Book Review – I Am Number Four

Judul Buku : I Am Number Four
Pengarang : Pittacus Lore
Penerbit : Mizan
Jumlah Halaman : 500
Genre : Fantasi

Tidak banyak bacaan yang bisa menarik minat saya. Sedari dulu, hanya genre fiksi ilmiah yang bisa membuatku bertahan membaca buku secara non stop. Setelah terhenti di saga Twilight dan Harry Potter, ada satu serial yang sepertinya berpotensi menjadi hit. I Am Number Four.

Dalam buku ini kita akan bertemu dengan 9 alien yang dikirim kebumi karena planet mereka, Lorien, telah musnah dalam peperangan melawan bangsa Mogadorians. Tokoh utama ceritanya bernama John Smith, bersama sang penjaga, Henri kemudian berkelana dari satu tempat ke tempat yang lain. Rupanya bangsa Mogadorians juga telah sampai ke bumi dan kemudian memburu ke 9 anak ini. John sendiri telah melihat sebuah visi bahwa nomor 3 telah tewas terbunuh. Berarti yang diburu berikutnya adalah dia, dan dia harus berpindah kota lagi untuk kesekian kalinya.

Disinilah cerita berlanjut. Number Four dan sang Penjaga kemudian memutuskan untuk menetap di kota kecil bernama Paradise, Ohio. Semakin terpencil mereka, berarti kemungkinan ditemukan oleh para Mogadorian semakin kecil. Satu hal yang menjadi istimewa adalah ternyata kekuatan Number Four sudah mulai bangkit dan dia harus berlatih keras untuk mendapatkan pusaka-pusakanya.



Apakah masalahnya selesai disini? Tentu saja belum. Number Four akhirnya bertemu dengan seseorang yang membuatnya jatuh cinta. Sarah Hart kemudian menjadi alasan utamanya untuk tetap tinggal di Ohio. Walaupun itu berarti harus ditemukan dan melawan bangsa Mogadorian.

Sebuah tema yang sangat klise memang. Melihat cerita ini sebagai cerita cinta alien bersama manusia. Sang alien memiliki kekuatan dan harus melindungi sang wanita. Tetapi yang membuatnya menarik adalah bagaimana perjalanan perkembangan kekuatan Number Four diceritakan. Kita juga akan menikmati alur balik ketika apa yang terjadi di planet Loriens, bisa saja akan terjadi di bumi. Bukan masalah diserang oleh makhluk asing, tetapi tentang bagaimana menggunakan hasil alam.

Tentu saja klimaks ceritanya ketika Number Four akhirnya ditemukan oleh bangsa Mogadorian. Pertempuran akhirnya tidak terelakkan di sekolah, bersama Sarah, serta Mark James, musuh yang akhirnya menjadi teman, serta Henri sang penjaga dan Sam Goode. Satu-satunya sahabat manusia yang didapat oleh Number Four. Disaat keadaan sudah semakin gawat, ternyata datang bantuan tidak terduga. Number Six yang ternyata seorang perempuan, hadir dan bergabung dalam pertempuran dengan kekuatan yang dimilikinya.

Bisakah semuanya selamat? Dalam buku setebal 500 halaman ini kita akan menemukan jawabannya. Apa sebenarnya yang menjadi kekuatan inti dari Number Four dan Number Six, bagaimana kisah cintanya bersama Sarah. Terdengar klise? Tapi sepertinya 6 buku masih akan menjadi cerita yang panjang. Masih ada Number Five, Number Seven, Number Eight, dan Number Nine yang belum muncul.

Re-Appeared!

Salah satu episode terbaik dari komik bleach, saat Hirako Shinji and the gank datang menolong pasukan Shinigami yang sedang bertarung dengan Aizen. Style mereka berubah dari Shinigami dan menjadi setengah hollow. Come on Ichigo!

Bleach Edisi No. 42 by Tito Kubo

Selected Lines From the Last Two-Plus Weeks' Pleasure Reading*

* - This is the first part of what should probably, for the sake of meeting copyright technicalities, be considered a book review.

She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter's dreamscape... A vision in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.

And the other point is I started to fall even before I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He'll Never Be Great...It was a religious moment. I learned what it means to be a body, Jim, just meat wrapped in a sort of flimsy nylon stocking, son, as I fell kneeling and slid toward the stretched net, myself seen by me, frame by frame, torn open...It's a pivotal, it's a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment, Jim.

'And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void/And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep/And We said:/Look at that fucker Dance.'

...the party music's now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock's grim dental associations...

'As we'd later reconstructed the scene, he'd used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the over door, then when he'd gotten his head in he'd carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.'
'Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.'
'Everybody's a critic. This wasn't an aesthetic endeavor.'

The real football reason, in all its inevitable real-reason banality, was that, over the course of weeks of dawns of watching the autosprinklers and the Pep Squad practices, Orin had developed a horrible schoolboy-grade crush, complete with dilated pupils and weak knees, for a certain big-haired sophomore baton-twirler he watched twirl and strut from a distance through the diffracted spectrum of the plumed sprinklers, all the way across the field's dewy turf, a twirler who'd attended a few of the All-Athletic-Team mixers Orin and his strabismic B.U. doubles partner had gone to, and who danced the same way she twirled and invoked mass Pep, which is to say in a way that seemed to turn everything solid in Orin's body watery and distant and oddly refracted...The schoolboy epithet they'd made up to refer to Orin's twirler was the P.G.O.A.T., for the Prettiest Girl Of All Time...this was the kind of hideously attractive girl you just knew in advance did not associate with normal collegiate human males, and clearly attended B.U.-Athletic social functions out of a sort of bland scientific interest...When she danced, at dances, it was with other cheerleaders and twirlers and Pep Squad Terrierettes, because no male had the grit or spit to ask her...The big hair was red-gold and the skin peachy-tinged pale and arms freckled and zygomatics indescribable and her eyes an extra-natural HD green.

How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? Because every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal...

She's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're 'Here But For the Grace of God," ... but that her trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that the Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.

Storrow 500: Local argot for Storrow Drive, which runs along the Charles from the Back Bay out to Alewife, with multiple lanes and Escherian signs and On- and Off-ramps within car-lengths of each other and no speed limit and sudden forks and the overall driving experience so forehead-drenching it's in the metro Police Union's contract they don't have to go anywhere near it.

...looking due southeast up Prospect, Lucien can see the variegated glints of passing low-chassis headlights off a whole long single-file column of polished metal wheels stolidly turning, being turned by swarthy hands in fingerless wheelchair-gloves. 'Squeak.' 'Squeak.' ... Wheelchair Assassins ... Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, A.F.R.s, the ones who come always in the twilight, implacably squeaking, and cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, feel no pity or remorse, or fear (except a rumored fear of steep hills), and now they're all in here all over the shoproom like faceless rates, the devil's own hamsters ... Lucien bursts almost falling through the curtains, bug-eyed and corded and webbed in thread ... only to horrifically see the shop's rear service door standing agape in a gritty breeze and Bertraund ... sitting, squinting piratically straight ahead, with a railroad spike in his eye.

'Under what presidential administration was this room last deep-cleaned, I'm standing here prompted to fucking muse out loud,' my father said.

Two homemade pom-poms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis rackets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulder pads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc's incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader's outfit and had one of deLint's big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.
'I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting,' Pemulis said.

The kid's still obsessed with her approval. He lives for applause from exactly two hands.

(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hand after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, one, special and only, the One would not be he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered, and will never again.)

... carpal neuralgia, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae. Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses ... One third of those 50% of metro Bostonians who still leave home to work could work at home if they wished. And (get this) 94% of all O.N.A.N.ite paid entertainment now absorbed at home ... Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

The kids did somewhat better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice - whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' - while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own.

... Struck, canted slightly in his desk-chair from the over-development of his body's right side, is also trying to carve up each of this diarrheatic G.T. Day, M.S. guy's clauses into less-long self-contained sentences that sound more earnest and pubescent, like somebody earnestly struggling toward truth instead of flecking your forehead with spittle as he ranted grandiosely ...

Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness, no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional involvement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones ... Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself.

Joelle'd felt half-crazed. She could detect nothing fake about the lady's grace and cheer toward her, the goodwill. And at the same time felt sure in her guts' pit that the woman could have sat there and cut out Joelle's pancreas and thymus and minced them and prepared sweetbreads and eaten them chilled and patted her mouth without batting an eye. And unremarked by all who leaned her way.

'You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?'
'Boy do I ever.'
'Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.'
'But then how do you know they're monsters, then?'
''That's the monstrosity right there, Boo, I'm starting to think.'
'Golly Ned.'
'That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.'

One reason Pemulis was cautiously unassertive about Wayne's unauthorized presence in the room was the leaflet, which given a certain office-incident it wasn't impossible Wayne might choose to suspect seeing Pemulis's hand in the Olde-English-fonted leaflet up at various boards and inserted on the E.T.A. TP's communal e-board for 11/14 announcing a joint John Wayne/Dr. Avril Incandenza arithmetic presentation to the pre-quadrivial 14-and-Unders on how 17 can actually go into 56 way more than 3.294 times.

