Since this album came out in March, and the web is packed with thoughtful reviews about these guys, I won’t bother. Let me just say this is one of the best albums of the year. This song has Cure-ish moments, but don’t let that fool you. It’s all about the rhythms. Thanks to Eric Greenwood for making me notice these guys.
If this doesn’t make you happy, you’ve got issues.
It’s a dicey thing to criticize a Nobel Prize winner, but I find myself even more loath to take a position contrary to that of Harold Bloom. Nevertheless, here I go: Portuguese Laureate Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness is a flawed work that has its gripping moments and images but that nevertheless falls far short of greatness.
Blindness tells the story of a city/country/world whose population is stricken with a contagious form of blindness. The reader follows the first handful of people who lose their sight as they are quarantined and then as the basic structure of society is decimated by the disorder. The saving grace for this group, known only by descriptions since names are said to be of no use to the blind (?), is the wife of an opthamologist who mysteriously remains unafflicted. Her sight is a blessing to the blind, but a curse to her as she essentially becomes the last caretaker in the world. She is also a blessing to the reader, for it is only really through her that we can legitimately gain a view into the ruin that the world has become. And the world has become quite a mess. Electricity, plumbing, and anything else that depends upon human monitoring and engineering soon sputters out, leaving a misery of sanitation disasters, food shortages, and illnesses. Our initial victims only survive by hanging together and by relying on the vision of the opthamologist’s wife.
This is rich material, and might be rewarding for those who delight in allegories. Unfortunately, I think allegories are best confined to short stories or novellas. There’s a reason why The Metamorphosis is Kafka’s most read work: it is simply better than any of his novels. Can anyone imagine how disasterous it would have been had Kafka decided to expand that classic story until it ate up several hundred pages?
Despite the fact that Blindness reads as, and is often taken as, an allegory, I’ll be damned if I can say what it is an allegory for. The last few sentences provide a hint: “Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes I do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” Get that? So, the blindness in the novel is a metaphor for…our unwillingness to really observe the situation around us? Ok, so how does the rabid contagion fit into that? Why did people go blind when they did, and why did they lose their blindness when they did? And what was it about the wife that she didn’t go blind? Perhaps I am being dense, but I see no good answers to these questions.
Perhaps, then, it is not an allegory. Perhaps we should take Blindness on its face, as a tale of an optico-apocalypse. (Say that ten times fast.) Fine, but then there are some implausibilities that need explaining. The government’s harsh reaction seems dubious, as does their unwillingness to provide crucial medical supplies to the inmates. Also implausible is the apathy of so many of the quarantined people in the face of oppression by their less honorable fellow inmates. I also found myself very doubtful that Saramago has captured the mentality of the suddenly blind. At one point, for example, the doctor asks a group of people to raise their hands in a vote–and he quickly realizes what a silly idea that is. I seriously doubt this sort of forgetfulness would afflict someone who was really blind. (And this is not the only instance of this sort of thing in the novel.) No one uses sticks, canes, or anything of the sort, allegedly because it doesn’t make sense given the chaos surrounding them. Like many explanations offered within the text for the novel’s pecadillos, this one makes no sense.
Then there is the writing style. No names, rather arbitrary use of punctuation, and a narrator that is impossible to locate. My first thought was that the lack of names and punctuation was meant to engender in the reader the same sense of disorientation that the blind might feel. While that’s still my best guess, I’m disheartened to learn that Saramago uses these devices in most of his novels, which makes one doubt that it is a content specific device. Besides, these devices disorient in precisely the way blind people are not disoriented. The blind have the sounds of voices, and one imagines names and the like are all the more important. (Visual descriptions, however, such as “the woman with dark glasses” are useless.) The narrator is meanwhile all over the map, from all perspectives and none, which might sound clever but in fact strikes one as a result of a lack of writerly discipline. (This sort of narration is doable, but it cannot be done randomly, which is the way it appears here.)
Finally, the characters and the narrator have a sporadic penchant for stale cliches and unprofound abstractions, all presented as poignant philosophy. I buy neither the reality of the business–that normal people would speak as they do–nor the conceit that these occasional proclamations or questions are the least bit profound.
Now that I’ve ripped on the old man, let me say that I don’t think the book is a complete failure. It is not a bad book. It does a splendid job of showing how frightening such a world would be, and how dependent we all are on something so fragile that we take for granted. Saramago does think of some dire consequences of mass blindness that would not come to a pedestrian mind, and he offers a plethora of images (ironically) that will stick with the reader long after the novel ends. It combines many of the powerful elements of both Camus’ The Plague and McCarthy’s The Road, and for that reason alone it is worthy of praise. In the end, though, I don’t think it touches the hem of either one of those great and, not incidentally, more concise novels.
That’s holding Saramago to a high standard, though.
But he did win the Nobel Prize.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that in Harrold, Texas the schoolboard has approved a motion to allow teachers to carry concealed handguns at school. The idea, apparently, is that this will help prevent a massacre by discontented students.
This is a really dumb idea, for several reasons.
1. This makes teachers an easy source for a weapon. These people are not trained to fend off attackers. If someone wants to shoot students and teachers in the school, now they don’t have to prepare by planning and purchasing a gun–they can, in the heat of the moment, overpower a teacher, take his/her weapon, and have at it. Criminals who cannot purchase guns but want to go out in a bang can do the same thing.
2. Teachers can go crazy too, and as mentioned above, this allows the heat of the moment to become a factor.
3. Misplaced weapons. One mistake, and a kid has a gun in his/her hands. No matter how careful you are, over a period of years, carelessness will happen.
There are more reasons, but it seems to me that these three simple points should be persuasive to people on both sides of the gun control fence.
If you really want a gun in your school,if you really think the students are such a threat, hire a cop who is trained to handle himself in tough situations.
I love Barack, but this is fucking hilarious.
Radiohead will be webcasting their last show of their US tour tonight from Santa Barbara. Find info about the webcast here.
Somehow I missed this band on their first release, Beautiful Seizure, but on the strength of this sophomore effort I’m completely on the Volcano! bandwagon. Paperwork is not an easy album to digest, especially if you simply let it play in the background. Don’t do that: it demands your full attention. So much is going on in most of these songs that they must have been written with flow charts. Unusual beats and time signatures merge into one another, and the melodies–sometimes several different melodies per song–clash into each other and angle off into new directions. Noisy, yes, but not noise. These guys are tight and everything is woven together very carefully. Can you say Radiohead meets Don Caballero? I didn’t think so. But if you could, you might say “Volcano!”
If you were in a traffic jam on Saturday morning, it was because an 18-wheeler full of MARBLES jacknifed, spilling its load.
The 18-wheeler full of banana peels, on the other hand, made it safely to the home of one Wile E. Coyote.
Last spring, I was eating dinner in a semi-fancy restaurant that incongruously had flat screen TVs playing news in the corner. (This is very Dallas, by the way.) My taste for food faded as I saw a commercial for Japanese Foot Pads which reportedly sucked various toxins from your feet while sleeping. It was both gross and grossly implausible. Here’s the ad:
Recently, All Things Considered on NPR (or, as my wife affectionately calls it, “the nipper”) had a feature that pretty conclusively unveiled the sham. Listen here as Sarah Varney blackens her soles for science. I still see these things in stores. More evidence that people are idiots.