Close Encounters of the Flan Kind
Jan. 29th, 2009 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneBad news: I left my glasses in my coworker's car, so I am SO BLIND RIGHT NOW.
Good news: after joking with several people that since I would be working in Malibu, I would probably see Joe Flanigan going about his daily Flan, I ACTUALLY SAW HIM!
The following is c/p'd from the semi-hysterical email I sent to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
siriaeve and sheafrotherdon when I got home:
After only four days, Operation Joe Watch '09 is a success! I can't believe it, but I really saw him today [last Friday]! On my lunch break I wandered over to a little sandwich shop called John's Gardern (*snerk*), and sat down with my food at a tiny picnic table. I was eating and reading, when—well, I'm not sure how I became aware of him, but I think I recognized his voice. I looked up and there he was, live and in the flesh: THE FLAN! He was with one of his sons, who was insanely adorable. Some basic facts:
1. Joe was wearing a red flannel shirt over that black dead panda? pirate panda? you know, that shirt we've seen him photographed in before. He was very beardy.
2. The went in the shop, looking for Joe's wife, who I think they were supposed to meet. She wasn't there, so they came out again and stood by a tree, about three feet from where I was trying to be cool. Joe's son spun in circles making airplane noises, while Joe stood with his hands on his hips like he was surveying the land.
3. They checked the shop again, then went and sat down at the picnic table RIGHT NEXT TO MINE.
4. Joe's son decided the wobbly table was a see-saw or a rocking horse and started moving it back and forth, which Joe found amusing. So did I: I was grinning while I continued "reading" my book. Joe must have noticed me glancing over, because he then asked his son to stop "because she's trying to read her book." (HE NOTICED ME AND IT LOOKED LIKE I WAS REALLY READING!)
5. The book I was reading was, amusingly, Neil deGrasse Tyson's new one.
6. After a few more minutes, Joe got a call from his wife (presumably) and indicated to his son that they were at the wrong sandwich shop, so they set off for the correct one.
7. Immediately, as if grieved, the sky opened and it began to pour.
8. I went back to work and had a hard time concentrating for the rest of the day. :)
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Goal for next time (if there is a next time): Think of something witty to say!
In addition, I would like to add: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
*cough* Okay, we now return to your (ir)regularly scheduled booklog.
11. Under the Jaguar Sun, Italo Calvino — This was, I belatedly realized, rather a poor place to begin reading Calvino. I chose it because it was what my library had, but as the afterword reveals (why not the foreword? That would have been much more helpful), it’s an unfinished work. Calvino had originally intended to write five short pieces, each about one of the five senses, but only three of the five were completed before he died, none received a polish, and the framing device he had intended to include wasn’t even begun. In short, the Under the Jaguar Sun I checked out bears little resemblance to what Calvino intended. This makes it hard, and perhaps wrong, to judge the author on the basis of this work.
Which is good, really, as I was not crazy about this. The first story (taste), was my favorite: it involved a lot of decadent descriptions of Oaxacan food and some weird stuff about cannibalism; I found it a bit overdone (no food pun intended), but compelling. The second and third stories, however, seemed less solid, more like fragments. I was underwhelmed.
So I am relieved, actually, that this book is not considered representative of Calvino at his best. I became interested in him because his novel The Baron in the Trees plays a part in one of the stories in The View From the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier. So far I like Brockmeier’s descriptions of Calvino’s writing better than the actual product, but I shall hold onto hope.
12. Kangaroo Notebook, Kobo Abe — Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from here, allow me to confess: I am not a fan of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Didn’t like it when I was a kid, wasn’t fond of it when I reread it for a class in college. (I bet you can guess how AWESOME it is listening to a bunch of over-eager English majors start insisting that Alice is really a metaphor for post-colonial blah blah blah.) I do dig me some whimsy (not to mention some Wimsey), and as my recent Murakami marathon has made clear, I can be a big fan of Japanese surrealism, too. But I feel there needs to be a sense of balance, so when a story tips you head over heels down the rabbit hole to a place where there’s no logic, no plot, and no characters, it’s just too much for me. My eyes glaze over and I end up bored and annoyed.
Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook epitomized all the potential pitfalls one could imagine popping up in surrealist literature. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist discovers radish sprouts (which are referred to throughout the whole book as “radish sprouts”—why the quotes?) growing from his calves. This initial unexplained weird event sets him on a path that catapults him from one unexplained weird event to the next. Everything that happens is related in one of those flat, unemotional first person POVs—possibly my least favorite narrative technique ever. The people he encounters are devices, not human beings. And while the cover copy claims that the book is supposed to be a biting satire of modern Japanese life, I really did not get that from the text at all. This may be in part my failing as an ignorant Westerner, but nothing in this book felt astutely realized; it was all either very very generic (bureaucracy? Dehumanizing and annoying!) or incredibly obscure.
It also just wasn’t very well-written—or anyway, well-translated. On the most basic level, Abe (or Abe’s translator) couldn’t seem to figure out if he was writing in the present or the past tense, so he settled for swapping back and forth repeatedly. And unlike in even Murakami’s most confounding work, there wasn’t a single beautiful—or even a distinct—piece of imagery to be found. It was all a muddle.
Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is supposed to be a classic, one of the things you MUST READ if you are cultivating an interest in Japanese literature. I am now, however, disinclined to.
13. The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa — A trio of eerie and unnerving novellas. The first two involve women inflicting needless cruelties on people helpless and dependent on them, but Ogawa strays away from creating caricatures or relying on obvious psychology. The third story, possibly the most complex and strange, involves a lonely woman befriending the triple-amputee landlord of a maybe-cursed dormitory complex. The ambiguous ending is frustrating, but nevertheless compelling. Ogawa’s use of language is both seductive and severely disquieting; I will definitely be seeking out more of her work.
14. House of M, Brian Michael Bendis — This is the arc in which Wolverine regains his memory, so I was anxious to read it. However, the focus really isn’t on him dealing with it—that may be in another collection? I don’t know. Let’s skip the frustrated rant about how Marvel releases TPBs of title-spanning “event” comics this time.
The alternate universe shenanigans were still fun—who doesn’t like alternate universe shenanigans? However, the ending confused the hell out of me. Why did some mutants lose their powers when others didn’t? Are there rules or logic involved, or is it just random? *pouts* I don’t like random shit, man. I will buy your mutated spiders and Lantean princes and your dudes in spandex fighting crime, but I demand internal logic!
15. The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama — Can my review just be “What Siria said”? We read this book at the same time—right before the inauguration—and her review sums up my feelings pretty perfectly. Much more political and much less personal than Dreams From My Father, The Audacity of Hope does at times feel like a sales pitch, which I understand the necessity of, but don’t personally need. It also at times serves as a reminder of how not-quite-in-sync my own views are with the more mainstream side of the Democratic Party, and with this country in general—it seems I’m a radical lefty without feeling radical, and I’m way in the minority when it comes to (an utter lack of interest in) religious beliefs. But, you know, here’s the good thing—one of many good things—about this book and about Barack Obama as a politician and as a person: a large part of his message is that it isn’t about me. It’s about us. It’s about the country as a whole—about the world as a whole. I’m not personally good at compromise, but I am so glad that the United States now has a president who is willing to reach out his hand, to be a unifying force rather than a divisive one. A president who’s thoughtful and willing to listen. It does give me hope: not just that the country can become better, but that we all can.
So yeah, um. What Siria said.
16. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood — January book club read. I found this to be well-written but boring. Atwood’s prose has energy, and she attempts to mix things up with the use of flashbacks, newspaper clippings, and a novel-within-a-novel. But I’ve heard this story before. So many times: societal and family obligations, sprightly women oppressed, a bad arranged marriage, a love affair, all of it recounted by an old woman at the end of her life…wait a minute! This is the plot of Titanic! I knew it seemed familiar! Atwood took Titanic and made it literary. MAGS I AM SO ON TO YOU.
So, not awful. But kind of redundant.
17. Superman: Birthright, Mark Waid — In some ways, what Waid is trying to do with this graphic novel is the exact opposite of what Tom De Haven was attempting in his (prose) novel It’s Superman. That book returns Supes’ origin story back to the 1930s, the era when the character was conceived; Birthright updates it to modern times with things like an internet-savvy Martha Kent and a Lois Lane who’s striving to break stories on The Daily Planet’s blog.
While it did not blow me away quite like It’s Superman, Birthright was still really good. Like De Haven, Waid does a great job of humanizing Clark, while at the same time emphasizing the ways in which Clark Kent is Superman in disguise (and not the other way around). Things get a little hammy at the end, but in general, there’s a nice emotional and psychological realism that makes the story compelling. The Lex backstory was especially inspired: Waid writes him as a disturbed genius who feels as alien in his brilliance as Clark is in origin. Reading this graphic novel is a kind of revelation: “Oh yeah! This is what Smallville would have been like if it were good!”
18. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami — Murakami’s second full-length collection of short stories. In general, I think I liked this one even more than The Elephant Vanishes. The first few stories were not my favorites (it felt like a lot of the slighter ones were toward the beginning of the collection), but once the meatier ones came along—the ones that I felt I could grasp the significance of, the ones that were more than just random, surreal slices of life—I was enthralled. “Tony Takitani” was perhaps my favorite—it broke my heart.
It was also interesting to see how certain short stories of Murakami’s wouldn’t leave him alone: two of the tales in this collection and one in Vanishes were later incorporated into three of his novels. I always enjoy small peeks into the writing process like that.
19. Deaf Sentence, David Lodge — David Lodge’s latest novel feels like two separate stories forced to cohabitate. Like most of Lodge’s fictitious marriages, the combination is kind of awkward. The first story involves retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates struggling with his premature hearing loss and with his stubborn, ill father. The second, which is much more wacky and sex-charged and in certain ways more typical of Lodge, finds Desmond becoming involved (though not quite involved) with an unstable female graduate student named Alex. I greatly preferred the first narrative. Alex’s behavior is way too Fatal Attraction to seem plausible to me (can the fact that she shares a first name with Glenn Close’s character from that movie be a coincidence?). The contrast between the subtle maturity of the first story and the juvenile sub-par early-Lodge-set-on-mince feel of the second is quite jarring. Maybe in some ways this novel represents Lodge saying goodbye to such youthful follies, but while I still enjoyed the book in parts, I found the divorce process distracting and rather coarse.
20. The Bro Code, Matt Kuhn — How I Met Your Mother tie-in book. HIMYM is my favorite show currently on the air; I found the book disappointing. Mostly it just recounts a bunch of stupid guy clichés, and a bunch of guys’ stupid clichés about women. For the most part, except for when it’s cribbing concepts directly from the show, it lacks Barney’s wonderful weirdness—I mean, he’s not some dull frat boy, which is what this book sounds like; his rules and schemes are much stranger, are always slightly off-kilter. Barney is a unique specimen; this book is depressingly average.
Oh well. I bet it’s a lot funnier in audiobook form. NPH makes everything better.
Total Reviews: 20/29
You know, there's a weird theme of blindness or other impairment in this selection. I totally should have seen this coming.
Good news: after joking with several people that since I would be working in Malibu, I would probably see Joe Flanigan going about his daily Flan, I ACTUALLY SAW HIM!
The following is c/p'd from the semi-hysterical email I sent to
siriaeve and sheafrotherdon when I got home:After only four days, Operation Joe Watch '09 is a success! I can't believe it, but I really saw him today [last Friday]! On my lunch break I wandered over to a little sandwich shop called John's Gardern (*snerk*), and sat down with my food at a tiny picnic table. I was eating and reading, when—well, I'm not sure how I became aware of him, but I think I recognized his voice. I looked up and there he was, live and in the flesh: THE FLAN! He was with one of his sons, who was insanely adorable. Some basic facts:
1. Joe was wearing a red flannel shirt over that black dead panda? pirate panda? you know, that shirt we've seen him photographed in before. He was very beardy.
2. The went in the shop, looking for Joe's wife, who I think they were supposed to meet. She wasn't there, so they came out again and stood by a tree, about three feet from where I was trying to be cool. Joe's son spun in circles making airplane noises, while Joe stood with his hands on his hips like he was surveying the land.
3. They checked the shop again, then went and sat down at the picnic table RIGHT NEXT TO MINE.
4. Joe's son decided the wobbly table was a see-saw or a rocking horse and started moving it back and forth, which Joe found amusing. So did I: I was grinning while I continued "reading" my book. Joe must have noticed me glancing over, because he then asked his son to stop "because she's trying to read her book." (HE NOTICED ME AND IT LOOKED LIKE I WAS REALLY READING!)
5. The book I was reading was, amusingly, Neil deGrasse Tyson's new one.
6. After a few more minutes, Joe got a call from his wife (presumably) and indicated to his son that they were at the wrong sandwich shop, so they set off for the correct one.
7. Immediately, as if grieved, the sky opened and it began to pour.
8. I went back to work and had a hard time concentrating for the rest of the day. :)
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Goal for next time (if there is a next time): Think of something witty to say!
In addition, I would like to add: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
*cough* Okay, we now return to your (ir)regularly scheduled booklog.