So Hal's most vivid full-color memory of the non-anti-Substance Meeting he drove fifty oversalivated clicks to by mistake will become that of his older brother's doubles partner's older brother down on all fours on a Dacronyl rug, crawling, hampered because one arm was holding his bear to his chest, so he sort dipped and rose as he crawled on three limbs toward Hal and the needs-meeter behind him, Bain's knees leaving twin pale tracks in the carpet and his head up on a wobbly neck and looking up and past Hal, his face unspeakable.

My whole descent into somewhat-heavier-than-normal drinking may have been some instinctive attempt to bury third-grade feelings of despicability, submerge them in an amber sea.

'You stepped in against six armed Hawaiians, I hear. Marshall Plan. Captain Courageous. God's personal Shane ... Glenny Kubitz calls me and describes the thing blow by blowjob. Says I should see the other guys. Says about breaking a Hawaiian's nose, shoving the bits up into the brain. The old chop-and-stiff-arm he says. Big Don G.'s a Satanically tough motherfuck: this was his assessment.'

The resentment, fear and self-pity are almost narcotizing. Way beyond anything he'd felt whn the hapless Canadians punched or shot him. This was a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage that always sends any sober addict falling back up and inside himself, like vapor up a chimney. Diehl and McDade were backing away from him. As well they fucking might.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

He was always kind of a boys' boy. He had a jolly ferocity about him that scared girls. And he had no idea how to deal with girls except to try and impress them by letting them watch somebody do something to his head. He was never what you'd call a ladies' man. At parties he was always at the center of the crowd that drank instead of dancing.

The condescension with which Prissburger insets that hemoptysis means something called 'percussive hemmorhage,' like Kathy the R.N. wasn't enough of a pro not to have to insert little technical explanations for, makes Gately sad for the guy - it's obvious the guy pathetically thinks this kind of limp condescending shit will impress her. Gately's got to admit he would have tried to impress her, too, though, if she hadn't met him by holding a kidney-shaped pan under his working anus.

The door's got a big poster of R. Limbaugh on it, from before the assassination.

I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.<sup>1

1</sup> Alternatively: I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... 388. Talwin-NX - © Sanofi Winthrop U.S.<sup>a

a</sup>Doubly alternatively: I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies ... And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out. / 1. Methamphetamine hydrochloride, a.k.a. crystal meth ... 388. Talwin-NX - © Sanofi Winthrop U.S.

A Bunch of Shorter Reviews

* - A collection of what's left. Don't worry, I'm almost done.

Black Snow ("1967") by Mikhail Bulgakov

A biting account of the inflated egos incumbent in Moscow Theatre in the 1930's. This is a very quick, tight story of a would-be-author would-be playwright who lucks his way into the wondrous world of theater only to discover it is just as insane, corrupt and ridiculous as everything else. It's satire that refers to very specific historical figures, but you don't really need to be in-the-know to get the jokes - in fact, it probably translates quite well into all kinds of social and professional venues. It's the kind of book that does not grip you in throes while you're reading it, but upon finishing it, you realize you've just read a classic and expertly executed work of art. So, maybe not top notch in the immediate kickback department, but a truly great work. I found the left turn that the novel takes at some point (I'll let you wait for that) to be both frustrating and brilliant, and thoroughly sad. This is, at its heart, a novel about a highly imaginative man suffering from melancholia - so you should probably know that going in, too. Great work by a great author - if you've never read Master & Margarita, go grab it now.

Seriously. Let go of that mouse. Grab a classic Russian Novel. Join the Literati Elite. Get your cocktail party on.

Einstein's Dreams (1993) by Alan Lightman

Very quick read, and more of a series of vignettes - so while it was enjoyable, I'm not about to call it life-changing or essential or anything of that sort, hence the rating of just good. It's a very tightly written account of 30 different dreams or versions of time - told against the backdrop of Einstein as he developed his Theory of Relativity in the early 20th century. The dreams succeed in unravelling every aspect of time - future, past, human perception, the meaning of now, etc. Some of the ideas are extremes of the implications of Relativity; most are just fantastic spins and non-standard takes. In fact, I think this book overly simplified things - by attacking each of times individual elements, it killed the collective mystery. No one aspect standing alone - unchangeable past, the never attatinable ever-present now - reads as all that bizarre, even when exploded to its extreme conclusion. The mystique of time sits in the fact that all these elements occur coincidentally, so when Einstein's brain strips the elements away one at a time and considers them individually, he really doesn't create a more spiritual expeience of his theories for me - perhaps its just that these are all things I've though before. No doubt time is an enigma, and this novella does a good job of capturing each element of it in vignette form - but the very fact that this was nothing special, just flashing thoughts and not a literary space for characters to *really* exist in, left me wanting a lot more out of the world's most notorious genius's dreams. Also, some times (ugh), I think the novel ran out of steam - though the repeated use of villagers in everyday events and lovers and dreamers and mothers and fathers brought a nice consistency, it also wore thin by the end. Turns out that even time gets tiring the 30th time around.

Fever Pitch (1992) by Nick Hornby

Simply a great, great book. Hornby writes a memoir demarcated in its chronology by League games of his childhood and lifelong obsession, Arsenal soccer games. After two or three of his earlier game accounts, I thought there was no way he would be able to keep it up - he is, after all, talking about people I don't know, a sport I barely know, and he is more or less playing the same angle over and over again, that it is completely ridiculous that his life centers around this seemingly arbitrary soccer team which, incidentally, is not even his hometown team. But he pulled it off and then some - weaving the history of the club with his relationship with his father, mother, girlfriends, roommates, schoolmates, fellow fans, his own writing career, his depression... you name it. Surprise, surprise, I did not find my self laughing so hard that I cried, as the bookback promised - he is a witty chum, but it was really the amazing craft to paint his life around the soccer backbone. Along the way he makes poignant comment on the history of the game in his times, the riots, hooligans, deaths by stampede, the lack of modernity of the sport and the dying nature of the club loyal to its fanbase in the pursuit of dollars. Highly, highly enjoyable, and while I do find Hornby a little unquestionably sentimental and overly "bought-in" at times, this was really stellar stuff, and his wry telling of a story that could have turned into another Cubs-and-or-Sox bitchfest carried itself with grace. Great work.

Side note - Jimmy Fallon is on my hit list of sorts. That movie, while okay in and of itself, is just a slap in the face to this book. Tragic, really.

A couple of excerpts that I enjoyed are below, and there were many great segments splattered throughout the book along these lines:

"Arsenal were too good, Charlie's goal was too spectacular, the crowd was too big and too appreciative of the team's performance...The 12th of February did happen, in just the way I described it, but only its atypicality is important now. Life isn't, and never has been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch."

"Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred metre runner, or a hopeless centre-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is fullproof. (Everyone gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated. Even so, I think there is a real resonance with the Gus Caesar story: it contains a terrifying lesson for any aspirants who think their own unshakeable sense of destiny (and again, this sense of destiny is not to be confused with arrogance - Gus Caesar was not an arrogant footballer) is significant. Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madision Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin... and it doesn't mean anything at all."

P.S. I neglected to mention something that I mentioned over in blogland, which is that this book put a huge dent in enthusiasm over the current state of pro-sports and any fandom I have staked therein. Hornby just nails it - the constant switching of teams, locations, taking away the sporting event from the working class - I'm sure you can read about all of these things elsewhere, but FP really nailed that home, the impossibility of devoting yourself to a club and having any stability associated with your devotion outside of uniforms (and even that is no longer sacred). I've definitely soured on the Cubs and their rotating OFs, middle infielders, catchers, relief pitchers; I guess really it's only Wood and Prior that have been around any substantial amount of time but they've probably missed a collective 80 starts between them at this point. The Red Sox are no better, dropping WS heroes left and right. I also think fantasy baseball and good ol' ubiquitous ESPN have a lot to do with this, too - as awesome as it is to watch every game simultaneously in the country, know all the stats, etc., it kills the need to sink your teeth into one team. Hell, in college I even mindlessly devoted myself to the San Jose Sharks (for a very important reason, to be revealed later) and rode the ups and downs of that team, but then it became watching who was on the tube... I think the hyper-availability renders supporting your "local team" pointless, even worse when that club is a revolving door, too. And colleges that recruit world-wide and the players only stay for two years - you see where I'm going with this. It's all disheartening and impersonal, like, I don't know, say, a modern times metropolis. So in a way, Hornby's great book about his intertwined life with a sports team was a dirge - and although that's probably just more misguided nostalgia for theoretically golden times, it is true, your local club is not your local club any more. I feel painted into a corner where I enjoy the ballet of it all more than anything else - but that just makes those Olympic human interest pieces, soft-focus and all, all the more trying.

All the same, it would be really nice if the Cubs could win the World Series. Tres nice.

In Cold Blood (1967) by Truman Capote

Supposedly the first "true crime" novel in that the narrative is based on actual events (Ripped From the Headlines!), In Cold Blood is a great novel independent of that fact. It consistently bounces between the perspectives of the crime victims, the town they psychologically destroy, and the criminals themselves. And what starts with a horrifyingly brutal and arbitrary crime is explained in an equally terrifying manner: it was just brutal, and just arbitrary, the intersection of two very socially and mentally maladjusted individuals and a chance cell-sharing with a former employee of an upstanding family. The criminals' nonchalance is "chilling," ha ha, the detective's obsession is meticulously detailed, and the breakdown of the affected town is just wrenching. Excellent, excellent story, and Capote really creates and covers a universe in a very tight narrative.

