The Great Gatsby is published. Twenty-nine! Twenty-nine, and able to write an all time classic story about the folly of trying to reclaim the past. Yowza! And, oh yeah, Benjamin Button is a lighter, easier, shorter read, but it's all about aging, too. Naturally. So as far as I've gotten through his bibliography, Fitzgerald's always been obsessed with exploring the way the past and the present interact, the way it's a shame how the wisdom and maturity and opportunities that come from aging can't replace the thrill and wonder of being young. And I've always liked that about him. It's a subject that transcends nearly a century at this point without losing any of its punch - hell, the age and timelessness of these works might even add another layer to the themes. The past that Fitzgerald's characters lament and can't revisit is, like, a hundred years farther out of reach for you and I. And man, what a shame that he went ahead and died at 44, and right at the dawn of World War II. Imagine how much a crotchety old man Fitzgerald could have said? Imagine him reflecting on the Holocaust and the atom bomb? Jesus.

Okay, back on track. This book. It starts with its protagonist, Amory, playing coy and hard to get with a cute girl... at the age of thirteen. He's a precocious kid, desperately trying to play it cool with the ladies in what we today would call, I dunno, eighth grade. And right off the bat, he fucks up a classic "late arrival, keep her waiting" plan by arriving well after the rest of their group has departed for the school dance or whatever it was. This I liked! This weird subgenre of "young, dumb kid who wants to act like an adult can't quite crack it because his brain isn't done developing yet," which Wes Anderson does so well - I dig it. I can get behind a story about a high school kid flailing around emotionally and trying to understand who he is and what he wants to be - that's Catcher in the Rye territory!

But it was all downhill from there. Middle school romance gave way to prep school hijinks, which gave way to Princeton egotism, which gave way to [snooooore]. Amory got less likable and more annoying the older he got, mostly because a vain 21-year-old is so much less likable than a vain 18-year-old, who in turn is less likable than a vain 16-year-old, and so on and so forth. After several failed romances and, oh yeah, World War fucking I, which is just sort of glossed over as an intermission of sorts, the book ends with Amory realizing that he knows nothing at all, but at least he finally knows himself!

It's a nice notion, but it's ultimately hollow - again, this whole thing's being written and reflected upon by Fitzgerald at the age where, today, he'd just barely be graduating college. And look, listen - I'm not suggesting, at all, that no one can properly reflect on their own journey through coming of age - the teens and early twenties - during and immediately following that time period. We've all been there, we've all done it, and Fitzgerald did it as good as anyone, even then. But here in 2017, as I close in on thirty myself - I'm sorry, but another tale of a young, moneyed, white guy trying to untangle his own desires in life - it just doesn't do it for me!

And lastly, can we revisit World War I? I spent the first half of the book knowing the war was looming and knowing Amory was going to go away for it - so I really expected Amory to come back from war a completely changed man. Hardened, maybe, a drastic and dramatic "loss of innocence" now complete. But truly, it barely resonates. Granted, Fitzgerald's writing all this in the war's immediate aftermath, long before we collectively had time to suss out the symbolism of World War I, long before we even dubbed terms like "Lost Generation" or "Roaring Twenties." But still - I really thought the war, appearing right in the middle of the book and spanning a two year hiatus from the girl-chasing and social climbing of life in America for Amory - would mean something. Nope! Oh well.

I've just come to expect more from Fitzgerald. This wasn't a bad book, especially for something written a hundred years ago, but it was a letdown compared to what I was hoping for. There's still one more Fitzgerald book on my shelf, though - Tender Is the Night. People rave about this one. Even Fitzgerald called it his personal favorite work.

The Art of War

Here's a classic example of something that's so old I can't adequately judge it. My copy was only 45 pages long and they're filled with repetitive and, at least by modern day standards, painfully obvious bits of advice. "All warfare is based on deception," is the recurring theme here and only real takeaway. Is your enemy expecting you to attack him? Then don't. Let him tense up instead. Is your army smaller than your enemy's army? Then do everything you can to make it seem like your army is bigger. And vice versa.

And it only gets more obvious than that. Is your army crossing a swamp? Don't stop there, keep crossing the swamp. Are your men hungry and tired? Then they aren't going to fight very well.

There may be some poetic quality to the whole thing lost in the translation to English and also across 2500 years, but this felt like nothing special to me whatsoever. At least it was a quick one! We're onto whatever's next.

The Graveyard Book

I read a book! You know, a book? Feels like it's been ages since I read anything that wasn't Dresden related. 

Decided to bounce back into Neil Gaiman territory. The man who's brought us Stardust, Sandman (a comic series I'm still pushing my way through), and -- my personal favorite -- American Gods. I think if Gaiman has a talent for anything, it's creating a mythos. A fully fleshed out world for you to lose yourself in the lore and grand characters contained within. Jumping onto another piece of work of his, where does The Graveyard Book stack up against the rest?

