childpost is father of the manblog

Books

The Hero of the Play

This is one I had to read for school. Book of poems about hockey. Yeah, I groaned too! I figured it was gonna be an incredibly mislead attempt to appeal to “jocks” that might have enrolled in this poetry class but no no this is actually pretty dang good. Couple quick beefs: first off I mean it's like, hardly poetry. Aside from maybe a bit of a feel of linebreaks and such occasionally there really isn't any reason this couldn't be chunks of prose. I think he chose “poetry” mainly for what I think he felt was a freedom from the requirements of prose i.e. a narrative but who says prose needs to have a narrative? Now I think the same freedoms of poetry have turned into restrictions, and when you feel like he's on the verge of some really stunning little narrative it like hits a wall. And plus this contributes to my other beef, that this is really in some contemporary mode of subject preceding feeling. It's like he just had a bunch of hockey related subjects and then set to making a poem for each of them versus having a bunch of feelings about hockey and then looking for how to express them. Yeah again almost all of them are done really well, some really nice phrasing and interesting ideas about sport and violence and legacy and all that, but a lot of them still manage to be forced, sure, so much good stuff came out, but you get the sense that he really really dug for it. The best poems are the ones that seem like they burst out of some inner heart of the poet and whatever words or images needed to encapsulate it formed naturally. Geyser versus picking a spot on the map you figure you ought to use and drilling until you find a bit of oil. I dunno. As far as hockey itself goes, it's still one of my favorite sports to watch, mainly because plays go on for so long and everyone moves around a lot. The very principles of hockey culture seem to be about like unrefined things, pretty contrary to this elegant writing, but the paradox is intriguing rather than frustrating. Good stuff all around. I guess I shouldn't complain much about contemporary poetry's subject matter choice and stretching things for it when I wrote a sonnet about Tetris Attack in school.

Oblivion

Have read a bit more of this:

“Another Pioneer”

This one's a little nicer, a bit. Very clever, yes. I love the fact that it's a story being told by one guy on a plane to another, the teller obviously having heard it or read it somewhere else, with a friend of the narrator overhearing and then telling the narrator later, and then the narrator tells us and there's even another layer that's that abstraction between author and reader that's sorta neat but I'm too lazy to get into it. So anyways I think the really cool thing you can get from this is that dfw is one of those people good enough at writing that they can essentially choose any topic, no matter how difficult the concept, no matter how varied the ramifications, and contemplate it fully and enthrallingly. What I can't really decide is if this gift is more impressive when applied to simple cases or complex ones like this. Actually though this is sort of a simple case too: “what would happen if a kid in a basic tribal village suddenly had unlimited knowledge?”. Probably more simple than “what if a depressed person is caught in a double bind of needing support and said support making her feel guilty and then their therapist kills themselves?” But yeah my point is that no matter what the situation, Wallace can and does take it to its natural limits. And once you're talented and experienced enough to that, the world, or I guess any world, is your oyster. Speaking of which:

“Good Old Neon:”

Oh man hahaha this is the name of one of Kool AD's Hyphy Ballads. Specifically it's the one where he drones out The Stooges' “Search and Destroy”. What are the ramifications of this? Pretty wacky prolly! I dunno I can't say I get it or if I'm sure there's something to get. Probably should focus on this story then okay wait no it's just too sad, it really is. One aspect of Wallace's writing that I sometimes dislike is when he has a character who has a trait like “socially manipulative” - it's a character trait that guarantees success, you know? Like, I dunno, it always seems just a bit... well, socially manipulative itself. Like, the difference between seeing a character engage in social situations and coming to the conclusion that he's socially manipulative, but still getting the tension of like “wait what's he doing what's he saying why's it working oh I see how it's working how clever, how socially manipulative” versus being told “this guy's socially manipulative, he's gonna socially manipulative this conversation, okay I guess he did it” or even more often “ah I see, he socially manipulated that”. I guess the former doesn't really work in this retrospective structure. It doesn't matter anyways because I realized something pretty big with this one: because of the flawed and centered third person, we're still getting a lot of these “socially manipulative” characters opinions of themselves filtered through themselves. They are, in short, often frauds, and this simplification and predetermination of a trait like that is their own justification. Like this dude here in “Good Old Neon”: he starts by talking about his social prowess, his ability to do this and that without revealing his inner self, etc, etc but we begin to realize that this is a facade as well and either the thing he'd been putting on was his true self or there was no true self at all. I feel like a lot of the text is sort of a distraction from this key problem, which I think is this: the self, when evaluated in a certain way, will always feel false. By “evaluated in a certain way” I mean “evaluated by a person who has some sort of inherent chemical imbalance causing depression” but to some extent I think this is something we can all relate to, right? I know sometimes I look around my room or whatever and think “there's no way I can actually like all of this, I must be faking some of it somehow” and then I get thinking about what I really like and what I like for appearances, and, depending on my mood, evaluating anything like this, no matter what it is, will reveal either that I must truly like it and be faking the rest, or I must be faking it and liking the rest. It's one of those traps you can just think your way into. A minor logic loop propped up by the fact that there really is some stuff you just can't know about yourself. Speaking of which I went on a tangent about Godel's incompleteness theorem being applicable to conspiracy theorists and conspiracies themselves on a recent film assignment and my TA completely called me out on how confusing it was and I felt a mixture of pride and shame and I couldn't tell which one was real. But that's really enough or too much about me, the point is this story really examines this little pseudo-paradox that I've never really seen addressed before, and examines it with the comprehensive depth that is customary of this collection. He finds a situation at the extremity and presents it realistically, which is impressive in itself. Good job etc.

