I’ll let this general subject stand, and comment below with hope to hear some of you chime in, if you’ve seen the new move or not.

This should be a lively discussion…the quantity of books published in the last decade, and amount of time invested in reading them means there will be far less “shared” time with the same books as our fellow Hollow Men.

On a second note- I am going to do some work on a graphic novel (semi-inspired by Maus) based on a character I will call Promi the Squirell, who steals a flaming marshmallow from a suburban fire pit. My initial sketches ceertainly aren’t of the caliber of Ned’s but, whacha gonna do?

Peters may remember a friend of mine by the name of Jason Neulander, then Artistic Director of Salvage Vanguard Theater.  For the last decade or so he has been working on-again-off-again on The Intergalactic Nemesis.   It started as a radio show, then live performance, then comic book, and now live performance/comic book/online serial?

The Intergalactic Nemesis is obviously pulpy but I think you all will find it interesting.  And I think that more meaningful work could be (and probably has been) done in this cross media format.  Anyway I’m looking forward to the live performance.

Check it out if you have time.

Adam Rex’s Blog

I just finished reading a book of essays by Wendell Berry, entitled, The Way of Ignorance (I got it for Christmas, unfortuantely, I didn’t get Life is a Miracle). One of the most interesting articles is by Courtney White on the revitalization of the western wild (his essay was included with Berry’s). I like Berry when he talks about farming, politics, and ecology. When he talks about writing and gets more philosophical, not so much. I also am enjoying Shaun Tan’s new series of illustrated stories, entitled, Tales from Outer Suburbia.

I enjoyed seeing Amanda and Peters over the break and speaking briefly with Toby. J.E., your package arrived and the ornament is quite striking. The kids were very excited. Shotts, I hope to get to the cities once the snow melts and see that little guy. It’s freezing up here. Hope you all had good holidays.

I feel that McEwan is making a statement about how certain behaviors can not be made right in life. To that I agree, one can not go back and change the decisions one has made, for better or worse we are bound by time; and I think in the most catholic sense, we can not atone for such choices. But in a larger sense, I feel that we can change. We learn from our mistakes, and we are changed by regret. I think there is something in this, maybe not equal to atonement, but very valuable nonetheless.

The ending of the book (radically more complex than the movie) confused me. SPOIILER ALERT: Briony’s character does not seem to be aware that her exposing of the rape and shaming others will not, in fact, bring about any kind of resolution or “atonement” for her own earlier actions. This is sad if nothing else.

But then, with the references to an author being like God and that there can be no atonement for God or authors because they can bend reality however they want to, I sort of lost him and what he was trying to say about life or fiction or atonement. The book certainly leaves your thoughts running in circles as to what fiction is and what a story is.

2) I also recently finished John Berger’s new book of essays. The essays are more political than many of his past and there is less about art. I think I prefer his book Shape of a Pocket. But I am glad to have read these new essays, especially a couple of them.

3) I am now in the middle of two books, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright, and The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr. (winner of the 1978 National Book Award), which is a fantasy influneced by Chaucer, Milton, and other cultural fables and myths.

As far as the Wright book goes I still think, as I did with the Moral Animal, that he takes too long developing his arguments, but I am enjoying it. It is interesting that he brings up some ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the somewhat nonconventional Catholic monk/paleontologist/anthropologist who I happened to be reading when I was reading the Moral Animal. He focuses especially on de Chardin’s idea of society as a brain or organism and the more we unite and connect, the more we resemble the evolution of a complex organism. Maybe this simply prooves deChardin’s famous concept that “everything that rises, must converge.” Of course, he dismisses de Chardin’s mystical aspects. I appreciate the breadth of Wright’s writing, all of the sources he brings in.

I should have time to read this week (as Sara is leaving for a weekend with her sisters) but not much, since I need to be painting my ass off.

4) Next on my list is River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit, just in case anybody actually reads this far into my post.

5) I also read an interesting article about Dark Energy and Dark Matter in the New York Times on Tuesday.

6) And it looks like it is shaping up to be Obama. Hope he picks a good running partner.

7) I saw the Golden Compass. The actress they chose for Lyra was great, but the movie actually felt lighter, less dark and less urgent than the book. It will be interesting to see if they make the next two.

I also managed to see Prince Caspian, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There is a scene where they attack Prince Miraz’s castle that is really visually rich and seems to spell out a subtle lesson of pre-emptive warfare that is relevant to our times. The movie is perhaps almost embarrassingly satisfying, but maybe I didn’t mind that so much in this instance. I was happy just having fun.