Sadly, I place it at the bottom.

The Graveyard Book felt too toned down for my liking. It was a simple story contained in a world that felt rich with backstory and history, a history that's never really talked about. Instead the story stays swimming on the surface over this vast, vast mythical ocean that contains vampires and werewolves and goblins and the undead and more! Yet we only scratch the surface. And I suppose I wanted more. Much more!

Once upon a time I heard Ron Howard was going to direct an adaptation to this story. I could see that possibly working. Possibly. But I think there would need to be some fundamental changes to make it stand on its own a little better.

Still, this book does have a bit of charm to it as it resonates as sort of a children's storybook you might read to them before bed. Maybe that's where the simplicity comes into play. Because at the end of the day, it really feels like a story about an orphaned boy being raised by ghosts in a graveyard that's intended to help lull a kid softly to rest. 

A Little More Human

I struggled with this one.

It's immaculately written, in the sense that most sentences and paragraphs were just delightful to read, clever and interesting and, uh, well-written whatever that means, and perhaps good writing was an extra welcome quality to me after reading that Stuart Woods dreck. But! As far as the story here goes, the characters in this novel, the actual cover-to-cover plotting and piece moving and development and denouement - I'm left wanting more, I think. So many narrative dead ends here, so little pay off, and I'm sure so much of that is intentional and that plenty else is just flying over my head. It's not like this is rare, a case where I've enjoyed reading a book but couldn't reliably recount the big plot points or what about the book mattered, and some of my favorite authors have given me similar experiences through the years. (Heller, Vonnegut, Murakami, to name a few.)

But then, in a certain sense, it makes sense for the narrative here to be a jumbled mess - the book deals primarily with the frailty of the human brain - missing memories, dementia, that horrible gap between thinking or knowing something and being able to clearly express it. So for the story to be full of dead ends and red herrings kind of works, I guess. Maybe. Kind of.

Standup Guy

A long way back, when I was 16 or so, I was on a family vacation to the Florida Keys, bored out of my mind. My grandfather lent me a paperback murder mystery novel he'd just finished - your standard airport bookstore trash, but I didn't know such a genre even existed at the time - and I read it and enjoyed it and even felt sort of - ugh - older and wiser and more mature for having read it. (Four-hundred pages! Sex and crime! Grandfather literature!) It was a book by an author named Stuart Woods, a guy I'd never heard of (and still really haven't, all things considered) and I ended up "borrowing" and reading two more Stuart Woods novels somewhere over the next couple of years. (I distinctly remember reading one during my freshman year of college, which would have been just two years later, and oh holy shit how time dragged then and flies now.)

Fast forward to a couple summers back, I'm up in Maine visiting the grandparents when my grandmother says there's a huge pile of paperback books from the last few years they're going to throw away if no one wants them, so go ahead and pick through it if you'd like. I take home with me a copy of American Sniper (oh boy) and two more Stuart Woods books. Why not revisit them? Marissa immediately winces at the Stuart Woods picks and asks, "but why?" It's a valid question! Y'all know my tastes - Heller, Vonnegut, Atwood, Murakami, Perrotta, Hemingway, Camus, with the occasional dash of sci-fi or YA (what's the difference?) and of course a few experiments along the way. Michael Crichton and Dan Brown are as close as I come to "airport bookstore literature," and have you seen my batting average on those books? Yowza!

The thing about Dan Brown and Michael Crichton - even at their worst, they're telling interesting stories. A zany caper in the Uffizi is patently absurd pulp, but it's interesting pulp, sort of. And a story about man-eating nanoparticles gone rogue is dumb as hell, but it hints at philosophical questions, at least, even if it never addresses or answers them. But Stuart Woods? Nothing. None of any of that. Just stories about khaki-wearing men's men solving crimes for sexy lady clients while drinking hard liquor and flying back and forth a lot. It's lanyard literature. It's four-hundred pages of generic political thriller action movie, stuffed to the gills with phone calls and breakfast. I think what it is, really, is lifestyle porn for old men; there are an alarming number of direct references to J. Crew and Brooks Brothers in this book, no kidding.

We all like to say that our tastes evolve with time, grow more refined, and so on, but never have I seen more direct evidence of this than in my own reaction to this particular novel, Stuart Woods' Standup Guy, which I'm almost positive was ghostwritten by someone else, since otherwise Stuart Woods is popping out four or five books a year these days at the age of 79. Good for him! Anyway, yeah - ten to fifteen years ago I was reading this guy's novels and at the very least enjoying them. These last few days, on the other hand, I tore through Standup Guy almost laughing out loud the entire way through. These books are decidedly not for me!

Since showing is more powerful than telling, and since sharing is the greatest gift of all, I will now present to you all the first sentence of every chapter in this book. Really helps you get a feel for Stuart Woods and his writing style, everything [sic].