On top of that, Capote's writing style is fascinating - it is densely descriptive and detailed without being overhanded, and there's a sense that not only is he leaving no stone unturned in terms of story details, he is also not leaving no sentence re and re edited - everything comes out very polished and processed, very efficient. That's just the style: great for the most part, a little overbearing at times - I think I remember the phrase "minute Lilliputian figurines," which to me is a direct application to the department of redundancy department. Anyhoo - I am not really a big fan of "true stories," I think once the narrtive is written it is implicitly interpreted and whether it "actually happened" or not is not very meaningful. I think James Frey probably likes my take on that. But Capote keeps you in this one and amazingly so - definitely a gifted man.

The Inner Game of Tennis (1973) by Timothy Gallwey

I had long wanted to read this classic of East-Meets-West sports psychology/philosophy, and after reading a couple of tennis-based DFW essays, I finally went to the library and grabbed it. I found it to be a meatloaf-spoon version of another EMW classic, Zen in the Art of Archery, meaning that it took the intricate complexities of that activities and boiled them down even further, turning everything into a simplistic model of Self 1 versus Self 2, "letting it happen" v. "making it happen."

That is the jist of the book - that you are split into two selves, 1: the teller and 2: the doer. And the teller self, Self 1, has a nasty habit of harshly judging what Self 2 does and actually impedes what Self 2 is attempting to accomplish. So turning Self 1 into an observant machine and not a judgmental one is a major goal of the book. And he offers a lot of techniques for doing so, including amping up Self 1's concentration level such that a, you don't have time to critique Self 2 because you are so busy concentrating, and b, you are actually making Self 1 more observant of the situation at hand. Think focusing on the seams of the spinning ball or concentrating on the sound the racket makes. The other major goal of the book is to identify and address the actual version of the inner game being played - why do you play tennis? Why do you do anything? In re-aligning these goals, being more honest about your reasons and hoepfully, dropping some of the interfering inner games that tend to get played (perfectionism, ego-inflation, etc.), you cn achieve a great deal more in tennis. This is the straight up ironic "you can only achieve greatness if you aren't obsessed with being great."

When reading books such as this, I feel like I am being sold a car: "it's just that easy - for the low low price of $1995," etc. This book has brilliant ideas about being in the moment, dropping the judgmental frontal lobe activity in favor of the observant, knowing sub-conscious self and identifying the real inner game you are playing when engaged in competition. Unlike ZitAoA, it acts as if these monumental tasks could be accomplished with the flick of a wrist. Denying the complexity and the difficulty of overcoming natural western tendency is bizarre and misleading - I did not appreciate that aspect of the book. But I did enjoy the general message, and I enjoyed the fact that the vast majority of the book is a transparent metaphor and not an actual tennis instructional guide. I skimmed through the actual instructions on strokes and serves and such, trusting that the general philosophy will be easy enough to apply when and if I take up tennis again. But the central message that you can apply these concentration and achievement techniques to any field is great. Which makes it all the more bizarre that he wrote the rest of the series, the Inner Games of Golf, Music, Business, Butterfly Taxonomy, etc. And makes him see that much more like a car salesman.

The Stupidest Angel (2005) by Christopher Moore

The B-movie in book form, and spliced with the utter wackiness that Moore is known for. The story is set in a small Californian town at Christmas time - the angel Raziel (aka the Angel of Death) has lost a bet and therefore must perform this year's Christmas miracle. And yes, he is the stupidest in question. A ridiculous cast of characters, many of whom have appeared in other Moore novels, flush out the "setting" in a way and when Raziel's miracle goes haywire, they all collectively take it on the chin with a hilarious lack of grace. I can't get over the B-movie comparison because that's exactly what it is, except with someone competent at the director's wheel - so even though the outcome and events are fairly obvious, Moore absolutely nails the pacing and it's just a joy to read as the events hurtle toward their crazed conclusion. I'm doing my best not to give anything away here - so I'll just sum it up by saying that it's a fairly stereotypical "Crazy things take place in a small town" story, only Moore spices it, the town and its inhabitants, up nicely and makes it a great trip. Some of his "modern day" jokes are a little played - like "Hummer" the vehicle v. the sinful act playful puns; that type of thing. So while that detracts a little bit, the "spirit" is definitely there, as are Moore's usual zany but heartfelt characters. Very good read; doesn't aspire to much, but it kills what it does. So to speak.

BR: Baseball between the Numbers (2006) by Baseball Prospectus

This is a great book for answering a lot of classic baseball questions using data and sabermetrics instead of speculation. I enjoyed it tremendously, but the book definitely had its shortcomings - it was written for a VERY lay audience in an occasionally aw-shucks goofy tone, it didn't include a lot of the formulas for their statistics so you had to take the reliability of their measurements on faith, and the thing that annoyed me the most, it is in the end a collection of articles: the editing was very spotty, so sometimes great references were made to other chapters, but at other moments the text explained what a correlation coefficient was for the 17th time. Those faults (and a bit of a rhythm problem with having all the "boring" baseball financial chapters packed in the middle) aside, this was a very solid read, and confirmed a lot of the rumors I've heard from the sabermetric crowd as well as making my own thoughts more precise. Here's the question by question breakdown from this thoroughly enjoyable book (written in a mock "9 inning" format)

Batting Practice - Is Barry Bonds better than Babe Ruth? This is fairly complicated argument, coming down to the fact that the Babe was better relative to his own league, but Bonds is as great as he is against far superior (athletic, integrated league, superior equipment / nutrition, and drawing from the world instead of just the States) competition. Among other things, this article points out that the men's Olympic record for the 100 meter freestyle in 1913, the year Ruth started, was 63.4 seconds; now it's 48.2 seconds, and girl's high school swimmers often break 60 seconds. (The article mentions how ludicrous it is to say that expansion has diluted baseball talent; in a vacuum, yes, but now the league is drawing from a population almost 7 times larger (700 million v. 110 million)). The article is very interesting in that it devalues Ruth's stats for having played in his relatively smaller-competitive times, but then must add value to them for not having access to the science that Bonds has had. In the end, Ruth edges out Bonds, barely, and it actually comes down to his pitching contribution from his early career.

1.1 - What's the matter with RBI? Everything, it turns out. Unsurprisingly, RBI stats are strongly tied to RBI opportunities, and usually managers put their best hitters in the spots where they will accrue the most RBI opportunities. So it's not surprising that the big bashers end up with lots of RBIs, but the cart is before the proverbial horse. The article picks like mad on Joe Carter, who managed to have 100 RBI seasons where his hitting VORP (value above replacement player) was near zero, meaning they could have gotten equally good hitting from a minor leaguer off waivers. In short, RBIs ain't all that.

1.2 - Is David Ortiz a clutch hitter? In short, no - clutch hitting is not a repeatable skill, meaning that people who hit well in the clutch in one year have no increased statistical probability to do so in the following year; their year to year clutch stats have no correlation, and getting hits in the clutch is often a matter of luck (i.e., good timing). This article defines clutch hitting by late situations where a hit stands to greatly increase your team's chance of winning the game - for instance, if your team is down by one run with one out in the bottom of the ninth and you hit a double, you increase your team's chance of winning from 3.9% to 11.2%, a +7.3% change. After heavily crunching the numbers, it turns out that if there is a clutch hitting skill, it has about 2% of the impact (70% of it is general hitting skill, 28% is blind luck). And it turns out that even this small amount of clutch shows up best in hitters like Mark Grace, the career leader in "clutchiness," meaning that this probably has something to do with your batter's eye or ability in situational hitting. SO, sorry, Big Papi.

1.3 - Was Billy Martin crazy? by James Click - Billy Martin once picked his lineup out of a hat, and James go on to discuss that optimal batting orders pretty much just descend in order of OBP, but even that said, optimizing a batting order would have very little effect on the runs a team scores. Batting order, it turns out, is nowhere near as important as people think.

2.1 - Why are pitchers so unpredictable? A much ballyhooed stat discovered recently is that pitchers have very little, if any, control over what a ball in play does - they can have a tendency to produce groundballs instead of flyballs or vice versa, some pitchers show a small ability to induce pop-ups, but otherwise its the defense that determines the percentage of balls hit in play that become outs. Pitchers DO have control over preventing homeruns, striking batters out, and not hitting / walking batters. So on the one hand, there is simply a lot of variability from year to year on what happens to balls in play, AND pitchers hits/walks can get clustered somewhat randomly, so pitchers are less consistent than you would think. On the other side, the problem is in our measurements - ERA is an unforgivably dumb stat that hinges on what "would have happened" and is at any rate susceptible to a bad defense; a simple RA is better but similarly susceptible to the defense's ability, and a stat like wins and losses is absurdly out of the pitcher's control in a lot of cases. Add on top of this that pitchers get injured easily and - well, at best you can say that pitchers are relatively consistent at an inconsistent job, and we have been looking at them incorrectly for a long time.

