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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
We Few / David Weber and John Ringo
We Few / David Weber and John Ringo Skilled military SF from two guys who are pretty good at keeping the pages flying. The last book in this series had a "more of the same" beads on a stinrg quality. And frankly, both these guys are a bit too much of the Military Feudalists for my tastes a lot fo the time. Lots of heros who are royalty and such. But the military part of that, which admires and rewards competence, and honor, leavens the bit of "lord and master" that creeps through in their writings from time to time.Thursday, April 28, 2005
Plot Against the Readers
I was noodling through some of Lance Mannion's past posts, and I read through some discussions of the National Book Awards from last year in his Writer's Workshop category. One of the books that came up in the discussions was Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I tried to read that book a while back, because every once in a while I make a point of readings authors I know are terrible, or I expect them to be. It's the reason I read Jackie Collins. Roth is just an exmaple of a bad writer who gets reviewed well. I liked Portnoy's Complaint just fine, but have found all of Roth's subsequent work to be wholly inadequate and limited in range. Really, so is Portnoy , but at least that book has the verve of the new.Plot Against America was bad in the ways I come to expect from writers from the "literary" genre who take on tropes from other genres. Usually, these writers have a terrifically mediocre grasp of plot. And they are often extremely bad at explaining actions, or background information. And by bad, I mean dull as day-old dogshit. But when these writers add the difficulty of, say, a mystery plot, or science fictional plotting story techniques, they are worse than the most boring Boy Scout ghost-story teller around a campfire. In Roth's specific case, he fucked up all the world building, which is the essence of alternate history (and much other good science fiction). Boring dumps of information, like reading a history paper written by a retarded 5-year old. And I could frnakly care less about Philip Roth's same goddamn family dynamic I've read for 40 fucking years.
I can understand why Roth would want to use the alternate history technique, even badly, because it helps hide how little he has to say about the world, and about people.
Like a lot of literary writers, his world is so cramped and constipated, it gives me claustrophobia to read about it. Even when he changes the entire world, he doesn't really care about except in so far as it affects his own gonads and guts. That's fine, but frankly I can get a more expansive and interesting worldview from a freako right wing Mack Bolan novel, or a JAG novelization. I blame Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, and JD Salinger for second-rate junk like Plot Against America. The huge self-regard that fueled the fiction of all those writers led to novel world that only existed to be reviewed and cataloged, often rejected, by the characters in them. OK, using fiction to judge the world is a reasonable use of pages and ink, but not when you're goddamn boring. Bellow is often boring, but at least he's boring in a way had never been done before. Roth is boring in a way that's been done for years in the slush piles in the offices of Tor and Baen Books.
Look, I am biased in favor of books that have interesting plots. I think Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy would be in favor of that. But even Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier, which is a slow and tightly focused book, has a compelling and involving plot. Unlike the over-determined classist crap of Henry James, at least Ford shows non-obvious things about the people involved in his story. I think it's because Ford genuinely likes people, and James, Bellow, and finally Roth only like themselves.
Darwin’s Radio / Greg Bear
Darwin's Radio / Greg Bear
I actually read this a few
weeks ago, but figured I would mark it down. I like Greg Bear fine, but
I always ened up thinking his books should have been more complete,
should have gone further. This was an interesting evolution disaster
novel, with a bunch of biology discussion. But the ending didn't seem
like an ending, so much as running out of steam and paper.
Nibbled to Death by Ducks / Robert Campbell
Nibbled to Death by Ducks / Robert Campbell
A fine little book.
Sort of like having an interesting conversation in an Old Man Bar. But
there is one nice section worth excerpting.
So I says, “How come we don’t do that right off the bat? Talk to somebody what comes recommended and cut a deal? I mean, you must know plenty of contractors you worked with before. Why can’t we just sit down and talk to one of them?”
“Human nature,” Bikas says, fixing me with this look like he telling me how whatever else I’m going to learn from this house we’re going to build together, here comes the most important lesson. “You go to keep people honest.”
