This is a review of Jerry McGill’s excellent memoir, Dear Marcus: Speaking to the Man Who Shot Me. But first I want to tell you about:
My Experience in a Wheelchair
I was in a wheelchair once. It was only for a day but it was enough to appreciate how maladjusted society is towards people with disabilities. Continue reading
Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month. For all you aspiring novelists, you may want to join in on the fun. This is the website, cutely abbreviated to NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 50,000 words by the end of November. The goal is not to write a polished novel, but rather to produce 50,000 words. Just get it out, then in the chill of December, you can edit and polish to your heart’s delight.
I have had a couple novel writing ideas floating in my head for the past decade, but never did put it down on paper. Strangely enough, I’ve decided to abandon all these loyal veteran plots for an untested rookie tale, one that just came to me a few weeks ago, spurred on by a suggestion from T. I won’t be giving it away now, but it’s an adaptation of the 12 Labors of Hercules, set in Tokyo.
Predictably, I’ve assigned myself a series of tasks today that have been effective sources of procrastination. One of them includes writing this blog post. And to further muddy the waters of marathon writing, I’ve also received several books that I ordered, all aching to be read. They must be put off save one, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which I took with me on my recent trip to Malaysia. It’s precisely the kind of novel I want to write: magical-realism, philosophical, easy on the eyes, funny and compassionate. As my only dedicated reading for the month, I’m counting on it to inspire me.
Just for the hell of it, let me tell you what books I received. They will be my Greek chorus for the month.
Dear Marcus by Jerry McGill. Jerry is in the top 3 of most interesting people I know personally. And I know a lot of interesting people. This is a memoir in the form of a letter to the anonymous man who shot Jerry when he was a promising teenage performer. Being a quadriplegic really hasn’t stopped him from being a creative force of nature with the sparkly eyes and sly grin. This is the book I’m most looking forward to reading.
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin. One of my favorite authors writes about how to write stories. There are a lot of exercises and suggestions on crafting tales.
The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. Simmons is insufferable, a diehard fan of the Celtics who are the hated nemesis of my beloved Lakers. His writing is fetid with bias, obscure unfunny pop culture references, and the self-satisfied wanna-be blue-collar smugness of all Boston sports fans. Nevertheless, he’s the most entertaining sports writer I read, and he’s written the definitive book of basketball, my favorite sport.
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I haven’t even opened the cover yet but I can tell you what will happen. All you need to know is that the hero of the story will solve some historical mystery, with the aid of a much younger woman. There will be a suspicious swarthy police officer. A freakish assassin hired by the helpful man will be lurking about and menacing people. The person who seems most responsible for the misdeeds in the novel is not your man. The man most seemingly helpful and benign is the evil mastermind. I’ll be able to identify all these people by the second chapter, yet I’ll continue reading because that Dan Brown writes a fun novel.
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. This book describes in detail how nature would reclaim the built world if humans were to disappear. I nearly read all of this addictive book a few years back at a bookstore in Santa Cruz and it’s haunted me ever since.
So that ends my procrastination for the day. Now, on to the novel…
I did this viral exercise from Facebook:
Name 15 books that have made a strong impression on you. List them in 15 minutes. It doesn’t have to be books you love, just ones that you can’t shake.
I enjoyed doing this but as usual I couldn’t follow the instructions and instead listed 16. 15 is arbitrary. As far as a “good” number goes, I think 12 would have been a solid archetypal figure to pick. But I wouldn’t know how, after listing 16, to whittle it down to 12, much less back to 15.
I wonder if it’s significant the order in which the books popped into my mind. One book reminded me of another, and so it went. Whatever the significance, I’ve reordered them here into groups and annotated them.
Patterns. Three books of non-fiction found themselves on the list. All three attempt to answer the big questions by understanding underlying patterns.
Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond. This book was Number One on the list. Diamond asks the question, why did the Spanish conquer the Incans and not the other way around? And by answering, he traces the history of human civilization and finds some surprising patterns. Every now and then I re-read a random chapter and get something new out of it.
The Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell (pictured above). I’m reading Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, and love it. Like Diamond, he’s a master generalist, collecting eclectic research and presenting it in deliciously digestible form. In The Tipping Point, he explores how and why social trends start, looking at the factors that push a movement.
A Pattern Language. Christopher Alexander, et al. This architectural bible is about a million pages long and will cost you $60. Each page explains a building or planning archetype that has been repeated across cultures and eras. It’s both simple and deep.
