You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir

My book is called You're on an Airplane. It's a memoir pronounced with the emphasis on “me”. Think of it like an actor who was cornered into writing.

The opening premise of You're on an Airplane is that you're sitting beside Parker Posey on a flight, and with such close proximity and time to waste, she begins to tell you about her life and her career as an indy actor. The premise is embraced in the beginning – with Posey interrupting her storytelling to ask the flight attendant for a seltzer or a warm cookie; to ask sporadic questions of yourself – but the concept eventually kind of fizzles out, with fewer and fewer references to the imaginary scenario as it goes along. (Which was fine so far as smooth storytelling goes, but it did make the conceit feel slightly pointless in the end.) A celebrity memoir is a strange animal – the author presumably wants to tell you about herself, but it's not like she owes you her soul – and while I learned plenty about Parker Posey's childhood, hobbies, and celebrity encounters, there's nothing deeply revelatory or shocking here (and again, she doesn't owe me that anyway.) Usual caveat: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.

I was on As the World Turns at the time, fresh from dropping out of college after three years on probation, mainly for a bad attitude because I didn't want to rehearse scenes in acting class, preferring instead to wing it. I had a lazy attitude for things I didn't feel were important, like circus class. I didn't have the guts to be a real clown and already knew how to juggle. I skipped class to clown around and kept my probation letters in the freezer, for some reason – an act of self-preservation, maybe.

Posey reveals an interesting family tree; with big personalities going back a few generations and her own parents seeming like cool but odd ducks (I loved the newborn picture of Posey wearing false eyelashes: “You were so small I didn't know what to do with you”, explained her Mom). But there's really nothing about how Posey broke into acting – all of sudden she's on a popular soap opera while also filming Dazed and Confused. From there, Posey recalls film projects out of any chronological order, and while from her stories you understand that she approaches acting as a serious art form – filming scenes often leave her exhausted, hysterical, or in tears – there's nothing about her processes or personal philosophy of her craft.

Auditioning feels like my real self has been punished and sent to my room, while my pretend self is forced to make nice when there is nothing I've done wrong. At an audition in my twenties I spazzed out so much that the casting director asked my agent if I was on drugs. I wasn't, but just had lots of energy and was excited to be there.

Posey writes about her more famous costars over the years, but it's not gossipy (the few times she has something slightly negative to say about someone, she doesn't name the person). She found Wesley Snipes to be distant, Vince Vaughn to be sweetly supportive; Liza Minnelli and Catherine O'Hara to be funny and wise; Louis CK is a complicated auteur and Woody Allen is the “greatest living director”. On meeting Liev Schreiber:

Liev came in fresh off his motorcycle, holding his helmet and exuding a strong actor's attitude. He acted like he'd just finished Yale School of Drama, which he had. This was before The New York Times said he was the greatest living theater actor of his generation, or something to that extent. He was the envy of so many of his contemporaries and treated the small part as a favor to Daisy, which it was. Liev is spectacular onstage. He later told me that he almost didn't do the part in Party Girl because I seemed like an idiot.

In addition to interesting enough storytelling, the book itself contains pages of collage, recipes, and both a very long description of a sequence of yoga moves and a very long explanation of how to throw clay on a pottery wheel. With stories of meeting with a dog psychic to discuss her emotional service animal (and beloved pet, Gracie), investigating Ayurvedic medicine (as it relates to the nature of your own body in conflict with the nature of the settings it finds itself in), and meeting with an analyst who explains the mental stress of Posey exposing herself onscreen as an unconscious reenactment of having been put on display in an incubator as a premature infant, there's a real risk of Posey coming off as a bit flakey. But then I read a review in The Wall Street Journal which goes:

In her book, the actress finds her own ways to provoke. At one point, she refers to her past lives in India. Asked about it, she said she enjoys toying with the image that people have of her.

“It’s like I’m playing with being the person people expect,” Ms. Posey said, “performing that on paper.”

If that's Posey's game, it's not obvious; but okay – she's the artist here. You don't get the sense that Posey is living the fabulous celebrity lifestyle of fame and fortune, and it's also hard to say from this memoir if what she has is worth the tradeoff of not being able to live a normal, anonymous life. There's a late scene at the co-op pottery studio she's a member of – a place that expects its members to share the chores or pay a $15/month fee – and another woman tells her that by paying the fee, it makes it seem to the other members that Posey must think she's special. Posey explains that she is special; she's famous; she can't go to the grocery store without being recognised by someone. And this scene seems like the crux of the book: It's hard to feel sorry, exactly, for a middle aged actress who still has the cachet to only work on projects that personally appeal to her, but what cost does she pay for this career? On the one hand, why would she want to spend her limited down time mopping a pottery studio? But on the other hand, it makes her seem totally out of touch – this is not a “normal” life, and that must be hard.

People say such weird things to you when you're famous – like a cardboard cutout version of yourself wearing a mirrored mask.

Ultimately, we don't learn anything deeply personal about Posey in this memoir (not that she owes the reader that) and this isn't your typical “How I broke into show business” (a la Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mindy Kalin) celebrity origin story. You're on an Airplane contains the story of a life, but it does feel crafted and curated; but what else would you expect an artist to create? This may be of more interest to someone who watches more indy movies than I do, but I wasn't unhappy to have joined Posey on this flight.

The Price You Pay

Crazy Jack Price.

There's a line I've always joked about in my head. Standing on top of a bar with a broken bottle like fucking old skool is what:

MY NAME'S JACK. YOU DO WHAT I SAY, OR I'M THE PRICE YOU PAY!

