Ramble On
Okay, so this could be construed as being late (by the way, if you didn’t already know, I tend to post Saturdays) but I posted last Monday, so you got last week’s SIX DAYS EARLY. Or, yeah, this is late. Sorry.
So I saw Stranger Than Fiction Saturday evening. It’s about as good a movie as I’ve seen recently (keeping in mind that I can’t trust movies anywhere near as much as I trust books, largely due to the piecemeal/corporate way in which movies are made, and so I never end up liking all of a movie on reflection) - the premise is that the movie’s protagonist is the main character in a great novelist’s work-in-progress, and that he (the main character) can hear her (the novelist) narrating his life, which involves foreshadowing his death. He then has to find her and convince her not to kill him. This is a great premise. Given the premise, the movie could have been so much more intelligent than it was (curse you, Hollywood!) but it’s still very interesting. [Spoilers ahead, but read on anyway.] Most of the problems arise through a simplistic treatment of literature - for instance, when the novelist writes about Harold Crick’s “imminent death”, he has to die. It is unacceptable for the novelist to lie to the reader in this fashion, to foreshadow events that do not come to pass. Also, the pacing of the novel, as we see it in the movie, makes no sense - and what exactly is the relation between the protagonist’s actions and the novelist’s narrations? Does she create his actions or merely record them? The movie would seem to indicate the latter, but he becomes less interesting as a result. And the simple fact that whatever the novelist is writing, it is not the most important piece of literature in several years. The story of the novel itself is completely uninteresting - simply another variation on “boy meets girl”. In short, the problem with the movie is that the genre of literature is entirely subjugated to the genre of film.
However, it is worth watching for some great conversations, particularly that between the protagonist and the professor of literature: “You have to die,” he tells Harold. “The story makes no sense without it [Ed.: I agree.] You would have died anyway, eventually, but it would have been nowhere near as meaningful.” The character of the eccentric novelist is fascinating, and the movie quotes Italo Calvino, which is pretty cool.
Speaking of whom: everyone needs to read both Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveller. The first is a collection of very brief vignettes, miniatures of different cities - it deals with perception, meaning, language, civilization, and contains many incredibly beautiful moments. The latter is a second-person epic of the reader’s (i.e., your) quest to finish the book - it ends up being a varied collection of ten beginnings of novels, united by your attempts to find the rest of a book, any of them, and finish it. Very postmodern, very thoughtful, very beautiful. Why don’t I just make a list of five books everyone needs to read? Three: Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov - death has never been so completely without dignity, and seldom is the charade of the novel so very evident. Brilliant work. Four: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway - see post 5. Five: Watership Down by Richard Adams. It blends Celtic myths, Homerian epic, and Orwellian dystopia (and a few other flavors that everyone should know and love) in a book about the journeys of a group of rabbits, who are nowhere near as anthropomorphic as you’d expect (for instance, they can only count to four, and anything above that is hrair). If all you’ve seen was the 1980s movie, well, it’s an untranslatable book, and the soundtrack was terrible anyway. Read the book.
Since I’m making lists - three albums I am most happy to own: Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin (narrowly beating out IV and III for favorite Zeppelin album), Lateralus by Tool, and Extension of the Wish by Andromeda. And that’s about all for today.