Oh, and the main character's name is "Stone Barrington" which is just fucking awesome. See? Lifestyle porn already.

1. Stone Barrington made it from his bed to his desk by ten a.m., after something of a struggle with jet lag.
2. Stone wore a dark suit and tie, because he didn't know who else was invited.
3. Kate came back at five minutes before the hour and handed Stone a sheet of paper.
4. Stone took his breakfast tray off the dumbwaiter, along with two morning papers, the New York Times and the Daily News.
5. Stone arrived at Patroon as Dino was getting out of his car, a large black SUV. He clapped his friend on the back. "No more town car?"
6. Stone's ass had barely touched his office chair the following morning, when Joan buzzed.
7. Less than an hour had passed, and Joan had returned from making her bank deposit. She buzzed Stone.
8. Stone had a sandwich at his desk, then Joan came in with the New York Post, which he subscribed to but rarely read. Today would be an exception.9. Stone was having his usual breakfast in bed when his private line rang. Caller ID said the U.K. was calling.
10. Shortly before lunch, Joan buzzed.
11. Stone polished off his Dover sole and took another sip of the Far Niente Chardonnay.
12. The president of the United States finished his scrambled eggs and sausages and started on his coffee. He could eat sausages for breakfast because the first lady was in New York.13. Sunday morning, and Stone's phone was ringing.
14. Stone sucked in a breath and clenched his teeth as Holly took a curve on the Sawmill River Parkway.
15. When Stone awoke the following morning, Holly was gone, and her side of the bed had been neatly made up.
16. Dino Bacchetti attended a meeting at an uptown precinct, and among the subjects discussed was the shooting of Sean Donnelly.
17. Stone got to P.J. Clarke's early, so he bellied up to the bar to wait for the others.
18. Stone let them into the house, entered the alarm code, and took their coats.
19. John Fratelli sat in a deck chair on a terrace of the Breakers, a monumental turn-of-the-twentieth-century hotel built by Henry Flagler, the partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil.
20. Secret Service special agent Alvin Griggs rapped on his boss's door and was invited in and offered a chair and coffee.
21. Onofrio "Bats" Buono, whose sobriquet arose from his wanton use of that instrument when collecting debts, took the call in the little office behind the chop shop he ran in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
22. Jack Coulter, née John Fratelli, checked his image in the mirror before leaving his apartment. He had lost twenty pounds since leaving prison, ten of them since buying his Brooks Brothers suits.23. John Fratelli awoke the following morning, and something was nagging at the back of his mind. It came to him: IRS. He showered and dressed and had his first shave of the day, then he called New York on his throwaway cell phone.24. Howard Silver stood at the hundred-dollar window at Hialeah and took one last look at the odds board.
25. Stone's day was closing, and he called Holly Barker.
26. Alvin Griggs was called into his boss's office during what would ordinarily have been his coffee break, and told to sit down.
27. Stone was awakened, as the first rays of dawn came through slatted blinds, by a cool hand on his warm crotch, to which he immediately responded.
28. Harry Moss's ears were burning. He had just been rudely escorted out of the Breakers beach club because he was not a member, and it was embarrassing.
29. Now Stone was faced with a problem: he had an itch to go to London for a few days, but on the other hand, he had a very similar itch to stay closer to Hank Cromwell.
30. Dino and Viv showed up for drinks at the appointed time, as was their wont, let themselves into the house with Dino's key, and entered the study, where Stone was reading a book. He looked up as they entered, then got up and built them drinks.
31. The following morning at seven thirty, Stone walked out his front door and had a look up and down the block.
32. The car belonging to Derek and Charles was an old London taxicab with the taxi sign removed.
33. Emma was on her cell phone all the way to the dinner party, at a house in Eaton Square, so Stone didn't have to talk, which was just as well, as he was dumbstruck.34. Emma woke Stone the following morning by the simple device of biting him on a nipple. Nature took its course, a couple of times.35. John Fratelli sat on the edge of his bed, feeling sick.
36. Stone was back at his house before John Fratelli called.
37. Dino was out front in his unmarked police SUV on time.
38. New Fairfield was an actual wide place in the road, not a metaphor.
39. Stone watched Hank take a deep breath.
40. John Fratelli was dressing for dinner when his cell phone rang.
41. Stone was at his desk when Dino called.
42. Manny called the number, and Willard Crowder answered on the second ring.
43. Stone got downstairs to his office at the usual time, and there was a pink memo slip on his desk: call Dan Sparks.
44. Stone thought about it for a few minutes before he made the call.
45. Jack Coulter was in the Breakers' gym, working out, as he had done every day in prison, except he did not now use weights to achieve bulk.
46. Herbie Fisher sat in his office, cradled by his Eames lounge chair, reading a letter for his signature. His secretary buzzed.
47. Stone called John Fratelli on his throwaway cell phone.
48. Joan Buzzed. "Mike Freeman on one."
49. Harry Moss sat on his usual stool at his usual Sports Bar and had his usual Cutty Sark and water.
50. Stone's bell rang a couple of minutes after seven, as he was walking down the stairs.
51. Stone smelled leather, and he couldn't understand why.
52. Jack and Hillary finished their round and went back to the clubhouse for lunch.
53. Stone had managed to doze off.
54. What the fuck?" a man's voice said.55. Hank and Parese were driving north on the Sawmill River Parkway in the van.
56. Stone, Dino, and Viv had a good dinner and waited for Dan Sparks to call back.
57. Stone sat in the backseat with Viv. He didn't know why he was so tired; after all, he'd spent the day on the sofa in his office.
58. The group sat around the living room of the lake cottage. It was after one a.m., and the medical examiner's wagon had already left with Parese's body. They were all having a drink from the cabin's booze supply.
59. Stone and Dino got the two suitcases out of the SUV and rolled them into Stone's office.
60. Stone slept through the afternoon. He woke around six p.m. and reflected on the past few days and weeks. Three people were dead, one of them someone he had grown fond of, before she had betrayed him for money.61. Stone was at his desk at ten a.m., and his first call was to Mike Freeman.