9) Of course, I felt a little guilty. Eliot and I are reading the Narnia series together, and he has been swinging a sword and shield I made for him for a costume party, pretending to be Peter the knight. So when he discovered I had seen the movie, he was full of questions about Peter… and about when he gets to see it…

10) Just thought this post was long enough to constitute ten items.

Things I liked about the film:
1) It is really quite subtle and actually relies entirely at certain points on the actors ability to communicate simply through expressions and body language.
2) The visuals are strong, both beautiful and repelling.
3) The chronology and storytelling are engaging (though even I haven’t read the book it is obvious there was some chopping of details).
4) Its ending makes you think and reflect about its themes quite effectively, forgiveness, judgment, the imagination, class, etc.

Things I wonder about:
1) I am familiar with only one other story by McEwan, Black Dogs. I like Atonement better. Both stories rely on a rape as a central part of the plot. Even though this may even have metaphorical implications beyond traditional plot devices, it struck me as a bit strange.

Maybe those of you who have read more McEwan can comment. I wondered about this because Atonement seems to be about reality versus fiction and the power of fiction to redeem real life mistakes. Any thoughts on this?

I will say that we both thought the movie was a powerful and dramatic story. Just that one thing came up in our discussion.

There isn’t too much new there, but it offers a good overview of some of the ideas of Moral Psychology and relates them to issues of the environment at the end.

I’m glad that he brings up Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of reciprocal trust and action. He once again dismisses religion by saying that Plato did away with it 2,400 years ago, which again, seems a bit odd, but the article has a lot of good info.

It does seem funny that these guys keep insisting that “love thy neighbor as thy self” is the ultimate moral concept, but keep dismissing religion. Oh well.

Here’s the link if you guys get a chance. It’s about eight pages; so probably takes about fifteen minutes to read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

It really is difficult for me to describe how much reading that book meant to me. It kind of seared me. It succeeds on so many levels that at times it was difficult for me to think of it as fiction, and yet that sounds as if the fact that it is fiction is somehow a detraction. What a miracle that something imagined can emanate into the minds of others so entirely.

Of course, I’m sure that all of this sounds like blathering, and perhaps others would not have the same experience I had with the novel as they have not had the same experience with life, but I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to experience it.

I just finished The Dream Life of Shukhanov by Olga Grushin. It was a terribly engaging book that takes place in real time over three or four days, but covers in flashbacks much of the life of a Soviet artist/critic. There are several narrative techniques that are interesting, such as the way the book flows from third person narration to first. But I guess the most valuable part of the book to me was what it said about living with the choices we make, the life we live, and the art we do and don’t make. It reminded me a bit of Ishiguro’s novels in that it begins to blur the main character Sukhanov’s past with his present in an effort to reconcile the two lives he has led in a manner that is almost surreal.

So since I took twenty minutes of my time I ask you to take twenty minutes of your time to review this TED talk on A Brief History of Violence by Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker. Shotts if you are looking for an “popularized” science book, you can’t go wrong with anything by Pinker though I have only read The Language Instinct.

Anyway, this is sort of an evidenced based “feel good” story about how the chances of human being killed by another human have consistently dropped throughout history. Pinker talks about why we may believe that the opposite is true and what we may have done right in the last 400 years or so to make this possible. Please take time to view this. I think it’s really important.

The View From the Center of the Universe by Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams may be the most influential book I’ve read since The Moral Animal. This book takes the popular understanding of the “scientific worldview” and turns it on its head by rescuing our cosmology from the meaningless void. As with most science and philosophy texts it takes a lot of work to get through but I highly recommend it. You should expect several bog entries in 2008 referring to View from the Center.

Martin Amis’s, Time’s Arrow tells the story of a man’s life backwards. It’s an old device but very effective. If found that after I had been reading it for a while and had to put it down and perform some task I had to “set” my brain back to “forwards.”

I as I think I’ve mentioned before, I highly recommend Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell — a novel about English magic during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It’s a fantasy novel that reads like Jane Austen.

Oh yeah, I think I read something about Harry Potter and some stolen horses or something or other.

Jen and I will be at her parents’ home for a couple of days over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, then will be enjoying some restful days here in Minneapolis. We have a good few inches of snow on the ground, and it’s expected to snow tomorrow an inch or two. So no need for dreaming of a white Christmas in these parts. 

OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson is #33 on this week’s New York Times Bestsellers list. Amazing for such an introspective, literary work of translation. Funnily enough the book is just ahead of WAR AND PEACE. So take that, Tolstoy!

Any thoughts on the past year? Predictions for the new one? Anyone care to share some of their favorite books, albums, gallery exhibits, songs, movies, etc. of 2007? 

Here’s to what’s ahead… 

I have always enjoyed Scandinavian literature. Many Scandinavian authors share a preoccupation with the formation of the self in the early years of life — a preoccupation we Hollow Men seem to share as well.

Wish I had more intelligent things to say right now but it’s just to late for that. Suffice to say, thank you Graywolf Press for publishing this fine translation and thank you to Shotts for being such insistent champion of it. Though it is too early to tell, I suspect Out Stealing Horses will have a strong presence in my literary consciousness for many years to come.

I received my copy of Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” in the mail today and “read” it. It’s a graphic novel told totally in pictures about an immigrant’s experience in a strange and fantastic “new world” where he tries to make a living to bring his family with him from their oppressed homeland. Tan’s drawings are exquisite and evocative. It’s one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever seen both because of the art and the beauty of the story. At a time when many people in this country do not want to welcome immigrants, this story seems to have “arrived” at just the right historical moment. I think all of you would really enjoy it, but I especially recommend it to Toby. I’ve been watching Tan’s career for some time now, but this book is sure to cement it. You can view a few images from the graphic novel at his website here: http://www.shauntan.net but in order to really get a sense of the amount of drawing and the consistency of quality you should get a hold of a copy. Anyone interested in illustration and visual storytelling will love it.

I definitely admonish people to do what Shotts apparently had to do with the HP books and persevere through lengthy exposition (except in this case we can’t say Wright could have used a good editor, because apparently he is one). At times Wright will seem to be completely self-indulging in his hypothetical arguments, but keep reading – it all comes around. I feel that early in the book I could have skipped large sections, though I’m glad I didn’t.

I would like to thank J.E. for his recommendation, it has given me new insight into life (somewhat like Peters’ NVC recommendation). And I feel I do understand some of the formative influences on J.E.’s outlook and this makes me happy, as well as Peters’. And I have thoroughly enjoyed the recommendations from Shotts as well.

There is so much in the book that I can’t really respond to everything it covers (it kind of covers everything), but I am in primary agreement with most of Wright’s assertions, though that may be a misleading statement without qualifications. He is a generous mind, an attribute I would also ascribe to Stephen J Gould.

What I find extremely funny is that, in making his argument, Wright often brings up many of the exact issues we covered on the blog discussion, right down to actually comparing the characters of Mother Teresa and Donald Trump which I brought up in the earlier discussion with Peters. Wright also has a section in the back that specifically addresses the example of a soldier falling on a grenade which was also raised.

Both books do support the idea that humans are basically selfish (which is what Liz said, but I couldn’t discern if this was meant in a hopeless sense or a self-awareness sense), as well as self-serving, though not necessarily that everything we do we do to serve our own needs. Both books also encourage individuals to be conscious of this and why we are primarily self-serving, in order to resist this reality.

I would love to discuss the book further, but the blog, sadly, will simply not suffice for the depth of conversation needed. If you want to call me sometime, J.E., I’d love to chat with you about it or anyone else that reads it. I would say that if you were to reread the last eighty pages, from page 313 on to the end, you would see that with the Berger and Weil quotes I posted earlier we were never as far apart as was felt (at least as far apart as was felt by me at the time, if not you). You used the word freewill in a recent blog and this would make for an interesting discussion too.

My question for Toby is… “Got a recommendation?”

I recently read an article which talked about Rowling’s insistence that the themes and narrative arcs in the story are the product of a deeply felt Christianity. I felt that that was evident with this story more than the other stories that have made it to screen, for sure, but perhaps that is due to the escalting nature of the stories and good and evil. Her books, of course, took a beating from the right in this country, and I am amazed that Rowling managed to keep her Christianity basically a secret for all that time she was lambasted. She is quoted in the article as saying she felt that to state that Christianity undergirded the books was to give away the ending. In some ways I feel guilty for not having read the rest of the series (I thought at the time I finished the third book, years ago, that this series was never going to end and I wasn’t interested in reading the same thing over and over. I also read the first three books of the Series of Unfortunate Events). I do, as Shotts suggested, hope to enjoy them with my children some day, along with the Tolkien books and many others. Eliot has been learning some words with flash cards.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the film (which wouldn’t have been new to any of you readers of the series) was HP’s discovery of his father’s teasing and bullying of Snape. It is jolting and changing, that moment when you realize your parents are not right about everything and perhaps downright wrong about some things. I also read the NY Times article and found it interesting that Hitchens complains about the HP series’ avoidance of Christianity and then encourages readers to “graduate” to the Pullman trilogy.

