Friday, January 4th, 2008
Herbert Asbury – All Around the Town (2)
Curious and strange, most of the stories in this book make for delightful reading and provide a colourful historical backdrop for the current New York to be viewed against. Unfortunately, though, the author is not all that trustworthy (an easy to check example is his assertion that cops are called that because New York’s police wore copper stars, which is false), and never provides sources for any of his claims, not even the more outlandish ones. It might be suspected that the stories actually tell us more about how people in the 1920s pictured the history of New York than about the actual history itself, but that itself has become historical now, and it certainly is entertaining.
This book about cognitive dissonance is a good read, and an interesting account of both the theory of why our decisions and opinions can be so much at odds with reality sometimes and a number of examples from history and daily life, where the principle can be observed in action. Yet through much of it, it felt like being a bit lost in someones attempt to make sense of the subject, and as though going to Festinger’s original work might be more illuminating. This in spite of the fact that I don’t think he ever wrote something comprehensive like this on top of his individual studies.
This collection of short pieces did not leave me quite as astounded and fascinated as did his longer story 
A fascinating look at animals and researchers surrounding the Great White Shark Project at the Farallone Islands off the coast of San Francisco. On a clean day you can just see these islands beyond the Golden Gate, and I am going to look out there with much more respect and curiosity now I’ve read the book. On the downside, Casey comes across as a somewhat irresponsible girl, whose obsession with untamed wildness and rugged men ultimately leads to severe consequences for everybody involved.
After having read much of Lethem’s work, I think I love his stuff more for the abundance of ideas than for the actual execution. There is often something oddly fragmented about his storytelling, creating a disaffected air, but many of his characters and situations are very acute and touchingly observed conundrums of human existence, cast into odd narratives. Oh god, would you listen to me. Or rather, don’t. Read Lethem instead.
The premise is a marvelous riff on the post-apocalypse theme. Starting out as a classic, nuclear holocaust story set in the desert, complete with mutants and vigilantes in old cars. But we soon realize something isn’t quite as it seems, and as the protagonist makes his way from the desert back to San Francisco, we slowly understand that what has happened is much more apocalyptic than the mere destruction of the physical that bombs bring about: mental coherence, the very fabric of reality itself, has somehow been damaged, and dreams, paranoia and neuroses bloom freely and infest the world of the real. In keeping with the very lost feeling that pervades the story, we never learn the truth about what people call “the break”, though several alternatives of it are offered. And this, I feel, is also the shortcoming of Amnesia Moon: the exchangeability of the different narratives robs the story of some of its impact – when everything seems possible, nothing can mean much any more.
A cute book about the trip to Japan of a father and son, to meet some of Anime’s legendary figures, and to be shown, time and again, to be fundamentally wrong about Japanese culture. While this book stays on the surface of the issues a lot of the time, and some of the misunderstandings and oddities seem so naive to make me suspect exaggeration for the sake of the books thread, the subject itself is fascinating to me. Having never been to Japan, but being confronted with how utterly strange and alien the culture there is to Westerners, I find myself very unwilling to buy into it. Language books fuzz endlessly about the different politeness levels of Japanese speech, and what a unique concept that is, as though all words and phrases were applicable in all social situations in English. Likewise, many of the unfathomable quirks that are described in books like these seem to be a mix of different historical backgrounds and skewed perception on the side of the visitor, with some deliberate mythbuilding thrown in on the Japanese side, possibly as a means of establishing unity of the nation against foreign influences.
For some bizarre reason that I find it hard to put my finger on, I still like Timothy Dalton’s Bond best. Maybe it was the discrepancy between his effeminate appearance and the supposed tough guy he portrayed. Craig certainly doesn’t have that asset, if an asset it is, but the realism the makers of this movie were striving for, is certainly rewarding. I’m not a fan of product placement, nor of movies that are longer than they should be, nor of the elaborate stunt sequence beginning, that felt like it was tailored for a computer game, but still watching this latest Bond was more fun than I recall the last few attempts to be. And I also liked the surrealist feel of going back to the roots, yet having the plot set in the present, with Dench as M.
I am not a fan of Gibson’s – or indeed any of the cyberpunk writers’ – plotlines. I find the constructions they come up with to throw the little guy into the arena of big corporations and social and economic powers of great thrust hard to swallow, and the conclusions shallow. On the other hand, the intricacies of the worlds created are meticulously worked out, and just for imagining the community of people dwelling on the abandoned structure of the west span of the Oakland Bay Bridge this is well worth reading. The characters are memorable, and the ideas have enough Gibson cool to make the ultimate shallowness of it all less of an issue.
I almost didn’t buy this when I saw it at the local Salvation Army store. Who needs another book on Yosemite, sporting pretty pictures of waterfalls and sunsets? But as it turns out, Brower not only knows many of the key players of Yosemite’s recent cultural and natural history firsthand, he also writes engagingly and knowledgeably about this intriguing stretch of land. The discussion of a supposed dichotomy of artistic concepts battling over the park could have been spared, but the rest of the book is a joy, and the picture really are gorgeous. Makes me want to go up there again.