James's updates

James's updates http://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/958786 en-US Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:53:25 -0700 60 James's updates http://www.goodreads.com/ 200 41 http://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/gr_logo.gif 32173344 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:53:25 -0700 Review27913843 <![CDATA[James added 'Reading Comics']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27913843 Reading Comics (Hardcover) by Douglas Wolk
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 32173130 Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:52:10 -0700 Review27913663 <![CDATA[James added 'MW']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27913663

to: MW (Hardcover) by Osamu Tezuka
MW by Osamu Tezuka is a thoroughly entertaining graphic novel. I just finished it and found it to be quite, quite enjoyable.

Soon after setting down MW, I picked up Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. So I do not yet have an adequate framework to be much more articulate and informed about how and why MW is so good. Yes, I am that confident in Reading Comics that after absorbing its content, I will be forever eloquent and wise on the topic of comic criticism. Even though I have read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which Reading Comics has already taken issue with on a few finer points of comic lore and craft. So it’s sure to be an enjoyable read of comic nerd in-fighting.

How’s that for establishing your form as a legitimate medium? Splinter into competing sects of disagreeing “experts” and engage in petty and nonconstructive debates. Now that’s a classy, established medium! If only we could get Chris Ware and Alan Moore to engage in a widely publicized tiff, a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Then you comic-kazes would know you’ve really arrived.

But back to MW. It’s good. It is.

And don’t just take my word for it. According to the flap copy, Osamu Tezuka is a comic god, the godfather of Japanese manga comics, who spurned his doctor’s degree to pursue the then-considered “frivolous medium” of comics.

The protagonist of MW is a scion of a famous Kabuki family. There’s a secret military cover-up. Finance. Politics. Murder. Rape. WMDs. A public prosecutor. A Catholic priest. And homoeroticism. Don’t forget the homoeroticism. You know how those graphic novelists revel in good old-fashioned sexual obsession.

If you’re looking for even more elements of intrigue combined in a single graphic novel of “sweeping vision, deftly intertwined plots, and indefatigable commitment to human dignity,” I think you’re asking too much. But there’s probably a comic out there for you. Keep looking.

Try starting with Battle Pope.

If one reads McCloud’s Understanding Comics, Wolk’s Reading Comics, The New Yorker’s comics issue, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern all-comics issue 13 edited by Chris Ware, Michael Chabon’s championing of the medium, or even the Best American Comics series, you will be amazed at the indefatigable lengths guardians and cheerleaders of the form go to in order to establish comics as anything but a “frivolous medium.”

Not to discredit the admirable and necessary actions that have thankfully lifted comics out of the doldrums brought on by a prejudice of childish obscurity and pretentious elitism, to me the debate has already been won. Comics are without a doubt, a legitimate artistic craft worthy of serious reading, and as novels go the way of five act plays in iambic pentameter, comics will burgeon into a significantly dominate form of published entertainment. Turn a couple of these graphic novels into video games, and boom, look out Hollywood. Brilliantly talented nerds: 1. Naysayers: 0.

But this leaves me to ponder what fringe form will next emerge to demand the acknowledgment and serious criticism its proponent’s feel it so urgently deserves?

I’ve already mentioned one: video games?
Graffiti?
Tattoos?
Fake memoirs?

I personally want there to be an annual competition for the finest fake memoir awarded to the autobiography that best duped the general public and publishing industry into believing that it was absolutely true. Authors will keep their lips sealed until the submission process in which they can then discreetly admit that, “Oh yeah, I made that all up. Hehe. Clever me.” They could call the competition The Big Get and it could be a legitimate genre that authors set out to execute instead of a highly embarrassing mistake. ]]> 32021937 Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:51:06 -0700 Review16809395 <![CDATA[James added 'The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16809395

to: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Hardcover) by Alex Ross
As a recovering Band Nerd, I assumed that this book, subtitled “Listening to The Twentieth Century,” would be an enjoyable companion to my amateur musical education. I have had the privilege of performing hundreds of renowned musical compositions, from Gershwin to Hindemith, and even conducted several hundred marching musicians playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Attending grade school in Connecticut, I can even remember a relative of Charles Ives visiting our music class and telling us disinterested ankle-biters about her famous composer-relative.

But alas, The Rest is Noise is a book about classical music.

