We read this meta-meta book for book club called Woman With a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine. It's meta noir-mystery, which is interesting and whatnot: this takes place during WWII when the narrative for Japanese-Americans on the West Coast became something a lot different. McAlpine constructs this world where a Japanese-American writer submits a manuscript to a mystery editor in the days before Pearl Harbor and then the editor has to be, like, Oh, the market has changed somewhat in the days before you submitted the text. And then she has to encourage the writer to change his book from a complicated Japanese-American character to a cartoon-like Korean-
American superhero who saves days.
The conceit of Pencil is that when the author changes the story accordingly, the stranded characters are preserved in drafts and you see how, Back to the Future style, one flick of the pencil erases the identity of a character. The conceit is OK, but then they have to end it somehow, and the ending is basically OK, but whatever.
The problem is that Pencil is sort of too clever by half; the idea is inspired but there's not a lot to it beyond that. Sure, there's the twist at the end (sort of spoiler?) when the missing character resurfaces in the narrative, but at 189 pages, the book is — literally — a little thin, which is weird when the (IRL) author jumps between three separate narrative lines: a textual original story featuring the Korean-American hero, a scrapped first draft using the Japanese-American character and then a third commentary from an outside editor, the story's namesake.
Ultimately, Woman is not not cute and inspired but it's not that much more than that, either. Go figure.
Posted: May 26th, 2016 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club
There's this collection of essays called The Subway Chronicles which includes writings by some relatively notable people and then some up-and-coming writers, or at least writers who were maybe up-and-coming around 2006, which is ten years ago now.
So the thing about the subway is while it's crazy and cool and moves a lot of people places and used to have really amazing graffiti and is one of the biggest systems in the world, it's maybe not at that interesting, in and of itself. At least, that's what you kind of walk away with after reading Chronicles.
By which I mean that all the crazy stories are not all that crazy, and the first-person accounts of various subway shenanigans are, well, kind of not that wild, and then you sort of question what the point is at all.
The funny thing is that for all the navel gazing and nostalgia erupting, there are one or two pieces that really get at what is actually interesting about the subway: David Ebershoff's "Lunch Time" is one of the very, very few pieces that go outside the rider/writer's mind to do original research — versus ruminate about "what it all means." The result is funny, if not completely satisfying: he corners some subway cleaners and learns about what it's actually like to clean the subway: in other words, not speculating about people, humanity or whatnot.
A word about 2006: it seems people around then found license to talk about themselves in an outsized, universal way. And for whatever reason, people (also, publishers) listened. This is crazy. There's nothing special about people when they're first to do it. If there's a slogan for today it should be "blog softly and don't perseverate about getting clicks." Then type whatever it is you want to say . . .
Posted: May 7th, 2016 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club
The most frustrating thing about Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow isn't the overwrought title — mass incarceration in the era of the War on Drugs has a lot of layers of bad but it just doesn't seem as bad as the Jim Crow era was described; the title kind of hangs over you as you read the book and distracts (sort of like a bad headline). What's more frustrating is that the bad policies, blunt-force military-style, stat-driven policing and prosecutorial overreach that Alexander describes are all things that people of various political backgrounds decry; there are opportunities to make common cause if people bothered to listen.
I came away from Crow thinking that the drug laws and various liberties afforded to the police and especially prosecutors were ill-conceived, full of unintended consequences (Alexander almost argues differently, thus the title) and applied badly — and the people affected the most are on the margins of society, which is a good enough reason to revisit those laws. This is an important distinction: you don't want the logical conclusion of all this to simply apply the same laws/procedures equally across the board — it's shitty policy because it's shitty policy and it's made worse because it also happens to disproportionately affect the most marginalized populations. (This also provides an out for the Civil Rights entities which, as Alexander writes, have been hesitant to pivot to this issue.)
Alexander spends a lot of time showing how the police and prosecutors in the legal system creatively exploit their powers to arrest and lock up African Americans. I think she's giving the lawmakers a huge pass. Cops and attorneys have a job to do, and will do what it takes to do their jobs well. But they don't set the policies or write the laws. They're performing in the way they're expected, as aggressively and effectively as possible.
Something confounding is how Alexander seems to rhetorically treat drug crimes as simply a matter of a younger man being stopped and frisked and having a joint in his pocket and then going to jail. She seems to avoid the violence surrounding the drug trade and all the other neighborhood-destroying elements of drugs (there's an extended portion about how the War on Drugs predated an actual drug problem; this part seems thin). I don't think a joint should mean that one loses his right to vote, but then you're getting into just whether the laws (and application thereof) are too draconian. At some point I also wondered whether it was too much to ask that someone simply not use drugs; as long as society/lawmakers believe that drug users should go to jail, isn't it reasonable to expect someone to follow the law?
Posted: May 2nd, 2016 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Books Are The SUVs Of Writing | Tags: Book Club
