» Monday, November 22, 2004
Martin and the Betacam battery. It's transmitting information to him that he'll need when the apocalypse comes. No, really.
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Barbara and Suzanne meet the horrible horrible Betacam.
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Our interpreter in Belgium, Barbara, with her children Suzanne and Martin. Martin est fatigué.
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Peevish man at Heidelberg Zoo. While I distract him with the camera, the shrubbery advances on him from the right and takes his wallet.
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This is not a great photo of monkeys, but it's all I've got. Heidelberg Zoo.
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all europe is down with the smartcar, yo.
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Man waiting for bus, Karlsruhe.
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Red building in Karlsruhe.
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Georg S_____ is nervous because I'm in his house taking photos of him without explanation. I kept photographing until he produced this expression.
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Nun with pet pigeon, Feldkirch.
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Matching coats in Heidelberg.
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Streetcorner, Feldkirch.
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Two men in Feldkirch.
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Under the bridge over the Rhein.
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coffee time... um... coffee time...um...
» Saturday, November 20, 2004
Yesterday at a local coffee house I saw a donation cup for the local cell of the Alzheimer's society. I began to imagine the Alzheimer's society as a terrorist network relying on the good will and loose change of coffee drinkers to advance their nefarious (but likely outdated) agenda. I figure that if you staff your cells with Alzheimer's patients, they'll never reveal any information when CSIS rounds them up and wheels them away. Better yet, they'll refer to their interrogators as "Uncle Pete" or "Father St. George". Whatever their agenda is (Free the Falangists!) I intend to fight it with meaningless italicization.
Like so:
Attention, Alzheimer terrorists attempting to conquer Prussia, Rhodesia and the Ottoman Empire! Stop what you're doing immediately and sit with your hands folded on the front steps of the burlesque house until the Doukhobors have passed safely through town. Then approach the constabulary and offer a full accounting of your childhoods! That is all.
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mysterious fragment found scribbled in a back flyleaf
» Friday, November 19, 2004
“... therefore we spent our afternoons exploring the gardens in Palinode’s palace, wandering among the overgrown topiary, chasing spiders along their webs with the tip of a twig, studying the map at the entrance of the hedge maze - now abandoned so long that the hedges had choked off some paths and opened new ones. To enter that maze was to lose your way instantly and turn an afternoon’s diversion into a dark, confusing adventure".
A.G. Morgan, A Summer in Palinode’s Palace (1929) (?)
I found this in a hardbound copy of Dombey & Son when I was nine years old or so. The book rested on the top shelf of my father's bookcase, part of a complete set of Dickens published in 1875 or thereabouts. My father had inherited the set upon graduating from Royal Military College, and though he went to great pains to encourage me to read Dickens, it was clear that these editions were not to be opened or touched. Therefore it was always in secret, at stolen moments on weekend afternoons or even in the predawn hours that I would hoist a chair up in the kitchen and walk it aloft into the living room, my skinny nine year old muscles trembling, and pull down a volume from the shelf. Generally I didn't read any of the text - they were all available in paperback on the lower shelves - but I loved to look at the frontispiece, with its fine crosshatching and expressive faces. I even loved the verso, with its information finely engraved at the foot of the page. Chapman & Hall Publishers. 193 Picadilly. The brief fragment, handwritten in violet fountain pen, first scared me - handwriting in my dad's volumes! - but soon after began to intrigue and then pester me. When I grew a little older I began to look for A Summer in Palinode's Palace in various libraries and used book stores, but without success.
More later.
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the perils of speaking out loud II, or the perils of even listening
» Wednesday, November 17, 2004
After a conversation I overheard in a coffee shop today, I'm pretty sure that the aliens have landed and now walk among us, attempting to learn our ways in order to conquer us. Or in order to order a cup of coffee.
Server (Earthling): What would you like?
Customer (clearly a green tentacled alien stuffed into a human suit): Uh yeah. I'll uh... Americanus doublo... Americano?