“Oblivion”

So the last one focused on what I called a pseudo-paradox: the examined self is false, acting without introspection is false, thus there is no real self. I call it a pseudo-paradox because I don't think the premise is true in all cases, I think for most people examination of the self can make the self seem truer than ever. But in the case of someone mentally disturbed in such a way to make these premises true, it would seem to me to be a legitimate paradox. But because of this not being a universal paradox but rather some private one, the story thus becomes a story of private suffering. In “Oblivion”, the protagonist and his wife struggle with an actual paradox: he is asleep, but feels he is awake, his wife is awoken by his snoring, he cannot be snoring even if he is asleep because if he thinks he's awake he isn't in the stage of sleep where he can snore, so what gives? Or vastly simplified: “What happens in an argument when both people are mutually exclusively right?” So as just a quick aside I like two terms when I think about these sort of dilemmas in fiction: contraries and paradoxes. In my mind, a big part of plot development can be summarized as “a paradox is proven actually to be a contrary”. For example, in “Good Old Neon”, we're presented with his life as a paradox, but as the flaws in his character are revealed, it's more of just a contrary between the way he thinks and the way he thinks he is able to think. Basically the shift is between “two things that are mutually exclusively right” (a paradox) and “one thing that is right, and one thing that is wrong but might as well be right for the effect it will have” (a contrary). I think this is maybe getting too abstract. Anyways my point is that Wallace, and a lot of other authors, like to construct paradoxes in our mind and then deconstruct them to contraries as a tool for, like, plot pushing or whatever term you want to use here. So here we get the same thing that he constructs this paradox of both of them being right. Or rather he constructs a situation where he is right and is saying his wife isn't, but any Wallace vet is ready to see the conclusion where his wife is right as well. So at the conclusion, where, spoilers, but I guess I already spoiled it, we see that yes, they are somehow both right, there's a bit of this jarring reeling feeling like someone's just snapped your bungee cord. It isn't all about the snoring, obviously, just like it wouldn't be in real life. The real art of these paradoxes and contraries is how they exemplify the character dynamics at large. And we're trained to think that the various marital dilemmas will be resolved by the resolution of this snoring paradox, right? So when they aren't, when the paradox is revealed to be indeed paradoxical, what happens with the rest of the plot? And then we enter the twist ending, which I won't spoil but will probably inadvertently make obvious, and we reflect on the title a bit, and we go back and reread, and everything makes more sense, and we see that the true contrary was between paradox and reality, and we raise our eyebrows and make a little puffed sound and think, dang, this next story better be good if it's gonna try to top that.

And whoops I forgot about the one with the woman whose plastic surgery is botched and makes it look like she's always screaming

But I don't know if I'd have much to say about that anyways.