11. Under the Jaguar Sun, Italo Calvino — This was, I belatedly realized, rather a poor place to begin reading Calvino. I chose it because it was what my library had, but as the afterword reveals (why not the foreword? That would have been much more helpful), it’s an unfinished work. Calvino had originally intended to write five short pieces, each about one of the five senses, but only three of the five were completed before he died, none received a polish, and the framing device he had intended to include wasn’t even begun. In short, the Under the Jaguar Sun I checked out bears little resemblance to what Calvino intended. This makes it hard, and perhaps wrong, to judge the author on the basis of this work.
Which is good, really, as I was not crazy about this. The first story (taste), was my favorite: it involved a lot of decadent descriptions of Oaxacan food and some weird stuff about cannibalism; I found it a bit overdone (no food pun intended), but compelling. The second and third stories, however, seemed less solid, more like fragments. I was underwhelmed.
So I am relieved, actually, that this book is not considered representative of Calvino at his best. I became interested in him because his novel The Baron in the Trees plays a part in one of the stories in The View From the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier. So far I like Brockmeier’s descriptions of Calvino’s writing better than the actual product, but I shall hold onto hope.
12. Kangaroo Notebook, Kobo Abe — Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from here, allow me to confess: I am not a fan of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Didn’t like it when I was a kid, wasn’t fond of it when I reread it for a class in college. (I bet you can guess how AWESOME it is listening to a bunch of over-eager English majors start insisting that Alice is really a metaphor for post-colonial blah blah blah.) I do dig me some whimsy (not to mention some Wimsey), and as my recent Murakami marathon has made clear, I can be a big fan of Japanese surrealism, too. But I feel there needs to be a sense of balance, so when a story tips you head over heels down the rabbit hole to a place where there’s no logic, no plot, and no characters, it’s just too much for me. My eyes glaze over and I end up bored and annoyed.
Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook epitomized all the potential pitfalls one could imagine popping up in surrealist literature. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist discovers radish sprouts (which are referred to throughout the whole book as “radish sprouts”—why the quotes?) growing from his calves. This initial unexplained weird event sets him on a path that catapults him from one unexplained weird event to the next. Everything that happens is related in one of those flat, unemotional first person POVs—possibly my least favorite narrative technique ever. The people he encounters are devices, not human beings. And while the cover copy claims that the book is supposed to be a biting satire of modern Japanese life, I really did not get that from the text at all. This may be in part my failing as an ignorant Westerner, but nothing in this book felt astutely realized; it was all either very very generic (bureaucracy? Dehumanizing and annoying!) or incredibly obscure.
It also just wasn’t very well-written—or anyway, well-translated. On the most basic level, Abe (or Abe’s translator) couldn’t seem to figure out if he was writing in the present or the past tense, so he settled for swapping back and forth repeatedly. And unlike in even Murakami’s most confounding work, there wasn’t a single beautiful—or even a distinct—piece of imagery to be found. It was all a muddle.
Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes is supposed to be a classic, one of the things you MUST READ if you are cultivating an interest in Japanese literature. I am now, however, disinclined to.
13. The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa — A trio of eerie and unnerving novellas. The first two involve women inflicting needless cruelties on people helpless and dependent on them, but Ogawa strays away from creating caricatures or relying on obvious psychology. The third story, possibly the most complex and strange, involves a lonely woman befriending the triple-amputee landlord of a maybe-cursed dormitory complex. The ambiguous ending is frustrating, but nevertheless compelling. Ogawa’s use of language is both seductive and severely disquieting; I will definitely be seeking out more of her work.
14. House of M, Brian Michael Bendis — This is the arc in which Wolverine regains his memory, so I was anxious to read it. However, the focus really isn’t on him dealing with it—that may be in another collection? I don’t know. Let’s skip the frustrated rant about how Marvel releases TPBs of title-spanning “event” comics this time.
The alternate universe shenanigans were still fun—who doesn’t like alternate universe shenanigans? However, the ending confused the hell out of me. Why did some mutants lose their powers when others didn’t? Are there rules or logic involved, or is it just random? *pouts* I don’t like random shit, man. I will buy your mutated spiders and Lantean princes and your dudes in spandex fighting crime, but I demand internal logic!