2.2 - Are teams letting their closers go to waste? Yes - if the closer is really that good, he should be brought in the situations where he can have the most impact, not just the ninth inning when you have a lead. Baseball managers, notably Joe Torre, tend to behave more properly in the playoffs. Bringing in a closer in the ninth with a three run lead is a waste; bringing him in as the home team down by one in the top of the ninth is not. It turns out that dire situations where it would be appropriate to use your closer start in the sixth inning and beyond, not that anyone's going to start doing this any time soon.

2.3 - Five starters of four? Your top four pitchers should be better on average than your top five. There is no evidence that three days of rest is worse injury or performance-wise than four; the injury evidence points towards too many pitches within a given start as predictors of injury and poor performance. So if you started only four pitchers and had them throw fewer innings / pitches per game (but had them making more starts), you would actually gain in total innings pitched by each of your four best starters. Given that the fifth guy is usually a replacement level type, this sounds like smart thinking.

3.1 - When does a pitcher earned an earned run? - Another article investigating the correlations of ERA from year to year and pointing out that there are a dearth of factors that are out of the pitcher's control when it comes to his ERA.

3.2 - Did Derek Jeter deserve the gold glove? by James Click - Nope. Despite the flash, Jeter is notoriously slow-footed, low range defensive shortstop. Actually, the flash is probably due to his lack of range - he has to dive, leap, and otherwise show off on plays that better short stops would make routinely. In the best line of the book, James said that Jeter's nickname should be "Pastadiving." Sound that one out. The year he won a golden glove, though, Jeter made a big improvement in his D - unfortunately, this improvement was from terrible to mediocre. So he didn't deserve it, and just to rub salt in, James showed how obvious it is that, given the normal continuum of defense, that Jeter should be the one playing 3B and A-Rod short - Jeter is costing his team runs.

3.3 - Is Mike Matheny a catching genius? Guess what, no. There's no statistical evidence that certain catchers will reliably improve their pitcher's ERA. Their effect on the opponent's baserunning game is palpable, but past that, there are huge swings in the measures of other aspects of a catcher's performance from year to year (notably the article does not explicitly mention pitch-blocking, but one can probably guess that this means that the base level of blocking pitches in the dirt at the major league level is not far enough from the top performers in this area to produce big differences in runs or wins).

4.1 - What if Rickey Henderson had Pete Incavilia's legs? by James Click -or really, how much is the running game worth? Extensive article pointing out just how little Ricky's running ability positively contributed - about 5 wins over the course of a 25 year career. Largely due to the fact that while stealing bases is great, making outs on the basepaths is god-awful. And all of those ideas about a good baserunner distracting the pitcher and the defense have proved untrue. So speed makes the game exciting (and let's not forget helps a lot in the field), but its impact is very small.

4.2 - When is one run worth more than two? by James Click After pointing out how routinely futile and more often than not, detrimental bunting is to a team's scoring chances, this article compares big inning strategy v. small inning strategy. The most interesting this it pointed out is that when thinking of run expectancy, don't forget to include the probability of scoring "at least one" as a factor - there are lots of situations where it turns out that playing for one run is appropriate, even though over the long haul you would score more on average by doing other things. (The obvious one - tied in the bot 9th - those extra runs, or any strategy that aims at them at the cost of the probability of scoring one, is bad).

4.3 - Is Joe Torre a Hall-of -Fame manager? by James Click - Yep, but you're going to have an impossible time finding any numbers to back that up. All of the things attributed to managers do nothing tangible for wins - that's pretty much the summary of this one. Good, detailed article, and nailed the idea that it's largely the tools and not the blacksmith.

5-1. Why is Mario Mendoz so important? This is Mario of "Mendoza Line" fame, and he pretty much exemplifies the concept of a replacement player, the very bottom level of offensive output you would tolerate in the big leagues (in his case, actually, his defense did enough to make him slightly above replacement player, but you get the point). Players like Mendoza point out just what a rare commodity an "average" player is, and doubly points out that even the Mendozas are in the 99th percentile of baseball players. The whole concept of VORP has been vital to shifting the concept of statistics; not just performance in quantity, or relative to the average, but relative to what you could easily acquire for no money.

5-2. Is Alex Rodriguez overpaid? Yes. This goes into excruciating detail of the amount of money that wins actually bring in for the club, and A-Rod's 25 million per year is probably around twice what his ability would be expected to bring in on average. Egads. (I actually found this article to be the most statistically suspect - they seemed to derive a lot of figures from certain teams and extrapolate to others; I just don't know if you can get at the smoky financials of the trust league). I tuned out a little bit here (sorry).

5-3. Do players perform better in contract years? In short, yes, but barely. This article stresses the point that most players in contract years are at or slightly past their prime, so basing any future predictions on that year's performance is dubious anyways. Again, I don't like the money side of things.

6-1. Do high salaries lead to high ticket prices? No, and if anything, the other way around is more likely. The ticket prices follow classic supply-demand economics,a nd usually increasing the price of the tickets will cost you money - so doing something that costs money in addition to paying the higher salaries is not too good.

6-2. Are new stadiums a good deal? See what I mean about the economics section in the middle of the book? Turns out that a publicly funded new stadium is a fantastic deal for the owner, a bad one for the taxpayers, and that even privately funded stadiums are often publicly funded via tax breaks and such. And most teams do seat a boost (if a short lived one) after a new stadium goes up.

6-3. Does baseball need a salary cap? Mildly interesting article pointing out that all of this "competitive imbalance" is not what it seems - true, the Yankees and Braves are there pretty much every year, but year-in and year-out, then winners and playoff contenders (and the world series winners) have varied a lot. Actually, this article was a solid look at the details of revenue sharing and such, and points out that the size of a team's market has very little to do with its on-field performance.

7-1. What happened to Todd Van Poppel? This article addresses the question of the relative merits and risks of drafting players out of high school or college. Turns out a high school super-prospect, one you would take with the #1 overall pick, is a legitimate choice, but after that, college prospects, particularly college pitchers v. high school pitchers, are a much safer bet. College hitters are the safest bet; all of this revolves around "averages," so it's hard to argue when to take chances.

7-2. Is there such thing as a Quadruple-A player? Yes, but the argument is that hitting is part ability (say 90%) and part experience (10%). So take one inexperienced but skilled young AAA player and one older experienced but not as skilled AAA player who are performing the same (both well in AAA) and bring them up to the majors. Now, both of their experience is wiped out (because of the huge leap from AAA to MLB) and suddenly the kid with skill has a lot more to fall back on than the older player. This is theoretically where you find the AAAA guys - ones that don't perform well enough in the minors to be noticed until experience is playing a too large role, also keeping in mind that these guys would be more likely to be on the decline anyways.

7-3. Why was Kevin Maas a bust? Kevin Maas was a slow, strike-out and walk heavy heavy player who came up to the majors and hit about 21 homeruns in his first less-than-half-of-a-season. He then flopped badly. The idea professed in this article is that there are "young skills" (average, speed) and "old skills" (power, drawing walks). Young skills, obviously, deteriorate eventually, and you must rely more on your old skills to compensate. So someone who comes up with only old skills, like Mr. Maas, is already performing at max capacity, and the only thing that's going to deteriorate is his already old skill set. Cool article, especially if you look at case study like Geroge Brett who started his career utilizing his young skills and finished off adapting and using his old skills.

8-1. Can a team have too much pitching? Theoretically, no, and according to the pythagorean theorem, pitching runs are actually more valuable than hitting runs. But given that pitching is a finite resource purchased with a finite resource (wampum), you can't just add pitching ad nauseam, and it turns out that, shockingly, a good balance of hitting and pitching and defense, and correctly identifying your situation and making the appropriate adjustments, is the way to win. This may well have been the "well, duh" chapter.

8-2. How much does Coors Field really matter? A whole lot.

8-3. Is Wayne Huizenga a genius? That's the GM of fire-sale fame for the 1997 Florida Marlins. Another money chapter; they said yes, and had some pretty decent, though heartless, reasons.

9-1. What do statistics tell us about steroids? Pretty weak argument here - but it first pointed out that the number of "sudden spikes" in the so-called steroid era were no more than other eras (actually, the "Greenie Era," the 1970s, had more spikes). Then it pointed at the players who have been caught, and noted their performance before and after their suspensions, and showed a very small (if any) decline in performance after they stopped. It then went on to question why marquee players would bother... blah. This article very blandly said "we couldn't find anything" about a topic that is hard to find anything out about. Boo-urns.

9-2. What does Mike Redmond know about Tom Glavine? by James Click. The basic argument is sound; that the batting samples oft-cited to claim that a certain batter owns a certain pitcher are absurd. And James correctly points out that you can't apply a normal distribution to an individual batter's 48 at-bats, because they're not a random sample; so even if you said something like "if Mike Redmond's actually a .284 hitter, there's only a 0.5% chance that he would have hit .438 or better against Glavine," you are pulling some goofiness there; yeah, you would reject that .284 hypothesis, but of course you would - he hit .438 against him in the entire (small) population! SO while that logic is good, I don't like the following logic - if you put all batters who have 50 plate appearances against Glavine in a distribution, that distribution is normal, and Redmond merely falls in one of the places that someone inevitably would have. I feel like that's a slight of hand, a "looks like a bell curve, smells like a bell curve..." statement. The fact remains that Redmond IS at the high end of that curve, and the others are not - true, the fact that it's a bell curve means that we don't KNOW that Redmond owns Glavine, but we certainly wouldn't reject the notion based on this either. I think James leans too hard the "no one owns anyone" way. Additionally, he brings up the fact that pitchers who have faced people 50 times are likely to be good pitchers, but he didn't mention that batters who have faced a pitcher 50 times are also likely to be good batters.