A book. About classical music.

It’s a bit like macramé about kite flying. That is, an obscure, archaic, and largely ignored medium conveying a rather dismissed subject. A quilt about baking contests? Stained glass about some dead dude on a cross? An election to decide world leaders?

Ross does acknowledge that, “Classical music is widely mocked as a stuck-up, sissified, intrinsically un-American pursuit.”

Though critically acclaimed, well enough written, and well researched (the result of 15 years of being a music critic), I found The Rest Is Noise to be rather dull, a bit boring, and overall, a lot of work to read. It’s 543 pages of, “…for example, in The Anaemic Rag chains of thirds unwind over an open-fifth ostinato.” And that’s an example, which is supposed to be an instance serving illustration, but I had no idea what an ostinato was and Word spell check wants ostinato to be “obstinate,” even though ostinato is simply a constantly recurring melodic fragment.

Ross absolutely excels at bringing the music he is talking about to life with evocative and stirring descriptions, but I found myself pleading to just listen to the music itself. I can only hope that they will publish an edition with a supplementary CD so a reader can pause and listen to samples of this music that seems to matter so much. Does the audio edition already have some of the music playing with it? I can only imagine that such an endeavor would be a lawyer’s nightmare with the endless rights and clearances and royalties. (The same problem is why The Wonder Years is not on DVD. All that damn music.)

While the historical context portrayed by The Rest is Noise is enlightening and the composer’s lives that are detailed therein are only mildly interesting, it is the music and the music alone that emerges as worthwhile. So in that, Alex Ross, as a critic, has achieved something great with this book. It makes me want to actually listen to some of this music he talks so damn much about.

And classical music seems to have been quite full of homosexuals and drugs. Take that Rock and Roll! ]]> 31518907 Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:13:31 -0700 Review27405376 <![CDATA[James added 'VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel. By Steve Tomasula. Art and Design by Stephen Farrell.']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27405376 VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel. By Steve Tomasula. Art and Design by Stephen Farrell. (Paperback) by Steve Tomasula
bookshelves: to-read
]]> 31416414 Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:30:32 -0700 QuestionUserStat14984 <![CDATA[James Borowy took the never-ending book quiz]]> http://www.goodreads.com/trivia 958786

James took the never-ending book quiz.

questions answered:	47
correct:	37 (78.7%)
skipped:	48
best streak:	5
questions added:	0

beat his score »

]]> 31299405 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:55:04 -0700 Review27237124 <![CDATA[James added 'The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27237124 The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (Paperback) by Terry Teachout
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> 31299356 Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:54:38 -0700 Review27237090 <![CDATA[James added 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/27237090 The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Hardcover) by David Wroblewski
bookshelves: to-read
]]> 28791655 Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:40:05 -0700 Review25274596 <![CDATA[James added 'I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25274596

to: I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell (Paperback) by Tucker Max
Tucker Max is an inexplicable success story. He wrote emails to friends about his drunken, debaucherous sexual exploits. This turned into a blog. This became a book. This became a New York Times bestselling book. Now there is a movie.

Though an impressive exercise in excess and gall, Max’s tales of drinking and sex are mostly unremarkable. Most youths half-conscious for high school and college will be able to meet Tucker half-way with his mildly shocking anecdotes of modern bacchanalian adventures. So let this be a lesson to you kids: be a cruel, disrespectful, self-absorbed, misogynistic drunk, and America will reward you.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, somewhere between a drunk Paper Chase and The Game on meth, is certainly appealing because it is authentic. You believe everything. Nothing is embellished. Nothing over-written. There is something very refreshing about its straightforward, casual forthcomingness.

But of course it’s totally depraved and reprehensible. The puritan in us wants to be appalled. The Top 40-listening, Simon Cowell wanna-being, Paris Hilton sex tape-watching fool in us wants to be entertained even more.

Though it pains me to say it, there’s a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson in Tucker Max. While I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell can’t hold a match to the rocket-fueled blowtorch that is HST’s intellect, craft, and cultural relevance, Max does carry around a tape recorder and write about his heroic consumption, just like the good Doc, however elementary and inferior the writing is. Sample passage (from page 69 no less):

“It got to the point where I was fucking with so much force her booty was clapping like Madison Square Garden, the bed was chipping the paint off the wall, my hips were bruising as they slammed against her ass bones and I was sweating like a migrant worker in a strawberry field, but it still wasn’t enough.”