The next one I haven't read yet, I'm saving it I think. I've noticed a lot in these sort of story compilations (that is, exceedingly good ones), that the “thrust” story, that is, the story that really exemplifies the book, is the penultimate one and then is followed by the “followthrough”, that is, the story that exceeds the book in just the right ways. Example I can think of off the top of my head: Sekai no Owari to Yoake Mae, by Inio Asano: the second to last one is the pseudo-biographical gutspill that captures a ton of the themes in the rest of the collection and rolls them into one bruiser of a story, followed by “The End of the World”, probably my favorite single chapter of manga ever, which zooms in on the real quality of the whole book, disregarding anything less than that brilliance. It's the “miracle to masterpiece” quality that I tried to describe about the first and second season of a lot of shows but in reverse. I dunno. Anyways that's the dynamic I'm expecting here.

Saimoe stuff

Okay so I was wrong about Kuroneko vs. Kyouko, man oh man Madoka is just going full out DJ Khaled “all I do is win” mode if you know what I mean. Also interesting: Madoka vs. Sayaka got like half the votes of the other matches, lol. Seems like there's definitely still a Madoka faction that is aside from just “everyone”.

Music

The Smile Sessions

So at some point I was convinced that “God Only Knows” was the most beautiful song of all time, or perhaps just the greatest pop song of all time, or maybe just the best song ever. And heck yeah I believed whatever website or list or whatever this was, 'cause it was sure one of the best songs I've ever heard. It was the best song until this March when “Black and Yellow Sketch” came out. But no not now. They had it wrong. “Surf's Up” is actually the best song I've heard besides “Black and Yellow Sketch” and is thus the best song of those 44 years. Wow, 44 years, I cannot get my head around that. So yeah The Beach Boys started making Smile and that all got generally screwed up but now, 44 years later, we get the recording sessions. Okay okay yes most of this stuff has been released in some form or another, usually many forms, since then, sure. But I dunno like as much as I liked Pet Sounds – and I really really like Pet Sounds – I never really felt the motivation to try to piece together the rest of the whole Brian Wilson affair. Geez like I haven't even listened to Brian Wilson Presents Smile, although I probably will get on that soonish. So yeah, this is actually my first time hearing “Heroes and Villains” and “Vega-Tables” and “Good Vibrations” and especially “Surf's Up”, which I have been listening to over and over again for the last day or so just because I really still cannot get a grip on how good it is. This is pretty exciting stuff, for me, at least. Everything is like 10/10 great and then on a few moments it kicks it up to like the quad-star god-tier of uhh, well, not a whole lot else. Like a few seconds into first track “Our Prayer” when you remember exactly why these guys were the godkings of harmony and you realize that you really couldn't have prepared yourself for this at all. Or the end of “Gee” transitioning to “Heroes and Villains”, that suspense, that hesitation, then BOOM, “I've been in this town so long that back in the city/I've been taken for a lost and gone/An unknown for a long long time”. This song is seriously good, huge and sprawling, an aesthetic that seems some weird combination of The Beatles and Bob Dylan near the start, then changes a good five or six times in five minutes into things I honestly have never heard before or sense. This is the sort of like, ethereal celebration that Animal Collective is still trying to nail. This didn't just have potential to be the best song, it had the potential to be like the best five songs. But oh well doesn't matter because the best song is actually “Surf's Up”.

Anyways I might have more to say about this later but for now let's just do some more fun lists and post this thing.

Top 5 Beach Boys songs

5. “I Know There's An Answer”

4. “Heroes and Villains”

3. “That's Not Me”

2. “God Only Knows”

1. “Surf's Up”

That's pretty standardish I guess, really.

And plus since The Beach Boys have got me listening to a lot of them right now again:

Top 5 Animal Collective songs

5. “My Girls”

4. “I Think I Can”

3. “Mr. Fingers”

2. “Brother Sport”

1. “Banshee Beat”

Geez that was a hard decision. I'm not sure if I believe that. I think it needs more stuff from Sung Tongs prolly.

Also this probably:

Top 5 hardest songs I've passed in ITG

5. “So Deep” on 9

4. “Epileptic Crisis” on 7

3. “Tricky Disco” on 9

2. “July” on 9

1. “Hand of Time” on 10

Yeah yeah new list that's right old list out of date that's right I passed “Tricky Disco” and it was tricky and then I passed “Epileptic Crisis” which isn't so much actually difficult on that difficulty as it is just overwhelmingly weird and that is RIGHT I passed “Hand of Time” in that I got a D, a 48%, but I had meter at the end, I didn't die, it didn't say “F” and “Ineligible for ranking”, I passed, I passed a 10, and that is what counts.

I am so happy that I passed a 10 that this blog post ends RIGHT NOW.