Holy shit, why did I just do that?

Some of my personal favorites are in bold.

You get the picture. Forget the bland, basic sentence structure. Ignore the bad grammar an abundant commas. Taken on content alone, every single sentence in this book is about cars, drinking, falling asleep or waking up, sex, secretaries, meals, newspapers, and phone calls. The only food described in any detail are breakfast meats and eggs. At one point Stone and his pals "had a good dinner." The phrase "throwaway cell phone" appears twice, and that's just in these chapter openers. "The following morning" is written five times. Thirteen of the sixty-one openers include the word "call" and an additional three include "phone." There are several references to Stone being tired, and still he finds the time for two one-night stands.

Old man lifestyle porn, indeed.

Ready Player One

Meh. I understand the hype, but this is one giant self-love letter to '80s nerd culture, arcade games, and Angry Redditor Syndrome. The main character is Harry Potter and Charlie Bucket and Matilda and every other put upon poor-ass teen, and he spends his shitty life playing video games and looking for a multi-billion dollar prize in a virtual reality simulation. I had plenty of issues, but chief among them was that to believe this story at face value you need to buy into two or three eighteen year old kids being more prepared to solve a years-long puzzle than an entire corporation dedicated to doing the same. Forget that the corporation, essentially a Google-Amazon-Facebook-Verizon combination, owns the ISPs that allow these meddling kids to connect to the VR simulation flawlessly - we can suspend that much disbelief, this story takes place in the 2040s, so maybe instantaneous network connections are a dime a dozen - but how the hell do three fucking kids outsmart entire teams of dedicated researchers and puzzle solvers? It's the ultimate nerd rage fantasy, this story where the real life social outcasts are somehow the coolest dudes on the Internet, and where these dipshits who do nothing all day but watch '80s television reruns are able to decipher riddles that flummox fucking Google. I mean right down to when the main character falls in love with a woman who thinks she's hideous but then he finds her beautiful, so, shit, win-win for him, he gets to be the hero and get the pretty lady, and a win for her too, because she gets him, right? Ugh ugh ugh. I just never felt like I was rooting for the protagonist in this one. Earn it, book! Earn it!

Ringworld

So way back when, some previous version of me - let's call him 22-year-old me - thought it would be a great idea to get into some classic sci-fi. And that was by and large a fairly bad idea. It's very easy, and fairly interesting, to read about 20th century science fiction. It's much less easy and interesting to actually read 20th century sci-fi.

Ringworld is a book about a ring-shaped world (go figure). That's the most interesting aspect of it - its setting. You ever play Halo? Like, more than just the multiplayer? If so, you're familiar with the idea of the ring-shaped world, an impossibly large man-made structure that provides a ring of terraformed surface area spanning an entire orbit - three million times the surface area of the earth. How's that for a solution to your sustainability crisis? Larry Niven goes into specific details, sometimes to a fault, about the physical properties of the ringworld - the "what" and the "why" - but never really dives deep into the "how." Which is just as well - it lends a bit of an air of mystery to the whole place, which is kind of cool. And again, the setting is really the only memorable part of the book.

The rest is generic, shitty, 1970s sci-fi fodder. (Here's an alien species with two heads and three legs and a snake tail! Here's one that's basically just giant ferocious housecats! Mushrooms! Acid! Whoa...) And the characters, and the story they're involved in, and the prose they speak in.... yikes. The less said about any of that, the better. You can just see the line between sci-fi and fantasy being blurry as hell here. A field full of monster sunflowers! A human being who's literally been bred to have good luck! (D&D much, bro?)

You don't need to read this. I barely feel more well-read for doing so. But still, props for a cool concept, Larry.

