Fire Watch by Connie Willis

Pretty good book, quick read, all that.

The main thing I wanted to talk about is time travel because I really do want to talk about what I want to talk about. That would make a great chorus for a pop country song.

What's cool about Connie Willis is that, for my money, she handles time travel well. It's not explained in this story, but I had a kindly office mate explain to me that Connie Willis' other books that take place in the same universe involve something called "slippage." Slippage is the thing that keeps you from going back in time and killing Hitler, for example. If you tried to go back in time to change a large historical event, you would find that your ability to travel accurately, to an exact time or place, would be limited. The larger your potential for changing history, the more time keeps you from placing yourself accurately.

I like that. It's a pretty decent explanation for the way in which time travel can still work in a narrative without answering the question of why someone didn't kill Hitler, which is really the ultimate time travel question (The Hitler Paradox, as I like to call it).

I've been thinking a lot about time travel narratives lately. At first I thought that the only way time travel narratives work was in comedies, such as Back to the Future. But that's not entirely true because it can also work in things like 12 Monkeys or (on a self-contained level) Memento.

So what is it that makes a time travel narrative work, if it's not about theme?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is that the time travel is the path the writer takes in order to talk about something that he or she is passionate about. In other words, Connie Willis uses time travel, but really it's mostly about the fact that she wants to write about the Blitz. Additionally, the beauty of time travel is that you can write about something like the Blitz from a modern perspective, which means that you can discuss it while still being respectful of it.

Because (as I understand it) characters are not allowed to time travel backwards within their own lifespans, the other problem of time travel is dealt with as well. You know, that whole thing where you run into yourself and then you explode or something? I call it the Hitler Paradox II, not because it has anything to do with Hitler but because I name all my time travel paradoxes that way just so I can index them properly.

And if you think about it, the idea of traveling back to see your own young self makes no sense.

Normally, it goes one of two ways:

Alpha Pete travels back in time. He runs into his young self (who is supposed to also be Alpha Pete) and then changes time somehow.

That doesn't make sense because what has happened there is, essentially, cloning. Because the universe now exists in such a way that there are TWO Alpha Petes, yet the only process that occurred was time travel, not cloning. So rather than being one consciousness that is Alpha Pete, there are two iterations of Alpha Pete. But why?

Okay, here's the other common scenario:

Alpha Pete travels back in time. He is wearing a red sweater. He sees his young self (Beta Pete). This fulfills a pattern that Alpha Pete remembers from his childhood (when he was Beta Pete), a time when a mysterious stranger in a red sweater (Alpha Pete) showed up.

This works a little better for me, although if this is the case time travel is very pointless because once young Beta Pete sees grown Alpha Pete, in this scenario, this event will ALWAYS happen for Petes Charlie through Zebra and on and on. Not only that, but it will have always happened in the past as well. In other words, this event is replicated infinitely in the "past" and "future" and is therefore kind of silly and pointless.

Anyway, time travel rant over, thanks to Connie Willis for figuring a decent workaround that's good enough to satisfy, yet nebulous enough that it's not fully explained. Because if you ask me, fully-explained science fiction is not only boring, it's not really science fiction anymore. It's just a fictionalized textbook.

Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers

Okay, before getting too far into reading this, understand that I only read this book because it was required of me for a book club. I wouldn't normally review something I felt this unkind towards because I would not finish it. Nor would I expect to like it.

Fair warning.

Redeeming Love is a part of the genre we like to call "Inspirational Fiction" where the word "Inspirational" is a more friendly and inclusive way to say "Jesus-y" or "religious" or, as I like to say it, "Jesus C fiction where the "C" stands for "Centric" AND "Christ."

And in this case, I don't mean that Jesus is an important figure in the characters' lives or that their belief system informs their decisions. I mean that god literally speaks to the characters. In case you're wondering, god's words are differentiated by being in bold. On the plus, you can just flip through and still catch most of the god stuff. I kind of feel like god would have the graphic design sense to have his own font, but what do I know?