Server: You'd like an Americano?
Customer: Yeah, what's that?
Server: It's a cup of coffee with a shot of espresso in it.
Customer: (extending tentacle sensor, hurriedly retracting it): Yeah, okay. What's the double?
Server: That's two shots of espresso.
Customer: Oh, I see.
Server: So, a double Americano?
Customer: Well, I'd like the espresso, but I don't think I have time for the coffee... (N.B. - none of this dialogue is made up) so I guess I'll have one to go.
Server: A double Americano to go?
Customer: Do you think I have time to drink it inside?
Server: (somehow intuiting actual meaning behind near-phatic question, holding up mug) We serve it in a cup this size, so if you're in a hurry you'll want to get it in a to-go cup.
Customer: (mulls it over, establishes neural link with mothership, reaches decision) Oh, I don't have time for that. Maybe I'll get a double espresso for inside.
Perhaps this conversation isn't as strange as I'm making it to be. It certainly seems like a long way round to get a double espresso. Perhaps he was not an alien but some kind of Caffeine Hunter attempting to outsmart his drink.
Outside I heard this conversation:
Dude A: Dude [B], look at this motherfucker. Take a look at this fucking motherfucker!
Dude B [to Dude C, the fucking motherfucker]: Fuck, motherfucker. Fuck. What the fuck's happening?
Dude C, "the fucking motherfucker": Fuck, dude, I don't fucking know. Fuck's happening with you, motherfucker?
I don't know those guys get organized. They all seem to have the same name.
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the perils of speaking out loud I
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When we extended a post-election invite to Americans who wanted to flee to Canada, this really wasn't what we meant.
Sheesh.
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clearing up a misconception
» Tuesday, November 16, 2004
As many of you know, newspapers all over the world have reported that Condoleeza Rice has been tapped to fill Colin Powell's position. If you visit the official White House site, though, you'll see that it's the oil tanker Condoleeza Rice who will be Bush's Secretary of State for his second term in the Oval Office:
Washington (AP) -- The giant Chevron tanker, renamed the Altair Voyager not long before Rice left Chevron to become Bush's National Security Adviser, expressed its excitement at the appointment in a special news conference.
"As the first double-hulled tanker to be appointed Secretary of State, I promise fewer spills, an unblemished safety record and prompt delivery of unrefined policy to all corners of the United States".
"Even though I am only nine years old and officially registered in the Bahamas, I assure you that neither my youth nor my deceptive transnational identity will impede my performance".
The Rice then spewed oil over the assembled reporters. "That's my precious lifeblood and cool drink of water all rolled up in one!" exclaimed the "Suezmax" ship, so termed because its girth is the maximum allowable for passage through the Suez canal.
When asked about its name change in 1999 to the Altair Voyager, it said: "Chevron officials, including my namesake, felt that it was inappropriate to associate a senior Bush cabinet official with the myriad oil spills, human-rights violations and general rapine qualities of the oil industry. It would have been tacky to remind everybody that the Bush administration has forgotten the distinction between those who govern in the people's name and those who kick the Earth's ass to make a buck". The ship continued, "So yeah. They changed my name".
The Rice then spewed more crude on the crowd. "Sorry about that," it remarked. "A reef breached my hull a few days ago".
After repairs, the new Secretary of State plans to make a diplomatic visit to the nations of Nigeria and Angola.
