Pace, And The Book Of Air and Shadows Reconsidered

A complete lack of balance has thrown me off kilter, and I’ve been zombie-esque walking the halls. I’ve over-reacted to meaningless but seemingly distressing news from far away, and haven’t paused enough to appreciate truly sad news here at home. I enjoyed but didn’t fully engage in a nice family wedding. I haven’t exercised in a week, and, in a rush at a gig, ate not one but two walking tacos, Fritos snack bags topped with taco meat and cheese. I’ve been running around, racing rats, and lost a bit of myself in the process. No signs of the pace letting up, but the coping skills are kicking in.

Roderick gave me an assignment that is now way past due, a song about my time in Oregon to be written and posted here. I think about it every day, but I’m not exaggerating about the pace of everyday life lately, so I need to extend the due date more than a bit. But it will happen.

Tying up a loose end:

Someone hit this site Googling for discussion questions for the novel The Book of Air and Shadows. When I saw that, I was reminded of the less than flattering write up I did here about the book. Well, I finished the book, quite some time ago, and I have to say that it really redeemed itself in my eyes. Turns out, much of what I complained about was, I think, deliberate; one major theme of the book is how we allow the familiar patterns in popular fiction to effect our expectations of the world. So he used those patterns to made that point. It’s actually a topic I’m fascinated by. Once class I teach is basically on that point. So I’m embarrassed that I wrote critically of the book, when really I was just falling for the very point the author was making. Cool.

That’s an interesting topic for me: to what degree is author intent relevant? I tell my students that it really doesn’t matter what the author means to do. What matters is what he or she does. But I don’t quite buy into that. Here’s a weird “for instance.”

A while ago, the now-defunct band The Darkness was getting a lot of press as being very influenced by Queen. I like Queen, so I listened to The Darkness’ only album at the time. I thought it was ridiculous and over-blown and awful, full of bombast, like Queen, but without the sense of irony or fun.

Then, later, I saw their second album, and I realized that they were in on the joke – that the bombast and absurdity was the whole point. This became clear to me when I saw the title of their second album: “One Way Ticket To Hell. . . and Back.” Now, I love ‘em.

See? Author’s intent.

Here are some passages from The Book of Air and Shadows that I want to hang on to:

Someone once said. . . that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time. Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens, as, reportedly, my maternal grandmother used to say, quoting Schiller: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Paul’s theory is that our civilization is collapsing into a dark age and that the advancing edges of this are visible in urban ghettos. He says dark ages are all about forgetting civilization and its arts and also the increasing reluctance of the ruling classes to pay for civic life. This sealed the fate of Rom, he claims. He doesn’t think that the ghetto needs uplift, however, but rather that when the crash comes, the poor will survive better than their masters. They need less, he says, and the are more charitable, and the don’t have to unlearn as much. This s was shy Jesus preferred them. Yes, quite crazy; but when I observe the perfect helplessness of my fellow citizens of the middle class and higher, our utter dependence on electricity, cheap gas, and the physical service of unseen millions, our reluctance to pay our fair share, our absurd gated enclaves, our “good buildings,” and our incompetence at any task other than the manipulation of symbols, I often think he has a point.

In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish.

Well, you know, there is really nothing like Shakespeare, even performed by children. . . .[R]emarkably, when the golden lines begin to flow from their lips the are able for a moment to leave the shut hell of teenaged narcissism and inhabit a broader, richer universe.

I did not see or seek out Amalie, although I was aware of her presence in the house, like a rumor of war.

And here is where a character really sums up the point:

“Mishkin seemed remarkable interested, fascinated in fact, with. . . whether movies really determined our sense of how to behave, and more than that, our sense of what was real.
“Surly not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around – filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”
“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear then in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action – foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He's seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”