Novel+ Review: Crime and Punishment

            It took me over 27 years to read my first Dostoevsky novel. Literally. The reasons for this delay were multiple.

Reason 1: I’ve just never really connected with The Russkies, just never gotten into Russian history, art, music, film, boxers:

Or lit. No Tolstoy. No Chekov. No Gorky. No Nabokov. One book of Bulgakov’s (Master and Margarita). OK, so I do love me some Lenin:



But... that’s because Lenin’s a bad-a$$.
            Reason 2: I’ve never really ID’d with the people who claim to love Russian literature. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t found such people engaging, interesting, and friend-worthy (you know who you are), merely that I’ve never wanted to become them, like, I’ve never seen the broody, scarf-wearing, smoking, pale guy scoffing at his fellows and said, “Yes! I wan’t to be like him!”

This is the same reason why I previously avoided things like Deleuze, Country Music/Nascar, and Harry Potter. (Recently, I did overcome my Deleuze aversion and am now one of the obnoxious a’holes I previously loathed; don’t expect the same Country Music//Nascar! ‘Arry Potta’, on the other hand...)

So what the he!! happened to me and my prejudices? Well, per usual, a bunch of crap out of my control.

First, a guy gifted me a copy of Crime and Punishment a few months back.

Second, I reread a David Foster Wallace article about Dostoevsky/Joseph Frank (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”).

And third, I started reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for myself.

            What did I find? Humor. Moral seriousness. A willingness to both sympathize and not sympathize with Them That Think They’re Better than the rest of their fellows. Characters so lively I couldn’t forget them if I wanted to (if only I could remember their names!!! Porfiry?!?). A story both well crafted and unwieldy and deeply in touch with the issues of its time.

All of which is to say that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment I found a novel that was both the kind of novel I love to read and the kind I hope to write. And there’s no higher praise I can give a book.

            I do, however, think C & P could’ve used a solid, like, 200-page edit. Just sayin’...

Occupying My Parents' Basement

I wish I had some funny, anecdotal way to get into This, but I don’t. The following is going to be about the Occupy Movement in general, Occupy Portland in partic...

Wait, WAIT!!! I do, I do have a funny, anecdotal way to get into This:

4:15 in the morning. Sunday morning. 13th of November.

There I was in my parent’s basement, in my PJs.

Yeah, I’m 27 years old. Yeah, I live in my parents' basement. Yeah, they live in a multi-million dollar home that isn’t just in Lake Oswego, Oregon, it’s on Lake Oswego, Oregon. Lake Oswego, Oregon. a.k.a. “Lake No Negro,” a.k.a. “The Land of Oz,” a.k.a. the richest suburb in the Portland-Metro Area.

Anyways, there I was ready to start my morning stretching/exercise routine:

I’d prepared the juice I always drink while stretching (OJ cut with water and Emergen-C).

I’d angled the downstairs television into optimal viewing position.

Yeah, my parents have a downstairs television, and a mid-level one, and an upstairs one, and another downstairs, and one in my little sister’s room, and....

I turned on the TV hoping to find out whether or not the Ducks had beaten Stanford the night before, but instead of being on its usual channel 735 (ESPN, HD) my parent’s cable-box was set to channel 702 (ABC, also HD).

*Breaking News*

The Occupy Portland camp had not been broken up like Mayor Sam Adams promised!!!

Now, I want you to let your own personal reaction to that news wash over you. Get frustrated. Get excited. Get whatever you got back when that was the news. Heck, get whatever.

   

Actually, scratch “whatever” off your list.

If your reaction to the Occupy Movement has been some kind of indifference then you probably need to go to a hospital: Some vital part of you is dead and/or dying.

Don’t believe me?

Think I’m being melodramatic?

            Or Captain Obvious?
 

How about this: The Occupy Movement isn’t just protesting corporate greed:

Or government hoo-ha twaddling:

 

It’s protesting the way of life of any/all those of us who’re doing well enough Right Now to not be a part of the Occupy Movement.

There.

I said it.

My new definition of the 1%.

Less this:

More this:

 
(For some reason, my computer won’t let me upload images I download from facebooooook; I wanted a picture of myself for the above and apologize for the somewhat shameless mirror-mirror maneuver I decided to go with instead.)

And you know what? Me and my would-be-ESPN-watching/PJ-wearing/stretching/exercising/juice-drinking/Lake-O-with-parents-living/somewhat-gainfully-employed/health-insured/college-educated/pretty-d@mn-Happy self actually thinks the Occupy Movement is onto something.

