Coming Soon 3--I Changed My Mind

I can do that right?

So, I will save James Joyce for another day. It has been a long time since I have read McCarthy. I think I am going to enjoy this one immensely. 

Fight Club ch. 20

Just a short post this time. I thought Palahniuk made some interesting choices in chapter twenty. 

In Chapter twenty, the narrator goes out on a homework assignment for Project Mayhem--Tyler has asked his groupies to bring him twelve driver's licenses to prove that they had made twelve human sacrifices. The narrator targets a Korner Mart (convenience store) employee named Raymond Hessel. He points the gun at Raymond's face and starts rummaging through his pockets. 

I like this scene for two reasons: first, the narrator lets Raymond go. He doesn't kill Raymond like I assume Tyler has instructed him to. The narrator looks through Raymond's wallet and discovers little details about him from the contents--a library card and a college student ID. He asks Raymond why he isn't going to school anymore? What he was studying? What he wanted to be when he grew up? They he lets Raymond go. The narrator tells Raymond that he will be watching him and if Raymond doesn't get back into school and begin working towards being a veterinarian (like he dreamed), then he will come and kill him. I love this. I love that the narrator decides that this young man needs this in his life. All he needs is a little push to get back into the right path. Which is very interesting because the narrator has rejected that same path. He walked what he is asking Raymond to walk and it didn't bring him any fulfillment. At the end, the narrator decided that it was all a lie and he really had nothing in his life; nothing made him happy. And yet, he pushes Raymond to seek after this dream. I love the last couple of lines...

"Now, I'm going to walk away so don't turn around."This is what Tyler wants me to do."These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth."I am Tyler's mouth."I am Tyler's hands."Everybody in Project Mayhem is part of Tyler Durden, and vice versa."Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life."

I'm sure that meal was the best he's every tasted.

They add Tyler Durden to this scene in the movie, which is an interesting choice.

The second thing that I really like about this chapter is the use of the second person. I usually don't like it when authors use "you" in their writing because it is so difficult to get right. Palahniuk gets it right in this chapter. You can feel the tension because this is happening to you. 

"You gave me your wallet like I asked.
"Your name was Raymond K. Hessel on your driver's license. You live at 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.
[...]
"Raymond K. K. K. K. K. K. Hessel, I was talking to you."

The use of you draws the reader in and after a while you really get into the scene. At the end when you are let go, you can breath again.  Because you realize that you've been holding your breath the entire time.

Fight Club and the Man-Child

My mind keeps going back to my chapter 6 read along of Fight Club, and how Palahniuk talked about a generation of men raised by women. How men don't know how to be men anymore. Those thoughts reminded me of several articles (even a book) written about this very subject; the foremost being an article by Kay S. Hymowitz entitled Where Have the Good Men Gone, published in 2011 in the Wall Street Journal.

Essentially, Hymowitz details the decline of the modern American male. She discusses the societal phenomenon wherein men become stuck in this limbo--pre-adulthood. These "pre-adult" men "talk about Star Wars like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his band mates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends." They wait longer periods of time before starting a career, getting married, settling down, and having children. And this problem is perpetuated by our society. Mom and Dad say, "why not, he can move into the basement." "Getting a job right now is tough." Hymowitz doesn't necessarily blame these "pre-adult" men, but more points the finger at American society. Although, I would make sure these "men" do understand that this problem isn't out of their control--they could make the choices to become responsible...anyway.

I wonder if Palahniuk is concerned about this same thing. Let's go back to chapter 6 and look at a passage one more time:

   "My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what?
     "My dad didn't know.
     "When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married.
     "I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need."

Sure sounds like the same thing that Hymowitz is talking about. The narrator drags himself through the milestones of life, not quite sure what should be next. He has a job, a nice apartment, beautiful furniture, and a top-of-the-line car. But he isn't happy; in fact, the narrator is miserable--he can't sleep, he doesn't seem to have friends, he drunkenly spins through life. He consults with his "father," but even then he doesn't get any certainty. There used to be a set plan and now that plan has been thrown out the window and set on fire. Men (and especially the narrator in Fight Club) don't know where to turn, where to go, what's next.

The narrator creates Tyler as his new father-figure, but Tyler is part of this problem. Tyler is the epitome of the "pre-adult." Tyler is the frat boy with ideas of anarchy. Tyler doesn't have a career, he has a series of jobs. Tyler squats in an abandoned house in a shifty part of town. He cuts in scenes of pornography into family movies because he thinks its funny. He drinks and fights and plans to shake the world up. But does Tyler contribute anything to society? I would argue that he doesn't. "Pre-adult" men don't contribute, they just take.

Fight club, the group of "pre-adult" men who gather in the basement of a bar to smash each other's faces in, is a definition perfect example of what Hymowitz is talking about. I like to think that Palahniuk is writing this as a rejection of the idea of the man-child. He creates a narrator that simply cannot do the work of an adult. Because of his failure, the narrator reverts back to this man-child ideal and ruins his own life and the life of those around him. For a while he is happy, but he continually has to find more extreme things to occupy his time. This all leads to his eventual suicide. He doesn't like what he has become. The man-child destroys the narrator.