He looks me over and decides he’s got to fill that out a little bit.
“Also you got to help people stay honest. You got to keep temptation away fomr them if you can. You understand what I’m saying?”
I nod my head.
“Even honest people go bad around money,” Bikas says.
Cadillac Beach / Tim Dorsey
Cadillac Beach / Tim Dorsey
This is the second novel of Dorsey's I
have read, and it's better than Hammerhead Hotel. Dorsey seems to have
looked at the market for novels involving crime in Florida, and thought,
"You know, Carl Hiaasen is just not surreal enough." One of
the thing that just about every Florida writer seems ot have in common
is a love for the state's past, mixed up a hatred for the way it is now.
John D. MacDopnald write about the same scumbag developers that the
modern guys write about.
Having been in the Orlando area for the last few months, I understand where these guys are coming from. Though they do seem full of an attitude they also decry: "we were here first, so can we close the door on any new residents now?"
Anyway, Cadillac Beach almost falls over under the weight of its own constant invention, but it holds together better than Hammerhead did. And there was one moment I found memorably comic.
At one point, the protagonist Serge Storms has gotten his stolen limo shot up by mobsters. To hide the bullet holes, he buys a bunch of those decals that look like fake bullets holes to hide the real ones. It’s a funny throwaway bit.
The Island / Peter Benchley
The Island / Peter Benchley
I would bet this is the silliest
of the books Benchly wrote in the first burst after JAWS. Suffice to
say, it involves a society of pirates who have hidden away in the
CAribbean for hundreds of years.
In the Heat of the Summer / John Katzenbach
In the Heat of the Summer / John Katzenbach
I believe this is
his first novel. One of the Miami Herald crowd, like Carl Hiaasen and
Edna Buchanan. Katzenbach may be best known for Hart's War,
whichi was made into a movie.
The Forgotten Man / Robert Crais
The Forgotten Man / Robert Crais
It’s a nice continuation of the
Elvis Cole series. The main mystery is kind of boring, frankly, but the
scenes of Cole as a child are interesting. The problem with the
structure of the Cole books – and the Myron Bolitar series has a similar
problem – is that the secondary characters are somewhat more interesting
than the main one.
The last Crais went into the background of Joe Pike, the Killer Pal of Cole. Bolitar has a Killer Pal, too. Hell, so does Easy Rawlins from the Walter Mosely books. As I think about it, they all serve similar purposes: they are perfectly willing to be more violent than the main character, as if the main character will lose sympathy without that. As Mike Hammer or Joe Reacher show, the main character can be a borderline sociopath and still be compelling to readers.
This is a different structure from, say, Spenser and Hawk. Spenser is just as violent as hawk, but with a different set of rules. There’s a comparison, but it’s not because Robert Parker is unwilling to have Spenser do dubious and violent things.
In any case, it’s certainly as entertaining as an hour of TV.
The Fanciest Dive / Christopher Byron
The Fanciest Dive / Christopher Byron
I have a certain admiration
for someone who very clearly has no fear of pissing in the pool he's
swimming in, biting the hand that feeds, cutting off his nose to spite
his face, and abusing cliches til the bleed. Chris Byron does a lot fo
the first three, and even a little bit of the latter in this book. When
I lived in the West Village, I used to read Byron a lot in the weekly NY
Observer. Mostly, he came across like a harsh shot of whiskey after all
the soothing, full release (with an occassional shiv in the back) style
of writing that the Observer specialized in. Byron happily told the
self-regarding Upper East Side types who were assumed to read the
Observeer that they, and their peers in the financial industry, were
fools, marks, and scam artists. I mostly remember he seemed to hate
Revlon with a passion, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia. When I lived in the
West Village, I used to read Byron a lot in the weekly NY Observer.