The article goes on to make some fine points - that teasing out these differences is really the key, like the famous lefty-batter v. righty pitcher advantage. If someone can figure out the other trends, like who hits ground ball pitchers better, etc., then you may get some serious platooning going on.

9-3. Why doesn't Billy Beane's shit work in the playoffs? A long examination of the small underperformance that the A's have suffered in the recent playoffs - of course, the playoffs are a small sample, so a lot of their losses are due to bad luck, but even in the small sample, the A's have performed worse than expected. It turns out that in a competition fought in the cold weather between the best pitchers and hitters, it turns out that defense, pitching and especially relief pitching have disproportionately large impact. So Beane's slow-footed starting pitching heavy teams were not ideal for the conditions, and thus lost more than they should have. But remember, in 2003, they were one nasty Derek Lowe curveball away from a ALDS win - so it's not like they purely failed.

Extra Innings - Can stats and scouts get along? They need to - after an entire book of sabermetric articles, I started to notice a lot of the weird assumptions that stats make - that players are unfluctuating, that a player is *really* a .270 hitter even if he hit .290. It's the old one foot in boiling water one foot in ice argument, but the general disdain some scouts show for the stats is highly understandable. Plus, there's an entire aesthetic aspect to baseball that sabermetrics ignores - and that may be obvious, but hear me out. In hockey, the neutral zone trap can be most effective, but it's stunningly ugly. In basketball, an overbearing in your shorts physical zone defense may be very effective, but it would reduce things to a jump shot contest. In football, a team that could just run dives over left tackle for six yards a pop would be impossible to stop, but... you get the idea. A sports efficiency ideal could be an aesthetic nightmare, and the rules get changed accordingly - usually to "improve the product" - gag - but it's a real problem, that scientific pursuit of the ideal offense could expose the fundamental monotony of the game. I sometimes get the feeling that the logical end of the sabermetric argument is a robotic game - and while that awesomely serves front-office purposes, the scouting side is vital to that which keeps the game beautiful.

Eight Months of Misc Reviews*

* - Sort of a grab-bag of reviews from 2007-ish. Documented!

Wow. Clearly, I've been remiss in the whole "review-writing" game. The whole "have well-articulated, profound thoguhts about the media I encounter" game. Sigh. These things happen. Backtracking and writing compelte reviews of the past eight months of movies and lit would be an unendurable chore, so instead, I'm going to throw a laundry list of reviews in here and update all of the appropriate pages and links. So a big fat caveat: these are pathetic reviews. One to two sentences max (unless, of course, I feel like going beyond that). I'm also going to just use a 1-10 scale (really, it's 10, 20, 30, etc. scale) so I don't have to overthink the ratings on these things I haven't seen in a few months. Maybe I'll tweak the ratings at some later date. But the point is to throw in, make sure I get my Art Garfunkel on and maintain a list of the books I've read / movies I've seen in these exciting years. So here goes.

Books
What's Your Dangerous Idea?
Rating: NR
A bevy of interesting entries from your friends at Edge on controversial topics. Several are way out there, and it's a little heavy on the materialist/detereministic side, but a good chance to view things from multiple perspectives.
The Keep
Rating: 50
Meta / pomo narrative about a castle and a prison tutor. Fantasy part: good, jail part: meh.
The Emperor's Children
Rating: 55
Verbosely written and well-constructed plot about spoiled new yorkers about whom you don't care about. Booty was a tool; 9/11 was a surprisingly cliche twist.
Betting Baseball
Rating: 30
Anecdotal account of a bettor's baseball season. Some interesting tidbits, but his "system" is pretty ear-y.
Collapse
Rating: NR
Excellently researched tome by Jared Diamond of Guns Germs & Steel fame. Surprisingly boring, though the theory was great.
Underworld
Rating: 90
See my Lenny Bruce paper. Postmodern masterpiece.
Harry Potter 7
Rating: 50
Pretty tired story by this point - definitely got bogged down by being away from Hogwarts. Still good to see thigns come to their fruition.
Falling Man
Rating: 60
More cosmopolitis-y fiction from Delillo. Best for its "from inside the tower" scenes which are spectacular, but the detached dialog detracted from the humanity.
Primer on Postmodernism
Rating: NR
Good intro to pomo concepts, oddly written by something of a conservative christian. The conclusion - "we must reject this" - was profoundly absurd.
Beloved
Rating: 90
Fantastic work, dreamy and passionate, though I will always question how much of its impact is indebted to its topic. An American classic, no doubt.
Rabbit, Run
Rating: 90
Speaking of American classics - the cold reality of 1950s suburbia and the familial pain rendered by personal freedom. Brilliant work.
American Pastoral
Rating: 80
Another great one, though this book's genius is somewhat curtailed by its simplistic order / choas dichotomy. The stoic pain endured by the swede is rendered beautifully.
Genre & Television
Rating: NR
Briallint account of the fleeting yet narrative-connected nature of genre definitions in television. Fabulous account of the the "Golden Age" of cartoons in particular.
The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Rating: 75
Pomo fiction intertwining the historical DR with the life of an overweight, nerdy hero. The ending was not good - a little too manipulative and convenient - but the trip was fantastic.
Drown
Rating: 70
Seemingly autobiographical accoutns from Junot Diaz who wrote Oscar as well. Startlingly bleak portrayal of the fallacious American dream.
Miles Davis
Rating: NR
Biography of the Jazz legend. Great read, though puzzling at times for the excuses it made for Davis. Especially odd - the half page "he was bisexual" toss off. EH???
Atonement
Rating: 75
A much better than saturday entry from Mckewan about a horrific misidentity in the time of WWII. The meta-ending was predictable.
The Corrections
Rating: 80
Deeply felt, painful rendition of familial dysfunction, miscommunication and incompatibility. The east coast v. Midwestern mindset protrayal was haunting.
Rabbit Redux
Rating: 75
The sex-infused sequel captures the time well at the expense of a compeltely absurd set of circumstances and actions by the protagonist. Rich, vivid, but kind of cheap.
Bob Dylan and Philosophy
Rating: NR
A sometimes-highlighted collection of essays that delves into way too much "hey look at this lyric" comparisons to philosophers.
Musicophilia
Rating: 30
Painfully anecdotal text with a few interesting tidbits but that for the most part just highlights Sacks' own love of classical music and the neuroscience tendency to play the correspondance map game with the brain. Very repetitive and boring for the entire second half.
Beware of God
Rating: 70
Shalom Auslander's colection of humorous short stories which are quite obviously disguised anecdotes from his orthodox jewish upbringing.
Foreskin's Lament
Rating: 75
Obvious because they overlap a lot with this memoir of his - this deeply felt remembrance wanes a little toward the end, but overall gives a very honest accoutn with a nice now and then framework.
2007 Non-Req'd Reading
Rating: NR
Oy. The usual great collection of miscellany from the past year. highlights include a Conan O'Brien graduation speech, a chilling account of soldier life in baghdad... and many others.
Movies
Eastern Promises
Rating: 65
Good movie about russian mob in England that has one particularly intense and famous scene. Worth it just for that.
Michael Clayton
Rating: 65
Lawyer / corporation piece featuring some nice work from conflicted gofer George Clooney.
Gone Baby Gone
Rating: 35
Stupid period/place piece featuring "authentic boston" and an idiotic central story line. Really disappointing.
No Country for Old Men
Rating: 85
A GOOD period/place piece from the Coens. It's a remake of a McCarthy novel and carries all the moral ambiguity - or at least alternate definitions - he writes. Its elegance is its strength.
Juno
Rating: 60
Super-actress driven indie flick with some questionable dialog choices, an underdeveloped relationship, but overall some feel-good and feel-bad dynamics that make it worth-while.
Grindhouse: Planet Terror
Rating: 80
Hot damn! It's Dawn til Dusk without the annoying buildup - just pure overthetop nihilistic insanity. Exceptionally well done grindhouse homage.
Grindhouse: Death Proof
Rating: 75
Ditto - I didn't enjoy this one quite as much - but the car chase for car chase sake's aspect was brilliant in its own right.
Monkeybone
Rating: 75
A classic psych farce if you ask me. Beck begs to differ.
Children of Men
Rating: 60
An excellently filmed, interesting piece that fell alittle flat for me (particularly in the end scenes).
Reign On Me
Rating: 55
Surprisingly well done Adam Sandler / Cheadle vehicle that unfortunately contained some of the stupidest court scenes in recent memory. The 9/11 exploitation adds an intersting element.
Ocean's Thirteen
Rating: 55
Better than 2, not as good as 1. Exactly what you'd expect, but the charm has worn off for use.
Next
Rating: 0
Ladies and Gents - I now present the "Worse than Premonition" Award. Nic Cage and Jessica Biel vomit on your brain. Wow bad. So bad it's so good that it just becomes bad again. We're talking WOW BAD.
Cars
Rating: 65
Cute little Pixar ditty. Not their best, but not bad.
Hoodwinked
Rating: 55
Cute little mixed fairy tale animated work.
Harlem Nights
Rating: 55
Better than you would have thought. Eddie Murphy and Pryor make a great team.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Rating: 50
The structure is interesting, and ubernaked Marisa Tomei was a clear presence, but Beck nails this when she says that PSH's "ACTING" gets annoying after awhile. There was a lot that was unbuyable about this movie, though it should be noted that my man Ethan Hawke was FANTASTIC.
This concludes the brief, pointless review part of the show. Hope you enjoyed.