Fight Club ch. 6 Read Along

Still really enjoying this book. Such a delight to re-read. I look forward into jaunt into this world each evening. 

My thoughts for this read along are in no particular order:

• "I did this to myself." 
• More on lines like this later.
• "Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath and sprayed blood to say, stop."
• Now this is a sentence. While some people may slap the hand of people who write sentences like this, I really love them. Thus why I am drawn to authors like Faulkner, Joyce, McCarthy, and now I guess Palahniuk. You can see this happening though. The description is simple and beautiful.
• "Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer." and "Maybe self-destruction is the answer."
• But between those two lines is this one, "Tyler never knew his father." Now this idea comes up several more times in this chapter, but we are beginning to see this theme formulate throughout the novel. Now-a-days we have a lot of young men being raised without a male figure to look up to, to learn from. Who is teaching these men to shave, to fix things, to fight, to take a punch, to throw the ball. I don't think that I am the best person to answer these questions as I am not the manliest of men (I mean I read and discuss literature for a living--nothing better than curling up with a good book), but there is something to be said about the modern man and what we have devolved into. Maybe this is why Mr. Warren says that every young man should be required to read Fight Club.
• Then we get the famous rules of Fight Club that every knows from the movie.
• "What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women."
• Nothing inherently wrong with being raised by a woman. Many great men have been raised by women. But like I said before, do we lose something by not having a male figure to look up to?
• Then Palahniuk talks about football on television and it occurs to me that we are used to watching other men doing manly things rather than doing manly things ourselves. He has this great line, not entirely appropriate, but the point is made: "After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having sex." The point is this...that we watch people being manly and never get out there and do man things for ourselves. We don't hunt for our own food. Heck, I hate working in the yard. Building my shed in the backyard was probably one of the worst experiences of my life, I hated it. But that is what a man would do, right? He would get up and build something out of wood, build it to last.
• "The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men."
• "I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need."
• Another good point to my whole argument about men. The narrator talks about walking through his life, just jumping through the hoops. Graduation high school because that is what is expected of you. Going to college to get a degree. Upon graduating, what comes next? Get a job. Get married. Have children. Work until you can retire. Our lives are scripted these days. Everyone follows the same formula. But are we really happy? Living our lives which are the copies of every other life, are we really happy? Palahniuk would say no, I think. And what will break the mold? Being a man.
• "You aren't alive anywhere like you're alive at fight club."
• "Fight club isn't about words."
• "Sometimes, Tyler speaks for me."
• Again, hints at things that will come later.

I agree with all of this to a point though. Palahniuk is trying to make the point that we are all the same and that men are no longer men. But if we all attending fight club and "become" men, then don't we have the same problem again? The meathead cliche of men is one I actively reject, and I spent a lot of time trying to dispel when I used to teach All Boys English. Men are just a varied as any other group of people and I believe that is a good thing. Being a man can mean so many different things. I especially like the renaissance man ideal--a man that is strong, smart, artistic, and sensitive. Hey Palahniuk, how about a fight club of the mind?

Fight Club ch. 2

Introduced to Marla Singer in chapter two and Palahniuk shows his description chops in this chapter.

"Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses, this woman was also in my  tuberculosis support group Friday night. She was in my melanoma round table Wednesday night. Monday night she was in my Firm Believers leukemia rap group. The part down the center of her hair is a crooked lightning bolt of white scalp."

"Skim milk thin" and "buttermilk sallow" are just the most awesome of descriptions. I don't think she is supposed to come across a beautiful or anything. Maybe androgynous? Her features don't scream gorgeous; more like sickly

And she seems to be smoking the entire time the narrator is watching her in this scene. I find that interesting and would like to come back to it later.

The other thing I would like to revisit in a future blog post is the fact that the narrator is at a support group for men who suffer from testicular cancer. And the group is called Remaining Men Together. I find it very ironic. Plus Marla is there.

Like I said, I want to circle back around to this one, but I find it very interesting.

The Drowned, by Al Maginnes

Another beautiful poem this week from Linebreak, The Drowned, by Al Maginnes. It also includes a wonderful reading of the poem by Penelope Pelizzon.

The Drowned

by Al Maginnes

                              Already the first of the year has entered
                                        the calm prayer of the lake and become
                              a part of it, his last essential song trapped
                                        forever below the surface, blued syllables
               (5)          slipped from the vessel of his body.
                                        They remain though the rest of him was
                              raised, pale, a creature of half-land, half-water.
                                        Spring and summer claim their share
                              of drunken boaters, careless fishermen.
               (10)                  But rarely this early in the year, this close
                              to shore. I know that bend of water, how shallow
                                        it stands close to the bank. Only
                              the very drunk or unlucky, only one determined
                                        not to rise would slide under and stay.
               (15)        When I was fourteen, a minister who professed
                                        a home-brewed faith of his own sent
                              blurred photos of himself walking on water
                                        to a newspaper. When a covey
                              of reporters came to see the feat repeated,
               (20)                  the minister announced he could not
                              perform miracles in the face of such doubt.
                                        He left the brown river untrod, returned
                              to his congregation whose prayers would
                                        rise like floodwaters, unstopped by doubt.
               (25)         Deep in the gummy mud that is the lake's floor,
                                        the last words of the drowned burrow
                              deeper than any prayers can reach, preserved
                                        in water where no miracles come to pass.