And not because I think it’s “good.” (I don’t).

Or because I think it’s going to “work.” (What do we even mean by “work” any more?)

Or because I think it’s got a “clear message.” (It doesn’t, at least not in terms of being able to articulate the kind of concrete desires that we seem to want from others, e.g., "I want X")

Or because I think it’s going to find the kind of charismatic leader necessary to unify/organize it in such a way that news reporters stop asking stupid questions of hapless-weirdos and pundits just shut the f*ck up.

I think the Occupy Movement is onto something because it shows us something true about ourselves.

And by “ourselves” I mean my new definition of the 1%.

And by “something true” I mean something that most of us don’t like seeing when we look in the mirror and say, “Mirror mirror...”

Or something we don’t want to hear from others when we ask them, “Do these jeans make a$$ look fat?”

What the mirror is showing us isn’t what we want to see.

What our friend is telling us isn’t something we want to hear.

And what are we being shown/told?

Occupy Portland has shown/told us that we have such a substantial population of crazy, drug-addled, homeless people in our city that our iteration of Occupy basically couldn’t do anything more than merely admirably try and fail to take care of said crazy, drug-addled homeless people.

            Anyone who saw the Occupy Portland camp on the news (me, you, everyone else we know), anyone who went into the camp for any period of time (not me, admittedly), couldn’t help but see who/what was there.
            Even Occupy Portland apologists, people who say things like, “But it wasn’t all homeless, crazy, drug-addled people! There were families there, too!” are basically admitting, via good, old-fashioned de-Nile--

--the truthfulness of what Occupy Portland has shown us, namely, that there are people living in the United States of America, the most prosperous nation in the history of the world, who are not being taken care of.

We sure-as-sh*t aren’t taking care of them.

Nobody else appears to be taking care of them.

They sure-as-shei$$e aren’t taking care of themselves.

Like it or not, this is the Truth.

Like it or not, when Occupy Portland finally got disbanded in its camp-form, all the crazy, drug-addled homeless people that made Occupy Portland such a volatille, ineffective iteration of Occupy, i.e., which made Occupy Portland what it was, didn’t go nowhere.

They just went somewhere else.

            They went back to Burnside.
            They went back to that three-four block radius around Pioneer Square.
            They went back to...   

Well, at least they didn't go back to Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Fool Me Once, Shame on Me

           I’m going to go ahead and assume that most of you haven’t read Alexander Malisk’s recent novel, You Deserve Nothing. If you have, great. if you haven’t, I’m not going to spoil it for you. I am, however, going to spend the first part of this piece unpacking what I understand to be its core problematic, a problematic which gets most potently delivered late in the novel when an old man says to a young one, “If you remember one thing and one thing only, remember this: Anyone you can fool is not worth loving.”

I’ve been discussing this quote with everyone I can these past few weeks (including the author himself, if you’re interested...), and after much noggin-knocking I think I finally figured out what it means, sort’a.

First Off: The quote has almost nothing to do with other people, i.e., it’s not really about them and whether or not they’re worthy of sweet lovin’ (at least not initially...).

Whom/what is it about? Well, first and foremost, it’s about us. It’s about me. It’s about you. It’s about an answer to an uncomfortable question...

Anecdote: I read an earlier version of this piece at an open-mic event a few weeks back. The day after, I was in a coffee shop in downtown P-town and happened to see one of the other open-micers, a gal who’d sung this fantastic song about a woman coming up to her and mistaking her for Liza Minelli.

Being the brazen, fool-hardy, aw-shucks kind’a guy I am, I went up to the Liza Minelli “look-alike” and said, “Hey, I saw you sing last night and I really loved it. I just wanted you to know,” which precipitated her responding, “Awww thanks, hey, I really liked your piece too,” which precipitated my being like, “Thanks, whatever, yeah, blah blah,” and her going, “No, really, your piece really made me think. I always have a cigarette before I go to bed and I was out there smoking and was like, ‘How full of sh*t am I? Am I like 100% full of sh*t?’”

Sure, the gal could’ve been fooling me with her “No, it really made me think” (there’s almost nothing I like to hear more in response to something I’ve written, *wink wink, nudge nudge*), but I’m  going to go ahead and assume she wasn’t for the purpose of what follows.