To briefly summarize, Angel is a prostitute, and Michael is pretty much the best guy ever who comes along and hears god's voice telling him to marry Angel, which he does. They go back and forth a bit, she leaves him three times and bangs his brother, Paul, on the side of the road. A family traveling to Oregon comes across their land at one point, and Michael invites them to live on the land with them. They have children who Angel likes, and that brings ups the fact that Angel has undergone some sort of barroom hysterectomy, which apparently didn't take because the epilogue explains that she inexplicably has kids anyway, Paul marries one of the cross-country travelers after he and Angel make peace, and all accept god as being The Man.

I can sort of understand the appeal of this book in some ways. It's compulsively readable in the sense that you can read 100 pages in a sitting, easily. Lots of stuff happens, and there's a pacing to it that keeps it all moving.

But aside from that, I really have a problem with a lot of what this books sees as love.

For starters, if there was a god who literally spoke to me and told me that a particular person was "the one" that would simplify things quite a bit. Seriously, if god used his god-to-brain telephone to let me know that someone crazy, Courtney Love let's say, was the one, then I'd really have no choice but to pursue that person because nobody else would make me equally happy. I probably wouldn't wait until a pimp beat the holy bejeezus out of her to make my move and ask her to marry me the way Michael did in the book, but I'm just saying the path is a little clearer-cut.

But life isn't that easy. It's really not, and perhaps Courtney Love is the one for me, but I don't suspect that she is, and therefore I won't be busting my ass to try and convince her that a Derk/Love wedding is the ultimate fulfillment of god's plan. If it were, the good news is that we could at least all come together on the fact that good is crazy and has very bad taste in Fleetwood Mac covers.

One of the unfortunate, difficult things about love is that there will always be uncertainty. I've talked to people who have been with lots of partners, and they're never sure. I've talked to people who married the only person they've ever dated, and there's uncertainty there too. I'm not saying it's the kind of uncertainty that causes infidelity or wandering or whatever, but part of loving one person exclusively is accepting a certain level of doubt and learning how to put that aside or work through it. Or spending a lot on flowers and tennis bracelets.

The one kind of person I've never talked to is the kind that says god literally told him or her, in an audible voice, who "the one" was.

So if god tells you directly that California's hottest prostitute is the one, I would highly suggest getting a second opinion. St. Francis maybe? Is that a guy?

Now, I don't know enough about the romance genre to say whether this is endemic within it, but I have seen my fair share of romantic comedies, and there is a sort of love narrative that I don't approve of.

A lot of romcoms push the assumption that Person A can love Person B so much that it doesn't really matter that Person B doesn't love Person A. And in the romcom world, it is acceptable to pursue someone with a naked aggression that would never be acceptable in real life.

Imagine some of the things that people do in romcoms to show their love. If someone came sprinting through Manhattan traffic to catch you on the other side of the street, wouldn't you question his sanity? If you caught a woman peeping into your house from a position in a high-up tree branch, wouldn't you consider updating your security system to include some sort of lasers or robotic dogs? If Lloyd Dobler was playing a boombox outside your window, would that really change your feelings about him? (actually the correct answer to that one is "No" but only because you loved Lloyd Dobler immediately and always)

The point is, I don't belive in loving someone so much that they eventually love you, and maybe some couples end up together because one person engaged in an untiring pursuit, but I would think it's very rare that several rejections end with an equally shared love. Wearing someone out to the point that it's easier to say Yes than No is not really the same as making them love you. It'll do in a pinch, and if you're a lot better at being annoying than charming it's worth a shot, but overall it's not the best plan.

Let's talk about characters for a minute.

Michael, the main guy, couldn't me more flat if he were digitally rendered for the Atari 2600. All this guy does is listen to god, and then forgive his wife for everything. Relationships have to be about forgiveness to some extent, but I don't think you should forgive your wife for banging your brother on the side of the road for no apparent reason. Or your brother, for that matter (unless, as we discussed earlier, your brother happens to be Lloyd Dobler, in which case who can blame them?). I mean, if my brother banged my wife, I think this would warrant, bare minimum, a heated discussion over a dinner that I don't even finish because I'm too busy being mad at my brother and wife equally.

