Best of 2011

• Best novel: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. (Actually published in 2001, I believe, but what a wonderful story. The minotaur of Greek mythology is alive and lonely in the American South, living in a small trailer park (where he likes to work on cars in his spare time) and working at a restaurant (where the manager has the brilliant idea of taking M.—as everyone calls him—out of the kitchen to carve prime rib for customers in the dining area). There is plenty here to make a grotesque southern gothic novel—a half man half bull protagonist; a hirsute woman; a gay civil war re-enactor; a jealous weightlifting husband of an underdressed, attractive, and flirtatious neighbor; a dead dog; aimless young men looking for a fight—but what’s amazing about this book is its tone and tempo: a calm and somewhat bemused loneliness even as various threats loom ahead.)

• Biggest book read: A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (968 pages).

• Best book of poetry: At Lake Scugog by Troy Jollimore. (How did this book not get more attention? I just assumed it would be up for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer and so on. This guy has as big a brain as anyone else writing poetry today. A professor of philosophy, he writes formal, funny, musical poems that engage rather than intimidate the reader.)

• Favorite new cookbook: Trout Caviar: Recipes From a Northern Forager by Brett Laidlaw. (Laidlaw wrote a couple of interesting novels back in the 80s and 90s. Though they were realistic stories set in the Midwest, their Berrymanesque circumlocutions flew in the face of the plain-spoken minimalism that was au courant at the time. When I met him and mentioned the novels, he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone read and remembered them. Now, without warning, and nearly 20 years after his last book of fiction, a cookbook full of hearty recipes and good, clear writing.)

• Best New Yorker Article: “Dr. Don” by Peter Hessler in the September 26 issue. This profile of a small-town pharmacist in Western Colorado is like McPhee at his best.

• Favorite new band: Avett Brothers.

• Favorite new solo artist: Sharon Van Etten.

• Single of the year: “Miss K” by Dear Tick.

• Best movie: Bill Cunningham NYC.

• Best television series on DVD: Slings & Arrows. (Three seasons of a Canadian series about the goings-on behind the scenes at a Stratford-on-Avon type theater. Wonderfully combines Shakespeare, humor, and poignant drama. I actually watched these at the end of 2010, but certainly haven’t seen anything better since then.)

• Best online video: Ultimate Dog Tease.

• Favorite new restaurant: Cajun Potluck in Shoreview, MN.

• Favorite spice: prosciutto.

• Favorite new breakfast food: smoothies.

• Most awesome national landmark visited this year: Crater Lake in Oregon.

• Biggest fish caught: A twelve-inch brown trout in Hay Creek.

• Prettiest fish caught: A couple small brookies in the Poplar River.

• States I attempted to catch trout in this summer: Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, and California.

• States I was skunked in: 0.

Please note: "New" means new to me; "best" means favorite; "favorite" is self-explanatory.

Lies

Despite what it says on the front of the box—

“Flat-out funny.”

—The New York Times

“You’ll laugh till it hurts.”

—Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

“Darkly funny, twisty-cool.”

—Entertainment Weekly

—Cold Souls with Paul Giamatti really isn’t a comedy.

Has Anyone Noticed . . .

that critically-acclaimed holiday movies The Messenger and Up in the Air are basically the same story? A pair of employees goes around informing people of bad news, the older ones, settled in their ways, supposedly showing the young pups the ropes, while ending up learning a lesson or two along the way themselves.

Two Beautiful Lists From Movies that Are Now (Gasp! . . . Sigh) Twenty Years Old

I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.

—Kevin Costner as Crash Davis in Bull Durham (1988)

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

—John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything (1989)

I Can Barely Contain Myself!

I just learned that Julie Taymor, the director behind such visual masterpieces as Titus, Frida, and Across the Universe, has been working on a movie of The Tempest, which is currently scheduled for release this year, and which features Helen Mirren as a female Prospero and Djimon Hounsou as Caliban. The cast also includes a bunch of guys who don't give bad performances: Alan Cumming, Alfred Molina, Chris Cooper, and David Strathairn.

Taymor previously directed a production of The Tempest for stage, and the clips I have seen of it are remarkable. If I could go back in time, I would buy tickets to see it. Since that's unlikely, I'll be at the new movie version on opening night.

Observation / Pet Peeve

Language is a constantly evolving thing, so I tend not to get too caught up by changes in it. In fact, often I revel in them, and think that people who get their noses bent out of shape by minute changes are rigidly old school (a term itself that has risen in prominence lately). As a result, I know I run the risk of sounding like an old fuddy duddy in bringing this up, but I have noticed my students using cliché as an adjective with increasing frequency, both in speech and in their papers, and it grates on me. Until this morning, I thought it was a trend that was perhaps confined to adolescence, but in the recent profile of Philip Seymour Hoffman (a peer of mine, at least chronologically) in the New York Times Magazine, the amazing character actor, commented, “It’s a cliché thing to say . . .” and I cringed.

