Sometimes the thing rattles around in your head all week, or for a couple of weeks, and you know it’s going to be your post. Other times you find that there’s nothing left in the well, and you flail about the living room looking for inspiration, like John Lennon did when he no longer wanted to leave his house and then wrote “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Good Morning Good Morning,” among others, except that the post you’re going to write isn’t going to be as good as those songs—although it might be better than Harrison’s “Piggies” (you recently discussed with two different people whether there was a Beatles album that didn’t have at least one bad song on it).
At this point, you—and by you, of course, I mean I—begin to wonder if this is the most self-indulgent thing you’ve ever written, except that you made that observation senior year of college when you wrote a column about how hard it was to write the column that week, which means that this is not only self-indulgent and empty, but also a shameless ripping-off of your 21-year-old self.
And everyone else who’s ever written about writing, and blocks, and wells.
I don’t remember why this phase began or how long it lasted, but for a brief period in my youth I read movie novelizations. Above are three I remember reading. Terminator 2 is the weirdest one, because I was 13 when that movie came out, and thus I know I hadn’t been allowed to see it. And yet I had this book.
I didn’t like the books better than the movies, but I was under the impression that objectively they were better, because they seemed more… complete. The authors added narrative voice, interior monologue, a point of view that a camera doesn’t need to establish, and this tricked me into thinking that the books gave me more information than the movies did. Really, for the most part, these additions are impossible to avoid when translating to the written medium, but I assume they were also attempts by those authors to put a stamp on the work, to claim some piece of it for themselves.
Of course, that river usually flows the other direction. I recently watched the 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”:
I keep trying to choose between “The semester is barreling toward the end” and “The semester is limping to the end,” which, taken together, make the semester sound like a very determined competitor in a three-legged race. And really, that’s not too far off.
My point is that I’m buried to my neck, with little time to read/do/think anything that isn’t a pile of text in MLA format.
Don’t pass me by. Don’t wait too long. Don’t go to strangers. Don’t let go. Don’t fade on me. Don’t leave me now.
Don’t bring me down. Don’t let me down. Don’t let it get you down. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t talk (put your head on my shoulder).
Don’t try to stop it. Don’t tell your mother. Don’t do me like that. Don’t let me explode. Don’t stop. Don’t stop me now. Don’t stop ’til you get enough.
Don’t stand so close to me. Don’t come around here no more. Don’t think twice, it’s all right.
Don’t let’s start. Don’t be that way. Don’t let me be misunderstood. Don’t cry no more. Don’t say nothin’ bad (about my baby). Don’t look back in anger. Don’t forget me. Don’t be cruel. Don’t make me a target.
Recently, in my never-ending battle to catch up with every movie I’ve missed, I made my way to Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman, as you may already know, wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation (in which Nic Cage played him—and his fictional twin brother), and the criminally-underrated Chuck Barris faux-biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
The point being that the guy can write. But Synecdoche reaffirms that just because you can do something well, that doesn’t mean you can do everything well. Without Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry to act as a balance, Kaufman gets to do whatever he wants—and what he wants is everything. The movie is stuffed full of characters and conceits and ideas—no, Ideas, with a capital-goddamn-I—and it can’t handle them all. It collapses. It bursts. It doesn’t work.
But I don’t want to be too dismissive. Because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an interesting failure on this scale. Because I’d rather see a movie with too many ideas than a movie with none, and I’d rather watch talented people try to do too much than Transformers 2. Read more »
I came across this “influential books” meme—i.e., “10 books that influenced your worldview,” which, terrifyingly, appears to lead many bloggers straight to Ayn Rand—and I am certainly not one to pass up a solipsistic exercise, much less a list-making one, so away we go: 10 books that left fingerprints on the way I think, in autobiographical order.
1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
It would be hard to overstate how important these two books (in one volume) were to me all through elementary school and beyond. The Alice books are rife with symbolic logic and puns and death jokes and words likes “memorandum,” and I can’t claim that I understood it all when I was reading them at age 8, but I was drawn to them over and over. (In high school I wrote an English paper on Lewis Carroll that was penalized for being 10 pages too long.) And when I re-read them a couple years ago I recognized my basic sense of humor, cadences I still use when speaking, sentence structures I still write. Bonus: I actually had two copies—one with the great original drawings by Sir John Tenniel, and one illustrated by Ralph Steadman. This must have warped me good.
1. The fantastic collection of George Orwell’s critical essays, All Art Is Propaganda. Orwell is so damn smart that reading him makes me feel smarter, and everything he writes about—dirty postcards, Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, the disappointment of T.S. Eliot’s later work, and of course, socialism—is made fascinating and important. Which is what good essayists do. The stone-classic “Politics and the English Language” is here, as well as a long piece about the quietism of Henry Miller and a 60-page essay about Dickens that is destined to be the best piece of lit crit you ever read. All of them are written in sentences so clean and matter-of-fact that you don’t even think about how easy it isn’t to write like that.
One of many favorite excerpts:
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful.
In a lot of ways, it’s hard to explain my love for R. Kelly. People want it to be ironic, an enjoyment that comes from condescension to an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing. But Kelly knows exactly what he’s doing: He’s a performer, and he’s good. He knows “Ignition (Remix)” will get people bouncing. He knows a song called “Sex Planet” is ridiculous. He grins like a ten-year-old when he knows he’s being a goofball. He proclaims himself every other second to be the King of R&B. He also got himself in big, big trouble with underage girls.
To me, the contradiction of R. Kelly is that he is always true to himself, but he has no self-awareness whatsoever, which leads to an authenticity you don’t get with most performers. During the six years between his indictment and his acquittal, he continued to record jams—both club and slow—about having sex with you. He waved to screaming fans in the courtroom. On 2007′s Double Up, he describes his morning-after routine as “Wake up with two chicks, wash our ass, and then go straight to the mall.” Why didn’t he let up? Because he can’t. Read more »
5 Comments 
1. The fantastic collection of George Orwell’s critical essays, 