There is somethig about this Michael character that we are supposed to see as very strong, but to me comes off as the worst kind of weak. His entire purpose in the book, the entire scope of his life, is putting up with a woman who takes a very long time to actually love him. He apparently has nothing in his life and is a simple, empty vessel waiting for the right woman to come along and not only make him complete, but be his Wizard of Oz and give him brains and a heart and whatever the hell else those other losers got.

This character is a bad example for men and women alike. Men should not strive to be like him because his forgiveness extends so far that it would make any real person extremely unhappy. Also, following his example means living a life that is devoid of purpose outside of having a romantic relationship, which means you are an empty, soulless person, and good luck attracting someone else if you have no interests, no passions, and nothing about yourself that you've built or cultivated.

He has no personality, nothing that sets him apart from other men other than he's on the "good" side of the line that ALL characters in this book could be categorized by. Seriously, this really is like an Atari game in that you could easily divide the characters into two camps: good guys and bad guys.

Through the lens of Angel, we discover that there are two kinds of men in the world: sex-crazed maniac murderers, and the nicest guys ever who still only vaguely manage to suppress their sexual urges through a close relationship with god. Basically, all men in the book are tormented by their relationship with sex, and it's all about whether or not they "give in." Even with a spouse, there's some sex that's okay and some sex that's not okay because it's "giving in."

What a terrible way to look at the world. I personally believe there are many men out there who have healthy relationships with sex. Lord knows I'm not one of them, as my internet browsing history could easily confirm, but I strongly believe that those men exist, and I also think there are men who struggle with sex without forcing their struggles on others. Sex or sexual desire can be something a man wrestles with a little without becoming a crazed sex maniac who bangs his brother's wife on the side of the road. I'm really obsessed with that, in case you can't tell.

The author doesn't understand men at all. If you think the ideal man is an empty vessel waiting to be filled, then buy a blowup doll and whisper your prayers into it every night until he's full. Then wish for him to be a real boy and see how far that gets you.

And what about Angel, the female lead?

Ah, the hooker with a heart of gold.

The idea of the hooker with a heart of gold is very odd to me because it makes some very unfair assumptions. First, why would we assume that someone who has sex for money does not have a good heart? Why would our default assumption be that this person is heartless and mean as opposed to having a good heart? Why is this the only profession that we hear this about? When someone says their husband works at a grocery store, they don't throw in, "but he has a heart of gold." I've never heard of a baker with a heart of gold. And flipside, if these gold-hearted hookers are such an anomoly, how come I never read stories about hookers with hearts of wet garbage, or hearts of heart meat that perform their functions adequately if a bit coldly?

I do have a great idea for a steampunk novel called Hooker with a Heart of Gold about...well, exactly what it sounds like. And somehow the mechanical heart gives her fuck powers. I haven't worked out all the details yet, but I suspect the end involves her 40 years later living in a small cabin, the one bullet she stopped still lodged in her golden heart. If only she'd been able to stop the other...

Anyway, I thought I would have more to say about Angel, but she's just as empty as Michael. She's empty in a different way in that she seems like a self-contained unit piloting her way through the novel, going whichever way she is steered by the various characters. At least she had a career of sorts so she wasn't totally empty. And I didn't mean that as a hooker pun, but once you start denying hooker puns you've already kind of lost the battle.

The most redemptive part of the book is the idea that Michael is constantly forgiving Angel for her past. I suppose that's a somewhat enlightened view of things, and I wouldn't expect that many men of god living during the gold rush would be too excited at the prospect of making a hooker into a wife. Warts and all. LOTS of warts and all.

But, the book loses touch with reality because it's not about recognizing the past as something that has shaped a person into the person you love today. It's about getting over the past, hitting the reset button and starting a new life, which doesn't even work in the book because everything is thrown into total disarray everytime the past comes up, which it certainly will.

As an adult, you do have to reconcile with the past, both your own and your partner's. You have to recognize that the past shaped the person you're with today, and that's the person you love, so for better or worse things have sort of worked out.

