pere goriot and jiro dreams of sushi

it's difficult to know what to think of pere goriot because i don't know if it's funny. it's an epic, absurd, exhaustingly moralizing melodrama, and i have no idea how seriously to take it. a pivotal thing, for example, is whether madame de beauseant's suicide is actually even a shred of a counterpart to pere goriot's demise.

more fundamental to the book is its ultimate fixation on money and characters that have or have had it. they're the only ones entitled to a story, to a tragedy. there's no drama or even interest in humdrum misery, only on the preposterous array of characters with a shred of a claim on millions. balzac's set up in some dumpy-ass boardinghouse is amazing—are there really going to be a solid 5 out of 12 boarders on the precipice of being maad rich?

it's also a story of spicy feudalism, of lords and serfs but mixed with passion and debt—for the serfs are sometimes really good looking and now there are pawn shops. AH gotta run to the movies, write more soon.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi would be immaculately elegant if they weren't cooking fish; the politics of those sublime smorgasbords are iffy.

The idea of doing the same thing for 75 years is astonishing. The special thing about Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is that it does not make it look easy. The need for time is at the center of the movie, for the most meticulous drudgery. I guess I'm amazed to see something that says that one must practice. It's a very austere but entrancingly simple idea that practicing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times will produce extraordinary outcomes. There is nothing at all mystical or special in this movie, just a profound, life-defining reverence for practice and time. How EXHAUSTING.

The intensity of their practice breeds exquisite mania in these Shikonin. They whittle away relentlessly at themselves, at their imperfections, and so the immutable parts of them become outsize. Jiro is left handed; his younger son is right handed. Because of this handedness the younger son's sushi restaurant is a perfect mirror image of his father's restaurant.
 
The Japanese food critc in the movie has THE silliest mustache I have ever seen.



but back to pere goriot. it's odd how for a writer renowned for biting political commentary and social awareness how little he writes about the mechanics of money. this book's really operatic, really emotional, really personal. i mean, it spends plenty of time indicting the rich, but really just because they're assholes, which is a pretty weak condemnation of the furred and cigared ones. there's certainly no "system" being critiqued here.

fascinating historical bits include: the filthiness of walking (it's nearly pointless for poor rastignac to get dolled up if he doesn't have a carriage to shelter him from the muck of paris's streets); how a foggy morning means people don't get up en masse. that weather was a force in the intimate lives of millions of people is stupendous. it was important and universal and bigger than small talk.

oscar wao

i should probably write more about the things i read because why else read them i suppose. this is how the good things will stick. i already wrote a short bit about this book, probably talking about i loved the history in the book and how i love its elevation of spanish, and of poor, urban spanish into the realm of the untranslatable, to the thing to which mr. 1st world language has to conform. that's gotta be at the core of respecting another language and so another people, is to recognize a language's dominion over a certain thought because you cant even translate it.

something that's iffy but perhaps just unavoidable is the book's trafficking in all the badonkadonk, car-stopping asses and general mania about female bodies. i mean, this stuff, apparently, is extremely real, but diaz indulges it pretty uncritically. or maybe not. i guess i just felt the book encourages you to salivate along with the greasy hordes. it definitely spends a little bit of time with how women were really uncomfortable with their bodies, about the horror of the attention, but i think it ends up coming down pretty emphatically on the side of voluptuousness as an empowering thing for them. which is thoroughly iffy.

yunior (junior?) is an interesting character. why choose him to narrate? to choose the one who ultimately loses out? from that perspective, he seems like a guy to give the story a happy gloss, the gloss of longing, a lying gloss. i guess he works because he's the one who's "friends" with oscar. still, a strange choice. maybe just empowering the meathead in a book that empowers a slew of maligned demographics.

i mean, the glory of this book was being on the subway and reading this book and not knowing many of the words in it and so approaching, as i never ever had before, hispanic people who look live and work nothing like me. but they knew more than i did! they could explain, and giggle knowingly, at my book! that's fucking ill empowerment for people too easily known just stammering english. to forget, as one so easily can, that this person does not speak "broken" but has a whole fluent mind. that they're just accommodating your foreign-ass language because they have to. that these people might very well be dazzling articulate. oscar wao's a beautiful reminder.

i think the most poignant image in the story is of oscar's mom when she's with the gangster, just before that ends, when they're having sex and she grabs him to stop him from pulling out but he wrenches free and comes on the "ruined plain of her back" or something like that (because her back's burned from when she was orphaned). so so horrrrrrible.

YO FUCK RACISM AND RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE

the spying, racial profiling, racism that the NYPD's been engaged in is, well, racist and alienating to muslims, but also a decidedly 3rd rate strategy to root out violent extremists.

assuming one doesn't believe that all muslims are conspiring to "take over" and that the vast majority are super stoked to live in a pluralistic society of religious freedom and all that, these crazy violent muslims have to end up worshipping and chilling with lots of super chill muslims. and who fucking better to pick up these lunatics then their fellow muslims? their fellow arabic speakers? their fellow, sophisticated parsers of koranic meaning?

apparently there was even some poor schmuck sent on a white water rafting trip with college muslims to monitor the hell outta these kids who took note on how many times they prayed. YO! THAT IS THE LEVEL OF SOPHISTICATION THAT THE NYPD CAN BRING TO THIS! like "yo, that guy prayed FIVE TIMES one day, isn't that like, so much? probably a sign of violent extremism" some poor schmuck whose never even heard of a goddamn muezzin.

a sure way to make people close ranks and be sympathetic to violent lunatics is exactly this kind of ham-handed, INSANELY RACIST surveillance. they might even conclude, kind of rightly, that there is a "war" against muslims.

imagine if, instead, there was just a good faith effort saying, yo, you muslims are super chill but there are some crazies in your midst, like the proliferating white, christian crazies in scandanavia and other parts of europe. if you guys would take a passionate stand against those sorts of crazies and tip us off to the bonafide lunatics we'd be able to leave you all at peace and stave off demands from racists that you're all conspiring to slit the neck of a goat (which stands for america or something) and that we've gotta treat you and your co religionists like you're terrorists.

also please tip  us off whenever you notice another bigoted, violence inciting christian or jew doing their thing, because they do that pretty often and it's aways nice to highlight that end of it.

it's TOTALLY NUTS that mirrors actually double light. that if have a wall of a certain material you can ACTUALLY DOUBLE the light which would otherwise just be all it was in and of itself—I guess it's a corollary insanity that one can paint a wall black and swallow the light, that it'll actually disappear into that darkness. NUTS

THE CORRECTIONS! man this book is fucking spectacular. the description of alfred and enid's sex life, the lion emerging from his cave in the morning, that WHOLE description, is extraordinary. that guy's a legendary prude, though i honestly saw a lot of myself in that passage.

AAHHH!

the corrections is full of absolutely brilliant things, wonderful descriptions of getting lost in the woods between words, of the glow of digital readouts, of the sanctuary of fat leather chairs like a first baseman's glove. i mean, actually fantastic, thrillingly evocative writing. i guess it's convenient to have such diverse wonderful moments in one book but one consequence is that they have to get strung together. and if there's any weakness in franzen's work, and a similar thing often happened in freedom, it's a love of super cheesy, cheap catchphrases that're supposed to be really zeitgeist-y that he uses to thread together his epic. these show up especially when the book gets global pretensions, when freedom's joey ends up in poland and his iraq war debacle, and now with chip flying off to lithuania. this book has so many intimate treasures, it's almost obscene to thrust them in with chip's pornographic adventures and vodka and other such nonsense.

but whatever! those things are outliars, literally and figuratively, in a book of hawk-eyed sensitivity. marvelous!