| June 14, 1999 | Book Review of "The Beach" |
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My work friend Allyson just read "The Beach" last week, and she let me borrow her copy. I started it yesterday and finished it this evening. This book is completely and immediately engrossing. The story's about Richard, a young twentysomething British backpacker who acquires a map through very odd circumstances that leads him to a well-hidden Gen X enclave on a tropical island off the coast of Thailand. I won't say more because I don't want to give too much of the plot away. Though "The Beach" is compared to "Lord of the Flies" in the review blurb written by "High Fidelity" author Nick Hornby on the book's back jacket, the considerable pop cultural references to Nintendo's Game Boy, "The A Team," and Tetris made me think of Douglas Coupland's writing. Like Coupland, Garland understands the importance of pop culture to his generation of readers. I found it interestingly ironic that even though the main characters' shared goal is to live indefinitely sequestered away on an island paradise without contact with the outside world -- they still place high importance on obtaining batteries for their Walkmans and Game Boys, and almost all of their ideas of adventure and how to solve the problems they encounter come from popular American movies and TV shows -- notably "Platoon," "The A Team," and "Tour of Duty." One of my favorite parts in the book is when Richard talks about the game Street Fighter Two (a personal favorite) and the various ways people he knows react just as their Street Fighter characters' energy bars are going to be emptied. He calls this "the split second before Game Over" and he speculates that "Game Over" is one of the most widely understood phrases in the whole world. He also posits that the moment before Game Over "provides a rare insight into the way people react just before they do really die." Just as it would likely be true of myself and my friends, everything these characters know about survival they've gleaned from a lifetime watching video games and TV. One of the saddest themes in the book is about how you can't stop paradise from being spoiled - something's always going to come along and ruin Eden -- be it an onslaught of tourists, or even just progress. Labels: allyson, americanculture, book, popculture posted by Jess Barron @ 7:51 PM 
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| June 6, 1999 | The 'Absolution' of Jay Gatsby |
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This was the eighth time I've read "Gatsby" and maybe the fifth time I've read the short story "Absolution" which Fitzgerald said was a discarded beginning to "Gatsby." I love F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's so perceptive about class in America. (And he wasn't even a "poor boy" by any means -- just middle class, though painfully aware of it due to his obsession with winning over wealthy society girls, particularly Zelda.) Fitzgerald gets Gatsby's feelings about Daisy *so right*. It probably helped that he had gone through a similar emotional and financial peril when trying to win Zelda's hand in marriage while just a struggling young writer. Say what you will about the evils of money - here's a passage that really sums up its power: "Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor." And Fitzgerald's take on religion is darkly hysterical. In "Gatsby" when the gas station guy Wilson (whose wife has just been run down and killed) is in shock and says "God sees everything," it is perfect that he is referring to the gigantic eyes on a billboard advertisement. Speaking of religious imagery, I kind of regret that Fitzgerald's short story "Absolution" was severed from the book. I prfer reading it in order as an actual prologue to "Gatsby." It is damn creepy and very good. A young blue collar Catholic boy (apparently a young Jay Gatsby) goes to his priest to confess some prurient thoughts. During his conversation with the priest, it seems that the priest is a bit crazy with potential pedophiliac tendencies. The most darkly amusing part has to be when, after hearing the boy's long-winded confession, the priest impatiently commands the worried boy: "Please listen to me! Stop worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith." As he goes off on an odd tangent that makes the boy uncomfortable the priest's gorgeously irreverent advice to the young boy is: "When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering. The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then things go glimmering. The priest also tells the boy: "Well, go and see an amusement park. It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place - under dark trees. you'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and the smell of peanuts -- and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon - like a big yellow lantern on a pole." After hearing the priest's speech, the boy concludes, "There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God." As the story closes, we pan over the stilted sensual imagery of the mid-western Swede town out the church window. Labels: book, fitzgerald, gatsby, reading posted by Jess Barron @ 8:08 PM
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| June 1, 1999 | Did Pynchon Prophesize Cyberspace? |
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The other day, I read an academic paper that presents the idea that Thomas Pynchon prophesized cyberspace and The Web with "Gravity's Rainbow." Of course, this is an idea that I, of all people, enjoy latching on to. In my re-reading of the book, I happened upon a passage (which the author of the paper points to) that, to me, really supports his hypothesis. It is a dialogue between Tyrone Slothrop and his father that occurs toward the end of the book when Slothrop's consciousness has pretty much dissolved. The fragment begins with the father saying: "Son, been wondering about this, ah, 'screwing in' you kids are doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head - ha-ha?" The son replies: "Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips!" They talk about "keying waves" and comparing it to dope and "vacations" away from "Realityland." Then the father says: "Listen Tyrone, you just don't know how dangerous this stuff is. Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?" This sounds exactly like any paranoid technophobe's argument in the 1990s about limiting kids' use of computers, video games, and the Internet. The best part is Tyrone's final response in this fragment: "Ho, ho! Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? ... Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got stored there... Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat! But we can live forever, in a clean, honest purified Electroworld -" Perhaps plugging into "electrofreak dreams" and is what I'm looking for in my projecting of pieces of myself into cyber/hyperspace via the Web. Labels: book, internet, web, writing posted by Jess Barron @ 8:01 PM
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