I have noted before that I have a special affinity for transgressive crime fiction; in particular, books with philosophising sociopaths for main characters – Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, everyone around Renton in Trainspotting – books that appear on the surface to be about isolated underworlds but which, as one reads on, reveal themselves to be perceptive revelations of the fundamental ills of the societies in which they're set. If these books also have challenging language and offrule syntax – if I need to slow down and almost translate the writing into ordinary English – so much the better. At first I thought The Price You Pay was exactly this kind of book – philosophising sociopathic main character (check), more cursing and violence than I would expect to encounter in real life (check), a winking disregard for formal grammar rules (check), the skewering of a societal malaise (check?) – but as the plot unspools and the details focus more on the gore than any attempt at a deeper meaning, I needed to downgrade my experience from, “This is great!” to, “This is fun.” And while I may have needed to lower my expectations of this book's literary merits as I went along, I do like to have fun, too. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

I have a name. I have a name and a thin hard face with purple bootprints on it. I have thin lips split in three places and when I smile the teeth are like a quilt or maybe like geology. I have brown bedroom eyes that are swollen half shut, and my nose, my goddam nose, now is like a little bit of history repeating, like I should let my hair grow in Saigon and lose my job on the twenty-second floor and make a bad investment on a horse called Crossroad Guitar. Screw heredity and screw history and most of all screw you I have opinions. I have views. I am going to sit in the share chair and tell you a story.

When Jack Price wakes up one morning, he is dismayed to discover that the old woman who lived in the apartment below his has been killed – dismayed because, as a high-tech drug dealer who believes he has no traceable presence in the real world, he has to wonder if someone meant the assassin-style murder as a message to him. He asks a few questions of the investigating officers, and next thing you know, a couple of goons in party masks are stomping on his kidneys. Jack asks a few more questions, and when he discovers that an international assassination squad has been hired to take him down, he goes all dark web and only surfaces to confront the assassins one-by-one in a game of get-them-before-they-get-you. Jack's schemes are cartoonishly convoluted, involve increasingly bizarre levels of gore and violence, and are embarrassingly entertaining. 

Wall Street money is pirate money, loud and stupid and drunk, gets mugged in an alleyway and wakes up in the navy. My money is ninja money, strikes from the darkness, appears and disappears. Where do you keep your money Jack? Stuxnet baby. I keep my money in a digitally mobile distributed illegal wallet construct part-created by the NSA and stolen by @LuciferousYestergirl who is either a German anarchist or a Japanese-Nordic postdoc. When I want cash I push buttons and there is cash in a briefcase because I pay for it to happen. No one in the chain knows what they're handling or where it is going, just like my coke. The whole thing happens because water flows downhill. It happens the way an egg comes out of a chicken's vajayjay.

Well that image is gonna stay with me.

There are plenty of laughs along the way, and even though Jack is a nasty piece of work, you can't help but be on his side; this is an underdog, antihero tale of revenge – Pulp Fiction meets The Count of Monte Cristo – and it's a page-turner. As for its depth: Early on, Jack explains that he used to be a coffee importer (and apparently, the switch from coffee to coke didn't make a big difference in his professional world), until an acquaintance's death on 9/11 turned coffee “to ash” in his mouth. With a sporadic thread about the aftereffects of the trauma, and Jack explaining Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's “understanding of theatrics” while planning some of his own, I thought that author Aiden Truhen (a pseudonym) might have had something important to say about where we find ourselves in a post-9/11 world – but other than the obvious effects it had on Jack's own psyche, there really isn't anything deeper or universal here. Still a fun read for people with a strong stomach – if this is the beginning of a series, sign me up. Three and a half stars that I am generously rounding up because pomelo cannon.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

As the former chief book critic of The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michiko Kakutani has apparently spent the past three decades noting and commenting on the decline of “objective truth” in American literature and public life – and while she approves of this postmodern paradigm as it relates to art, she has been horrified to watch as disestablishmentarianism has migrated from a necessary Leftist pushback against the military-industrial complex to an alt-right, “drain the swamp” anti-intellectualism which has found its apex in the current alternate facts, fake news, lies tweeting president. Quoting from sources as diverse as Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Donald Trump's own Think Big, Kakutani's The Death of Truth is scholarly, logical, and angry. Here's the thing: For a book that decries polarisation and bipartisanship and the algorithms that ensure we only read news stories online that align with what we already believe, there's nothing neutral about Kakutani's treatise; she is preaching to her choir and dismissing everyone else as “alt-right trolls” and “dittoheads”; nothing here would be persuasive to anyone who believes that mainstream media has a liberal bias, and especially since she spent her career at The New York Times (which isn't to say that I fundamentally disagree with what she writes here). This is a quick read, divided into nine essays, and I've decided to let Kakutani do most of the talking here in excerpts I selected as demonstrative of either her points or her tone. (Two notes: I am a Canadian and have read this book only as an interested bystander. And since I read an ARC, it is probably particularly egregious that I have quoted such big chunks; these passages may not be in their final forms, but they do reflect the book I read.)

The Decline and Fall of Reason:

Trump, who launched his political career by shamelessly promoting birtherism and who has spoken approvingly of the conspiracy theorist and shock jock Alex Jones, presided over an administration that became, in its first year, the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, repudiating the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism in both its policies and its modus operandi – a reflection of the commander in chief's erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but on instinct, whim, and preconceived (and often delusional) notions of how the world operates.