Fantasy. It’s strange only one fantasy book made it onto the list because I’d read so many in my teens. But fantasy books tend to blend into each other and so there aren’t that many that I couldn’t “shake.”
A Wizard of Earthsea. Ursula K LeGuin (shown right). This slim novel is the complete opposite of most fantasy books. It’s spare in its descriptions and the hero is often not heroic. It’s a tale of the hero’s journey, with big themes. At the same time, all the magic, dragons, and wizards are mere facts in this world, ordinary nuisances to be stepped over.
Magical realism. Two of my favorite authors. I enjoy their earlier works more than their recent creations. Sometimes I feel they’ve evolved beyond my level of comprehension, but I certainly love reading everything they throw out.
The Temple of My Familiar. Alice Walker (shown left). A soulful exploration of relationships, between men and women, animals and people, narrator and characters, writer and reader. All in that easy-going, mellifluous, but unshakeable voice of Walker. The story is fun too.
Sexing the Cherry. Jeannette Winterson. I sometimes get lost in Winterson’s experimental narratives. I couldn’t finish two of her novels. It’s a fine line. This book is just experimental enough to blow your mind, but not too much that you want to shoot yourself. I can’t even begin describing what this novel’s plot is. There’s a 17th Century explorer and his enormous dog-breeding mother. They sail around the world, time travel, and move through dimensions, in search of exotic fruit, and the 12 dancing princesses.
Short stories. These are droll, understated, tragicomic tales, written by enigmatic and eccentric writers.
Nine Stories. JD Salinger (at right). I once read a critical review of this book that said that each story represented a Buddhist path. So I reread the book looking for signs of enlightenment. I guess a case can be made for some kind of religious meta-narrative. But I still returned to the haunting themes of post-World War II nihilism.
Pangs of Love. David Wong Louie. I don’t think Louie has written a book since. Too bad, because these stories have the same haunting but detached atmosphere of Salinger.
Post-apocalyptic feminist science fiction. It’s easy to call a work of fiction feminist just because the writer is a woman and the main character is a woman. But these four novels actually imagine post-patriarchal societies. And it’s lazy to call a story science fiction just because it’s set in the future. But as LeGuin points out, science also includes the social sciences. And these novels re-imagine social systems.
Also noteworthy is that 3 of the 4 are set in California. I think I need to write a blog post all its own about that.
He, She and It. Marge Piercy. In this future, corporations rule city-states. The protagonist however lives in one of the few non-corporate enclaves in a community of robot makers. The story is brilliantly interwoven with a story about a Jewish Polish community under Nazi rule.
Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler (pictured above). A highly addictive drug that makes people into violent pyromaniacs has created chaos. A young woman makes her way up to Oregon along Highway 5, and develops a new religion.
Always Coming Home. Ursula K LeGuin. Another LeGuin book on the list. Self-described as “an archaeology of the future”, it envisions a post-industrial utopia in Northern California. There’s a main story, but the book is constructed as an anthology of articles about the Kesh culture. My copy even included a cassette of songs sung by the tribe’s members in their language.
The Fifth Sacred Thing. Starhawk. Another matriarchal utopia based in Northern California, under attack by a violent and autocratic Southern California society. It sounds like it could be a moralistic tale of contrived stereotypes and I avoided it for many years for that reason. But the world is vividly fleshed out and the intercultural dilemmas are played out in compelling philosophical dramas.
A Play.
Heartbreak House. George Bernard Shaw. This isn’t necessarily my favorite GB Shaw play. But it was the first one I watched (on PBS) and it made such an impression on me that I began reading all his plays and fell in love with his acid wit.
Poetry. Only Sandburg’s book can properly be called a book of poetry. But the other two, while invariably in the philosophy sections of bookstores, read like poems.
Honey and Salt. Carl Sandburg (above left). So earthy, so spiritual. I love Carl Sandburg. His words are like a brisk desert wind.
The Prophet. Kahlil Gibran (above right). Before a wise person sails away, the people ask him to talk about various subjects like love, money, children. I consult this book as an oracle. If there’s a subject I need clarity on this is where i go.
Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu. So few words. Truth condensed down to its essentials.
There are so many great books that I haven’t been able to shake. I was going to write a list of honorable mentions, but perhaps I’ll save that for another post. What’s on your list?
The Aquariums of Pyongyang (2001) is an autobiographical account of a boy who spent 10 years in a North Korean labor prison camp, his subsequent release, and how he defected to South Korea.