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from the department of dread prescience
» Friday, November 12, 2004
Not two weeks ago I was grousing on this very site about the persistence of Band Aid on the radio. I concurred with Neal Ascheron of the New York Review of Books that Africa functions as some inexhaustible vein of misery from which Westerners feed. And now, twenty years later, a group of pampered Brit-poppers are banding together once more to sing that "Do They Know It's Christmastime" song again. Again. I tell you, we need the Middle East for its oil, China for its Wal-Mart-supply sweatshops, and Africa for its burden of suffering. From various parts of the globe we procure the goods and the energy sources that make our lives easy, and from various bits of Africa we procure the empathy and compassion that allows us to feel at ease with the cheap goods and cheap energy. Everybody rallied behind the "Feed the World" mantra of Band Aid and Live Aid and whatever else, because "the world" in that case simply meant "Ethiopia," and back in 1984 we had the luxury of pretending that Ethiopia's famine came about by a regrettable but natural drought. Never mind a war with Eritrea that had been hacking up the countryside for the last ten years. I wonder whether a new but still Bono'd Band Aid can persuade the pampered millions to part with the 14.99 or whatever it'll cost. THEY'LL JUST DOWNLOAD IT OFF KAZ@A, YOU FOOLS! THE MILLIONS WILL STEAL FOOD RIGHT OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF STARVING... OH... RWANDANS OR LES COTE D'IVORIENS OR WHOMEVER. THOSE WITH ARMS LEFT WILL THROW THEM IN THE AIR AND SCREAM OUT "WHY, CONSUMERS OF INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS? WHY?" And so forth.
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ignition loaf
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Bread generates its own heat. You ever noticed that? Leave a loaf of crappy store-bought sugar 'n' horsehooves bread in its bag out on the counter for an afternoon, then reach in. You're sticking your hand into a puffed latticework of carbohydrate fire. I wonder if the right circumstances ever get together and nudge a loaf of Wonda into full combustion. Strange conflagrations blamed on babysitters, errant Christmas fires that have the forensic teams sniffing at sockets: I bet it's the bread left out on the counter.
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bored blurry blogger spots a mirror
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In the Achat Hotel, Karlsruhe. The Lotus says that the picture is interesting because it makes my head look deformed.
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leisured indigent in Karlsruhe
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This appeared to be two homeless guys and two fixed-address types on the left. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you'll notice that the man on the far left is giving me an irritable glare.
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streetcorner in downtown Karlsruhe
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a favourably inclined bicycle by the Karlsruhe Waschhaus
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in europe they park all perpendicular like
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We need more of these Smart Cars in North America. They run on pure Fahrvergnugen.
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Karlsruhe girl
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This is one of those photos that you wait for, assuming a statue-like pose until the correct moment suddenly turns its face towards you. I stood in a plaza in Karlsruhe just two blocks down from the shop where I bought my camera, waiting for this little girl to look in my direction.
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in belgium: the man with a bag of lead
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This is Philippe van D_______, a crazy Wallonian who brought a bag of lead to an interview. Don't ask.
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nanowrimotosis
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Oy. My novel is getting away from me, only two days after its launch. Instead of meandering along with the story of a guy bleeding on the floor of a jeepney crawling through rush-hour traffic in downtown Manila, I let my brain devise an impossible task. I gave my brain a path and it duly planted a few hedges and transformed it into a labyrinth of ridiculous ambition. I’ll spare you the pain of reading a novel that requires of me hours of research and a cursory knowledge of eighteenth century Spanish, but here’s a vague outline so far:
In our first installment we watched a man stealing a pair of polka-dot boxers from a clothesline strung across a Manila alleyway. For reasons unknown, he’s being pursued through the city by unknown pursuers (this unknown quarry). For further unknown reasons, he’s broke and filthy. He jumps onto a jeepney cab, where the pursuers catch up to him, beat him up and take the boxer shorts back. I have decided to retract that last plot point, since it’s more interesting to keep up a chase scene and anyway, a man in bad straits needs a change of underwear. Who is this guy? Why is he being pursued? What’s the deal here anyway?