BR: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) by Haruki Murakami

I first encountered the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in short story form in The Elephant Vanishes. The first entry of the latter short story collection is the first chapter of this novel. I also started and stopped this book about eight months ago for reasons I can't remember - in that first attempt, I read just the first chapter. So when I picked up the book a second time and started anew (from the beginning = very good place to start), it was actually the third time I had read the tale of an out-of-work law clerk looking for his cat in an alley while his wife was at work. I think my own stumbling start to this novel reinforced the greatness of its primary quality, the nagging "this is a familiar dream" feeling that comes with reading Murakami's wispy, often surreal prose. But it also reinforced a complaint that I have encountered upon reading several reviews of the book, namely that this trippy faux-detective story often reads as a patchwork of short-stories clearly written a t different times and places. After some reflection, I think I agree with both sentiments, but feel that the disconnectedness of the vignettes in the story keyed the novel's portrayal of life, and that while TWUBC may be missing an element of "tightness" that most great novels strive for, the dreamy looseness is its defining quality.

The plot of the book - though really you should be going to wikipedia for that type of thing - is a man who among other things loses a cat, receives bizarre phone calls, befriends a bizarre teenage girl down the street, gets in touch with psychics, battles with his celeb-politician brother-in-law, has his wife run away, talks with a World War II veteran of the Japan-Russian front, participates in a strange cult-ritual healing exercise (where he is a kind of health-prostitute), fades in and out of dreams, and perhaps most memorably, spends a large amount of time at the bottom of a dried up well. Phew - that should give some kind of taste of the non-linear, entirely non-standard reality take being presented here. Toru Okada, aka "Mr. Wind-Up Bird," slides through a life that barely makes an effort to differentiate between asleep and awake. He also cooks spaghetti.

The first surprise is the shockingly mundane existence the protagonist leads. The novel covers a course of about a year and a half, the bulk of which Okada spends unemployed. His daily exploits are detailed, but consist of cooking spaghetti, fixing sandwiches, going for walks, people-watching and the like. There is a large amount of what might be referred to as "dead air" taking up the pages of the novel, but Murakami's rendering keeps these pages from going stale. They really create a pastoral rhythm that serves as a bubbling stream backdrop to the spike events that occur in his life. The action exists, to be sure, but the power of the surreal-in-the-mundane exposition gives the novel its unique feel.

The other notable aspect of Okada is that he has to be the most passive person on earth. A major symbol of the narrative is the wind-up bird, a mysterious unseen bird with a call that sounds like the winding of a spring. Only certain characters can hear the bird, and it's "winding up" occurs at points of the novel which set major cascades of important events into motion. So the wind-up bird represents a sort of unstoppable force of nature, a character who winds up the tension of fate to release it to inevitability. And Okada seems to succumb to this inevitability with barely a care - his wife disappears under bizarre circumstances, and though he plainly desires to find her and take her back, his efforts are swallowed up by sitting on the couch, drinking beer and contemplating. One scene that stood out in terms of Okada's passivity occurred between Okada and his borderline comically evil brother-in-law. The BIL lays into Okada, essentially calling his entire life worthless, with language that would inspire your average midwesterner to request a stepping outside. But Okada silently takes it, mulls it over, and delivers a reserved comeback. This is not to say that Okada is a wimp - he does deliver that comeback, and in a later scene of the novel finds, when pressed, the strength to beat a man to a bloody pulp with a baseball bat - but his reserved manner, his acceptance of the ebbs and flows of his life, are striking. Even the most bizarre course of events elicit barely a blink from Okada.

And this facet is key to the novel, because the bizarre cavalcade that assaults Okada's life would only have been tolerable to the most patient, accepting of people. Plus it lends the novel its mystic air - the winding of psychics, dreams, mysterious hallucinatory hotel rooms and healing rituals are met head-on by a mundane, "well this is how it is" response. The reader is sucked into Okada's level of passivity, and the normal level of rejection of the absurd doesn't occur. The reader accepts the status quo of the narrative, even at the height of its strangeness.

And even strangeness could get boring, were it not for Murakami's vivid portrayals. Again, true enough that many of the stories-within-the-story stick out as items dropped in from above, but I felt that the non-sequitur element of these stories' inclusion highlighted the dream-narrative aspects of the novel as a whole. And some of these seemingly external-to-the-main-plot sequences are the best parts of the novel. There's a horrifying account of a man witnessing a fellow soldier skinned alive, of a man being buried in a dried-up well in the middle of the desert and left to die, and most strikingly, an account of Japanese soldiers ordered to kill zoo animals to preserve food resources during the dying stages of the war. While these stories, granted, are not germane to he central Okada-looks-for-his-wife narrative, they do tie in wonderfully with the wind-up bird concept, that wound springs set off an unchangeable course of events - often culminating in horror.

This story is not for the faint. It's weird, hallucinatory and sex-violent-horrible in parts. And its nonlinear quality, plus its protagonist who is clearly operating on a non-standard, non-western, and non-identity-oriented level, may be too foreign (ha!) for some American readers. There's an extended relationship between the 30 year old main character and a fifteen year old girl that walks the "inappropriate" line throughout the novel, and if that sort of unusual relationship would turn you off, then don't bother; you're not open enough for this experience. For the rest, though, I recommend it. I don't equate it with some of the best novels by Pynchon and the like as some do, mainly because the complexity in this novel is easily dissectable as patchwork. So I suppose the lack of "tied-upedness" did bother me slightly. It also has a couple of groan moments of pomo-icity, e.g. "I felt like a character in a novel." Ugh. Still, for the dreamy experience, and for an unadorned look at an alternate way of viewing things, this dreamscape does the trick. You don't even need to read it at the bottom of a well to get that much.

BR: A Supposedly Fun Thing (1997) / Oblivion (2004) by DFW

Reviewing essays by one of my favorite authors is a tricky proposition; for one, I will just jump on board with anything he says because I like the guy's way of thinking (and additionally because it is easy to get swept up in the aptly described Bravura writing style - the big fun-making of DFW is that his readers end up dreamily penning "How true" in the margins of his books), and two, it's a collection of essays written over several years without anything resembling a cohesive center, so reviewing it as a collective is, ahem, silly. Like, say, someone naming Paul Simon's Negotiations and Love Songs, a greatest hits collection, as their favorite album. Just absurd! But I suppose I can tackle it from a "collection as reading experience," which is going to largely turn into reviewing it as though it were a greatest hits album, giving the essays star ratings and the whole nine yards. Somewhere in the back of mind is the vague notion that you are not supposed to start reviews by commenting about how you are going to write the review, much as you are not supposed to start essays with "this essay is about..." or "In this piece, I will demonstrate the futility of the modern notion of sainthood," etc. I think I'm supposed to just do it, but lest my review get screwed up, I will first take a practice run through. My review of DFW's Oblivion got a little shorted, so I'll run the collection-as-album experiment here...

DFW's Oblivion, story by story

Mr. Squishy. Four Stars. A biting account of the advertising industry and focus group-geared thinking. Interlaced with a very spectacular story about a man climbing a building; DFW actually eschews some of his trademark footnotes for a simple injected account in the main narrative that bounces around, not paragraph by paragraph, but sentence by sentence. Cool, smart start.

The Soul is Not a Smithy. Three Stars. An account of a would-be school massacre as (un) witnessed by an autistic child.

Incarnations of Burned Children. Three Stars. A two page, simply horrifying account of an accident.

Another Pioneer. Three Stars. An overheard airplane story of a near-deity in an indigenous South American village.

Good Old Neon. Five Stars. A gut-ripping story about suicide, therapy and the self. This one is so good that it physically hurts to read it, if that makes any sense - I guess the emotional content is very raw and real.

Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature. Three Stars. Great and very weird account of a mother who has had horrific plastic surgery and her spider collecting son.

Oblivion. Three Stars. A story that's ostensibly about a simple marital spat, but unravels to reveal a complexly ordered relationship. Very cool, streaming narrative.

The Suffering Channel. Four Stars. A thoroughly haunting and absurdly driven and fecal themed account of, of all things, 9/11. Beyond great.