What the book doesn't make clear is that you also have to balance the past. Yes, I think it's good that Michael can make peace with the fact that his wife was a hooker. I mean, it's a little easier to do and really doesn't bring up a lot of the core issues because she had no choice in the matter, but nevertheless, he didn't seem terribly judgmental of her past. But if your wife brings up the fact that she had sex with her own father in a revenge scenario, that's a huge red flag. If someone is angry enough at their own father, or confused enough or whatever, that when he walks into a brothel she has sex with him, it doesn't really matter how cool YOU are with her past because she obviously still has some stuff to work out there.

I don't know what kind of love people of the world are looking for. But I hope this isn't it. If you are expecting this story to match your own, I am very sad for you because I don't have very high hopes. I wish you the best of luck, however, and try not to fuck anyone's brother or your own father and you'll already be going down a better path.

Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead

A great, short western.

It's an unbelievable stroke of luck to be living when both Robert Olmstead and Cormac McCarthy are writing. To get one writer of these sorts of minimal, violent, pretty books would be a pretty decent stroke of luck. So to have two is almost more luck than anyone really deserves.

What I love about this book is that it's a western, but it defies what I consider the traditional stereotypes of westerns. For the most part, I've read westerns that are long and literary, and westerns that are short and trashy. But this one takes the literary, cuts it down to a manageable length, and the result is pretty damn good.

I sometimes wonder if authors of westerns feel that the length of the book, the expansiveness, helps encapsulate the expansiveness of the landscape and all of that. Olmstead take a different tack, and the shortness and brutality of the book matches well with the shortness and brutality of the characters' lives.

Just don't mistake this witholding for a lack of generosity on the part of the author and his storytelling. Everything that needs to be there is. Everything that doesn't is in a Longarm somewhere.

The Great James Frey Debate Revisited

This last week my book club we read the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. If you haven't read it, it's Walls' memoir of growing up with parents who were essentially nomadic and not super fit to raise your basic turtle, let alone a pack of kids.

To put it as horrifyingly as possible, these people would make my parenting look magazine-cover-worthy by comparison. And I don't even really understand what a Diaper Genie does.

Unfortunately, at the meeting we had a long debate wherein we had to discuss whether or not the stories were real. Were these true, or were they sensationalized in order to sell more books?

I have to say, I'm really, REALLY tired of having that debate.

James Frey, as much as I have enjoyed his stuff, is partially to blame for this, I suppose. I don't remember going back and forth about this kind of stuff before his time in the spotlight. I feel like we all took memoirs at face value before him.

Questioning what we read is not a bad thing by any means, and sometimes it needs to be done. I'll give the example of Jon Krakauer taking Greg Mortensen to (one of his stone-built) school(s). That matters because Greg Mortensen was taking money that people were donating to a charity and using it for himself. And he was claiming to have done great things. That's bullshit, and that's a situation where lying hurt not only him, but hurt the people he was allegedly helping.

But what about James Frey?

The complaints I've heard are:

1. The scene in a million little pieces where he had dental work done without aenesthetic was proven false.

2. He did not spend the time in jail that he claimed.

Okay, sensationalized. But who does this hurt?

The biggest claim of injury I've heard is from people who felt like they were lied to, who felt like Frey's story was uplifting and empowering, and now feel like they were lied to and that nobody understands them.

I don't normally work to invalidate feelings because feelings are not logic and if felt are irrefutable, but I think that as much as those people were being lied to, they also had a failure of imagination. If you can't be touched by a fictional story in the same ways you can by a memoir, then I feel pity for you.

Personally, I was touched by Frey's story, especially so in his second book, My Friend Leonard. And whether or not the smaller details are true is irrelevant to me.

Most of how I judge books, and most of what I remember about books, is how they make me feel. My memory is very weak on the narrative details of a book. It makes booktalking a real bastard, let me tell you. I don't always remember the details and the twists that made me feel certain ways, but I always remember how I felt when I was reading a book. Always.