The New Culture Wars:

Since the 1960s, there has been a snowballing loss of faith in institutions and official narratives. Some of this skepticism has been a necessary corrective – a rational response to the calamities of Vietnam and Iraq, to Watergate and the financial crisis of 2008, and to the cultural biases that had long infected everything from the teaching of history in elementary schools to the injustices of the justice system. But the liberating democratization of information made possible by the internet not only spurred breathtaking innovation and entrepreneurship; it also led to a cascade of misinformation and relativism, as evidenced by today's fake news epidemic. 


“Moi” and the Rise of Subjectivity:

Writers as disparate as Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Gillian Flynn, and Lauren Groff would play with devices (like multiples points of view, unreliable narrators, and intertwining story lines) pioneered decades ago by Faulkner, Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and Nabokov to try to capture the new Rashomon-like reality in which subjectivity rules and, in the infamous words of former president Bill Clinton, truth “depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”


The Vanishing of Reality:

Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors – including foreign governments like Russia – to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get. DiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks – which give people news that's popular and trending, rather than accurate or important – are helping to promote conspiracy theories. This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters like vaccines, zoning laws, and water fluoridation.


The Co-opting of Language:

Trump's incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast) is both a mirror of the chaos he creates and thrives on and an essential instrument in his liar's tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches, and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations, and innuendos – a bully's efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize, and scapegoat.


Filters, Silos, and Tribes:

Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world, people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought. It's a big reason why liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, find it harder and harder to agree on facts and why a shared sense of reality is becoming elusive.


Attention Deficit:

While public trust in the media declined in the new millennium (part of a growing mistrust of institutions and gatekeepers, as well as a concerted effort by the right wing to discredit the mainstream press), more and more people started getting their news through Facebook, Twitter, and other online sources: by 2017, fully two-thirds of Americans said they got at least some of their news through social media. This reliance on family and friends and Facebook and Twitter for news, however, would feed the ravenous monster of fake news.


“The Firehose of Falsehood”:

The sheer volume of dezinformatsiya unleashed by the Russian fire-hose system – much like the more improvised but equally voluminous stream of lies, scandals, and shocks emitted by Trump, his GOP enablers, and media apparatchiks – tends to overwhelm and numb people while simultaneously defining deviancy down and normalizing the unacceptable. Outrage gives way to outrage fatigue, which gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating lies.


The Schadenfreude of the Trolls:

Trump, of course, is a troll – both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling – the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path. Even as president, he continues to troll individuals and institutions, tweeting and retweeting insults, fake news, and treacherous innuendo.

Despite making comparisons between Trump's misinformation techniques and those of Hitler and Lenin, Kakutani ends on a hopeful note; pointing out those citizens who are pushing back against threats of despotism and urging her readers to join in: “It's essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend upon to subvert resistance.” American citizens must also protect the institutions that their founding fathers put in place to uphold democracy: the checks and balances of a tripartite political system, education, and a free and independent press. This is an angry book, and while Kakutani laments the modern echo chamber of thought, I can't see this making much of an impact with those outside her own silo. Four stars is a rounding up.

Becoming Belle

The way you said bella, it's made me think to change my name. I will be Isabel Bilton no more. 'Belle' seems a better one for me. Belle Bilton. Belle! What do you think?

Miss Isabel “Belle” Maude Penrice Bilton certainly seems to have led an interesting life – and author Nuala O'Connor did well to resurrect a woman whose name appears forgotten outside her final residence in Galway – but despite good authorial intentions and some truly remarkable biographical information, I don't think that O'Connor was completely successful in breathing life into Becoming Belle. This might have more appeal for another reader, but as romantic historical fiction isn't really my bailiwick, this was just okay for me. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

Oh, Isabel is not for literary pursuits. She prefers to live her story.

In a nutshell: Raised in a stifling garrison town by a doting military father and an abusive (erstwhile actress) mother, a young Isabel Bilton headed for London in 1887 in order to pursue a life on the stage. Finding immediate success, she sent for her younger sister, Flo, to join her, and together, they became the famed and feted Bilton Sisters act. Perhaps naive, or perhaps a true rebel, Isabel (soon known professionally as “Belle”) embraced the emergent Bohemian lifestyle in London's Theatre District – eating and drinking 'til the wee hours at extravagant clubs with enamoured suitors – and although she savoured the appearance of her name in the gossip columns, when Belle became embroiled in some personal scandals, those same tabloids turned against her. Eventually finding herself the defendant in a lawsuit, what justice could Belle expect from a jury of men with Victorian sensibilities who had been tainted by her own pursuit of notoriety?

                                        

Becoming Belle follows Isabel Bilton for the four years of her stage career (between her arrival in London in 1887 and her departure in 1891), and despite the story being told from her own point-of-view (and the addition of memories from her childhood), I never felt I had any idea who this character was (and by extension, I understood the other characters even less). Belle and Flo sometimes speak in rhyming Cockney slang, and sometimes they use jarringly multisyllabic words (which seemed extra odd coming from a woman like Isabel who notedly refuses to read books), and despite being two unchaperoned young women who have moved far away from their family, there's no mention of correspondence or visits between the daughters and their parents until late in the story. A second visit from their mother encapsulates what I ultimately found to be this book's biggest failing: After Ma Bilton shows up to Belle's trial and they have a brief and stiff conversation, the daughter is left thinking, “She's still a horrible old person, but I guess she did give me some good advice.” This book is stuffed full of self-contradictory passages – I think this, but maybe not; I want to do this, but I guess I won't – and overwritten in flowery prose, I found it all pretty wishy-washy:

The June air in London always hummed with heat and promise. Summer was already underway but, Belle thought, June was the month of highest possibility – anything might happen during the endless days when the song sparrow chimed his alleluia from every eave. The window-box roses of Oxford Street were shedding their puce gowns and they lay like a carpet under Belle's feet as she walked towards Piccadilly. She wanted to stoop, grab the petals and throw them like confetti to celebrate their triumph over smuts and everyday pestilence. But there were too many passersby and what would they make of her petal tossing? Instead, she toed the fallen flowers with light kicks and watched them flutter before her.