Mostly, he came across like a harsh shot of whiskey after all the
soothing, full release (with an occassional shiv in the back) style of
writing that the Observer specialized in. Byron happily told the
self-regarding Upper East Side types who were assumed to read the
Observeer that they, and their peers in the financial industry, were
fools, marks, and scam artists. I mostly remember he seemed to hate
Revlon with a passion, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia. I picked up a used
copy of The Fanciest Dive for a buck in a local library. Read it in a
few hours. It's a story of a startup magazine -- TV-Cable Week -- from
Time, Inc., back before Warner or AOL got connected to the company. Time
wanted to have a magazine that would capitalize on the growth of cable
TV in the 80s, so they poured money into an untested idea and lost tens
of millions in months. A ton of this MBA shitbaggery sounded awfully
familiar to someone who had been through various rises and crashes in
Silicon Alley in the 90s.
I picked up a used copy of The Fanciest Dive for a buck in a local library. Read it in a few hours. It's a story of a startup magazine -- TV-Cable Week -- from Time, Inc., back before Warner or AOL got connected to the company. Time wanted to have a magazine that would capitalize on the growth of cable TV in the 80s, so they poured money into an untested idea and lost tens of millions in months. A ton of this MBA shitbaggery sounded awfully familiar to someone who had been through various rises and crashes in Silicon Alley in the 90s.
Just some examples:
1) The young Harvard MBAs who had analyzed the idea and the market has specifically recommended testing it with potential audiences before committing all the way. The top magazine executives of Time (who were like most executives: more full of themselves than competence) dived right in, because they were desperate to be as successful as the Video side of Time, who were making Scrooge McDuck amounts of cash in cable.
2) At one point, the operations of the magazine moved up to White Plains. Having been part of a magazine that got moved up to White Plains, I had flashbacks of pain and commute.
3) Senior tech managers promised results that just couldn’t be done with the technology of the time. The tech guys who were actually making the systems work did heroic work, until reality finally caught up with them.
4) Money thrown at parties and gift bags and other accoutrements that would impress Manhattan peers, but not accomplish anything for the project.
And so on.
But my favorite parts were when Byron made it clear how little he thought of henry Grunwald, the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. (and former managing editor of Time magazine). Grunwald just died a few months ago, before I picked up Byron’s book, and the media was full of hagiography, treating him like some Solon of our age instead of a typical mouthpiece of the establishment. Byron describes the time when Daniel Zucchi, the publisher of TV-Cable Week took Grunwald on a tour of the White plain facility during construction. Then Zucchi took Grunwald across the street to the White Plains Galleria, which was pretty new in 1986.
Keep in mind, Grunwald was clearly kind of a sheltered type, the kid of New York executive who flew in a helicopter to White Plains, even though it would have taken less time to take a car. (Well, limo. People like Grunwald wouldn’t ride in the back of a Ford Crown Vic, unless they were finally fleeing the Children of 1789.) Anyway, this is from Byron:
The man who had first held the position of Time Inc.’s editor in chief, Henry Luce, possessed a mind of limitless curiosity, and found it equally as fascinating to hob-nob with Winston Churchill as to experiment with psychedelic dfrugs like LSD. But here was his latest successor, Henry Anatole Grunwald, the perfect embodiment of intellectual self-possession; who own father had written the lyrics for the operettas of Franz Lehar; a man who had never learned to drive a car, since he was accustomed to taking corporate limousines everywhere; who numbered among his “friends” the heads of government of half of Europe. Here was Grunwald wandering around inside the Galleria shopping mall, past Quick Snax and Salad Scene, past the Magic Pan and Pastrami Delights, even as pubescent teenagers swarmed about him clutching posters of Michael Jackson and licking triple scoop ice cream cones from SLups.
As the tour continued, Zucchi snuck a sideways glance at the look of bewilderment and confusion that had cemented itself to Grunwald’s face, and he thought, Christ, I don’t think the guy’s ever been in a mall before.