This book and its success is frustrating and bothersome on several levels. Why do the douche bags always get away with it?

Let’s talk about this douche bag thing. Having read his book, I think Tucker Max is a douche bag. My secret sources working on the inside of the movie production of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell confirm this opinion. Though in his thirties, he’s the kind of guy who wears athletic shorts with dress shirts. Tucker Max angers me like drug dealers who don’t get caught anger me. But Tucker Max clearly has his own ideas of what a douche bag is and spends ample time examining so in the book. He refers to “legions of douche bags and tools that now seem to infect every aspect of Vegas,” and “an endless expanse of bushy-haired frat boy fuckwits in striped shirts and red pants.”

But Tucker Max drinks Grey Goose and Red Bull. His dog is named Maxie. He drinks booze from a CamelBak. Add this to the way he treats people and isolates himself in an insecure, cocky, self-absorbed and self-important bubble protected by mildly creative insults and vain ignorance, and you have a bona fide douche bag. You simply don’t garner respect or authority on any level by attacking metrosexuals for dropping Foucault and Sartre when you refer to Toulouse-Lautrec and Pheidippides and say things like, “That’s like Chamberlain telling Hitler he can have the Sudetenland.” I know, I know. Tucker Max does not care about garnering respect nor authority. Add that to the list of why he is the embodiment of the douche bags he claims to despise so much.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is at best an interesting anthropological contemplation of the decadence of modern white male privilege and at worst as bad as having to read someone’s diary or listen to them recall their dreams. How far American Comedy has come since Mark Twain. Max’s humor consists of glib observations and opinions and the occasionally chuckle-worthy rhetorical device. “Whatever buddy, you’re wearing a Detroit Red Wings jersey to a strip club, you obviously suck.” “When I am mid-coitus, a girl could extract a promise from me to trade my first-born for a Twix bar.”

If you think this kind of thing is funny, read this book. You won’t even be able to polish off a six-pack before you’re done and ready to move on to funnier, heartier fare. Like whiskey.

But Bravo to Tucker Max for creating an empire from something so debased and otherwise normal. ]]> 28879730 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:50:59 -0700 Comment1043382 <![CDATA[new comment from James]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/25274522 James's review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris

yes and no. mostly yes with this one for sure. it's pretty mediocre. dammit.

where's that recommendation? ]]> 28831437 Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:56:53 -0700 Review22548849 <![CDATA[James added 'Alice In Sunderland']]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/22548849

to: Alice In Sunderland (Hardcover) by Bryan Talbot
Alice in Sunderland is technically a “graphic novel,” but an unruly, bursting, whimsical one that makes the experience of interacting with it engaging and fun. It often forgoes the frames of traditional sequential storytelling in favor of busy scrapbook-like collages that reinforce the intricate, intertextual, interwoven, self-referential story about a story about a story (ad infinitum) motif that defines and dominates this graphic novel. It is a reading experience unlike any other you’re likely to have.

With the premise of some bloke wandering into a theater, the reader of Alice in Sunderland is taken on a schizophrenic and tangential trip through the history of England in general and Lewis Carroll and his infamous and influential work Alice in Wonderland in particular.

The book is big (almost a full foot tall and 8 inches wide) and long (319 pages!) and colorful (red! blue! yellow!). It’s a very ambitious work and quite impressive. Its scope would be considered “high-concept” as it consistently squirms away from any one genre or aesthetic or subject like a stubborn kid wiggling away from a smelly aunt. It explodes with tidbits of trivia and random facts with pictures and photographs and drawings of every color and style. It is a veritable kaleidoscope of imagery and ideas and history and culture and art. If it were made into a movie, Baz Luhrmann would have to direct. Maybe Terry Gilliam.

Overall, Alice in Sunderland is a little too researched and too little crafted (or maybe over-crafted) and a lot too much indulged. Many times I turned a page and muttered, “You think you’re so clever…”

But I was quite satisfied with Talbot’s achievement in Alice. The scale and style and ambition of it all are notable. And entertaining. When it doesn’t drag. Which it does sometimes. Especially at the end. I was really ready for it to be over already. ]]>