I did think that the narrative picked up when it got to the trial – and especially since the author seems to have had the court transcripts to refer to – but again, the writing (and self-contradictions within passages) didn't much work for me:

Judge Hannen sat and waited for absolute silence before he embarked on his summing-up. He put Belle in mind of the brown bear at the zoological gardens. In truth, he had no ursine qualities, but the quizzical way he lifted his head to study people reminded her of Hector, the bun-scoffing bear. The animal watched patiently and swung its head from side to side, when he thought more goodies might come to his waiting mouth. Judge Hannen was watchful in a similar way, but his movements were subtler than Hector's. He was quietly fearsome like the bear, though not as contained, for his pit was the bench and his zoo the courtroom.

If O'Connor's research is to be trusted, Belle Bilton was a woman of great passion, and this led to some weirdly graphic sex scenes and some scenes I just found weirdly unsexy (They kissed and it was the most natural thing, to feel William's tongue hot and swollen in her mouth. Tears slipped from her eyes and mingled with their spit; they laughed and cried.) And I note “if the research is to be trusted” because in the Author's Note at the end, O'Connor admits to taking some rather large liberties with the truth of some of her characters; which made me wonder, “Was Belle's mother really the harridan she's made out to be? Was Belle herself sometimes unfeeling in the ways depicted?” Again, I appreciate O'Connor's motives in bringing Belle back into the spotlight, but if I don't feel as though I really got to know her, and as I can't be certain that I can trust the biographical detail, this comes across as little more than a rather unremarkable work of fiction.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

The rise and fall of the dinosaurs is an incredible story, of a time when giant beasts and other fantastic creatures made the world their own. They walked on the very ground below us, their fossils now entombed in rock – the clues that tell this story. To me, it's one of the greatest narratives in the history of our planet.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is thoroughly enjoyable pop science: author (and celebrated young paleontologist) Steve Brusatte uses his own learning journey to outline the exciting advances occurring today in his field (he calls this the “golden age” of paleontology, noting that new species of dinosaurs are discovered/described at the astounding rate of about one per week), and not only did I learn new and fascinating information from the deep history of our remarkable planet, but I found Brusatte's enthusiasm to be contagious. Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Totally accessible (but fact-filled) and balanced with personal stories (which I acknowledge might strain the patience of those of a more academic bent), it all worked for me.

Early on, Brusatte – who is a Chancellor's Fellow in Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Edinburgh – refers to his “ebullient, wildly animated lecturing style”, and for the purposes of this review, I'd rather demonstrate this ebullience than attempt to list everything that Brusatte taught me. On the sauropods whose tracks he studied on the Scottish Isle of Skye:

There's really no better way to say it: the sauropods that made their marks in that ancient Scottish lagoon were awesome creatures. Awesome in the literal sense of the word – impressive, daunting, inspiring awe. If I was handed a blank sheet of paper and pen and told to create a mythical beast, my imagination could never match what evolution created in sauropods.

Brusatte devotes plenty of breathless space to the Tyrannosaurus rex – including debunking what Jurassic Park got wrong about the apex predators (turns out that their eyesight was perfectly sharp, but they couldn't have outrun a jeep) – and writes, “The seat of Rex's power was its head. It was a killing machine, torture chamber for its prey, and an evil mask all in one.” And after having repeatedly referred to T. Rex arms as “sad” and “pathetic”, Brusatte shares new research that has determined, based on strong shoulder extensors and elbow flexors, the Rex used these “short but strong arms to hold down struggling prey while the jaws did their bone-crunching thing. The arms were accessories to murder.” Murder! The writing gets amped up when T. Rex meets its favourite meal:

Triceratops, like its archnemesis T. rex, is a dinosaur icon. In films and documentaries, it usually plays the gentle, sympathetic plant-eater, the perfect dramatic foil to the Tyrant King. Sherlock versus Moriarty, Batman versus the Joker, Trike versus Rex. But it's not all movie magic; no, these two dinosaurs truly would have been rivals 66 million years ago...The King needed immense amounts of flesh to fuel its metabolism; its three-horned comrade was fourteen tons of slow-moving prime steak. You can figure out what happened next.

So, you either enjoy a professor writing like a teenaged dino-fanboy, or you don't. Interspersed with the timeline of dinosaur evolution, Brusatte outlines the history of fossil hunting from the “Bone Wars” (which saw 19th-century rivals Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh sending out teams of mercenaries to hunt for bones for their individual glory; in the pursuit of which they weren't above stealing, lying, and sabotaging each other's sites) to the academics of today. In addition to referring to individuals as the “hot shots” or “rock stars” or the “Rat Pack” of paleontology, Brusatte proves that paleontologists just might be a special breed unto themselves. Barnum Brown, the first celebrity paleontologist at the turn of the twentieth century, prospected for dino bones in high summer “decked out in his fur coat with his pickaxe slung over his shoulder”. Baron Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás – an adventurer, WWI spy, and the first paleobiologist – was a “flamboyant dandy and a tragic genius, whose exploits hunting dinosaurs in Transylvania were brief respites from the insanity of the rest of his life. Dracula, in all seriousness, has nothing on the Dinosaur Baron.” And as for Brusatte's modern day colleagues:

Thomas Carr – my absinthe-drinking, Goth-dressing friend who studies T. rex – was with us on the expedition and was part of this team. Clad in khaki (it was far too hot for his usual all-black getup) and sucking down Gatorade by the gallon (absinthe was more of an indoor pursuit), he attacked the mudstones with his rock hammer (which he nicknamed Warrior) and his pickaxe (Warlord), exposing a number of new Triceratops bones.