He calls himself CW, which is short for Cardoza-White. His first name is Frederick. He has come to Manila from the US to locate distant relatives named in his mother’s will. Or you may say that he has come to spend an enviable inheritance in a foreign country before other family members think to contest the will. He locates a far-removed cousin named Apolinair Cardoso di Ocampo, who claims to be the only living family member left in the Philippines. Apolinair talks a mile a minute, owns a house full of animals and children, and is accompanied wherever he goes by a forty year old “boy” named Ferdinand. He seems to make his living by hosting beauty pageants and organizing eco-tours for German tourists. Apolinair calls him “Mr. Fred” at some moments and “my American cousin” at others. He promises to tell CW the story of their shared family, but confusingly, he tells him two distinct stories: the one of a family of Portuguese aristocrats who died in a volcanic eruption that sank the cities of the Provincia Taal into the sea in 1754; the other of a U.S. soldier stationed in the Philippines around 1900 who fathered several legitimate children and a number of illegitimate ones. It turns out that he also participated in the Balangiga Massacre of 1901 as well, the sort of brutal killing spree that occupiers occasionally carry out against the occupied.
It gradually dawns on CW that both his father's and his mother’s family have come to the Philippines in centuries past, and that the separate branches there have eventually intertwined, just as they have in North America. Or at least, this is what Apolinair tells him. But how did the White family cross lines with the Cardosos? And what were a family of Portuguese aristocrats doing in a country so thoroughly colonized by the Spanish? Just how much of what his cousin tells him is trustworthy? Whatever the answers are, we know that CW ends up running like hell through the city streets, filthy and broke and bleeding. With stolen boxers.
You see? I need to shave this thing down a little, or at least read a few books on Filipino history. Maybe I should get back to that post-apocalyptic story about the rich Australian teenager who ends up living in an underground shelter with a bunch of military freaks and rich white guys.
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this one sucks so I'll put up some photos next
» Wednesday, November 10, 2004
I came late as usual, but I’m here and now you’re stuck with me. National Novel Writing Month started ten days ago, but I’m going to give it a go nonetheless. I’ll even try it natheless. Can you believe it? Natheless and wearing my polka-dot boxers, I’ll churn out as much prose as possible between now and the 29th of November, when I’m scheduled for my next trip into the world of equipment hauling and the coaxing of dimly-remembered stories of misery from elderly people (necessarily of limited success, since most of the elderly people I speak to are experiencing plenty misery in the present. They’re more interested in talking about the children that ignore them and the body that is shutting itself down, organ by organ, sense by sense. But they talk anyway, you know. Natheless.). For those of you who don’t know, National Novel Writing Month demands 50 000 words from its participants but places no constraints on content. You can write about nostril hairs, international intrigue, shameful masturbatory fantasies, whatever you like. You don’t need characters, plot, theme, setting, or mood. You don’t even need to determine if the main conflict will be man vs man, man vs self, or man vs nature. You don’t need paragraph breaks. All you need are sentences, really, and they don’t require subordinate clauses. No ordinances necessary.
You can even, if you wish, write about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you must have fiction, then you can pretend to be someone else writing about Nanowrimo. You can pretend to be wearing someone else’s polka-dot boxers, a pair you grabbed off a laundry line while running at breakneck speed through the backyards of a South End neighbourhood. Maybe you found the clothesline anomalous in these days of automatic dryers, and so you leapt up in mid-run, clutching at a pair of bright red boxers with orange and white polka-dots, your hand closing around the fabric and the clothes pins popping free off the line. Maybe you were surprised (as surprised as your pursuers?) as your body carried you past the line, the boxers bunched in your hand, your foot hitting the ground and you with a new pair of underwear. Suddenly you’re a thief on top of a trespasser, never mind whatever it was you did in the first place to be going at breakneck speed through somebody’s backyard in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Maybe the neighbourhood’s not even nearby. It could be that you’re tearing through an alleyway in Manila, a side lane thick with clotheslines, white sheets and football jerseys, all colours pale except for those boxers. You spot them and leap up, knowing that you’re far enough ahead of your pursuers that this one suspended moment won’t matter that much, knowing that you can cut through this street and emerge onto Edsas Boulevard, where a jitney can take you straightaway to Makati. There are so many Westerners in Makati, shopping at the Gap and pulling down their face masks to sip Starbucks, that you can blend in. But the men after you will stick out there. You bet that there are at least a few stores in the Makati malls where you can casually enter and browse while a polite store guard armed with a shotgun escorts your pursuers beyond the gates. Even in the stained jeans and the filthy brown barong, you’re still Western, still the receiver of unearned privilege. And you’ve still got that sharp suit jacket to cover the worst of the stains and the fact that you have no wallet – that you are, in fact, flat broke and cut off from the only people in the country who could help you. At least you’ve got a pair of polka-dot boxers.