15. The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama — Can my review just be “What Siria said”? We read this book at the same time—right before the inauguration—and her review sums up my feelings pretty perfectly. Much more political and much less personal than Dreams From My Father, The Audacity of Hope does at times feel like a sales pitch, which I understand the necessity of, but don’t personally need. It also at times serves as a reminder of how not-quite-in-sync my own views are with the more mainstream side of the Democratic Party, and with this country in general—it seems I’m a radical lefty without feeling radical, and I’m way in the minority when it comes to (an utter lack of interest in) religious beliefs. But, you know, here’s the good thing—one of many good things—about this book and about Barack Obama as a politician and as a person: a large part of his message is that it isn’t about me. It’s about us. It’s about the country as a whole—about the world as a whole. I’m not personally good at compromise, but I am so glad that the United States now has a president who is willing to reach out his hand, to be a unifying force rather than a divisive one. A president who’s thoughtful and willing to listen. It does give me hope: not just that the country can become better, but that we all can.
So yeah, um. What Siria said.
16. The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood — January book club read. I found this to be well-written but boring. Atwood’s prose has energy, and she attempts to mix things up with the use of flashbacks, newspaper clippings, and a novel-within-a-novel. But I’ve heard this story before. So many times: societal and family obligations, sprightly women oppressed, a bad arranged marriage, a love affair, all of it recounted by an old woman at the end of her life…wait a minute! This is the plot of Titanic! I knew it seemed familiar! Atwood took Titanic and made it literary. MAGS I AM SO ON TO YOU.
So, not awful. But kind of redundant.
17. Superman: Birthright, Mark Waid — In some ways, what Waid is trying to do with this graphic novel is the exact opposite of what Tom De Haven was attempting in his (prose) novel It’s Superman. That book returns Supes’ origin story back to the 1930s, the era when the character was conceived; Birthright updates it to modern times with things like an internet-savvy Martha Kent and a Lois Lane who’s striving to break stories on The Daily Planet’s blog.
While it did not blow me away quite like It’s Superman, Birthright was still really good. Like De Haven, Waid does a great job of humanizing Clark, while at the same time emphasizing the ways in which Clark Kent is Superman in disguise (and not the other way around). Things get a little hammy at the end, but in general, there’s a nice emotional and psychological realism that makes the story compelling. The Lex backstory was especially inspired: Waid writes him as a disturbed genius who feels as alien in his brilliance as Clark is in origin. Reading this graphic novel is a kind of revelation: “Oh yeah! This is what Smallville would have been like if it were good!”
18. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami — Murakami’s second full-length collection of short stories. In general, I think I liked this one even more than The Elephant Vanishes. The first few stories were not my favorites (it felt like a lot of the slighter ones were toward the beginning of the collection), but once the meatier ones came along—the ones that I felt I could grasp the significance of, the ones that were more than just random, surreal slices of life—I was enthralled. “Tony Takitani” was perhaps my favorite—it broke my heart.
It was also interesting to see how certain short stories of Murakami’s wouldn’t leave him alone: two of the tales in this collection and one in Vanishes were later incorporated into three of his novels. I always enjoy small peeks into the writing process like that.
19. Deaf Sentence, David Lodge — David Lodge’s latest novel feels like two separate stories forced to cohabitate. Like most of Lodge’s fictitious marriages, the combination is kind of awkward. The first story involves retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates struggling with his premature hearing loss and with his stubborn, ill father. The second, which is much more wacky and sex-charged and in certain ways more typical of Lodge, finds Desmond becoming involved (though not quite involved) with an unstable female graduate student named Alex. I greatly preferred the first narrative. Alex’s behavior is way too Fatal Attraction to seem plausible to me (can the fact that she shares a first name with Glenn Close’s character from that movie be a coincidence?). The contrast between the subtle maturity of the first story and the juvenile sub-par early-Lodge-set-on-mince feel of the second is quite jarring. Maybe in some ways this novel represents Lodge saying goodbye to such youthful follies, but while I still enjoyed the book in parts, I found the divorce process distracting and rather coarse.
20. The Bro Code, Matt Kuhn — How I Met Your Mother tie-in book. HIMYM is my favorite show currently on the air; I found the book disappointing. Mostly it just recounts a bunch of stupid guy clichés, and a bunch of guys’ stupid clichés about women. For the most part, except for when it’s cribbing concepts directly from the show, it lacks Barney’s wonderful weirdness—I mean, he’s not some dull frat boy, which is what this book sounds like; his rules and schemes are much stranger, are always slightly off-kilter. Barney is a unique specimen; this book is depressingly average.
Oh well. I bet it’s a lot funnier in audiobook form. NPH makes everything better.
Total Reviews: 20/29
You know, there's a weird theme of blindness or other impairment in this selection. I totally should have seen this coming.