And working on the other side of the world in China, Brusatte describes another rising star:

Jingmai (O'Connor) calls herself a paleontologista – fitting given her fashionista style of leopard-print Lycra, piercings, and tattoos, all of which are at home in the club but stand out (in a good way) among the plaid-and-beard crowd that dominates academia. A native of Southern California – half Irish, half-Chinese by blood – Jingmai is a Roman Candle of energy – delivering caustic one-liners one moment, speaking in eloquent paragraphs about politics the next, and then it's on to music or art or her own unique brand of Buddhist philosophy. Oh yes, and she’s also the world’s number-one expert on those first birds that broke the bounds of Earth to fly above their dinosaur ancestors.

And speaking of the first birds: as uncomfortable as I find this book's cover art – depicting a wispily feathered T. rex confronting wispily feathered prey dinos – that's a mental-shift I'll need to force myself to make: Brusatte makes the incontrovertible case that all true dinosaurs (not crocs or other proto-reptiles) were in a direct line to modern day birds and shared many of the same body features (flow-through lungs, wishbones, and yes, feathers; there's a paleontologist working today who can even determine the colours of their plumage). But, if I can mentally shift the T. rex from the upright Barney-the-dinosaur stance depicted in my youth to the balanced-forward pose accepted today, I suppose I can eventually re-imagine it covered in feathers. After all of the enthusiasm Brusatte displays for the rise and evolutionary success of the dinosaurs, the final chapter on their sudden demise is urgently and tragically related:

It was the worst day in the history of our planet. A few hours of unimaginable violence that undid more than 150 million years of evolution and set life on a new course. T. rex was there to see it.

An impact from a meteorite (or possibly comet), hitting with the force of “a billion nuclear bombs' worth of energy”, caused the near total extinction of the earth's most successful and widespread species (excepting, of course, for those dinosaurs who survived to evolve into what we think of as birds). The good news is that this catastrophic event paved the wave for the rise of the mammals, and us; the bad news is that we're no more special than the dinosaurs, and catastrophes – including those of our own making – can strike at any time. If you like your pop science poppy, this is an entertaining and informative read.

Kudos

The Greek word “kudos” was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix, so that “kudos” therefore meant, literally, “prizes”, but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else.

Unlike with Outline and Transit, when the title eventually appears in Kudos, above, it didn't shine much light on the whole project for me. But now that the trilogy is complete, I think I have a better handle on what Rachel Cusk was trying to achieve – I think I finally understand the concepts of annihilated perspective and negative literature that Cusk is exploring with these “novels”; but as with any major shift from the status quo, I can't help resisting it. I still can't answer the question, “Is this art, even if I don't personally connect with it?” Perhaps I should have read this article in  The Guardian  before starting the trilogy, in which Cusk explains why she changed her own perspective on literature after her two memoirs (on motherhood and divorce) were met with harsh criticism:

"Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist."

For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was "fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry."

I wish I had known beforehand that Cusk and Knausgård (who, himself, seems parodied in Kudos as the apparent inspiration for an unflattering character) were both exploring similar territory at the limits of fiction; I've been grasping for such a frame of reference, even if Knausgård's books have also been slippery for me. I can wrap my head around this trilogy as a new mode of autobiography, but what I'm resisting is the notion that the novel itself is dead; that “making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous”. Is this a transformative moment in literature akin to Marcel Duchamp displaying a urinal in an art exhibition? Who says that isn't art if an artist tells you it is? If Cusk says that the only authentic way to reveal someone's character is to have other people tell her their stories, who am I to say that isn't art? Yet, I resist it.

Once again in Kudos, Cusk repeats and circles and mirrors themes throughout the “narrative”. This book opens, as did Outline, with a conversation between the narrator and the man beside her on a plane. He tells a story about a friend of his who is a pilot; an ambitionless man who detests (but won't leave) his job of flying rowdy Brits to sun holidays (and in a late scene, a local in Lisbon tells the narrator that post-Brexit, it's even more ironic for Brits to come barging down to their resorts, insisting on speaking English, and lounging around like babies). The man on the plane then recounts the story of his elderly dog (named Pilot), and how he figured into their family dynamics. Later, someone comments on the slovenly appearance of writers at international festivals, “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can't even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn't get on board – I wouldn't trust you to take me the distance.” A different character says at one point, “Like the family dog,” she said. “You can treat that dog how you like. It's never going to be free, if it even remembers what freedom is.” Freedom and dogs and pilots; all somehow interconnected. The man on the plane introduces a more central theme when speaking about his challenging daughter:

As she grew older the most serious problem of all became her extraordinary sensitivity to what she called lying, but what was actually as far as he could see the normal conventions and speech patterns of adult conversation. She claimed that most of what people said was fake and insincere, and when he'd asked her how she could possibly know that, she replied that she could tell by the sound.

Later, a young man who is guiding the narrator to a literary event (in, presumably, Cologne), explains:

As a child he had found stories very upsetting, and he still disliked being lied to, but he had come to understand that other people enjoyed exaggeration and make-believe to the extent that they regularly confused them with the truth.