Nanowrimo does want 50 000 words of you, but there’s no need to stick to those kinds of standards. Especially since that’s the only standard they’ve got. I think that expectations should have a critical mass; if they’re sufficiently low, you can ignore even those. Maybe I’ll put a slogan on a T-shirt: Give Me Nearly Nothing To Fight For And I Will Surrender. Anyway. I’d edit this stuff out, but hey - this in Nanowrimo, the anything goes attempt to get fingers dancing on keyboards. I think that if I can produce two pages a day for the next two and a half weeks, you will all be tremendously bored with my weblog. Natheless I prevail.
Some people don’t need this brand of encouragement. Mimi Smartypants, that Polaris in the weblog firmament, actually restricts her output to 2000 words per entry. How she manages that much in the first place is a mystery to me. I get filled with self-digust over my prose after five hundred words - not for its clumsiness, or pretentiousness, or artful disguise of personality, but for its ease. I feel like a homeless person with the world’s best crescent wrench. No plumbing in my cardboard box. Nor am I looking for sinks and toilets to fix right now, so what am I doing with this weblog, aside from offering some entertainment to friends? Here’s where the plumbing metaphors threaten to clog up. Which is apt for a novel that opens in the Phillipines, where most everything smells a little bit like sewage and grey water. After a few days you get used to it, that faint stench that only strong air conditioning keeps at bay. But who’s thinking of that, when you’re running through the alleyway, hoping for a jeepney that will get you the hell away from those guys? You duck around the sheets and run out onto Edsa Boulevard. A bright green jitney cab with the name Peireira blazoned across the open door in back passes by, so on you jump. Scraps of English, Tagalog jokes, a magandan hapon or two. You squeeze in between two civil servants and stuff the boxers inside a jacket pocket.
Okay, now the guy’s on his way to Makati in a jeepney. This is, in fact, a stupid decision, because it’s a Friday afternoon and the streets are packed with cabs, trucks, compact Japanese cars, slum dwellers hawking cheap Chinese goods between the lanes (not there are any lanes to speak of). Traffic cops lean on their vans by the most crowded intersections, looking not to direct traffic but to pick up a few pesos or US dollars from anyone who looks like they can pay. At the second light the pursuers jump on the jeepney, kick him around, take the boxers. I had to find a way to get rid of the underwear. Exit pursued by a natheless.
CHAPTER 2
As he lay on the floor of the vehicle, his suit jacket imprinted with a dusty Nike footprint, he found himself thinking, highly incongruously, about Tori Spelling’s career. What was she working on now that Beverly Hills was over? A series of Movies of the Week, a couple of direct-to-video erotic thrillers? Was she hosting a series of specials? Two weeks ago, flipping through the Mexican soap operas dubbed into Tagalog and the ubiquitous CNN broadcasts, he’d caught a few minutes of a crime drama starring Spelling and some guy from L.A. Law. What did other actors think, standing there on a set, trading scripted lines back and forth with Tori Spelling? It must be strange, because no matter what emotions you’re expected to call on, no matter what lines you mouth in the service of your character, you have to ignore how ugly she is. Every self-aware actor working with her must be thinking: “This is Aaron Spelling’s daughter. Therefore I must never betray my incredulity, not by casually dropped offstage line or by involuntary twitch, that her face appears to be staring at me through a fisheye lens”. Why not, thought the man on the jeepney floor with the footprint on his jacket and the sympathy of two civil servants, turn Tori Spelling into a figurehead ruler, a transnational monarch, a poster girl the modern world? The paragon of power triumphant over all other considerations. Plus, she appears to be capable of staring in two directions at once, so the “Tori is watching You” posters and pamphlets will pack additional punch. He began to make elaborate plans in his head until he noticed that he was bleeding.