Uncomfortable Question: How full of sh*t am I/are you? Are you Pinocchio full of sh*t?

Nixon full of sh*t?



Tubgirl full of sh*t?

• Answering the Uncomfortable Question:
• Angle 1: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the insert what you’re looking to see here-est one of all?
• Being tubgirl-full-of-sh*t and/or fooling ourselves is primarily about distorting, misrecognizing, remaining blind to, and/or lying about what we see when we’re confronted with a “mirror” (whether said mirror be literal or figurative or magical or...).
• Fooling ourselves is about twisting the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in the name of...
• Feeling better about ourselves.
• I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh-darnit, people like me!
• Feeling worser about ourselves.
• I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, and people just don’t like me (I know it).
• There’s always a “pay-off” to self-fooling (otherwise we wouldn’t do it).
• We get something when we fool ourselves about ourselves, a certain pleasure, a certain maintenance of the status quo.
• If I’m in the habit of telling myself that people don’t really like me (or that they’re too stupid to like me, e.g.), then I get to relish in the dark-fun of solitude.
• See Jonathan Franzen:

                                                           

• If I’m in the habit of telling myself that people do like me (i.e., that I’m just so d@mn awesome that they just can’t help themselves), then I get to ignore all of the subtle and not so subtle ques that suggest otherwise.
• When we’re in the business of fooling ourselves about ourselves it allows/forces us to tune out information/feedback/stuff we don’t want to hear.
• The opposite of fooling ourselves about ourselves is giving ourselves accurate self-appraisals.
• An accurate self-appraisal is any appraisal that doesn’t require you to ignore/obfuscate/distort That Which Is Present.
• That Which is Present is that which, when ignored/obfuscated/distorted becomes what is commonly referred to as a “pink elephant.”
• WE KNOW when there’s a “pink elephant” in the room.
• YOU KNOW.
• Accurate self-appraisal require that we learn to ask/answer the following, often uncomfortable meta-question: “What’s my motivation?”
• What does a given self-appraisal justify me in doing or not doing, ignoring or paying O.C.D. attention to, saying or remaining silent on, investigating or obfuscating, etc?
• Again, there’s always a “pay-off” for an inaccurate self-appraisal, and, unfortunately, a lot of the time the pay-offs are Big Ones.

• Angle 2: Hey, you there?!?
• Other people are just as likely to show/tell us what we want to see/hear r.e. ourselves as they are the opposite.
• Who am I kidding?!? Other people are way more likely to show/tell us what we want than not.
• Mostly as a function of their desire to be liked/approved-of or disliked/rejected by us.
• “He smiled at her, hoping to be liked...”
• “She scowled at him, hoping to be disliked.”.
• This notion is undoubtedly part projection on my part.
• Someone who doesn’t care whether/not they’re liked is not necessarily more trustworthy in helping us with accurate self-appraisals than someone who is.
• This is true insofar as nothing is really at stake in/for such a person, a “stranger.”
• Just like with the above, the first question we’ve got to learn to ask ourselves when receiving feedback from another person r.e. ourselves and whether or not we’re good/bad, ugly/beautiful, interesting/boring, etc., is: Motivation?
• What does the other stand to gain from helping us affirm/disconfirm a given self-appraisal? From saying/not saying X?
• Sorry people, but we just can’t trust strippers to give us information that will lead to a more accurate appraisal of our sexual desirability.
• Sorry again, but we just can’t trust people telling us certain jeans make our a$$es look downright delectable.
• Many of us can’t trust our own parents, period.

            And the Second Thing Is: It’s only once we’re actively not fooling ourselves that we’re really worth loving. Again, anyone you can fool is not worth loving...

Why do I believe this? Well, whenever I’ve developed a habit of fooling myself in regards to Thing X (e.g., my interests, my values, my principles, my intelligence, my looks, my goodness/badness) it has seriously compromised my ability to be the sort of person that another person could/should depend on or trust or be genuinely interested in.

I’ve come to believe there’s a big eff’n difference between being known/loved as one is and being known/loved as we/others distort us to be. And it isn’t until we stop fooling ourselves/letting ourselves be fooled about ourselves that being loved as we are becomes possible without the assist of wild, wild speculation on the part of some penny-stock kind'a person who, like, sees our souls or some such ideological sloppage (e.g., Drive).

ONE MORE THING: There’s nobody we can’t fool if/when we set our minds to it.

Nobody.

