Ntuple Indemnity

Glancing over the WordPress management panel, I see that I have no less than ten (ten!) half-finished posts that I never saw to completion. This is my usual excuse for neglecting to populate this space with my commentary, but it’s high time to admit that the direction this site was taking—as a whenever-I-feel-like-it dumping ground for tangled thoughts that spiralled into pools of greater complexity and extravagance—was becoming, shall we say, a bit on the unsustainable side.

To the end of resuscitating this website, which has, to be frank, fallen from the little glory it once had when I tended, watered, nurtured it like a garden of knowledge and meditation, I’m going to be making a few changes. While I’ve been preoccupied with a few unannounced “projects” that are consuming most of my time, the current plan is to introduce some regular features of a more manageable, bite-sized scope (by my standards, anyway; “bite-sized” can be a lot when you have a big mouth).

It’s also safe to say that I will occasionally let some analyses spin out of control, as I honestly can’t help it, but I intend to break most of the longer essays into segments, so they at least have a chance to see the light of publication in part, if not in full. I’m also doing this because readability is, admittedly, becoming an issue. Maybe I’ll even insert a few pictures.

The first regular feature that I plan to introduce is a book-of-the-week series, inspired by the 52 Books in 52 Weeks series at A Modest Construct. It will commence as soon as I finish the book I am currently reading, though whether or not I’ll carry it through the looming spectre of the National Scrabble Championship remains open to question.

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that being “current” is something that I’ll leave to the rest of the, what do they call it, “blogosphere”? It’s good for the Google hits and incoming links, but not so much for the quality of analysis that I’d like to provide. I don’t mind being late to the silly-hat party if it means I’ll show up with a very silly hat.

This space is typically free of politics, and it will remain that way. But I’d just like to air a little something about the race for our neighbour’s Presidency: since February, I have been telling people that regardless of whether he wins in November—indeed, regardless of whether or not he won the Democratic nomination, as he did tonight—Barack Obama will be TIME‘s Man of the Year.

The feature has become a bit of a farce over the years, and, like the magazine itself, has little of the glory that it once did when it actually believed in the conviction it promulgated, that history is a procession of Great Newsmakers. But nobody in recent memory has fit their criteria better. 2008 is less than half over, but barring a truly monumental world event (what, I can’t imagine), it isn’t even going to be close.

I’ll put big money on it. I recommend that you take the bet; I need the funding.

Michael Chabon enthusiasts have had plenty to be excited about of late. Not long ago, Chabon became the rarest of authors to be nominated for a Nebula, a Hugo and an Edgar for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union—a book that I didn’t find as sweeping as his magnum opus, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but stands nonetheless as the apotheosis of his recent efforts to tear down the walls of Genre like it’s ’89 in Berlin (as well as a thumping good detective thriller sprinkled with a healthy metaphoric dose of chess). Then it was announced that the film adaptation is in the hands of none other than the Brothers Coen, a dream pairing of filmmakers and source material if I ever saw one. And then the the draft screenplay that Chabon wrote for Spider-Man 2 hit the Web, finally revealing the extent of his contributions to the film, which were largely what I thought they were (Peter Parker the struggling pizza delivery boy—that sort of thing).

As I write this, I’m leafing through the newly released Maps and Legends, the first collection of Chabon’s literary essays in book form. (The bookshop stocked it in a shrinkwrap to protect Jordan Crane’s ornate three-piece jacket design—a boon for people like me who prefer to keep their books in impeccable condition, but perhaps unsuitable for browsing purposes.) Some of it is familiar to me: among the selections are his Eisner Awards keynote about the decline of children’s comics, his reflections on writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and my favourite, an expanded version of his 1997 essay on a bafflingly anachronistic Yiddish phrasebook that not only provided the inspiration for the contemporary Jewish Sitka of TYPU‘s alternate universe, but (hitherto unbeknownst to me) generated a stir of controversy on a Yiddish-language mailing list.

The other selections are quite refreshing; thankfully, they offer a lot more variety than a simple retread of Chabon’s position that serious fiction has dug itself into a hole as a consequence of relegating “entertaining” genres into other holes—though that, too, gets plenty of attention in the opening essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”. There is an excursion into one of the iconic moments of Chabon’s personal mythos (the abandonment of his would-be second novel, Fountain City), a piece that exalts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his mastery of nesting lies within lies along Holmes’ pursuit of the truth, and many a word about the storyteller as both Golem-maker and trickster figure (or Coyote, if you will). The connections to Chabon’s fiction should be obvious to those familiar with his works (respectively, in the preceding sentence: Wonder Boys, The Final Solution, Kavalier & Clay, Summerland), though I imagine the essays stand alone quite admirably. I haven’t read the whole collection, mind you: I deliberately skipped the piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, as McCarthy’s jaunt into the well-travelled post-apocalypse resides high on my reading list untouched.

I was immediately drawn, as I would be, to Chabon’s essay on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Before I proceed, I should say that the very thought of Chabon writing about Pullman is almost as exciting to me as Watterson writing about Schulz, which, if you’ll remember, I favourably compared to Beethoven writing about Bach. That said, I come not to praise Chabon (I swear!), though I’m not exactly going to bury him, either.

Continued »

Tenors get the girl.

Basses imprison her in a ring of fire.

Rachel Donadio has written a superb essay in The New York Times Book Review on literary dealbreakers, disparities in literary taste that spell doom for a relationship. As should be obvious to my regular readers, I fully agree that this is an acceptable standard that brooks no compromise, much like how many out there hold their partners to far sillier criteria like religion.

Need I name my dealbreakers, Dan Brown?

I find it a stimulating exercise, however, to ponder the problem in the inverse: the dealbreaker involving a book that a potential (but alas, only potential) companion fails to like. And come to think of it, on this account I can be quite forgiving—knowing, as I do, that I am a reader of profoundly omnivorous interests whose favourite novels hail from genres or aesthetic movements that virtually never intersect.

But if I had to pick one? Well, I wouldn’t even consider getting involved with someone who doesn’t appreciate The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A candlelight dinner with the sort of young lady blind to Mark Haddon’s whimsical celebration of genius—be it the intrigue of its Holmesian bravado, the incalculable charm of chapters numbered in primes (oh la la!), or simply hating France—is, frankly, two wasted hours better spent re-reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.