When and how did this happen? When did the d get dropped from the adjective form of clichéd? Why is the noun form now used adjectivally? Is there any going back? Should I just mourn the soon-to-be archaic form that I grew up with and move on?

Line of the Week (#7)

This week's sentence was submitted by a friend, adding a whole other pleasant layer of irony to the situation. The speaker is the Mickey Rourke character, Henry Chinaski, who is really the Charles Bukowski character, from Barfly, a movie I haven't even seen:

"I like people. I just like 'em better when they're not around."

Speaking of Mr. Rourke, I don't know how you feel about him—I don't even know how I feel about him—but his new movie, The Wrestler, sounds pretty interesting. I think it will be on my short list of movies to see over the holidays.

Star Wars Goes Green

W calls light sabers light savers.

Here's Something I Never Thought I'd Get to Say Again in this Lifetime on this Planet

I really liked Woody Allen's new movie.

Against Murakami

I feel like I first heard of Haruki Murakami in 1990 or 1991. He was a former jazz club owner who translated writers I loved like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford into Japanese, and his first novel to be translated into English, A Wild Sheep Chase, was being talked up as a Chandler-influenced exploration, something a bit lighter and stranger than a traditional hard-boiled mystery, an absurdist noir.

I tried the novel, and early on it didn’t do much for me, so I set it aside. I knew any time a novel doesn’t work that it may be the reader’s fault as much as the writer’s, and the mythology of Murakami was so engaging that he stayed on my radar for years even as I didn’t read him. A couple years ago, it seemed like I was hearing amazing things about his new novel, Kafka on the Shore, everywhere I turned. It seemed like it was time to give him another try. The only question was whether to read Kafka or his other big book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. People seemed split on which of them was better, and the gist of most conversations was that I wouldn’t go wrong with either one.

Kafka on the Shore blew my mind. I had never read anything like it. The closest analogy I can come up with is my experience watching Being John Malkovich. All the rules and conventions I had counted on as a viewer or reader had been twisted around. I recognized things, but they no longer made sense in the same way. On the familiar drive home from watching John Malkovich, I took a wrong turn. I was that disoriented. Kafka did the same thing to my equilibrium, but whereas Malkovich was mostly funny, Kafka resonated with history, loss, tragedy, and a poignant inability for characters to connect. I talked the book up to everyone, gave it as a Christmas present, and looked forward to the ever-lengthening shelf of Murakami titles I would eagerly work my way through.

But a funny thing happened on my way to Murakami-induced bliss: I got bored. I turned first to his other epic work, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and every trope sounded familiar. It was like reading another version of Kafka, but what had been magical now seemed habitual. The narrator-protagonist had a sense of alienation from everything (work, love, geography) that was strikingly similar to Kafka Tamura’s. There were mysterious alienated disappearing potential impossible love interests. There was the same sense of menace and fate, marked by massive good luck and coincidence as well as inexplicable dangers, mysteries, and disappearances. It felt like names and places had been changed, but otherwise the tone and content of both books were remarkable similar. Life is too short to read long books that aren’t moving you, so I set it aside, but I kept in mind the possibility mentioned earlier that perhaps I had failed the book, and in bookstores I would often find myself in the Murakami section contemplating a different angle of attack.

At the end of this school year, I plucked the thin volume, Norwegian Wood, off the shelf. On my internal buzzmeter, it was the next most discussed book of his. I managed to read the whole thing, and though I quoted a brief passage earlier on this blog, it was a desultory experience at best. Other than the passive tone (again), the aimless protagonist/narrator (again!), and the inability of any character to really connect with another (again!!!), I couldn’t fully manage to put my finger on what I found so dispiriting about it—until I read Geoff Dyer’s recent review of Murakami’s latest book, a nonfiction account of his life as a runner. (I should love this guy!—he runs marathons, writes novels, loves pop culture, and he has translated writers who are important to me.) Dyer pointed out to me that it wasn’t just the characters and their situations that left me uninspired, but the tics of language, the prose style that describes those characters and situations. The things that bothered Dyer about Murakami’s nonfiction were traits I immediately recalled from his fiction, and the voice that Dyer was hearing was the same one that wasn’t working for me.

It’s always a pleasure to come across a skilled, articulate reader. Dyer has been on my radar for a number of years. It may be time to move one of his titles on to my “Books to Read” list.