Exit West

A sneaky-good love story, a sneaky-bad refugee story. Most of the appeal comes from its focus on the ongoing migrant crisis, but the heart of it all is the relationship between the two protagonists growing and changing as they continuously "exit West." Credit where it's due - for the idea, the story, the ending in particular - but somewhere between the descriptions of an intentionally vague conflict and the magical realism of doorway portals that connect the first world, I lost track of Hamid's intention. Wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, too - it's likely I'm missing a few aspects of what he's done here, not appreciating a few others - but the whole thing's written in that God-awful melodramatically wan tone Mitch Albom made popular twenty years ago. No contractions, no exclamations, no soul or spark or pizzazz - just understatements and bare descriptions and lowest-common-denominator, "let-the-reader-do-the-work" nothing phrases like "in a way that felt both strange and familiar" and "for what seemed like a moment but also an eternity." Just the laziest form of writing, all generic, nothing specific. The country it's taking place in doesn't even get named or identified. If that's your bag, fine, go nuts! But this crap leaves me cold and distant - the exact opposite of how you'd want to feel reading any story "about" the "human experience." And the real shame is that this had potential - can't help but imagine Vonnegut or Murakami (just to name some personal favorites) having an absolute field day with this material. Oh well!

The Sun Also Rises

Fuck yeah, Hemingway!

I actually struggled a bit with this one. It's a slow starter. Nothing really happens for the first hundred pages or so - but that's kind of the point. We meet the cast of characters, fucking around and constantly drunk in Paris in the 1920s, no cares in the world, but also no real purpose in life. Then the action ("action") shifts from Paris to Spain - specifically Pamplona, during the running of the bulls - and the aimlessness and pointlessness of every character gets thrown straight into a wall of a week-long bull-killin' party. Everyone's drunk as hell, there's nothing to do but get drunk as hell, and our band of merry traveling expats turns on one another, getting into petty, drunken scuffles.

It's a real downer of a book, the central premise mainly being, "man, these people, huh?" and the world-traveling nature of the characters only barely masking their utter haplessness - hard-drinking, squabbling, not really doing anything with their young lives. Here's where the term "Lost Generation" was coined, used to describe this exact type of person - shattered and broken by serving in World War I, just milling around in Europe afterward without ever really giving a fuck about anything or anyone.

It's hard not to make Great Gatsby comparisons - vapid people with empty friendships, pining for something lost - and it makes sense that Hemingway and Fitzgerald, friends with each other and kindred Lost Generation spirits, would explore the same general spiritual malaise. It's maybe a little more overt in Gatsby, maybe a little vaguer here, but they're unmistakably the same disease.

In the end, I liked this book just fine, but it wasn't quite as crisp and boldly written as what I've come to expect from Hemingway after reading The Old Man and the Sea and A Farewell to Arms - but then, it's his first novel after all; maybe he needed more time to hone his iconic prose style.

Republic

Oof. Been working on this one in stop-and-go fashion for a while now. It's not a long read, but it's a very dense one, the whole thing a conversation, and every line putting forth a new proposition that's either agreed upon or rebutted. The very rigid prose doesn't make it a breezy read and there are logical fallacies everywhere acting as speed bumps besides.

The main question Socrates seeks to address here - yes, it's written by Plato but the main character here is Socrates, so let me know which one I should credit here - is, "What is justice?" From this relatively straightforward question comes an entire utopian society and plenty of philosophical discussion beyond, regarding the importance of education and rational thought. It's easy to see why this thing's a classic.

But! What a mess. What Socrates (Plato?) concocts as a hypothetically utopian just society essentially amounts to this proto-fascist state. It's a society of specialists who all "know their role" and don't stick their nose into business that doesn't concern them. For instance, the farmers shouldn't concern themselves with how they're being governed, the merchants don't need to worry about warfare, and so forth. Media censorship, insofar as it exists back then, should be tight and rigid, with the youth of the state indoctrinated with virtuous stories, no cynical or immoral ones, so it can be made sure that young warriors don't fear death. Plato (Socrates?) also doesn't think, for instance, that doctors should be burdened with caring for the chronically ill - so basically he's building Paul Ryan's America. It's a decidedly non-democratic vision, considering that Greece back then was the birthplace of democracy.

It gets weirder, bigger, grander. He advocates for common families, in which copulation is performed as a ritual and never otherwise, and all children born in any generation are said to be children of all the adults who were sexually active with each other nine months prior. In this way all the adults can be said to be parents of all the children, and all the children siblings with each other. Feels very similar to that "takes a village" proverb, and I know there've been many societies throughout history that successfully used this approach for hundreds of years or more. Plato also bans poets form his grand city (so, artists and creative types, in the modern sense?) because they pretend to know everything but in fact know nothing. (Whoa.) Oh, and the ruling class can't own anything. That's important. Because if you allowed rich people to rule, they'd seek only to protect their riches. So it's sort of like communism and priesthood, in that way.

