gregbrown

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by gregbrown

  2. Posted

    Hard to characterize my reaction to Munro because it's more of a non-reaction than anything. Yes, her stories are carefully crafted. Yes, they're amongst the best exemplars of the coiled, latent violence in how men often regard and handle and control women. Yes, I can see how the Nobel Prize committee would dig her.

    But at the same time, I don't really get anything out of them. The plotting is pretty insubstantial and just there to set up character moments. She'll sometimes play around with an epistolary mode, but variations in style are only ever like 5% at most. She gets a lot of praise because the characters are richly developed, even compared to novels, but there's a certain joy in the best novels of seeing something develop over time, or see a character end up in a radically different position than they started without any discrete fulcrum point. The very form of short stories, even in Munro's hands, collapses those possibilities down to where she can only really hint at those developments in backstory.

    [some of this probably reads as problems I have with the very existence of short stories, which is partially true! The form is a fucking weird place where there's almost no commercial success but, due to their shortness, they're perfect for studying and cooing over in academic or workshop contexts, their production artificially boosted by MFA programs nationwide. But more specifically, my favorite short stories are all, well, shorter. These fifty-page efforts aren't short enough to feel compressed or pointed, but not long enough to have those sort of novel-y parts I crave.

    Munro's just this awkward middle-ground of—I'll say again—extremely well-crafted short stories. They're incredibly controlled, giving every impression of being doted over with the vigilance and standards of someone who's been doing this for an entire career. But they're all just sameishness. The sample-size is small enough that I'm hesitant to use these stories to come to any conclusion about Munro's larger project, but I can't say that I'm a fan of this collection.

  5. Posted

    Not sure why this won the Pulitzer, outside of an enjoyable narrator's voice and being about an Important Subject. The plotting is a mess, the commentary pretty one-note, and the book as a whole seems to run on auto-pilot for the whole midsection. That said, the voice IS striking until it wears thin, and the end section was a refreshing change once it finally arrived. Nguyen allows himself to get more daringly-subjective with the prose, and despite the risks, I think he pulls it off nicely. And the book as a whole feels sort of like a novelization of Said's writing on Orientalism, but way more enjoyable!

     

     

    The whole book is a quick enough read, but squandered opportunities throughout. I feel kinda like a broken record, but this really does have many of the same debut-novel problems as the other stuff we've been reading recently. The steady hand of Munro will be a lovely change of pace. :)

  6. Posted

    I binge-read the first five books because my younger brothers were reading them, and the sixth was about to come out (and I think I wanted to watch the third film too). It was the same time as I was listening to a lot of Hail to the Thief, so the two are super-linked in that proustian sort of way in my head. After slamming through the sixth on a car trip, I never got around to reading the seventh, lol.

    Also, seconding the praise for Wizard People Dear Reader, which has totally superseded the first book/film in my mind.

  7. Posted

    I started out really hating this book but by the end it had subsided to more the throb of a dull headache. The most frustrating part is that the interesting bits—

    Mary and Daphne interacting, going out to dinner

    —are both lodged at the very end and quickly abandoned. I found the bulk of the book to be thinly-connected, often onanistic storytelling for storytelling's sake. (Including such bizarre and unnecessary pretenses as having the interbellum author write a story set in the modern day? The fuck?)

     

    Everything else is unrevelatory, especially the dropped theme of violence against women. There's something great to be examined in violence against women as not just a structural urge, but also a deeply personal and almost intimate one. That the reasons for killing women are often not reasons but just a pretext, targets of opportunity. But this book says next to nothing about that, just trying the theme on for size before ultimately discarding it. It's a bad book clothed in all the thematic and stylistic finery that get people to take it seriously.

     

    me mad

  8. Posted

    Man, this book is pretty great.

     
    For a novel where the premise is a grand bit of world-building, most of the story is shockingly interior. I know the plot threads fizzling out is often ascribed to Dick's haphazard I Ching-driven narrative, but it also serves to underline the inescapable, maybe even inexorable existence of this alternate world. The characters here don't even imagine trying to return the world to its "rightful" place, even with their glimpses of how it might be different. Instead, each take it as a personal challenge to survive and even persevere to act ethically within—despite the novel's total lack of any of the ethical quandaries we expect from dystopian literature.
     
    Juliana's thread seemed too erratic and just-so to me, and I didn't really find the ending worthwhile at all. Would have preferred to just end on Tagomi.
     
    I already had some vibes going from the esoteric nature of the I Ching's use, but Mr. Tagomi's trip towards the end of the book underlined the really enjoyable similarities to Alan Moore's FROM HELL. Wanna read more PKD soon, but I might have to double-back and re-read that one to get my cryptic vision fix. :D

  12. Posted

    What did you all think of the ending? I'm kinda confused as to why Ng felt the need to keep throwing in twists until the very last few pages.

     

    A lot of the book's dramatic and emotional energy came from the family members reacting to new knowledge of Lydia or each other—so it seems odd to sort of undo their final acceptance that she was both miserable and arguably justified to feel that way. Positing her death instead as an accidental drowning seems to both reduce the meaning of the death and be a weird grope for a happier or at least bittersweet ending. And since none of the characters will ever find out, it just kinda drops there without any meaningful impact. Feels totally unmotivated from a story perspective.

  13. Posted

    I also had really mixed feelings about the novel—or perhaps more accurately, I really enjoyed the middle portion but felt nothing for the beginning and end. 

    The mother's trip to Toledo, and how the outcome shaped her relationship with her daughter, felt much more interesting than any other character in the story—enough that it even made the other storylines lively as the implications ricocheted to every character.