So if James Frey wants to republish his memoirs as fiction, that's fine by me. And maybe he shouldn't have caved to pressure to try and sell them as memoir. But there are few people in the world who have the integrity to say No to literally millions of dollars. And, from the consumer standpoint, if his books hadn't gained the momentum they eventually had, I may never have heard about them, and I may have never read them. For me, it's still a net win.

As we discussed in the book club, I would also like to make a couple distinctions that I think are important separations between autobiography and memoir. These are my personal opinions, but I think there's a significant choice that is made when someone chooses to call their book a memoir as opposed to an autobiography.

1. Generally, an autobiography is the complete portrait of one's life, and this is usually a life that is generally agreed upon to be inherently important. A memoir is the story of a life, but the story behind the person is generally thought to be worth telling, regardless of the person's notoriety.

2. Autobiography is about facts that can be backed by research and working with other people. Memoir is all about a best-faith effort to remember things.

3. An autobiography is about Capital T Truth. A memoir is understood to be one person's point of view, and it is likely that events experienced by multiple parties would come out differently in different memoirs.

Okay?

I agree that Jeanette Walls probably didn't remember exact dialogue from her entire life. Nobody does. But in memoir, I think the agreement with the reader is that you are going to do your very best to tell the truth.

We do trade away the exactness and accuracy of a person's story when we move away from autobiography. But I think what we trade for is a palatable, read-able story that is from the perspective we want to hear as opposed to being a homogenized version of events.

This is why a David Sedaris essay will always be more interesting to me than an autobiography of...well, anyone. Even if Sedaris is tweaking timelines, adjusting dialogue, and omitting people, his stories are hilarious, and I trust that whatever alterations he makes are for the sake of creating the best, most coherent story as opposed to conjuring something from nothing.

I think what I want is to stop concerning ourselves so much, making the truth about a book the most important factor in our enjoyment of it. That probably sounds lazy, like I'm saying that it's someone else's job to find the truth. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that the truth about one of Chelsea Handler's blowjob stories really doesn't matter because I'm not donating cash to the Chelsea Handler Blowjob Foundation any time soon.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Right now, I don’t know how to feel about this book.

I guess I just need some time.

Shit, that was supposed to be a hilarious joke, but I guess I didn’t mention that this was a time travel book just yet.

Here’s the thing: I have no patience for time travel books anymore. It seems like every time travel narrative goes one of two ways:

Oh banana oil, we’ve traveled back in time and every attempt we make to alter the future only results in us doing EXACTLY what was done before.

-or-

Oh horsefeathers, we’ve traveled back in time and now must not alter anything because it will create an alternate future somehow, although that really makes no fucking sense because it assumes there is an initial point of time travel from which time basically goes wonky, and that point is somehow in the past and also…not.

And really, that’s about it.

In this book, there is somewhat of an alteration because the main character accidentally shoots himself in the stomach, trapping himself in a time loop. Because now the version of him that did the shooting will continue on, only to end up being shot in the stomach.

And see, this all happens 100 or so pages in. Up to this point, I was loving the book. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

On Missing

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

On Time Travel Sales

A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Self-Help Books

..books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.

Here’s the thing: Up until the point where we get really time-travel-y, the book is great sci-fi because it uses a science-fictional platform to explore very real emotions. Great sci-fi can do that. By stripping away the familiar and leaving the reader without any compass other than the emotional one, a good book can get to the core of a lot of really great stuff.

But then we usually get a paragraph about a laser rifle and I want to pull out my eyeball and fashion it into some kind of a spike that I can drive through my other eye and end my own life.

Because there is a guidebook element to this book, I would like to give everyone a brief bit of advice concerning time travel, just in case.

1. 1. If you find yourself way back in time, I’m talking horse days, immediately change the settings on your iPod in order to maximize battery life. You’re now living a life where you’ll only be able to listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits so many times.

2. 2. If you find yourself back in time, you will likely beat yourself up for not paying attention to history. Do not let this false emotion overtake your better senses. Remember, history is bullshit.

3. 3. If you end up in a certain time period, you may feel obligated to make an attempt on Hitler’s life. But killing him, doesn’t that make you just as bad? The answer is obviously No, so see if you can get a pistol and sneak up on him during the time when he’s trying to be an artist.