So, it seems that this style (or the fact that I now have not read the book in a little while) makes for a little bit of a superficial take on the content, but all the same is a bit more direct with the "this was good, this was great, this was transcendent" line of criticism. So, here's the same effort on ASFTINDA.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, essay by essay

Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley. Three Stars. DFW's take on his childhood as a junior pro tennis player in the windblown Midwest. Very in depth and cool take on the aesthetics of tennis.

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Four Stars. I loved this essay about fiction writing in the televisual age, the abuses and limits of irony, postmodernism and the post-postmodern direction literature seems to be forced to take. Awesome stuff.

Getting Away... Two Stars. I think I have just read too much DFW lately for this one to click with me - it was another east coast meets the familiar quaint midwest and can neither confirm his belonging there or deny his guilt over feeling above it. I just wasn't entranced by this one, sorry.

Greatly Exaggerated. Three Stars. An account of postmodern criticism and the veracity of recent "death of the author" claims.

David Lynch Keeps His Head. Three Stars. Very cool (and verbosely impressive) if you're into David Lynch and the function of the avant garde; if you're not, well, you're lame and you probably would not have enjoyed this. Also makes the interesting claim the DL paved the way for directors like Quentin Tarantino who took the absurdity of Lynchianism and made it palatable for a wider audience. Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (severed ear, anyone) were the two noted examples.

Tennis Player Michael Joyce... Four Stars. Awesome account of life on the sub-star professional tennis circuit. It mentions Tommy Ho, a tennis player and classmate of mine at Rice. Anyways, this is great, not just for its take on its own subject matter but the extended idea of applying the tennis lifestyle to other ventures.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Five Stars. The unimaginably brilliant account of taking a cruise vacation, with all the elaborate deal and social commentary that such a varied adventure brings. This essay is LONG (100+ pages), and worth every sentence. This is DFW at his best - bringing his dazzling intellect and style to bear on a bizarre situation and not coming away with a simple smirk of "isn't this f'ed up," but actually having the depth to display his emotional innards as he reacts to everything he encounters. He essentially (and appropriately, given the E Unibus essay) transcends the ironic in an obviously ironic situation; I couldn't recommend this piece more.

BR: The Selfish Gene (1974) by Richard Dawkins

* - It should be noted that I wrote this well before I started school and knew half an inkling of what the hell I was talking about. :)

This book focuses on one excellent thesis - that in thinking about evolution, we should focus on the down up perspective as opposed to the up down. Dawkins postulates that evolution began the moment a molecule "learned" to start replicating itself, and any molecule that could ensure its own stability or replicate more reliably than its fellow molecules would "win" and continue on, if only in form, through time. He postulates that the biological organisms that arose around these DNA molecules serve as gene vehicles /survival machines, and that our theories which had at the time of publication (mid 1970s) tended to focus on the survival of biological individuals or as species were misguided. Essentially he claims that the only genes that will survive will be the ones that instill in their "hosts" a better ability to survive and reproduce and pass them on. He terms this facet of evolution the "selfish gene" - not selfish as in consciously concerned with only its own well being, but selfish in that the dominant effects of any gene on its vehicle's phenotype will be those which look as if the gene is behaving selfishly. The term "selfish" actually arises in direct contrast to altruism and is an attempt to resolve the existence of altruism in animals, a seeming paradox when viewed from the top / down organism / species model.

Quickly, any organism that practices pure altruism - that is, self sacrifice for the benefit of other organisms - would be doomed to stopping its own gene line in the favor of others. While it would be nice if organisms would reciprocate to such a pleasant fellow, the reality is that such organisms would quickly be taken advantage of and they (the altruistic ones) would be at a selective disadvantage to the crafty ones, so the altruistic ones would inevitably die off. Dawkins says that in order for any trait to propagate and become viable, it has to demonstrate a survival/reproductive advantage - there is no such thing as "pure altruism" because it is such an obviously disadvantageous stance to take. We do see altruism on occasion, though, so what is going on? Dawkins says we can't see the advantages at the individual / species level because they're not there, but you can see them on the gene v. gene pool scale. The gene that promotes altruism in the host animal is causing it to rescue animals that are likely to be highly related to the host animal and therefore highly like to contain that very gene for altruism. The altruism does not, it turns out, sacrifice one animal for the benefit of many, but sacrifices one copy of the gene for the many copies that exist in those it saves. The move, then, is a "calculated" selfish one, something straight out of game theory or utilitarian ethics.

I've already committed the sin that Dawkins himself is widely accused of committing in this book, that of sloppily throwing out terms like "selfish" that imply a cognisant will on the part of the gene. Dawkins is actually very careful to stratify his language and fully admits within the text that he will write in an informal language that implies willful intent because to use the absolutely correct terminology would render the text clunky. He notes that when he says terms like "selfish" and "tries to" w/r/t genes, he means behaves in a way that seems as though it has a will from the outside much the same way we say a heat-sinking missile "chases" a target even though everyone knows the missile is not consciously chasing but is following a preset program that looks like will to an outside observer.

And this is what makes the world according to Dawkins a little bit terrifying - there is no will and no intended action, there is only this sense that physical actions as an outcry of the genes within the survival machines. In a weird kind of tautology, the things that exist and propagate start to be identified as "the things which came about that are the best at existing and propagating." There's a callous wasteland feel to the book that is psychologically terrifying for some people; that all that is is the quality of "is-ness" - you can break it down and identify individual trends that explain why these things have come about the way they have, but to the objects themselves, the only point worth considering is that you exist because at some point you did what was necessary to exist. The only permanence here is in the genes, and not even really there - they mutate and change, not to mention that "they" are not a "they" at all but really the abstract of the overarching forms they take - e.g., it's not the actual same carbon atoms that move down generation to generation, it's only their arrangement. I felt a harrowing undercurrent in the text of the absolute instantiation of everything only in form and not in content. There are details in survival and reproduction that are interesting to us but meaningless in the grand scheme - "gene still standing" is the only rule that matters, and not even that particular gene but that's particular gene's particular gene-ness.

Still, despite that gigantic dose of scariness, Dawkins makes great arguments for this approach to evolution with example upon example, each time meeting any challenge that could be thought up and dispelling many of the earlier models of species based evolutionary thought. The book is also filled with great "classroom examples" of game theory and other scenario setups that Dawkins used to explain typical animal world phenomena on a gene perspective basis - for one example, explaining on a game theory basis why cannibalism and battles to the death within a species tend to be rare events. It is, no doubt, a very easy-to-read layman's book that uses highly memorable examples to, for better or worse, hammer and hammer and hammer its point home - and yes, one complaint I had was that I had more or less gotten the message by the seventh example in favor of the theory.

The other big complaint is a trend I notice in a lot of these pop-science/religion books I've been reading lately and one that The End of Faith happened to be guilty of as well - that of the "now that I've established my main argument, I will now recklessly speculate on topics which I have no business touching upon." In this case, Dawkins does it twice - first, he throws in some highly miscellaneous comments about how humans are uniquely capable of consciously battling our unconscious, selfish genes. For example, a person can decide not to pass on his genes by not reproducing, an act that serves the "survival machine"'s interests but obviously does some harm to the genes within.

Second, O dios mio and insert other expressions of exasperation here, Dawkins coined the term "memes." A meme is the incorporeal thought-equivalent of a gene, and survives by the same mechanisms - the content of the meme is borderline irrelevant outside of the same abilities that are important to the original replicable molecules - is it a stable idea (good at living) and is it an easily transmittable idea (good at reproducing). VERY IMPORTANTLY, the survivability of a meme DOES NOT have to do with the survivability of its thinker - memes need not bestow reproductive or survival advantages upon their thinkers. They, just like genes, only need properties that help themselves survive and reproduce. Dawkins keeps thing relatively simple - he mentions stories, poems, tunes that stick in people's minds and such. He notes that they battle for the finite resources of people's memory banks as well as billboard signs and paper and everything else. He (rather weakly) claims that memes tend to survive and become replicate best if they are favorable to the psychological environment (though he neglects to mention what that psychological environment exactly is or what properties of a meme make it ideal). So memes are, in a sense, at battle with one another, and just like genes, they mutate and propagate and pass from generation to generation to arrive at the embodiment in which they exist today.

I have (and have had for a while) numerous problems with the concept of memes. One, unlike genes which endow their carriers with sharper claws, hyperactive sperm, or what have you, the characteristics that make memes memorable and persistent within human culture are often left out of discussions and carry a sort of ineffable quality that to me sounds a whole lot like my favorite quote from school this year:

"The movies that are the most memorable are the ones that are unforgettable."