     Before that, the characters all felt like tropes, and afterwards they quickly regressed to the same. It didn't help that the prose was thoroughly middle-of-the-road: that same delicate writing that's endemic in MFA programs and quick-as-hell to read, but utterly neutral and unhelpful to any story aims.

     

    A vaguely-similar work that I mostly loved is Top of the Lake, a BBC series about a young mixed-race girl who tries to drown herself in the lake. The similarities are mostly cosmetic, but the TV series was much more interesting in examining sexism/misogyny, small-town insularity, etc. by being unabashedly weird about it at points. Eventually it capitulates to the needs of plot and wrap-up and answers, but the most captivating parts are in the aimless sideways jags—something this book could have used more of, or at least anything that would set it apart as different from the dozens of other praised literary fiction books that come out in this vein each year. Kind of an arbitrary grievance, but one I felt strongly while reading. 

     

    Also some Goodreads users are so bad at reading lol

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  15. Posted

    IMHO the grossest thing that's been happening lately is the monthly story about how, "Surprise! Tax revenues fell short of expectations this month again after we gutted business taxes." Dynamic scoring of tax cuts is always pretty sleazy, but what really makes it outright evil is that the governor has UNILATERAL power to cut spending if tax revenue doesn't meet expectations, so he's cutting millions from child services and universities without even any legislative approval. It's appalling.

     

    Not that the legislature is much better, packed with conservative Republicans and currently locked in battle with the Supreme Court over whether we should adequately fund schools. But here in Lawrence, everyone openly hates Brownback enough that it even comes up in random conversations apropos of nothing.

  19. Posted

    Rewatching Mad Men and still can't believe how gorgeous the writing is. Character development is subtle and you can see it through not just witty, pithy dialogue, but the cinematography itself. Also never realized how much I'd enjoy a period show. This show is actually a work of art, every episode. It explores disconnection from society, unhappiness, happiness, relationships, aspirations, and the different values of the 60's and early 70's. You will fall in love with the characters and how shitty, good, and human they can be.

    I haven't actually finished the series though, since Netflix only has the first part of the last season... Part of the reason I'm rewatching I guess, so that I can smoothly transition into finishing the series since it's been so long since I've watched.

     

    They're putting up the last few episodes of Mad Men on February 5th. I've started watching them since I got Mad Men Carousel by Matt Zoller Seitz for Christmas. He's one of my favorite critics working today, and he especially loves writing about Mad Men so it's a really great companion to the series.

     

    Also going up on Netflix soon is Better Call Saul season 1.

  21. Posted

    I watched Slow West and enjoyed it a fair bit, been on a western kick lately, this, deadwood, might reread blood meridian. Any suggestions for great things with western settings?

    Warlock by Oakley Hall and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams are my two favorite westerns. (Caveat: haven't read True Grit or Blood Meridian.)

  22. Posted

    Just finished the book, and man am I not wild about some of the plot stuff in the latter half.

     

    Sexual coercion seems like cheap storytelling these days, IMHO, especially when deployed like it is here to add grit and gristle to a character. It's especially compromised for appearing as a flashback in the second half, where it's relegated to backstory—or at least as close as this novel gets to ~backstory~.

     
    Were any of the characters supposed to be enjoyable/lovable by the end of the first half, with the second half souring you against them by revealing their machiavellian backstory? Because the oomph of the plot twists was sapped for me by being reducible to "Remember how you disliked this character for one reason? Surprise, it's another, secret reason that makes them an asshole."
     
    My overall impression as we started to enter the second half was that Lotto was an ignorant fool who left a cloud of disaster in his wake, and that Mathilde was either the wife he needed or the wife he deserved. Groff spends most of the second act arguing for the former, but I'm not wholly convinced. Again, phrasing most of her decisions as ~backstory~ tends to rob them of agency, especially given how we've already been given an entire narrative where they've been essentially ignored.
     
    Once you start layering Chollie's schemes in there, it becomes this weird bit of one-upmanship that can't commit to being a thriller but still kinda wants to be just for plot's sake. There are things here that Groff could have honed in on if she wanted to—how money is deployed liberally to gain leverage through discovering secrets, how protecting someone through lies rarely protects them at all, etc.—but she never really committed enough to any of them other than the simplistic "wow everyone has secrets huh" that also drives a frustrating amount of the discussion I've read elsewhere online.
     
    Granted, I was kind of skeptical of the novel going in—lyrical realism is not my bag and the book largely rides on its prose for the first half—but the structure and plot of the novel became increasingly important, and increasingly worrying as I read on. While I wouldn't say I loved Evidence of Things Unseen, I certainly enjoyed it a lot more as an exemplar of the qualities of the first half. And for the second half, Fincher's Gone Girl is hard to beat.

  24. Posted

    Have any of the Thumbs seen Deadwood? A Deadwood (Re)watch Cast would be so good. Too bad there's not a reason for a revisit like there was with Twin Peaks, aside from the show's GOAT status of course.

    Especially if it was paired with a read-through of Oakley Hall's Warlock. <3

  25. Posted

    Kingsman: The Secret Service was so bad that I'm even grumpy at Film Crit Hulk for his big post praising the film. Just finished it and the only two things I liked were the production design and 

    the sequence where everyone's head explodes

    . Vaughn still directs every action sequence like the speed-ramping warehouse fight in Kick-Ass and so much of the film's content comes off as a mix of trite commentary and gross stuff. It's a mess that consistently squanders its opportunities, uggggh.