4. 4. If you end up even a mere thirty years back in time, it’s going to be hard to pretend to feel excitement over technological advances. But try and act surprised. Otherwise, everyone will think you’re an asshole.

Boo!

Someone was kind enough to put this book on hold for me at the library.

There are recommendations on the back, one by Nicky Hilton, one by Khloe Kardashian. In case you are not a pop culture junkie, these people are both marginally famous for being the SISTERS OF marginally famous women who became marginally famous for making sex tapes, which were of marginal quality, at best.

With recommendations from literary giants like that, who can refuse?

And the world wept for what it had made...

2011: Living in the Future

The future's so bright, I gotta wear a jumpsuit. Which, according to this book published in 1972, will allow me to match everyone else in the year 2011 perfectly.

So what did Geoffrey Hoyle's vision of the world of 2011 look like?

Well, it's kind of a mish-mash of the practical and the wildly imaginative and slightly less practical.

For example, Hoyle's proposition that switching to a 3-day work week will solve many of our traffic and pollution problems is actually one of the more realistic that I've heard. Not to get too earth-y here, but if people lived in homes appropriate to their family size, the country figured out a food system, and most entertainment was free, I think we could mostly live on a 3/5 salary, and I can't imagine that making me less happy.

However, he also has some less-plausible things going on, such as all foods being prepared by what appears to be the breakfast machine from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. The time the man spends on food preparation is a little out of hand, especially considering that he's also solved, you know, the little bullshit stuff like pollution. An entire page is devoted to the machine that makes toast, which also has my favorite future-y/as seen on TV sentence: "The toast starts life as ordinary sliced bread." Yeah, no shit. What a mind-blowing future you've constructed for us here. From there, it's exactly like an ordinary toaster except that a mechanical arm picks up the bread and then puts the toast on your plate. So I guess this solves that growing concern in the 70's about picking up toast.

Another weird one is the video phone. He's actually kind of dead on with computers and whatnot, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But what's strange to me is how every futuristic show is all about the goddamn video phone, but in real life we have somewhat abandoned the audio component of phones in favor of texting, which is really a dumbing down, technologically. We had texting technology in the day of pagers.

Although I have to say, video phone calls don't sound appealing to me personally. Plus, if you're a busy person, aren't you generally doing other things while talking as opposed to sitting and talking and doing nothing else? Then again, flip side, if all calls were video calls maybe it would cut down on people SITTING ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER AT A RESTAURANT AND FUCKING WITH THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY'RE EATING WITH A LIVE HUMAN SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE. Sorry for all the caps, but stop doing that. No matter who you are, texting at a table when there's only one other person there makes you look like a teen girl, one of the bad ones who picks on the shy but wonderfully spirited protagonists in teen girl movies.

The book also spends a great deal of time talking about school, and it sounds like people will be doing what homeschool kids are doing now. It's so funny to me that homeschool kids are on the cutting edge in terms of linking up to a satellite to go to class, but then they wear exclusively denim skirts and I imagine they churn their own butter for some reason.

Restaurants are not that much different other than the fact that the waiters and waitresses have been cut out of the equation, which is fine by me. I've never met a waiter who said he loved his job, and even though I like to think I'm a pretty easy customer and tip nicely, I never hear anything about it from a waiter, so I'm starting to feel like they don't want anyone to be at the restaurant, themselves included.

Public transportation is clean, free, reliable, and works 24/7. It's safe enough for kids to travel alone. So I guess the future also involved liquifying the homeless somehow. He didn't really go over that so much.

Overall, the future sounds pretty awesome, and it's kind of disappointing that the closest, most accurate page is the one that shows how horrible things were twenty years previous. Oh, wait a second, that was the SECOND-most disappointing thing. The MOST disappointing thing was the picture of a teenage boy playing an acoustic guitar. I hope that in 2050 we will have found better ways to pick up girls than playing a goddamn acoustic guitar. Maybe some kind of ray...