And a fellow author tells the story of attending a writer's retreat at a countess' castle, where the attendees were expected to be entertaining during meals:

Because they were conscious of her, everyone made an effort to say witty and interesting things. Yet because she didn’t conceal herself the conversation was never real: it was the conversation of people imitating writers having a conversation, and the morsels she fed on were lifeless and artificial, as well as being laid directly at her feet.

This concept of the bulk of adult conversation being “fake”, “insincere”, and essentially “lying”, feels like commentary on the authenticity of fiction itself; the ridiculousness of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”. Cusk is more direct with this bit about the strange hotel her narrator is staying in:

I hadn't realised, I said, how much of navigation is belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind. I had walked around the entire circumference of the building in search of things I had been right next to in the first place, an error that was virtually guaranteed by the fact that all the building's sources of natural light had been concealed by angled partitions, so that the routes around it were almost completely dark. You found the light, in other words, not by following it but by stumbling on it randomly and at greater or lesser length; or to put it another way, you knew where you were only once you had arrived. I didn't doubt that it was for such metaphors that the architect had won his numerous prizes, but it rested on the assumption that people lacked problems of their own, or at the very least had nothing better to do with their time. My publisher widened his eyes.

“For that matter,” he said, “you could say the same thing about novels.”

And the entire point of this trilogy seems contained in a story from a woman who tells the narrator about a church (identified elsewhere as the Igreja de Sao Domingos in Lisbon) that suffered a catastrophic fire, but was minimally restored before reopening:

“But then I noticed,” she said, “that in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces. These lights,” she said, “had the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue. And so I knew,” she said, “that this spectacle was not the result of some monstrous neglect or misunderstanding but was the work of an artist.”

Along the way, as the narrator attends literary events (readings, interviews, promoting her work and hobnobbing with fellow writers), Cusk makes it look like there couldn't be a more miserable and unglamourous job than attempting to get one's book out to an audience. Most of the conversations she records involve people talking about marriage, divorce, parenting, and gender roles – and in many cases, these narratives seem a metaphor for Brexit – and many of the conversations are about literature itself (which does appear a bit ridiculous in our post-po-mo world). Although the narrator – once again identified as “Faye” only once, and late in the book – doesn't often respond in these conversations, just like the illuminated yet empty shelves in the burnt-out church, Faye's blankness has “the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue”; it is “the work of an artist”. And yet, I resist. (The three stars simply reflect my personal enjoyment of this book – I could well give five stars for the entire effort.)

If Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård are indeed at the vanguard of transforming literature by dismissing fiction as somehow contrived and ultimately ridiculous - which is kind of what I assume Duchamp was doing with his art, too - I don't think I'm ready for that. A related tale:

When Kennedy was in her last semester of university, the "capstone" project in her Theatre degree was an ensemble performance, as it had been for every year previous. But when she first got to that final class, her professors had a surprise for their students: instead of selecting a known play that would showcase what they had learned over their four years together, Kennedy's class was expected to write and perform a piece of "verbatim theatre". As it was explained to them, they were to select a social issue (Kennedy's group eventually settled on homelessness), and in a series of scenes meant to illuminate the lived experience of those who are actually affected by the issue, the dialogue needed to be at least 80% "verbatim" - the actors meant to primarily voice those words that had previously been spoken, somewhere. To accomplish this, the group needed to find interviews and essays (newspaper, blog, video), spoken word performances and poetry, government and police reports; anything that could be considered "true" because someone affected by the issue had said it. To the professors, this was the future of theatre; implying that the art of a playwright processing another's lived experience through their own sensibilities to shape a metaphorical truth was somehow contrived and "ridiculous". Kennedy's group was able to create and perform a cohesive series of skits out of what they dug up - the other group wasn't as successful, but they really had no prior training in this format; shouldn't a "capstone" project allow you to display what you know instead of forcing you to teach yourself something new? - and while we enjoyed watching Kennedy (naturally) and appreciated the hard work that went into creating this piece of theatre, I understood why she resisted it; is this art? Is this the future of all art forms? That's what I'm resisting.

Tunesday : Listen to the Band

Listen to the Band

(Nesmith, M) Performed by The Monkees

Hey, hey, mercy woman plays a song and no one listens
I need help, I'm falling again

Play the drum a little louder
Tell me I can live without her 
If I only listen to the band 

Listen to the band

Weren't they good, they made me happy
I think I can make it alone

Oh, mercy, woman plays a song and no one listens
I need help, I'm falling again

Play the drum a little bit louder
Tell them they can live without her 
If they only listen to the band

Listen to the band

Now weren't they good, they made me happy
I think I can make it alone

Oh, woman plays a song and no one listens
I need help I'm falling again

Come on, play the drums just a little bit louder
Tell us we can live without her
Now that we have listened to the band

Listen to the band

There weren't very many kid-oriented shows on TV when I was little - Saturday morning cartoons, The Wonderful World of Disney on a Sunday night (hoping it would be an animated feature and not one of those lame 70s live-action snorefests) - so even if The Monkees wasn't, technically, a kids' show, you can bet my brothers and I watched it in repeats after school for the bright colours and the goofy action. On the other hand: Dave, while also having had this show on in the background of his childhood, has always thought of The Monkees as a real band; as rock stars. He went to see them on tour in the 80s - more than once - but since Mike Nesmith was busy at the time managing and spending all that sweet, sweet Liquid Paper money, Dave never got to see the fourth Monkee live - until last night. (Who'd have ever thought typewriters and correction fluid would go the way of buggy whips and powdered wigs? Liquid Paper must have seemed like a bottomless goldmine when Mama Nesmith invented it.) This is a happy man:

Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz are currently touring "The Mike and Micky Show", and Dave was unbelievably excited to go see it; he had Kennedy buy tickets the minute they went on sale back in March (and was disappointed that she got us box seats - which I prefer - instead of front row, which we probably could have gotten; and which I would have hated when all the old former go-go dancers eventually rushed the front of the stage to do the Mashed Potato; the Swim.) Kennedy had bought four tickets - because Dave assumed our girls would be excited to see The Monkees, too - but in the end, Kennedy needed to attend a  rehearsal and Mallory is out of town on a dig (which is probably for the best: if they couldn't have mustered up genuine enthusiasm, Dave's feelings would have been hurt; he was really anxious for Mike and Micky's feelings when he saw that the theatre was only half-filled.) Ultimately, we brought Dan and Rudy with us; and as we got to have a nice dinner out beforehand and chummy conversation during the concert - with people who actually remember the show and the music - it was a fun night out.