That is currently in my top five of literary takedowns, the list that Steve Erickson’s takedown of Al Gore permanently ensconced at the top.
Byron's book also appears to imply that Gerlad Levin, the Candide of NYC media executives, may have hidden a memo that would have scuttled the money-losing project right at the beginning. While Byron never says it, it seems obvious that Levin might have done it deliberately to make his rival execs in the Magazine division of Time Inc. look like dopes.
Anyway, no one should be surprised that the execs at the top got promoted and rewarded, while most of the middle and lower level execs got demoted and punished. That’s the way corporations work.
Anyway
Friedman and Its Discontents
OK, so I have Charlie Rose interviewing Thomas Friedman on the tele right now. Maybe I've been out of NYC too long, but isn't it clear that Friedman's a total rube? The look on his face appears to be the same as some pig-ignorant first-time visitor to Times Square, who watched a 3-card monte player for about five monutes, and announces, "This is easy!" OK, so I have Charlie Rose interviewing Thomas Friedman on the tele right now. Maybe I've been out of NYC too long, but isn't it clear that Friedman's a total rube? The look on his face appears to be the same as some pig-ignorant first-time visitor to Times Square, who watched a 3-card monte player for about five monutes, and announces, "This is easy!"
Except that Friedman isn't gambling with his own money. So I guess he's even worse: he's the dealer's plant, but he's so dopey, he doesn't realize he's the plant. Amazing. I thought this kind of unquestioning capitalist porn-hype died with the dot.coms. Ah well.
One example: he talked about how, a couple years ago, Indiana became the first state to outsource their tech development for state unemployment payment systems. There were three bidders, one of which was from an Indian company -- based in Mombai, I think Friedman said. Anyway, Indiana goes Indian -- contractually speaking. Because of cheaper wages, the Mombai bid was 8 million dollars lower than the two US companies (Accenture and maybe Deloitte). But as the process is starting, Gov. Frank O'Bannon drops dead of a heart attack. (Of course Friedman, being a NY Times fuckstick, forgets O'Bannon's name.)
"There's a run off election," Friedman says. (Um, no. O'Bannon's term would have been up in 2004, anyway. Way to check your facts, Jayson Blair.). The pisswad Republican Mitch Daniels makes an issue out of the contract, as one part of his winning campaign over Joe Kernan, the sitting Governor. And then the contract with the Mombai company is canceled.
And Friedman says: "Were the people of Indiana exploiting the Indians, or were the Indians exploiting Indiana?"
Rose chirps in, brown dripping off his nose in cascading sheets, "That's 8 million dollars they could have saved."
"Exactly!"
"Money that could have gone to hospitals, and training."
"Exactly! Who's the winner and who's the loser?"
Tom, both the Indians and the Hoosiers are the losers, because they either have to work like dogs for short wages (which they are happy to get in poverty-stricken India), while the Hoosiers continue to see their wages driven down. The winners are 1) the guys who get to throw that contract around; and 2) the owners of the companies, either in Mombai or in the US, who take the money. I can understand how you don't see them, since you're sitting in their press box at the Global Stadium (naming rights to be sold later), eating all their free cheese while they laugh at you behind your back. "Rube," they say. "Useful idiot." You and your porn star moustache.
"I don't want to make extravagant claims," Friedman just said, as the show was about to end. Good grief. Hearing Friedman earn his cheese makes me pray for the day when corporate shills like him can get outsourced to India. Shouldn't take too long.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Seymour Butts, Nobel Laureate
I hadn’t cranked up the software when he died, but I’ve been meaning to write down this apocryphal story about Saul Bellow. (Whose work I disdain, btw, but more on that later, after the funny.)
There was this woman I knew for awhile, through my Dad. I think she was dating his Friend Shu, but I’m not sure. Anyway, she had been involved with the University of Chicago. How? Hell, I don’t know. I was probably 16 when I heard this story. She might have been a former English grad student -- and I think she was -- but at the time my gearloose memory tells me she was involved in one of those “Ivy League Dating” businesses. (More on that later, too.)
