LookingLand

50bookchallenge update:

no. 29 ~ Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink ~ this book is a young adult Newberry award winner about a girl growing up out west while the war is raging in the east (her father paid the dodge, which i admit predisposed me against him from the start ~ an opinion that didn't improve later when he gives up an english inheritence so they can be Americans). junk. blech. boring, badly written, and not only insultingly simplistic and goody-goody, but just lame. i'm surprised i finished it. nothing to see here, move along.

in film: i watched Syriana but i sort of faded in and out of it due to tiredness. i think i liked it generally, but that's really all i can say about it. kinda a depressing film.

today i had amazing squid curry at some little thai place on the U strip. i'm getting around despite the parking problem. it's fun to be all urbanite in some ways, but i'm still glad i don't live in that twin. it rained all day, which was lovely, but the dogs are kinda insane for it.

i've got tons of work to do this weekend: homework and ADV work. i'm writing the TV series for Moeyo Ken. i liked the mini-series we did of it, so it should be mildly fun. anyway, it'll be nice to have the money.

writing has bogged down hellaciously. i'm a little befuddled by the reviews of "The Hot Spot" ~ good reviews, all, but the problems that need to be fixed at the same problems that have existed since time immemorial and coming up with another angle to try to solve them seems like a long way from my capabilities at the moment. i'm not discouraged, and i even have some thoughts about how to fix a thing or two ~ but it's going to be a spell before i can sit with it and work it all out.

and i have been making a lot of paper dolls lately, so for the time being that's been my creative output. this weekend i will try to scan some to share.

hope everyone on my f-list is well ~ seems like this is a busy time for a lot you too!

: D

no. 16 on my 50bookchallenge is jack dann's The Silent. this is a book i bought years ago, started, then put down and hadn't gone back to. when i moved, i almost gave it away, but i kept it at the last minute thinking i'd get around to reading it.

last night i got around to reading it. i stuck with it, though i remembered why i had stopped reading it in the first place. it's got a first person narrator who's allegedly writing the book as instructed by a doctor for "therapuetic" reasons (yeah, it's already stretching my believability ~ and then it reads like no 14 year-old boy would ever write, with both profanities and eloquence that just make you shake your head in wonder).

you get over that and into the story and it gets even more tedious. like a catalog of checked-off war horrors. decapitated head (check), bloated body (check), amputated leg (check). worse yet, it felt as though jack dann sat around thinking: what disgusting, horrible thing can i do to this character next? between the rape and murder of his mother, the protagonist's own rape by a yankee malingerer (huh? this moment is so random!), gratuitous masturbation, his run-in with a pedophile colonel (geh! stop!), and then the buckets of blood and entrails and maggots (oh the maggots!), i was pretty bored and tired of it rather quick. i never knew horror could be so dull.

and ask anyone: i'm the last person to defend stonewall jackson, but dann's insinuation that jackson was a closet drunk is just ludicrous.

sadly, some of the writing is very good (some phrases, some descriptions are wonderful!), but the effect overall is repetitious and ham-fisted (and how many times do we have to repeat about the guy shot in the head with the maggots oozing out of the wound?)--(not to mention those are the fastest maggots in the world the way they spontaneously generate after a battle. maggots take 24 hours to hatch and up to three days to mature).

other weirdness in the book include how the temperature was hot and then cold and then snowing, but not really. and there were characters who were there, but not, and had died but were alive. i think part of this is supposed to be the state of trauma of the character, but it was very confusing and the symbol of the "spirit dog" that follows the boy was utterly pointless and wasted.

i found the following review on amazon and pretty much agree with it:

Jack Dann's "The Silent" features a mix of overheated spiritualism, glaringly anarchronistic dialogue, and an embarrassingly voyeuristic approach to sex that left me chuckling inwardly at the same time I reproached myself for wasting my time on this bit of historical deconstructionism. Interestingly, one scene in a field hospital and another describing preparations for battle were so vivid and truthful that I was even more astounded by Dann's novelistic chicanery. Lump this in with "Cold Mountain" as one of the more wayward and self-indulgent misuses of American history in a novel.

(bold emphasis mine). a big disappointment, to say the least. and after i'd held on to it for so many years!

: o p

i guess the good thing to come out of this is that i'm reminded to ease up on the clutch when it comes to the sex and gore in my own writing. i could very easily fall into the same trap given some of the plot elements of my own work. i might reread Stewart O'Nan's Prayer for the Dying to be reminded that real horror isn't what the writer shows you, it's what you piece together from what's not being said.

The March is proving a struggle to read. i dunno if i'm just not focused, but Doctorow's writing feels really uneven in this (some of his words just astonish me: murderousness? are you seriousness?) and the way time bops around between characters has got me a wee confused as to who is who. And some of the characters I just don't like (either that or their immediate story) and feel like I am skimming. i get that sense that some of these things will dovetail and many of them won't, which i find frustrating. i don't want really cotton to novels that are really novellas masquerading as novels (this was my frustration with how Kantor's Andersonville devolved toward the end).

all this and i'm only on page 57. hahahahaha ~ slow reading, all right. i'm sure it'll pick up once i get into it.

~ * ~

yesterday i wrote an essay on how technical and managerial discourse is befouling the waters of critical thinking in education.

i must be back in school. i think it's dawning on me now.