During the show, Rudy posted a picture to facebook of (the now 73 year old) Mike Nesmith, writing, "Can't believe this was the guy I planned on marrying! Still think he's cute even without the the toque"; which is funny because Mike was my favourite; the Monkee that I wanted to marry. He was the funniest, the coolest, the most laid back, and for whatever reason*, this tune of his, Listen to the Band, was probably my favourite Monkees song (and I'm glad they played it last night alongside all the obscure B sides that Dave was delighted by). Now, Mike and Micky are both older than my own parents (which didn't bother me when I was a kid and choosing my favourite), and they still put on a great show (we couldn't believe that Micky's voice sounds exactly the same and he strides and glides across the stage like a much younger man; Mike was a little slower, but still himself even without a wool hat), and I'm just happy that I ended up marrying the guy who can air guitar along in his box seat with these "rock stars", the biggest smile on his face, forever transported back to being a happy little kid every time he re-experiences something from his childhood. Turns out, Dave's my favourite.

Listen to the band!

* It didn't take much further consideration to figure out why Listen to the Band would have been so compelling to me in my developing years. Opening with "Hey hey, mercy woman" in a masculine-toned semi-twanging Texas drawl would have made me feel like a manly man was saying I might have been too womanly a woman for him to handle (have mercy), and there's danger in that; and danger is sexy. But when Mike gets to the line "Play the drum a little louder" and smiles despite himself as the percussion joins in (which is an even more obvious connection in the ten minute version of this video taken from their live-recorded TV show, 33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee), that makes it all safe; that's the unseriousness that takes away the danger of actually playing out a fantasy. And the thing about The Monkees was that you always had this playful, unserious visual aspect to the songs; they're ultimately sexless, and that's a safe place within which a young girl can explore what she's attracted to.

The Book of M

 

Where did the shadows go? Ory wondered. He didn't even care about the why any more. Only the where. The why was inexplicable. Ory didn't believe in magic, but he knew in his heart that what had happened was nothing that could be understood by humans. It was no natural disaster, no disease, no biological weapon. The best name he'd ever heard for it was curse. Because in the end it didn't matter who you were. No one escaped – either because they were someone who lost their shadow, or because they were someone who loved someone who lost their shadow.

In The Book of M's future world, through some inexplicable and magical process, people start to lose their shadows, and with them, their memories. This “Forgetting” is tragic but also dangerous: sometimes when a shadowless person realises that they have forgotten an important memory, that distant person or place simply disappears. And sometimes when a shadowless person misremembers something, people and objects and places can be transformed into monstrous, nightmare versions of themselves. This all sets up a familiar zombieland us-vs-them scenario with the unaffected constantly reassuring themselves that they still have shadows as they choose to avoid or fight the shadowless, but with no set rules for how a person transforms (it's not a contagion, spontaneously occurs, and doesn't affect everyone in a group) and with unbounded magic that some of the shadowless eventually learn to harness in deus ex machina plot-meddling, the “magic” supplants “logic” to the detriment of the narrative; when anything could happen, I stopped caring what did.

The Red King was the size of two men, over ten feet tall, wearing a scarlet cloak of a hundred layers and haphazard armor made from whole, bent steel doors. A human skull could fit inside each scarred, crimson hand. Red dripped off him from everywhere, leaving trails behind him.

The book is told from four shifting POVs: Max (with her husband Ory) has been hiding out in the woods for two years since the Forgetting, but now that she has suddenly lost her shadow, she has decided to run away in order to keep him safe from what she might unwittingly do (Ory has given his wife a tape recorder to help her keep her memories, and what she records on her adventure as her memory falters was my favourite thread); Ory, naturally, is determined to find Max, and he faces constant danger in pursuit of her; Naz is an Iranian-born Olympic archer, training in Boston at the time of the Forgetting, and she faces constant danger in an effort to stay alive; and "the amnesiac” was under the care of a memory doctor when the Forgetting began, and as he met and interacted with the first man who ever lost his shadow, this nameless one might hold the key to a cure. When rumours and graffiti all seem to point to the presence of a mysterious prophet in New Orleans, those with shadows and those without begin a pilgrimage that see the storylines converge.

Later, he came to have many names. The One With a Middle but No Beginning. The Stillmind. Patient RA. Last, most important of all – The One Who Gathers. But in the beginning, he had no name at all.