There was an advertisement for the Golden Compass at the beginning of the film for which New Line cinema appears to have pulled out all the stops. I would strongly urge that anyone who plans to go see the movie (which I assume is all of the Hollow Men) should first read the entire trilogy, not necessarily as a recommendation from me, but because my guess from the preview is that they have toned down much of the philisophical content. And you certainly won’t get the Milton and biblical literary references from the film. It might make good discussion material; since in the very first scene of the book, Pullman deliberately decided to have a girl coming OUT of a wardrobe.

This may be a funny way to end this post, switching topics, but I’m curious as to how the HM would respond to this quote by Wright from the Moral Animal…

“Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest…it may be that the hallmark of the strongest, longest friendships is the depth of the shared bias; the best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly.”

From the Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

Pretty funny stuff.

*****I think Ned may be the only one here who has not read the whole series, but I want to at least put up a warning here that I will talk about particular plot details. So, in case you want to discover the books further for yourself, please don’t read further. I get the sense that Ned doesn’t care much, but I thought I should give proper warning.*****

I was disappointed in Book 7, actually. Nothing, in the end, felt that surprising about it, and it feels more like an inevitable conclusion rather than a riveting, surprise-laden finale. Sure, I was surprised that certain more minor characters died–Hedwig, Mad-Eye, Dobby, Fred, Lupin, and Tonks–but they felt sort of inconsequential, compared to how much fretting is done over Cedric Diggory, for instance. Sure, I thought maybe Hagrid would die, and he didn’t. But I felt the larger plot pieces–Harry having a piece of Voldemort within him as a Horcrux, Snape turning out to be doing Dumbledore’s bidding all the while, Snape being in love with Harry’s mother, Ron and Hermione finally getting together, etc.–were all in the realm of the predictable, and were all things I had entertained at some point in the series previously (certainly by Book 6). And I agree with Toby, in a different posting, that there is a serious lull in the book, while Harry, Hermione, and Ron go camping around various woods and locations pretty aimlessly–which confirms again for me that at least 200 pages could have been trimmed from the book. I would say that is true for Books 4 through 7, with the possible exception of Book 6, which could probably be trimmed 100 pages.

I did like the opening of The Deathly Hallows and did like the last 150 pages or so, when things moved forward at the pace the finale deserves. The Epilogue was perhaps the most predictable part of the book, and frankly, the Epilogue really took away the sense that evil, as part of the world, endures, which I think is a disappointing move, though I understand the pull toward having a shiny, happy ending: “All was well.” But that does feel like it pulls the seriousness out from under the whole series, in some ways.

Christopher Hitchens has an interesting review of Book 7 in today’s New York Times Book Review, and I believe you can read it online, if you haven’t already.

Looking over the whole series, there are some terrific things about the books–particularly Books 3 and 6. There are some imaginative, ingenious devices, and some thematic territories that I think are valuable for young people to explore. But I’m glad the series is over, and I hope Rowling will let it stay finished. The cleverness wore out over seven books, and for all the build up over making Voldemort into a villain with a complicated, disturbing, and interesting past, he came out in the end as another comic book villain with a lot of bluster but with the classic cardboard faulty arrogance that makes him lose control of his power. I lost it and it lost all credibility when 1) Mrs Weasley yells out to Beatrix LeStrange in all capitals: “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!” and that is followed on the next page by 2) Voldemort, alone with no other Death Eaters or allies, preparing to duel Harry, just back from the dead and surrounded by several Hogwarts professors and members of the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry then literally says “I don’t want anyone else to try to help. It’s got to be like this. It’s got to be me.” And then that is followed by six pages of goading talk between the two of them, while we assume everyone else is just watching this happen. I mean, that is just as schmaltzy and uninspired as it gets, for any reader of any age. In other words, the build up to everything seems far more interesting than the actual final installment.

But, J.E. had mentioned in an earlier post that Book 7 “doesn’t disappoint,” or something to that effect, and Toby put Book 7 right up there with Books 3 and 6 as his favorites. So I’d love to hear other reactions, and would love to be convinced.

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