Anyway, this woman -- let’s call her the Blonde -- claimed she had dated a lot of the “old men” in the English department at U Chicago. These guys, of whom Bellow was the Grandmaster, and I think Allen Bloom was the Grand Poobah, were all known (the Blopnde said) for dating chains. One woman at a time would cruise through their line of aging intellectualism, going out to dinner, listening to the great men pontificate, and then sleeping with them. And each of them would go to the same church Sunday morning – Episcopal, I think. Bellow was the last link in the chain of brain and cock. But he apparently didn’t sleep with all of the women who worked on the Chain Gang. If he did fuck ya, then you knew you had conquered in whatever silly way it mattered.
The Blonde described her experience on the Chain Gang, and then told the story of her dinner date with Bellow. The scuttle butt was that he didn’t like being complimented on his novels, because 1) suckups are unpleasant dinner companions; and 2) how were you, a lowly graduate student (and unsaid, but obvious, a woman) qualified to make any comment at all on the work of the Grand Master?
Yet at the same time, if you didn’t mention the books, he would also be offended. It was like the worst possible version of sitting for Oral exams. (There’s a sex joke hiding there somewhere, but I can’t quite read the map to it.)
The Blonde had prepared and planned for the dinner, yet all her preparation seemed to be wasted. Bellow stared at her stonily through the entire dinner, barely grunting as she carried the entire conversation by herself. Politics, literature, sports: no topic engaged him.
Finally, exhausted, she fell silent, only able to stare at Bellow over the post-meal drink.
At which point, Bellow said, “I’ll bet you’ve never slept with a Nobel Laureate before.”
I don’t remember if The Blonde she said she stormed out in a huff or not, but since she was telling this story to a group that included her current boyfriend, she might well have. But even at the time, all I could think was: That is the BEST pickup line I have EVER HEARD!
Friday, April 15, 2005
Blowing Up Your Series Character
In August, I cruised through just about all the Harlan Coben books involving Myron Bolitar. May I mention a couple of great things about series? First of all, when you find an author who has written a bunch of titles about the same characters, it means you have a bunch of reading to enjoy. No worse than watching CSI every week.
Even better, you can crank through a bunch in a row and get a panoramic view of a character. A lot of time, the characters are so simplistic, or the authors are clearly feeling their way, so that it takes four or five books for the main characters to really develop in interesting ways.
I guess Travis McGee is the paradigm for that. MacDonald wrote some great books, but McGee has an essential sameness for decades, even after everything he goes through. But the cool thing is that when that pattern has been established, when it has been hammered into your understanding, it makes books like The Green Ripper explode into you like fascination grenades. For at least two books before that, McDonald was setting up McGee for a pleasant and satisfying happy ending, and then he blows his whole life up.
Fluctuating between leaving the characters happy and blowing up their lives seems to happen to a lot of series writers. McGee is one example, but I can spin off a bunch of examples right away.
Like Spenser. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is a more interesting, weird character than McGee from the very first book (The Godwulf Manuscript). And things happen to Spenser, he evolves. But he hits the life blows up part of his over all arc in the 12th book in the series, A Catskill Eagle. And since then, he's gone through 20 more books. Some good, some only OK, but the stakes have never seemed as high as in Eagle.
Back to Coben. His hero Myron Bolitar blows to pieces around book six, I think. Part of the problem is that, I can’t tell the books apart by just their titles.
If I remember right, Dennis Lehane went five books before he blew up his Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro characters. Maybe just 4, with 5 being chock full of aftermath
Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch hasn't blown up yet, but I think that's because he's got so little to blow up. I mean, if Bosch were living in an SRO like Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder used to, with nothing more than a few jazz records and suits, I don't think the novels would be significantly different. Though having his ex appear with a kid is at least changing things somewhat. Reminiscent of Travis McGee’s suddenly appearing daughter in The Lonely Silver Rain, a book only worth reading because it clearly seems to be heading toward McGee's suicide until his never-before-hinted-at daughter appears. Though since Connelly is alive, Bosch gets to keep evolving.