~ * ~

i need a new device.

in the frist book of From Slaughter's Mountain i got away with just using quotes at the start of each section that were indicative of who was speaking. i think it mostly worked, unless you tend to just read and ignore quotes and notes at the tops of chapters. of the few people who've read the book, more than once i've been told that it "takes a while" to get a handle on which character is which. i think this is why it's so important to really get States's voice "right". he's not distinct enough from Lewis except in his proper grammar usage. Sharp is easy. no problem separating Sharp from the other two, but even though i can see the wall of difference between Lewis and States, i can see how someone coming in cold would need more time to acclimate.

so i've been wondering if there's some other device that would supplement the quotes, perhaps. i'm seriously considering using the portraits. on the one hand, it seems intrusive (the repetition of the pictures would get old, wouldn't it? on the other hand, it seems the most obvious way to clarify a split first-person narrative. here: here's the person speaking.

eh ~ when i put it that way, it sounds downright facile and pedestrian.

does anyone know of any split first-person narratives that are successful? (but not epistolary ~ the whole letter/diary-writing thing makes me crazy and that's not what i'm doing).

: o p

( as promised: truly bad victorian prose from Andersonville Violets )

my favorite moment in the whole book, however is this:

She laid her head on John's breast and sobbed like a little child. Her brave task ended, she was only a woman now.

i tell you: there's something to offend everyone in this book. it has been way too amusing.

: D

i got five books for my birthday, so there's a huge pile waiting for me.

i'm finishing up MacKinley Kantor's Andersonville and thought i ought to share some thoughts on it (the big fat 750 page ordeal that it is). there are spoilers in this, be forewarned.

i am only half-kidding about it being an ordeal. i thought i might give up after the third chapter (which is always the "danger" chapter for me in any book) ~ but i was compelled by the keen writing to persevere and i am glad i did.

the big three positives:

1. it's really well-written ~ the characterizations are marvelous and the level of detail is astonishing. it really sucks you into the world in an amazing way (both inside the stockade as well as in the neighboring georgia farmsteads). the dialogue is a pure joy: the idioms, the slang, the peculiarities of the New Yorkers, the coal miners, the Georgia reserves, etc. I think the language of the men and women is what really makes this book worth owning.

2. the characters are interesting and have lovely mannerisms and voices. kantor weaves their personal histories into the book so seamlessly that you can jump from the bowery to the stockade without blinking an eyelash and everything feels very organic and "real" ~ the historical figures are interestingly drawn. Wirz is complex (and insane), Father Whelan compelling and affectionate, the Raiders well-motivated, and random "real" prisoners like John Ransom and Chickamauga nicely drawn (though interestingly, I have to say Ransom and Bateese were some of the thinner characters in the novel ~ perhaps Kantor was shy of filling in what wasn't historical fact, though he did wonders with the Raiders).

3. many of the storylines are excellently executed. you can follow one character through an arc and it's as if you are getting a whole nine-course meal with a satisfying dessert at the end. now, i say most ~ there are a few duds and clunkers among the rest. The Willie Mann story is especially satisfying. As well as the Flory Tebbs story and the Willie Collins story and the Colonel Persons story. The Caffeys and Dillards and likable (Veronica Caffey being an exception ~ i was so glad when she was dead). Some of the stories were predictable (was disappointed with the Laurel Tebbs arc, ah well), but for the most part the book didn't lapse into maudlin clichés or obnoxious stereotypes. After the trial and hanging, i really missed Father Whelan ~ his absence felt really sudden ~ like he was dropped and forgotten.

the big three negatives:

1. the style is a little overwhelming at first, but i was able to get into a stride with it. the lack of quotation marks and dialogue attribution was very well handled, but there was a time or two that i stumbled over who was saying what or whether someone was actually talking and that made me frustrated for having to back up and re-read whole sections sometimes.

2. the story is told with a decidedly northern slant, i think. general winder is presented as a monster more horrendous than even wirz. i admit i don't know enough about the actual history to know whether this is over the top, but good heavens, the inhumanity of it is appalling. i don't feel kantor did much to off-set this. much of the worst cruelty is depicted as absolutely deliberate. while he makes eloquent cases for the barbarous conditions which turn men into monsters, he's pretty condemnatory of military arrogance and stupidity and savagery (as well he should be, but i question the degree, as i said, to which he asserts that the horror was intentional).

3. the structure of the novel is a mite frustrating. this is its biggest failure, i think. the book begins with the building of the stockade, the arrival of the prisoners, and the subsequent domination struggles as the Raiders rise to power and then are overthrown and hanged. that brings us midway through the book after which the structure devolves into a plethora of semi-random chapters about the trials and tribulations of one man after another (most of whom are new men and so there's no carry-over from the Raiders storyline). this was frustrating because no matter how well all these stories are written (and they were well-written), they just seem a diversion from action that we were invested in prior to their interruption. the height of this problem is a long chapter that dwells on the european travels of Nathan Dreyfoos, who is kidnapped by bandits in Spain (what all this has to do with Andersonville is never made clear). ultimately the character meets his end in an interesting and poignant way, but would have been just as effective or even moreso without all that digression about mules, baking bread, and naked ladies in knives. if anything this long digression made me lose my interest in the character and undercut the shock of his death because Kantor had removed us so far from what had made the character likable and interesting to begin with.

the gist of the complaint is this: it really feels like a novel and a set of short stories embedded within the larger framework of the viewpoint of the Caffeys (the farmer and his daughter who live closeby). i enjoyed it muchly, but got tired of it before it ran out of pages (and that can't be a good sign).

~ * ~

and that's that. i guess.

not sure what else there is to say about it except i recommend it with all sorts of caveats ~ i think you have to be a fan of the genre to really appreciate what's remarkable about the book. if you're on the outside of the history, it may be difficult to get into the era and "get" all the nuances.

: D