Ideally, says Plato, the rulers of such a society will be philosopher-kings - basically these proto-Jedi wisemen who have no passion, no lust, and are content to rule with and be ruled by logic and reason. It's as idealistic and fantastical a notion today as it was 2400 years ago, before "absolute power corrupts absolutely" was ever uttered. But Plato seems to realize this! Toward the end of Republic, after building up this intricate utopian society so thoroughly, Plato outlines the state's inevitable decline into tyranny. He predicts that even the most just philosopher-kings, being human, will err in selecting and training their own replacements. This will lead first to oligarchy, in which the rulers begin to amass riches and the rest of society becomes impoverished, then to what sounds like a Marxist revolution, or at least the French one, in which the masses revolt and drive the kings away and decide that every man has the freedom and license to do as he pleases. This is all chaos and no order, with no one occupying the right roles, and it ultimately leads to tyranny, as an opportunistic, crafty, political few will amass wealth and power, rising to the top and enslaving everyone else. (I mean, this sounds to me a lot like the original utopia for the lower classes - the farmers are just going to farm either way, right?)

Granted, it's not clear what exactly Plato is doing, writing this whole dang thing. Taken literally, it sounds like he's constructing (and then lamenting the inevitable decline of) an ideal society. But perhaps he's being willfully obtuse, sarcastic, ironic. He quickly admits that his own utopian society is doomed from the start, after all. And remember, the entire book and conversation are meant to be an exploration of justice - is it possible the entire city-state is a metaphor for the human soul? Maybe we, as individuals, are best off when we use our brains to reason our way past succumbing to our lustful desires. When we let our bodies become democracies, with each vice and desire weighing equally on our actions, do we not end up acting and behaving unjustly? There's a whole late chapter dedicated to exploring the tyrannical man - not a tyrant who rules a dystopian city, but an everyday man who lets animal instincts rule him, turning into a lecherous and violent glutton. Is such a man actually happy though? Here's the crux of Plato's argument - no. No, he is not.

I can see why this is such a classic for both historians and philosophers, and its value has everything to do with how it has shaped Western thought for millennia. That said, as a contemporary read, holy shit, this thing is a disaster. It's loaded with leaps in logic, contradictions, and circular reasoning. It's possible these are translation issues across several languages and thousands of years, but this reads like a guy just spitballing, thinking out loud, churning out these half-baked ideas like a high school senior designing society from scratch. Now, that's okay if the point of Republic is to defend and promote philosophical navel-gazing. If there's one main takeaway, perhaps it's not "this is how society should be," but instead, "this is why thinking long and hard and questioning everything is very important." But man, the thought process on display here is staggeringly incomplete. The whole thing predates the scientific method; claims are made and accepted with no regard for pragmatics or outcomes. Every claim here is subjective or unfalsifiable, and even a smart child could probably poke a few dozen holes in the path Socrates takes to defend some asinine claims. There are too many barely coherent examples to choose from, but for instance, here's how Socrates or Plato ultimately defends the idea that justice is good and worthwhile, paraphrased of course:

"You would agree that there are three types of men. Those who love the truth, those who love honor, and those who love profit."
"Yes, of course."
"And only a man who has loved all three can lay claim to knowing which love leads to happiness."

"Naturally."
"And only the philosopher has attempted to do this."

"Sure. Go on."

"So the philosopher alone can say whether truth, honor, or profit leads to happiness."

"Certainly."
"And the philosophers all agree that loving truth leads to the most happiness."

"Okay."
"Therefore the pursuit of justice is its own reward."

"I'm sold!"

Centuries of Westenr policy, based on the ramblings of a madman. Human nature, everyone!

No Longer at Ease

More than ten years ago I read and very much enjoyed Things Fall Apart, the Chinua Achebe novel about the tragedy of Okonkwo, a proud Nigerian man who winds up leading a one-man resistance of sorts when white men arrive to colonize his homeland. What I loved most about that book was the neutrality of its tone; it would have been so easy to depict the pre-colonial Nigerians as either a peaceful, prosperous people or a bunch of savages - and ditto the arriving white men - but Achebe toes that line carefully and allows his characters to be multi-faceted, to be good or evil or civilized regardless of their race. I was, like, seventeen, and very impressionable, and reading about how pre-colonial Nigerians were, you know, complicated, like all other regular-ass people in history - that was eye-opening.

Anyway, here's its sequel, a short read at less than 200 pages, No Longer at Ease, about one of Okonkwo's grandsons, who may or may not have besmirched his own honor by accepting a bribe or two. It... didn't have quite the same effect on me. Here's what I wrote over at goodreads:

Very difficult not to compare this to its own predecessor, Things Fall Apart, and for that it suffers. That book was about an obstinate man fiercely resisting but slowly realizing that his very way of life would be forever changed when white men came to his African village - a doozy of a conflict, a hell of a tragedy. This book, revolving one of that man's grandsons, derives most of its dramatic tension from the dilemma of whether or not an honorable and educated man would allow himself to accept a bribe. Like, whether or not he can resist becoming that dreaded stereotype of the corrupt and shady African government man is the tragic conflict facing Obi Okonkwo, which is a far cry from his grandfather's hopeless fight for his own culture. There's a thematic throughline here for sure, the grandfather's inevitable defeat leading indirectly to the society in which the grandson can have this fall from grace, and the story still works. It just doesn't thrive.

