There is a kind of filmmaking I’ve always been fond of, but which I nonetheless refer to as “endurance cinema.” Endurance cinema is not entertaining—iThere is a kind of filmmaking I’ve always been fond of, but which I nonetheless refer to as “endurance cinema.” Endurance cinema is not entertaining—it is grueling, often uncomfortable, and frequently boring: ten-hour depictions of labor camps and a failed escape (Masaki Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition”), forty-five minute zooms across a room (Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”), still photographs catching fire on a hot plate (Hollis Frampton’s “Nostalgia”), or deeply subliminal sensory freakouts (Stan Brakhage’s “Dog Star Man”) are typical. These films are not fun to watch. But if the viewer is able to get beyond the challenge of the experience, a different experience reveals itself, one that is revelatory and sublime. These films take us out of ourselves in a way standard narratives never can, and introduce the viewer to levels of investment and profundity as a direct result of their form, not in spite of it. These films are worth it.
Kim Stanley Robinson's work is often similar. (His Mars trilogy nearly killed me; no matter how much I delight in his scientific veracity, spending a hundred pages living through a general assembly after a revolution was taking the Gedankenexperiment a bit far.) He crushes us with detail. He makes us wait for the payoff. And wait. And wait. Yet in the waiting, we forget what we were there for in the first place, worn down as we are by the stream, and it is in this space that the reader may discover that there is something else entirely taking place—an emergent property, perhaps—that can only be observed in the totality. In this sense, his writing is a lot like life.
The Years of Rice and Salt pretends to be an alternative history. It sets up a clever premise (what would history from the Dark Ages forward look like without Europeans?) and the reader gets to play detective, sniffing out clues to how the world we recognize and this other world may overlap over time. So that we don’t need to form new emotional attachments with characters generation after the next, he employs a neat trick of reincarnation, which is by turns comforting and exhausting. But this is not what the book is about.
This book is about why we are the ways we are. Like the best novels of ideas, Robinson is able to locate the big questions in the minutae of daily life. What is science? Are these paradigms social constructions of cultures, or are we scraping against the surface of universal truths—so that the revelations and inherited wisdom attributed to one great man or another were really just inevitabilities, and only time was required for a technology to surface? One way or another, the world ends up with lenses, rules of thermodynamics, telephones. What is justice? As civilizations rise and fall, we watch the complexities of interest, resources, and accident collide, often with eerily familiar results. Islam gives birth to feminism; the Americas are devastated by contact with other peoples, but give birth to democracy nonetheless. What is revolution? At what point will we know we have succeeded? What is progress? As choice after choice leads to joys and traumas both new and repetitive, the reader is forced to confront their own life as a product of history.
Most importantly, this book is about mistakes. It is about seeing our patterns and challenges, our road blocks and frustrations and addictions and pain as a deep and holy inheritance, as gifts from the gods, given so that we may work these things out, life after life, with the same set of teachers and lovers and enemies. Our roles shift, but our souls remain intact, recognizable to one other over the centuries as we lift one another through our failures and push each other to carry on. For this reader, at least, this is a comfort: those members of my jotty who have been lost in this life, well—I will see them again in the next, where we will no doubt pick up where we left off. ...more
A charming little thought-experiment conducted by a writer of rich yet limited imagination. This book has received rave reviews in a number of journalA charming little thought-experiment conducted by a writer of rich yet limited imagination. This book has received rave reviews in a number of journals over the past few months, and I was on a waiting list at the library for weeks before I had a chance to check it out myself.
Meh.
Clearly influenced by the structured, dreamlike musings of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Sum: Fory Tales from the Afterlives dances neatly through a series of post-life possibilities. Some are clever, some are odd, but few manage to be more than a change of curtains on what is clearly a window into a Judeo-Christian background. There is always a God (capital G), always a mention of sinners and a "you guys get to go one place, and you all go over here." Unfortunately, this book is a missed opportunity for something a bit more mystical, creative, or even simply adventurous.
Eagleman's strongest moments are when he flows inward and touches some of the raw points of sadness we each carry in secret, and when he succumbs to a pantheistic vision that explores natural systems for their own intrinsic miracles....more
This book tapped into something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately - the continuum between freedom and security. It seems that, to gain one, This book tapped into something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately - the continuum between freedom and security. It seems that, to gain one, the other must be sacrificed - that the two are positioned in such a way that requires careful moral calculations to balance or understand.
As a young adult novel, this book does an excellent job of bringing out the complexities of utopian visions, of the difficulties that lie in making choices between collectivity and individualism, and explores very elegantly the positive sides of pain and sorrow.
For obvious reasons, this book is included in many high school reading curricula - it should make its way onto adults' shelves, as well....more
This book was written by a close friend of my parents, one of the old-school members of the "outlaw" community in which we lived. Andre was in AnchoraThis book was written by a close friend of my parents, one of the old-school members of the "outlaw" community in which we lived. Andre was in Anchorage for much of his life, given to chain-smoking and wearing berets; we were in Dutch Harbor and Kodiak. We lived on a boat. We had a paperback copy of this book of his, signed in a friendly scrawl that has faded over the years, due to wear, sun-exposure, salt spray, and the fact that I read the thing 17 times between the ages of 9 and 19. He was an accidental hero of mine, just one more example of the possibilities of what a life could look like, and another instance of what was commonplace in Alaska seeming like the lunatic fringe everywhere else.
This is the original Into the Wild, only instead of being an arrogant, self-centered, privileged kid that ends up dead in the wilderness, Andy is a grown man (with a history of self-abuse), who heads into the wild to save his own life. What results is a beautifully honest, lucid, first-person account of the authentic Alaskan outback lifestyle. I hesitate to use the predictable descriptor "gritty," but be prepared for uncomfortably "real": as in, seal clubbing and other less savory acts of human interest.
On the other hand, Andy's writing style has a freshness and a clarity to it that comes from being an interesting man with a story to tell, with none of the conceits or distractions of a "writer's" identity. I suppose it would be considered a "naive" work, when "naive" means self-taught; for all I know, the book was self-published, as well, and sold primarily in gift stores in Kodiak and the Anchorage airport.
This book is one of my secrets; I hereby share it. Find it and read it. It's great....more
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