I just want to focus on the first sentence of this poem, which spans several poetic lines. 

"Already the first of the year has entered / the calm prayer of the lake and become / a part of it, his last essential song trapped / forever below the surface, blued syllables / slipped from the vessel of his body."

Maginnes has some interesting language here--interesting use of pronouns. 

In the beginning we have the "first of the year" entering "the calm prayer of the lake." So the actor is the "first of the year," the action is entering. And what is the "first of the year" entering? "[T]he calm prayer of the lake." It isn't entering the lake, it is entering a prayer. 

Then the "first of the year" "become[s] part of it." What is it? The lake? The calm prayer? The calm prayer of the lake? I think the answer is yes. Can you really separate a lake from it's calm prayer?

Then Maginnes uses the male pronoun--"his." As in "his last essential song trapped / forever below the surface." I am assuming that the his refers back to the "first of the year" since that is our character. The first of the year is a he?

Well, regardless, it is a beautiful, interesting line of poetry.

Book Review: The Dinosaur Lords

The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Many people have talked about this book by saying that it is a cross between A Game of Thrones and Jurassic Park, which could not be further from the truth.

The Dinosaur Lords follows four protagonists in different parts of this world. One is the daughter of the Emperor of the land, a daughter who doesn't always agree with her father, or the way the empire is run. The second is the Princesses lover, who is the darling of the empire--a poet, leader of a religious order of dinosaur knights, and one of the most brilliant military commanders of his time. He is pushed by an unflinching sense of duty to the empire. Then we have Rob and Karyl whose story is really one because they are so intertwined. These two are charged with helping a small defenseless town prepare for raids from a much larger, aggressive kingdom. Giving that part a very similar vibe to the film Seven Samurai.

There were parts of this book that I liked. There were other parts that I didn't really care for, thus why I only gave the book a three star rating.

Milan's world building is interesting. I liked this world and especially the little bits of world info at the beginning of each chapter. It seems to me that people from our world, many ages ago, were transported to this new world. They brought some things with them--cats, ferrets, horses...etc.--but they went to a world where dinosaurs were not whipped out. This was extremely interesting to me. I would love to read a book about that--where the characters are figuring out how to get to this new planet with dinosaurs.

I enjoyed the Rob and Karyl storyline. It was the most interesting to me. I liked that it was interspersed throughout all of the chapters. I did enjoy Melodia's plot towards the end. There were parts of the book where she was a snore-fest. Jaume's plot was the least interesting to me. I just did not care about him.

There are some awesome battle scenes in this book. Milan is really great a writing battle so it is easy to follow and so the reader can sense the importance of what is happening. Milan excels here where George R. R. Martin has failed in the past--A Clash of Kings I'm looking at you. And Milan is certainly an accomplished writer. He has some wonderful sentences and many of the descriptions are just gorgeous. You feel like you can see these things unfolding in front of you.

But, I felt like this story could have happened anywhere. The dinosaurs could have been horses just as easily and the story would have been the same. And the dinosaurs didn't even make this novel. The story was unimpressive and the dinosaurs didn't make up for that. It was just an average story that had some dinosaurs in it. The problem I have with this is that there was sooo much hype for this book. People were raving, "Why hasn't someone thought up this before?" But I don't know that Milan did all he could this idea. This book was an instant buy for me when I read the description and it was just an average fantasy novel, at best.

I had a difficult time getting into this book as well. The first couple chapters are confusing and a hard entry point--beautifully written, but hard to get into this world. It's as if Milan doesn't want you to feel welcomed until after the battle in the first couple of chapters is over. And I don't know why an author would want that to happen to his readers. I would think that some people would put the book down because of the difficult entry point in this book.

Now, let's get back to the comparison that I noted at the beginning. This book is not a cross between A Game of Thrones and Jurassic Park. The intrigue is no where near A Game of Thrones. The characters are not as fleshed out. The dinosaurs aren't nearly as interesting as those in Jurassic Park. And this is the one that gets me the most: this isn't as good a book as either of those. Now, I love George R. R. Martin as an author. I think he has done some awesome things with his Song of Ice and Fire series. But to be not as good as Jurassic Park? I mean I like Michael Crichton, but he is no Martin. Jurassic Park, while not the best book, is better than this. Go read A Game of Thrones or Jurassic Park instead!

I don't know if I will be picking up the second novel. This one ended in a way that certainly points towards a sequel. I'm assuming that these books will eventually be turned into a movie or maybe a television series. I think they would totally work in that venue. Seeing dinosaurs clash in jousting tourneys would certainly be something to behold on the screen. I would probably tune in. But as a book, it just doesn't do enough to get more than an average rating.

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