The book is especially timely since two American journalists were sentenced to a similar fate this past week. The survival rate at one of these camps is less than 50%. The prison conditions, according to the Kang Chol-Hwan, the author, are medieval and brutish.
Kang came from a wealthy Korean family from Japan and was part of the movement of voluntary repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea in the 60’s and 70’s. As was the fate of many of those families, due in part to political struggles within the pro-North Korean organization in Japan, many families from Japan were imprisoned for re-education. The “guilt” of one person tainted the entire family and thus even children and the elderly are sentenced as one group.
Kang recounts a privileged life in Pyongyang, where only the elite lives, and the jarring transition, with no explanation nor trial, to prison life. He provides a rare glimpse of both the upper echelon and the lowest of North Korean society. One thing that struck me was the arbitrary and casual widespread use of imprisonment to control the populace, as many of his acquaintances had been in the camps at some point in their lives.
This corresponds with what we know outside the book. For instance, the entire 1966 World Cup North Korean soccer team was sent to the camps for partying too much after a huge upset over the Italians, and losing badly in the next game. And the current number two in North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, was sent to the camps due to a power struggle. If national sports heroes and a powerful member of the ruling family can be sent to the camps, then anyone is game.
After a decade of surviving on roots and rats, and inhumanely cruel labor in harsh weather conditions, Kang and his family were released. He made his way to South Korea and is now a celebrated journalist there. That was during a time when there were few defectors. He enjoyed government support, free education and notoriety.
Now that thousands make the dangerous journey to South Korea every year, the North Korean community is now mostly neglected second-class citizens. In my readings of interviews of these refugees, a central theme of their narratives is an utter distaste for the Kim Jong Il regime. They have been the regime’s bitterest critics, often advocating hard-nosed dealings with the north, running counter to the South Korean trend towards engagement and some would say, appeasement.
Whatever strategy you support in dealing with North Korea, the massive violations of human rights must be in the calculus. And Kang gives a harrowing personal perspective to make sure you put the suffering millions into the equatioin.
Underwhelming But Entertaining
I recently watched Angels and Demons, the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel. Like The Da Vinci Code, I was a bit underwhelmed, but only because I had thoroughly enjoyed the novels. And invariably, what your imagination invokes from words is a much more personally compelling endeavor than what someone else invokes from them.
However, I still enjoyed watching the movies. It’s thrilling to actually see the cathedrals, statuary, works of art, and cryptic objects that the author describes in the books.
Ron Howard provides his usual bland but workman directorial vision. He doesn’t have Spielberg’s ability to emotionally manipulate the audience. Nor does he have the ability to thrill the viewer like any number of action/thriller directors. Nowhere was I moved into any strong feeling about any character. But that’s alright. At least he entertains.
Tom Hanks kind of mails it in, but still manages to delivers a fine performance. The female lead was remarkably uncharismatic and had zero chemistry with Hanks, which was surreal. In the novel, there was a lot of romantic tension between these two characters. They should have casted Megan Fox and called it a day.
Narrative Patterns
Angels and Demons was billed as the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, but actually, the novels were written as the other way around. I’ve read all four of Dan Brown’s novels, including Digital Fortress and Deception Point.
By the time I read the third of these novels, I was able to predict the plot. All four have the following elements.
• Each novel has a young, smart, attractive women as a lead character. She is highly educated in some kind of science, has father (or grandfather) issues, and is involved with a…
• Middle-aged academic who is obsessed with some obscure specialization. In Angels and DaVinci, he’s the main character. In Digital and Deception, he’s more of a supporting character.
• A tough cop appears to be a bad guy, but has been manipulated by some sinister shadow figure.
• This shadow figure is somehow involved in a secret society or cabal, whether it be religious, governmental or scientific. The shadow figure uses a…
• A cold-blooded assassin. He runs amok and tries to kill the protagonists. He kills a lot of other people during the proceedings. They have some element of freakishness or weirdness about them. There’s an albino assassin, a deaf assassin, a member of an ancient order of assassins, and there’s also a Delta force squad.
• There are many secrets and cryptographic mysteries to puzzle over.
• And finally, the shocking twist (but so very predictable) is that the most helpful benefactor of the protagonists is revealed to be the main bad guy.
Once I gleaned these patterns, I was able to predict the ending. Nevertheless, I still am a big fan of Dan Brown because the stories are well researched, the twists are meticulously plotted, and the guilty pleasure of reading low-brow pulp fiction is expertly painted over with quasi-scholarly conspiracy theories. How’s that for a left-handed compliment.