I have to note a nice reversal of the Blow Up, in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. I can't say as I liked these novels too much, because reading them in about a week was a bit too relentlessly the same old thing. And the book that is most different from the others is the first one I read, The Enemy, which is a flashback to Reacher's days in the Army. And that's where he had his Blow Up, form which the series is basically aftermath.
All these guys are working the Chandler street (except for Child, who feels more Spillane and Ian Fleming influenced): "But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Fine with me. I personally think The Long Goodbye is probably the most important American novel of the 20th Century, and would be willing to argue it's also the best. But that's another day.
John D. MacDonald: Travis McGee, Ft. Lauderdamndale houseboat living, "recovery expert" and ladies' man.
Harlan Coben: Myron Bolitar, hyper sports agent.
Michael Connelly: Harry Bosch, depressed LA cop
Dennis Lehane: Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro, Boston PIs with lots of personality
Robert B. Parker: Spenser, one-named immortal Boston PI
Lee Child: Jack Reacher, drifter and killing machine
Lawrence Block: Matthew Scudder, NYC alcoholic detective
Other readable series:
John Sandford: Lucas Davenport, speed crazed Minneapolis cop
(Prey) novels
Robert Crais: Elvis Cole, LA private detective with lots of personality
Back On the Chain Gang
And didn't that work nicely?
Let's see. The last few in front of me:
Cold Service / Robert B. Parker
The Motive / John Lescroart
Blink / Malcolm Gladwell
Shadowmarch, Volume 1 / Tad Williams
The Pentagon's New Map / Thomas PM Barnett
Shadow of the Giant / Orson Scott Card
All the Flowers Are Dying / Lawrence Block
I have no useful thoughts about Blink. Very, very superficial, but interesting in a popcorn kind of way. Gladwell kind of lost me when he took on the Diallo case and determinedly refused to present any point of view about it.
Pentagon's New Map was by far the most optimistic foreign affairs book I have ever read. I don't want to go into his entire argument -- though I find the overall concept pretty compelling. Core States are stable, the States in the non-integrating Gap are unstable and are the source of much of current turmoil and violence. Integrating those Gap States is a goal that can be achieved through many means, including trade and war, but the idea is to give them clear views of evolving futures instead of constant instability. Frankly, Barnett probably had me convinced when he presented Core v/s Gap as Locke's hopes versus Hobbes' nightmares.
Two thoughts I had when reading it. Not issues, not arguments, but concerns based on my own knowledge and experience.
1-- I am not clear on how Barnett sees the Leviathan and SysAdmin forces being comprised, but he seems more sold on the capabilities of Special Forces than I am. That said, he only covers force composition briefly, and I feel like I'm setting up straw men even thinking about this in detail.
2-- Barnett's description of the free flow of capital around the globe -- especially from the Core ito the Gap -- feels like the right idea, as does the free flow of Labor -- especially from the Gap to the Core. But the model he describes is prone to the basic drawback that Walter Reuther would recognize: Capital unfettered abuses Labor.
Are there ways around that? Sure. But I distrust that corporations, left to themselves, will make much effort to improve the lives of those in the Core.
But again, Barnett sees economic transformation as just one of three ways in which countries can evolve. So I am curious to see his full view expanded upon.
As I look over both these points, I suspect that both of them come down to my reaction to Barnett's language. On the Gap enforcement force, he sounds remarkably like the counterinsurgency advocates who talked Kennedy into a viewpoint on how we could fight in Vietnam. And his language about economic transformation sounds too similar to the dot com bullshit that I worked through from '95 to, uh, now. Doesn't make him wrong, just makes his language trip the wrong levers in my head.