So lightning didn't strike twice. Damn. Chinua Achebe has a few more novels I may check out one day, but it took me ten years to get to this one and I didn't even like it very much, so, let's not hold our breath, alright?

The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is, for my money, one of the greatest short stories in American literature. You might have read it back in school a time or two. It's about this smart house, or at least a proto-smart house that could be conceived back in 1950, in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. The house rings alarms, announces calendar events, prepares meals, keeps itself clean, and plays music and reads poetry, completely unaware and uncaring of the fact that it has been uninhabited for years. The story's as clean and efficient as they come, taking you from "what's going on here?" to "oh no" to "yeah, this all seems like a fairly logical conclusion" in the span of, like, eight or nine pages. It's as simple as a Dr. Seuss allegory but the images it depicts without explicitly spelling them out - like the horrifying death of millions of people in a fiery blaze, or a mangy dog being torn to shreds by robotic mice - are the kinds of horrifying things that'll stay with you forever. (I think I was seven or eight when we first heard this in school. Understood it, but couldn't grasp the urgency and foreboding of it. Read it late in high school and it hit closer to home. Could probably revisit it in my old age and lament how little things have changed in a hundred years.)

Anyway, I bring up "There Will Come Soft Rains" because even though it's a complete story that stands alone perfectly, it hints at this global disaster that you can only really imagine. The Martian Chronicles, one of those novel-like collections of tightly knit short stories, fills in a few of those gaps, but only barely; most of the action takes place on the planet Mars as humans attempt to colonize it and, after succeeding, do their best to live there without making the same mistakes they'd made on Earth. But the long and short of it, well, yeah, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is the second-to-last story in the collection. This was not an inciting event that led people to flee for Mars; this was the conclusion of a human race that had already made it to Mars. (The last short story focuses on the few people remaining on Mars after, we are left to assume, everyone on earth is dead. It's bittersweet but hopeful - the perfect note to end on.)

So, yeah. This is a cynical and glum portrait of humanity, albeit not an especially deep or profound one. In fact the criticism here is subtle. Not present are the wacky one-dimensional characters of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, nor is there any judgment or humor in the tone of the narration; everything is told in third person without any flair or humility.

The rest of the stories in the book touch on all kinds of warts found throughout human history - colonialism, genocide, folly, hubris, tribalism. Blink and you might miss it, but maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that toward the end of the book, a thriving human population on Mars ends up wiped out not Mars is engulfed in any warfare, but because to a man they almost all decide to return to Earth once nuclear war breaks out there. Idiots!

Last note, more of a side note, I always love going back to these seventy-year-old science fiction stories and seeing what aspects of the future these authors got right and what they totally biffed on. I mean, yes, sure, these are allegories that belong in their own times and aren't necessarily attempting to predict anything, but it's amazing to see that Ray Bradbury essentially predicted a smart house (although he wasn't alone in doing that - isn't that essentially what the Jetsons live in?) but not, say, communication advancements that would allow Earthlings and Martians to communicate with one another by any means faster than handwritten letters. And the gender and racial dynamics in these stories from another time are always something to behold. Still, does this hold up? This absolutely holds up.

Okay, actual last note, way more of a side note, I couldn't pick up this book without singing this old chestnut in my head:

Yeah, remember that one? You do now.

The Selfish Gene

So here's a book. A book! And a nonfiction book at that. Hell, it's the second-oldest book in my backlog! Checking a lot of boxes today, yessir. This is a pretty famous one for popular science, as it's Richard Dawkins' first book and the one in which he developed or at least popularized the gene-centric view of evolution.

It's got a misleading title, so let's start there. This isn't about a gene for selfish behavior. Rather, on the contrary, it's about the idea that each gene "cares" more about its own propagation through a population and future generations than it does about whether or not its own "host" lives or dies; in that sense, it is "selfish," willing to sacrifice the particular creature it inhabits in order to allow more copies of itself to survive. Basically, it's a biologically consistent rationale for altruistic behavior, like when mothers sacrifice themselves for their young, or how brothers are more loyal to one another than cousins, who are more loyal than distant cousins, and so on. You might as well call the book "The Selfless Gene" - or as one of Dawkins' contemporaries suggested, "The Immortal Gene."

Take, for example, when a bird gives off an alarm call to indicate that a predator is nearby. This individual bird is putting itself at a slightly higher risk of being killed, but it's drastically lowering the flock's overall chance of losing a member. Thus the gene for this sort of altruistic behavior, as much as it exists, is more likely to survive than a gene for selfish behavior would in a similar population.

