4. Naked Pictures of Famous People

So I overheard someone talking about a new book by Jon Stewart, so the next time I was in the bookstore, I found "Naked Pictures of Famous People" (the quotes change everything in that sentence). Anyway, to make a long story short, the people I overheard must have been talking about "America: A Citizen's Guide", because NPOFP was written in 1999.

Naked Pictures is a collection of short comedic essays, and is pretty hit and miss. One essay is a formula for hosting an awards show, and with the knowledge of his Oscar performance this year, ends up being pretty funny. For example:

HOST:
General greetings and a query as to the audience's well-being. Affirmation of audience's well being. Statement of own well-being. Survey of surroundings. Improvised analogy comparing surroundings to different surroundings. Sarcastic jab at expected length of proceedings.

Pause for laughter.

HOST:
Confusion about actions of government officials. Statement of proposed personal action if given opportunity to govern.

Use. Repeat for Oscars. Repeat for Daily Show. Repeat. Repeat. And yet he makes it seem like new each night. You've got to respect that. Yet in many respects, the book is not nearly as entertaining as his performance on television (I was going to say "or film", but well, it is better than that).

Another good essay is on "The New Judaism", in which he suggests ways to get the kids to keep the faith:

Old Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat bitter herbs?
Adult: To remind us of the pain our ancestors felt while enslaved in Egypt.

New Judaism Passover Seder

Child: Why on this night do we eat hot fudge Sundays?
Adult: To remind us that being Jewish is like having your birthday everyday!! Plus they're delicious!

There are some duds, in one essay he poses as Vincent Van Gogh on an AOL chatroom, but there's nothing terribly funny, and doesn't really go anywhere.


The praise on the book cover compares Jon Stewart's book to Woody Allen's Without Feathers and Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes. I Haven't read "Cruel Shoes", but it has quite a reputation, and Feathers probably defined the genre of the short-absurd-comic-compilation. While it was a fun read, it didn't quite live up to those standards.

3. A Man Without A Country

By: Kurt Vonnegut

First of all, a passage that I thought the readers of this blog would appreciate:

Here is a lesson in creative writing.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.

MWAC is full of all kids of clever thoughts, insight about the state of the world, and other pure morsels of vonnegoodness. While he does an excellent job of exposing the politics of the day through its own absurdity, it feels like there's nothing entirely new here. Perhaps though, this is no fault of Vonnegut's. This administration and GOP rule is such a joke that there is no amount of absurdity that we haven't already seen. They echo the sort of sentiment that is expressed daily on liberal blogs and on Air America radio. To me, Vonnegut was a master of weaving an absurd fantastical story and having it being such an accurate reflection of what the world was really like.

Overall? a great read, but not all that unique and not nearly as interesting as his fiction.

My favorite passage though, was where he explains that all the hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and what-have-you, are all the earth's immune system trying to heal itself by getting rid of us.

Right on, KV! Write on KV!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

By: Haruki Murakami

I read this book last year, but enjoyed it and felt like writing about it, even though it doesn't count towards my 2006 fifty.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a strange postmodern Alice-in-wonderland type journey mixed with sexual angst and generation x passivity in a Japanese Setting. It begins when Okada's cat Noboru Wataya goes missing and his wife asks him to go find it. Okada has time to look since he quit his job at a law firm and has no motivation to find a new one.

This seemingly insignificant incident, is of course, the inciting incident that draws Okada behind the scenes of a story that begins in World War Two and has ramifications in the modern political world. All of this is connected by a supernatural dream-like world and the strange characters that move between these worlds.

Murakami pulls off an incredible feat- an epic with a passive gen-x-er at its center. More than that, he walks that fine line in creating a supernatural world without giving in too deeply to the fantasy. He shows you just enough of this world to intrigue his audience, but not enough to give any answers - much like a dream. There is something very 'twin peaks' about his world; a world in which the real and tangible are touched and influenced by the 'other', but this 'other' is too different to understand. Like 'Twin Peaks', if we understood this world any better, it wouldn't be as interesting.

2. An Artist of the Floating World

By Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist Of the Floating World paints an interesting portrait of post-war Japan as seen through the eyes of the aging Masuji Ono. It reads much like an early Ozu movie - the pacing is slow and deliberate, and it wanders through Ono's life, interweaving with thoughts and memories. Similarly as well, there is little conflict. Ono has tension with his daughters and he internally questions his past, but there are no crisises to overcome, all the battles have already been fought.

In his youth, Ono is the proto-typical rebel artist, aiming to achieve a new level in his work. The "floating world" refers to night-life Japan, clouded by drink and other pleasures of the night. Ono, like his colleagues, paints images inspired by this life. However, when his attention is turned to the suffering of the poor, his paintings come to support the Nationalist movement in their support of a stronger Japan.

Ono's reflections on his life often come through interactions with his daughters who are embarrassed of his past, and his grandson who has taken to emulating cowboys instead of Samurai. The book never dwells on these little moments, perhaps that is what makes them stand out so clearly. Similarly, the backdrop of a city which lies partially in ruins is only casually referred to by Ono.

There are great discussions on this book on the meaning of art, and its relationship with the world. Its particularly interesting to read, in Ono's rather passive voice, about his attachment to nationalism; its something that you rarely get 'the artist' perspective on, as most 'rebel artists' are portrayed as fighting against a totalitarian government.

1. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I figured that while Kim and I were in Prague this year, it would be appropriate to read something with a little local color. Seeing as Milan Kundera was of Czech origin (and having read and loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being), I picked up The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Good choice, because it included a lot of interesting personal reactions to much of the politics of Czechoslovakia during the communist period.

Like Unbearable Lightness, TBOLAF isn't so much a straightforward story, but a philosophy that wanders through different ideas like a path in the woods, meeting different characters and joining diffrerent events as it goes. In fact, where lightness wanders, Laughter and Forgetting even gets lost a few times. Not always in a bad way - it just strays from the path, looks around at another part of the forest, and then stumbles upon the path again.

The story follows a bunch of different characters in different stories. Kundera claims that some of them are real and some are made up. Likewise, it is obvious that the story goes back and fourth in an inconstant pattern between real and fiction as well. The characters and plots in the story have little or nothing to do with each other (with the exception of the author's presence who knew or wrote them into existence).

Many of the themes in lightness are repeated here. In many ways this book feels almost as if its a 'study' for lightness - sort of like sketches of an idea versus the finished painting. In a way, the sketches have their own beauty and capture an immediacy that is lost in the final painting, but it also doesn't reach the level of "complete-ness" (for lack of a better word).