Movie Review DOUBLE-DIP: Hugo and In Time

            This past Turkey-Day, my familly was up to its usual shenanigans: Getting lost in a snow-storm on a walk (with my father in the lead), a weepy round-table giving of “thanks” for everything we’re thankful for this past year (my father, brother, sister and I were all thankful for our “mustaches,” for example), a multi-course glutting at the Sunriver Lodge (mmmm, cranberry-sauce... on... EVERYTHING), and our post-glutting trip to the movies.


Hugo:
    
           The movie everyone had agreed to seeing before I’d been able to show up and work my argumentative magic was Martin Scorcese’s Hugo (“I’m not saying I won’t like it, dad, merely that I have absolutely no desire to see it”).

Yeah, I didn’t want to see Hugo before being dragged to the theater by my family (the only film I wanted to see less than Hugo was Puss in Boots, another movie that might not be godawful but which I have absolutely no desire to see... A part of me wanted to see Jack and Jill).

Yeah, when I was 13 that kind of pre-judgment might have been enough to prevent me from liking d@mn-near anything.

HOWEVER, I like to tell myself I’m not 13 anymore and that I’m more than willing to revise my pre-judgements if I’m proven wrong.

I wish Hugo had proven me wrong.

            My primary complaint against Hugo comes from Mark Twain. Twain writes somewhere in his “How to Tell a Story”:

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you--every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

In his essay, Twain is trying to distinguish what he calls “American humour,” with its meandering style and willingness to pass over the nub/butt/punchline of a given joke and be like “What, what’s so funny?”, from the kind of comic stories that make Twain want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

While not at all comic (sorry Sasha Baron Cohen and fans), Hugo was packed with so much shouting about the themes and morals and what was supposed to be of dramatic-import, so much italicization of The Point, so many exclamation points after things of significance and explanations of What’s What and Who’s Who and What’s to Come that it made me want to renounce story telling and lead a better life. 
                   Me, my brother, and one of my younger sisters didn’t like Hugo. My dad, step-mama, and other sister did. Me, my brother, and my younger sister are in a teeny-tiny minority of Hugo haters (Hugo has a 97% on RottenTomatoes). My dad, step-mama and other sister are a part of the 99, er, 97% that think it's Gawd's gift to cinema.

            You know what I think? I think Martin Scorsese totally bamboozled film critics the world over by creating a film that--because of who made it (Scorsese!!!), the quality of its production (it's beautiful) and apparent quality of its story-telling (it's a clock!), not to mention its lovey-dovey gushing over old movies (those of Melies)--cannot be criticized from within the current state of movie-criticism. Scorsese fooled us, or, at least fooled 97% of movie-critics.
            Allow me: Hugo was a belabored suck-fest of the the most polished order.
            Oh, and: It’s in 3D!!!
            Oh, and: My younger brother spent the entirety of the movie disliking/wanting to punch Hugo’s whimpering male lead (Asa Butterfield) in the face.
            AND: When (SPOILER!!!) Abigal Breslin, er, Chloe Grace Moretz’s character turns out to be the writer of the whole she-bang I nearly threw my Thanksgiving up all over the backs of my parents' neighbor’s heads (long, un-comic story, i.e., humorous).

Hugo, even for them that claimed to like it (my dad, step-mama, and sis) was the kind of film that made you want to go watch something else, which is exactly what we did when we left Hugo and snuck into....

In Time:

            In Time, while having lots of problems (plot stuff, the woodenness of Amanda Seyfried), was also lots of fun.

DO YOU HEAR THAT, SCORSESE?!? FUN!!!

Thought-provoking instead of thought-inducing, In Time takes place in a future in which 1% of the population lives forever while everyone else dies not long after they turn 25. Interesting, right?!?

In Time is a movie I’d gladly watch at least part of again. It’s also a movie made by the same guy who made the considerably better Gattica. I’m talking about Andrew Niccol, a guy who basically only makes thought-provoking, fun movies like Gattica, The Truman Show, S1m0ne, and Lord of War. Movies that, while definitely not perfect (except The Truman Show, of course, which I think is perfect and probably the best thing Jim Carey’s ever done), I’m always happy to have seen.

            Oh yeah, and In Time’s got JT doin’ his JT thang:

Parting Shot/Thought: Perhaps the New-Zealand born Niccol is, in accord with what Twain says about “American humor,” more American than Scorsese? I’m just saying...