In other words, a lot of meme talk sounds like an exaggerated version of "the ideas that stick around are those which stick around." My second major complaint is that regardless of how abstract you get about these memes, they ALWAYS exist in reference to a physical reality. And when they don't exist in reference to a physical reality, they came from one, i.e., a physical and biological human brain, so the line between the physical gene embodiment and abstract self propagating idea is woefully blurred. Third, I think there is a problem with the idea of replicability of memes. With genes, there is a physical object which, in order to be able to still be categorized as a variation on that which came before it, can only physically vary from its predecessor within certain limits. If a gene were to suddenly enact its exact opposite, it would clearly not be the same gene any more. With a meme, you can never be sure of this - for example, if I hear something incorrectly and the meme that is transferred into my brain is a wildly different version of the intended meme, is this a case of a bad meme that couldn't be replicated well or a good meme that varies so well that it can even propagate itself in brand new forms? Take Reform Judaism, for example - is that a bad-ass meme that has evolved successfully along a process for 5000 years, or is it a new invading meme that is beating up the old Orthodox one? Are the two even related? I don't think you can have it both ways. Fourth, the meme conversation to me *reeks* of the "pointless banter" of which philosophy routinely gets accused (and in this case, as opposed to all the other ones, it's accurate). A term like "meme" seems like it should be a categorical label, but I am hard-pressed to think of anything that isn't a meme - sure, terms like "the marriage meme" get thrown about, and that seems to be some kind of overarching, more permanent meme. But there are so many others - the carnivorous cat meme, the Coca Cola meme, the jazz meme, the what's in my back left pocket mere, etc. After a while, it seems like all you are talking about is IDEAS. And if so, why are you using a different word? The concept that memes constitute our mental embodiments is akin to saying there's a certain quality common to all things in the universe - it's a useless quality, because it distinguishes nothing.

(memes also have the additional complication of being part of their own subset; i.e., there exists something you could call the meme of "memes." And that gets the ball rolling for the meme of the "meme of memes," the meme of the meme of the meme of memes, etc.).

Of course, the main meme beef is that Dawkins brought this up at all. What the hell? In an otherwise great if somewhat repetitive book, there's this toss-off underdeveloped idea about how cultural evolution works. This armchair speculation in such a text is highly unwelcome - leave the meme banter for a book on memes! I'll fully admit that maybe I just don't understand what all the meme buzz is about, but the throw-away chapter in this book certainly didn't win me over. Otherwise, fine work, Mr. Dawkins.

BR: Saturday (2005) by Ian McEwan

I'm mentally stuck on this book, generally left with the impression that I viewed the practice palettes of a painting master. The strokes, or their equivalent, of this work, are fantastic - I challenge anyone to write something more beautiful, haunting and dripping with energy (despite being written about a singular event as it was witnessed by a single person) than the intro, the first forty pages, of Saturday. I had to set down the book; that first exposure to McEwan's writing style was more than a little breathtaking. It's a relatively brisk style of detail that, at least for the first forty pages, perfectly interweaves minutiae of surroundings with a characters reflection; you get a very authentic experience of what it is to see the world from the main character's, Henry Perowne's, perspective that is both lyrical but realistic; his mind wanders from the event at hand to his plans for the day to world events to remembrances past with the exact amount of ease. If McEwan's a genius, and at least to me he has some genius level skill in his hands, it's in what you might call clinical detail; he nails every sprawling inch, and God is in it.

But it's decidedly man that's in the narrative. I found this book to be a very frustrating read; on the one hand, I know it's great because individual sentences are intoxicating - the language and technical act of the novel's creation are amazing. On the other, though, I found myself hating some toss-off sentences, and after that beautiful opening sequence, found long stretches or scenes to be borderline idiotic, no matter how nice their florid touches. I was constantly battling the notion that there were parts of the novel that I was irritated either because one, I'm not in my forties, don't have children and therefore can't relate, or two, I'm just naturally inclined to disbelieve when I'm told works are great or well-written. But the more I think about it (and the more reviews I read that allude to this notion), I'm stuck with the feeling that parts of this tale are manipulative and contrived, derivative, heavy-handed and gratuitous. There are numerous reasons for this, and I fear this is going to come off sounding overly negative - I did enjoy the book. But it's a story against a brilliant background, a crafty juxtaposition of the everyday against the constant banter of post 9/11 terrorist world events swimming behind every scene. The background is brilliant, no doubt, and I think even the juxtaposition is well done with a nice rhythm in and out of the story v. the world events. I have to say that upon reflection, the story itself, though, looks like an ill-defined silhouette.

The first problem is that the narrative is sold as an average man going through his average day off; unfortunately, Mr. Average happens to be a neurosurgeon, which last time I checked is a profession that is so decidedly unaverage that it is used as a metaphor for things only a very small amount of people should be gifted enough to do, i.e., "it's not brain surgery." I completely understand why this profession was chosen for the main character - it's the cleanest example of someone whose collisions with the mental, spiritual and emotional worlds are all decidedly physical. He knows just what happens when you sever a nerve or infarct the wrong part of cingulate gyrus; his dedication to a realist vision of the world is not just personal but professional. So it was an apt choice, but unfortunately, it gave McEwan license to riddle the text with technical jargon that may have well just have screamed "look at me, I'm really researched." Technical jargon is not a turn-off for me instantly; Pynchon and Wallace throw in their share of miscellaneous rocket diagrams and math equations, too. But this application of it struck me an unnecessary and non-fluid. Part of the problem is that i already know what the effing motor cortex and frontal lobes and Huntington's chorea are and do to you - I'm nowhere near an expert in the area, and I felt like I was reading lay language run through an English-to-neurosurgeon's dictionary. His rendition of the neurosurgeon's thoughts about his own profession were, I felt, wildly off the mark, a transparent attempt at authenticating his main character. In short, I don't believe that neurosurgeons think in such overly simplistic and definitional terms of their own work, but I think authors that are trying to give the impression that they know what it's like to be a neurosurgeon do.

The second problem I had was something that I call "Ayn Randian tendencies." Ms. Rand, at least in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, her two most well known books and the ones that I have read, has entire characters that exist as sandwich board placards; they roam through scenes just to spout particular views and have very limited traits outside of their purpose to represent some idea. Which is fine, it's just an archetypal and metaphorical way of writing (people like Aesop and Jesus do this all the time), and I could criticize her for making puppets out of her characters and leaving them bloodless, but that's not the real point. The thing that makes an offense Randian is when a character steps on a pulpit and is given opportunity within the context of the story to vomit the author's philosophy, especially when one, this philosophy is already abundantly clear via the rest of the book (so it's a hammer across the forehead), and two, the character rambles for nearly a hundred pages (or, in Atlas Shrugged, even more). So it should be clear that I despise these kinds of passages because of their manipulation and overtness. McEwan doesn't go to Randian extremes, but there is a scene smack in the middle of the book where he and his daughter have an argument which is obviously thrown in to give the old v. young, hawk v. dove arguments for invading Iraq. It's a senseless and stilted scene, and goes on long and awkwardly, sticking out and killing some of the momentum of the book. There's another scene that does this but not through dialog - I found the scene with Henry visiting his senile mother to be a humdrum look at living with an aged parent as well as staring into the eyes of mortality and life's end morbidity. There was no grandiose speech, but the method and non-sequitur snippets were borderline emotionally cheap; if you've known someone to suffer through Alzheimer's or any form of dementia, then these scenes were the literary equivalent of sticking salt in a never to be closed. I think the entire scene was club-to-the-head morbid, better accomplished in the racquetball scene, and if I were to be really cynical about it, just plain nasty and emotionally manipulative.

The final, and third fault of the book was also the one that irked me the most: a forced, contrived plot (and a ridiculous scene within it). The central antagonist of Baxter was stupidly stereotypical, for one, and the mugging encounter and Baxter's disease, obvious enough to be diagnosable by a neurosurgeon (who, in case you don't know, would have no reason to encounter neurology, not neurosurgery, cases on a day to day basis), was far too convenient for me to stomach. This coincidence is the same kind of central plot-driving device that motors the movie Crash, and I found that one, too, equally manipulative and, for lack of a better term, implausible. Of course, this *could* happen, but when it happens as the central piece of the novel, it makes plain that the protagonist's profession and the antagonist disease are just puppets to the author's intent. This could have slid off just fine; a single encounter with the man would have been passable. SPOLIER: But since Baxter follows him home, and attacks his family in revenge for Henry's challenge to Baxter's street cred, the whole things becomes an overblown farce. And worse - Baxter holds Henry's wife at knifepoint and forces his daughter to strip and stand naked in front of him. I'm sorry, but this is painfully absurd - it may be because of the excerpt from Herzog that introduces the book, but all I could think while I read this scene was of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and the intense scene of exposure in that book. In other words, the scene stood out as an obvious attempt at making a shocking scene. Worse was that the fact that Daisy is naked is almost immediately dropped from the scene; it seems like an afterthought though it is obviously the oddest part of the encounter thus far. But the reason it is dropped is because Daisy is made *to read poetry* to Baxter. And Baxter *falls in love with it*, or something equivalent. McEwan tries to play this off as an effect of his Huntington's, but this does nothing to rescue the stupidity of the idea. But McEwan's trip through the depths of narrative highjacking are not done yet: to make a silly ending short, he and his son push Baxter down stairs, injuring Baxter's neck so that (yep you guessed it) the neurosurgeon has to operate on his attacker. Not to wreck the haughty tone of my review, but that is some stupid shit.

So, what I'm left with is a masterfully written and expertly detailed character study. To give credit, the opening of the book was outstanding, the squash scene (I find it very difficult to write sports action) very good, and Henry's relationship with his son, especially in attending his rehearsal, was downright beautiful. And, as stated, individual sentences throughout sang wonders. Unfortunately, the tumor of this book, its contrived narrative, was metastatic and forced beyond repair. I am forced to call this a very good but nowhere near great book.