This convergence made me think of Stephen King and The Stand; and being Stephen King, he can be forgiven for bringing in supernatural elements; for setting up an ultimate battle between good and evil (but even he had his dystopia start with a simple virus). But that ultimate battle isn't really what author Peng Shepherd is going for in The Book of M – and my biggest complaint would be that I don't know what she was going for. Post-apocalyptic fiction can be wonderful for exploring how humans behave once civilisation collapses (as in The Road or Station Eleven), but between an army risking their lives to collect books and a murderous cult trying to “transcend”, I didn't connect with any recognisable motivations. And post-apocalyptic fiction can make for fun and adventuresome storytelling (as in The Passage or The Strain), but there have to be rules: inexplicable transmission and human people suddenly being able to transform reality with their minds drain the tension for me (and those were my biggest complaints about The Marrow Thieves, too; The Power followed rules, so it worked better for me). Okay, let's accept that people can lose their shadows, but how (or why) are memories stored there? I can't accept the basic premise and having more than one character shrug and say it's magic doesn't cut it for me.

Madness, Zhang thought. An army of shadowed people led by a shadowless, who wanted to remove all human shade from the world – against a council of shadowless, led by a living shadow, who wanted to give everyone back their dark twin.

Madness. In the last few dozen pages of the book, Shepherd approaches something like a point: if people's memories – their personalities, if not their souls; a word never mentioned – are stored outside of their physical selves, then what is the body? To avoid spoilers, I'll frame it as: If your best friend became a zombie and threatened a near stranger, but not yourself, could you look into her familiar eyes as you plunged a knife into her heart? If you could wish upon a monkey's paw to raise your child from the dead, but the child returned with someone else's memories, is that still your child? I liked that Shepherd referenced Peter Pan and a Hindu legend about the sun king and his shadow wife, but there isn't a lot of intertextual background for what happens, no scientific explanations, and next to no philosophical exploration after the fact: things happen, magical meddling constantly subverts any logic, and we get to the end. Yes, some interesting things happen, but it wasn't enough for me.

Mr. Flood's Last Resort

 

There's an underwater quality to the light at Bridlemere, a greenish cast from the foliage that surrounds the house. Sound changes too, noise fades, so that you hardly hear the traffic outside. At Bridlemere there is only the slow settling of rubbish and the patter of cats, and, when he is not roaring a lungful, the subtle sounds of Mr. Flood moving, or the silence of him standing still. Sometimes there is a kind of hushed rustling, a sort of whispering. Like a sheaf of leaves blown, or a prayer breathed, rushed and desperate, just out of earshot.

As Mr. Flood's Last Resort begins, we meet Maud Drennan – a single thirty-something care worker – who has just been assigned to the notorious Mr. Cathal Flood – a fractious, elderly hoarder whose London mansion, Bridlemere, is stuffed with cat hair, sardine tins, and a Great Wall of National Geographic magazines meant to prevent outsiders from meddling in his business. As Maud scrubs and clears and stands up to Mr. Flood, something starts sending her messages from “beyond” – photographs with the faces of people burnt away, initials drawn in the dust, long-sealed envelopes revealing themselves – and Maud is forced to confront the fact that the seemingly batty old man might be hiding a dangerous secret. The atmosphere of this book is moody and mysterious, and with both supernatural intervention and flesh-and-blood characters who may not be who they say they are, it literally feels like anything can happen. Even so, the plot gets lost in too many extraneous threads, and just like with Jess Kidd's debut novel, Himself, I found myself enjoying this read more in the moment than admiring it after the fact. I'd still be happy to pick up her next book.

“They're not like this on the television, investigations, are they? Two downcast women in a maisonette with a bottle of krupnik.”

Maud's landlord (and, perhaps, only friend) is an agoraphobic, transsexual, true crime aficionado. This Renata is a wonderful character – dignified in her wigs and caftans, totally believable in her competing concern for Maud's safety and the vicarious thrill she gets from investigating “a case” – and you get a quick read on other characters through whether they refer to Renata as “madam” or “a nonce” (when one character goes from respectful interplay to later referring to Renata as “he”, that one little pronoun is devastatingly ugly.) In a subthread, we learn that Maud's older sister went missing as a teenager, and as Maud discovers more about the sad history at Bridlemere, her own memories of loss are dredged up, with this storyline playing out as a mystery as well: just what did seven-year-old Maud know at the time and what secrets has she kept for all these years? One consequence of her disappearing sister is the fact that Maud has been visited ever since by visions of the saints, with a sex-encouraging St. Valentine and an armour-rattling St. George played for laughs; a lamp-rubbing St. Dymphna and the plain-robed St. Rita offering advice and encouragement from the shadows. In addition to the otherworldly help that Maud receives from her saints and the poltergeist(s) at Bridlemere, Renata reads tarot cards and sends Maud to a psychic; her own dreams are frequently interspersed and add to the spooky atmosphere:

She's moving along the hall under the carpet, the woman. See the ripple she's causing. The pattern undulates with her. She moves quickly, following the sweep of the staircase down. Feet first like a breech birth she comes. Arms crossed high over her chest like a mummy. At the bottom step she bunches up, curls, and swells, pushing against the edge of the carpet. Then with a rush like waters breaking, she pools out, a liquid shadow, a dark puddle on the tiles. Behind her the carpet flattens as if nothing at all has happened.

But despite all this supernatural assistance, Maud needs to carry on as a care worker (a field that the author has also worked in) and it's touching to watch her make a connection with Mr. Flood and fight for him; dealing with office bureaucracy, meddlesome family members, and her own suspicions of the old man's wrongdoing. And yet...despite Kidd's attempts to make it seem like there is a major mystery to solve – and that, perhaps, everything will eventually interconnect in a satisfying way – that's not really the way it all plays out; and I found that not just disappointing, but confounding. As Maud is from Ireland's west coast, she often speaks in the charming Irish way that I loved in Himself; but since this story is set in England, there aren't opportunities this time round for Irish verbal jousts. Still: the language, the atmosphere, the characters – all engaging; the plot: not so much.