CHAPTER 3
Some days are better than others, he thought.
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a nupdate
» Sunday, November 07, 2004
Regarding Perdido Street Station, which I predicted would spawn a sequel real soon: there's is a sequel, another 800-page fatty that I will probably read. But for Christ's sake, Meaville: I want to write a novel as well, buddy, and if you keep dumping out these hay bales, where am I going to find the time?
Regarding The Lotus' entries on my kissing style or the high regard in which she holds me: Really, she is too kind. I am an ugly man, fish-belly white and surrounded by a pillow of my own grotesque flab. One of my legs is a sort of stump with an articulated flipper at the end, good only for stirring up bathwater. I live in a jar and travel around the world in the cargo hold of FedEx planes. But I have the nicest eyes.
Regarding the States: go visit Seastreet for a sober take on that brutal mess of an election. As a nation fulminates on voter rolls and Diebold and GOP dirty tricks, Seastreet swivels around and looks at the Democratic campaign. Yes, I'm sure that Democrat voters in their thousands were turned away or intimidated or had their votes meddled with by the magic touch-screen machines of Diebold - but come on, people. A close race? A mannequin like Bush shouldn't get more than five hundred votes in the first place. The booths should have been swamped, drowned, utterly saturated with pissed-off citizens working together to get rid of that pisshead and his syndicate. But clearly enough people felt that the alternative simply wasn't good enough. And that's all the Republicans needed - just enough people. Ah well. I'm betting that 2006 will see a backlash against the GOP. Anyone for backlash in '06?
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six weeks of looking at pieces of paper
» Thursday, November 04, 2004
I’ve been reading: Some Books. I’ve been reading Some Books because the movies and televisions insist on speaking foreign languages. They speak French, German, Spanish. The people go around speaking Allegmanisch, Wallonian, Flemish, Provencal, but the TVs keep the mainstream languages flowing nicely. Behind the walls of Europe people murmur their dialects as the electronics squawk in tongues. So yeah. I didn’t get to watch much TV in Europe. But I read Some Books. And here they are.
The day before I left I walked into Buzzword Books and asked Gord to recommend something. He handed me William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which has a lousy cover but turned out be one of those books that you read feverishly, one of those books that you spend the entire day thinking about, one that you are so impatient to return to that meals and work and conversation becomes an irritant, pointless filler. Why, I kept thinking, am I sitting here talking to this [European citizen] when I could be sitting at a café or in my hotel room reading my book? Even basic hygiene began to tax my patience. You can’t read a book in the shower. You can’t read a book and shave at the same time (without severe injury). I experimented with simultaneous reading and toothbrushing, with limited success. If Boyd’s novel had been another few hundred pages I would have given up on ablutions altogether and given over my body to its basic tendency to make men smell like goats. I would have been the Shaggy Canadian frightening the children of Europe. They would have cowered in their highchairs in all the Autogrills of France, all the Little Chefs of Britain, all the Valks of Holland. The fever and concentration with which I approached Any Human Heart reminded me of my reading habits of childhood, when I would sit in the doorway of my bedroom after my parents had turned off my light, and read by the light of the hallway. When my parents’ footsteps sounded too close to the base of the stairs I would leap up with my book, run across the room to my bed and pretend to sleep. Hmmm. I’m sure they couldn’t have heard the sudden thumps from upstairs and the squeak of bedsprings. Later I discovered that a small flashlights would allow me to read under the covers, but nothing felt quite as comfortable as my old habit of reading in the doorway, positioning my body between the uprights, one foot for a brace and the book tilted to catch the light properly.