The meat of Dawkins' theory is played out in nonzero sum games and computer simulations, which I enjoyed a lot. "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is a win-win, assuming it takes more effort to scratch your own back than someone else's back. Of course, the biggest win would be to have someone scratch your back without you returning the favor. Dawkins plays out all kinds of simulations to find the ideal stable population models with different simple behavior patterns (strategies) like "cheater" (never returns a favor) and "sucker" (always returns a favor) and "forgiving" (stiffs a cheater once or twice, but then resumes trusting) and "grudge-holder" (never returns a favor to someone who's cheated him in the past) and "wild card" (either scratches or doesn't scratch at random). This is all just an expansion of prisoner's dilemma game theory, and what Dawkins found was that stable strategy distributions will have most individuals acting altruistically and fairly, with a few cheaters in the mix - mostly mirrors reality, no?

There's also plenty of "relatedness" math at play that sounds like the trolley problem - is it better to sacrifice one of your own children, or two of your own brothers? - with entire chapters related to the subtle ongoing power balance between children and parents, hosts and parasites, and males and females of the same species.

The book was written in 1976 (though my own edition is from 1989 with a small expansion) and it still holds up after more than forty years (or almost thirty), albeit with a few very dated computer analogies and some very old fashioned language and perspectives in the "Battle of the Sexes" chapter.

The book's not without its detractors, whose rebuttals mostly focus on how the book doesn't give enough credit to the many other factors responsible for evolution - environmental factors, inter-species and intra-species competition, gene expression, and so on - but I didn't take the book to be a be-all, end-all take on evolution boiled down to 260 pages. That would be a crazy thing to do!

Oh, and lastly, and how did I almost forget this - memes! Right here in this book, Richard Dawkins invented the term "meme" to serve as a behavioral analogue to a gene. A gene mutates and propagates down through future generations; a meme spreads through populations too, with the best memes outlasting the worst ones in their own "survival of the fittest" competition. For instance, there is nothing "genetic" about the idea that priests should be celibate - how could such a gene propagate through children? But the "meme" that priests shouldn't have sex - a rule, a law, a custom, a practice - is one that we've collectively and consistently found sensible enough to continue to propagate. On the other hand, a meme like, I dunno, disco music? That meme boomed and then almost disappeared, like an algae bloom that has immediate short-term success but burns out just as quickly. The forms of disco that flourish today are bastardized, mutated forms, like R&B. (This is my own example; Dawkins wrote this in the 1970s, before disco even was a meme, let alone a dead one.) But that's Dawkins' point - that some memes are trends while others are mainstays, and some are these long unchallenged traditions that will struggle to adapt to radical changes (look at social views on gay marriage, for instance). Hell, even the idea of what a "meme" is has mutated from what I've just described to "a recurring JPEG or GIF on the Internet." Ha!

But yeah - great book. Dense reading, but easy reading - it;s a slow 260 pages, but it's also only 260 pages. And I should really read more of Dawkins' stuff in the future, having already enjoyed (even more than this) The Ancestor's Tale back in college.

The Dresden Files: Changes (Book #12)

Twelve books in and I'm beginning to lose track of what's happening in these stories. For instance, as I'm typing out the title of this post, I blindly write in "book 11" before questioning myself, "Wait? Was this the eleventh book?" To double-check myself, I searched online to see book #11 was actually Turn Coat, the previous book I read and the series, and -- for the life of me -- I couldn't tell you what happened in that story. I know it has something to do with someone betraying someone else... but, ugh... my mind is a little frazzled keeping all these events in order. It's all turning into this magical stew of Die Hard-like action. 

That said, I don't think I'll have that same problem with this book. Changes is by far the most epic story to occur in the Dresden series... so far. The story opens with a huge spoiler -- Quite literally the first line of the novel is a bombshell of a reveal. And from that huge reveal, to story goes into high gear. Pulling in characters (both good and evil) from the entire franchise to build towards the largest fight Dresden has ever faced.

Changes is an appropriate title to this story as everything the readers have come to know and love about Dresden and his life are turned on their head or completely destroyed. Much like how Hermione comments at the end of the Order of the Phoenix (the movie version; can't comment on the novel), she says, "Everything is going to change now. Isn't It?" (Well. don't quote my quote. I'm paraphrasing here.) But that's the sentiment this book carries. Change.

I'm not sure if Butcher is able to write Dresden back into his former life or not after what choices and actions he's forced to make in this story, but even if he could go back... would I want him to? Tough call. 

All I can say is that I thoroughly enjoy this addition in the series. It might be my favorite so far. If not my favorite, then at least ranking in my top three. I'm chomping at the bit to see where Dresden goes from here. 

Sween, you still reading these? If you are, where ya at?