Futility Now

As a metric of how much we listened to that Eluvium album, consider the following. It was in a CD changer with a Blonde Redhead album after it. When the Blonde Redhead album started, we found it harsh and abrasive. That’s a lot of spacing out, folks.

The other thing that I’ve been listening to a lot lately is a 2 disc collection of the incomparable Jonathan Richman. People make a lot of Richman’s break with the material from his first record, and his decision to do more lighthearted material, but the fact is, that material doesn’t necessarily cohere as an oeuvre any more than the pre and post break material do together. Johnny Rotten wouldn’t have been any more likely to forget the words to “Hospital” than he would “Rockin’ Government Center.” Considered stylistically, there was never any tradition from which to break.

What is recognizable about Richman, and the thing that holds all epochs of his production together, is. . . well, it’s sort of hard to explain. It’s the fact that how he thinks comes across really clearly, and it’s really weird. But also awesome. He also has an apparently naive but incredibly exacting command of language. I think my favorite example of this is “The New Teller,” where he rhymes “teller” with “well” by adding “er” to it for the first iteration of the line. Subsequently he leaves it off, leaving the first instance to create the rhyme in the listener’s mind while simultaneously making a little self-deprecating joke (“I didn’t really do that, did I?”) Guy sure writes great lines.

(Note about tags: I chose two from “Roadrunner” not to privilege that track, but because listening to this record makes me nostalgic for Amherst; pretty sure that’s the definition of senility.)

Yoshi takes a break from his study of the origins of the novel.

So I think I’ve been tagged to write about Broder (and I will), but I also wanted to talk about the difference in tone between the book and film versions of Let the Right One In.

FWIW: “Spoiler warning,” as the kids say. If you’re the type for whom the plot is central to your appreciation of a work, you may want to go back to the 19th. Century. Furthermore, if this is true of you and you haven’t read or seen Let the Right One In you may want to avoid this post.

It should not surprise anybody that many details of the novel Let the Right One In were dropped for the film version. In fact, there are many reasons to be glad that they were. In an age where people feel like we need 2+ hours to understand the finer points of fucking Iron Man, a film that tells a complete story while letting itself in at under that 2 hour mark is a feat in itself.

Snideness aside, the trimming was well done and, I think, fairly symmetrical. Also, you will note that while all flashbacks were omitted, there were a couple of brief flashes, confusing if you haven’t read the book (which I hadn’t when I saw the movie), that acknowledge the events from those flashbacks.

In contrast to this, none of the episodes from Hakan’s (sorry, not going to go looking for the right escape code) past get any reference at all. In the absence of further information, it is easy to get the impression that Hakan started his life as a guy just like Oskar, and, by extension, that Oskar will one day be just like Hakan. Hazel and I both left the theater with this impression, and even if it were not the original intention of the film maker, it must have been accepted at some point.

I’m pretty sure that this makes the movie superior to the book. While the book is full of gruesome details, and many of the characters are substantially less likable, it still ends with a restoration of moral order. By contrast, the end of the film is incredibly bleak in a way that I found very moving. I think that it showed a little more courage (although it really took a dive on adhering to the fat-people-can’t-be-protagonists rule.)

So I finally gave up on The Captive. I couldn’t take any more and gave the last 30 pages or so only the most cursory skimming. Even that was exhausting and, frankly, kind of degrading. I would say that of the many books that I’ve read that are counted amongst literature’s shining lights, this is the worst. By a wide margin.

Presumably The Fugitive will be an improvement if for no other reason that there needs to be something new for Marcel to complain about without Albertine. Still, I think I’m going to take a little break to avoid accidentally counting my lingering resentments against the new volume.

I have been reading Lovecraft on Wikisource. At some point early in this endeavor (before I had put 2 and 2 together to realize that Wikisource’s URLs would be just like Wikipedia’s) I tried to search for “wikisource lovecraft” in Firefox’s built-in search bar. As you may or may not know, the FF search bar tries to offer helpful suggestions once you start typing text into it. Once you get to about “wikis” it has suggested “wikisource,” which is pretty much par for the course, but the second suggestion is “wikisource catullus.”

Now I know that this probably (which is to say, almost certainly) means that most people who go to Wikisource are taking a Latin class, but deep down I’d like to think the world is full of people seeking the most venal and lurid pornography that antiquity has to offer.