If anyone’s curious about Any Human Heart– because I haven’t mentioned one word about its content – I will gladly lend it to you. Serious callers only. Limited time offer. No reasonable request refused. Void where prohibited.* In accordance with federal, provincial and municipal laws. Held over three big weeks!**
*By which I mean to say: Defecate in Public Places.
** Remember when movies were held over in theatres? E.T. hung around for months in 1982, just sucking people into theatres like they were strands of spaghetti. In the papers the ads would proclaim, “Held over two more weeks!” as if they were live productions. Now movies just persist or vanish.
Instead of flying direct to Amsterdam from Toronto, we stopped briefly in Heathrow to switch from Air Canada to British Midlands. As far as I can tell, the hour flight to Amsterdam on BMI is a kind of reward for the gruelling ten hours on Air Canada. If you ever fly international on Air Canada, do not opt for the vegetarian meal. You will get your food served twenty minutes before the carts come creaking down the aisle, but the food tastes like piping hot moist cardboard. Or freezing cold but somehow damp cardboard. You can’t outsmart Air Canada into satisfying your needs or giving you a pleasant experience. They’ve been around way too long for that. Anyway. At Heathrow I bought three books: Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog, China Meaville’s Perdido Street Station and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex.
First on my reading list – after Any Human Heart betrayed me by ending – was Meaville’s big fatty of a novel. I tell you, Meaville can not turn down an adjective. Or an opportunity to use words like “beguile” and “judder”. He’s like the guy down the street who ends up with an empty garage because he can’t say no to the neighbours who come over to borrow his tools. Run from Perdido Street Station before the adjectives catch on and come after you. The most frustrating thing about the book is its reliance on plot, such that you can’t put the book down because you need to know what happens next. So you slog through the swamp of adjectives, ford the waist-deep river of archaic verbs, just to see what comes after. What comes after is an inconclusive ending that will almost certainly get its sequel. Which I will read with gritted teeth and a cup of coffee. Mmmm, gritted teeth. It’s like cream of wheat with more calcium.
After eight hundred pages of Meaville’s bring-this-man-an-editor prose, I was grateful that Martin Amis was next on my list. And this was not just any Amis – this was Yellow Dog, the novel that had Tibor Fischer howling with derision, the one that just about everyone agrees hits the depths of depravity. The nadir of Amis’ talent and the squandering of his gifts. The novel that draws on an empty well of the spirit and comes up with a bucket of muck and worms. Yeah, well, I liked it, even though the complaints are justified. Yellow Dog doesn’t really feel like a novel so much as a bunch of collated notes for a longer, more substantial book. Or maybe several books. There’s a story about a successful modern middle-class man whose violent past hits him on the head and transforms him, by dint of a brain injury, into a yob with a conscience, a primitive fighting a rearguard action against his atavistic instincts. Which may be a good way to describe the novel: a text that takes a prurient interest in pornography and incest but keeps stepping back to examine itself instead of diving in wholeheartedly. Instead of gratifying desire, Amis seems to enjoy wallowing in desire’s repulsiveness. The result is all titillation, a striptease of a book, a porn movie in which everybody sits down to dinner instead of having sex.
Interleaved with the A-plot is the risible tale of the Englands, a fictitious Royal Family who end up embroiled in a sex-tape scandal. Perhaps this bit was allegorical, perhaps it was supposed to suspenseful or maybe even funny, but I didn’t waste time on piercing its veil. Complications ensue, other characters do other things, an airplane full of smokers comes screaming across the sky, eventually the whole thing ends. I left the novel in a hotel in southern France for the next off-season guest.
Enough for today? I think so. Next up on the Palinode Review Revue: Middlesex; Oryx & Crake; Snow Crash; The DaVinci Code.
Labels: travel
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