You made Kurt Cobain man of the year, and if anything he left an indelible last message that the easy way out is to blow your fucking head off.
– Dave Mustaine, commenting on MTV’s decision to ban the video for “A Tout le Monde”
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Reason #624 why Dave Mustaine is the man
Mr. Vertigo redux
I’m sitting here in a Starbucks right now with a friend who is pretending to work and I’m sketched out of my mind after overdosing on caffeine (as is my friday habit). While waiting for the transfer to the next venue, I finished off Mr. Vertigo.
Not a bad piece of work. It kept me turning the pages, but often at a rate that signified I was just trying to rush ahead to the next plot point at the expense of missing big chunks of prose. The biggest sticking point I had with the book was the deliberate fakeness of the dialogue. No kid would ever be capable of talking with the simultaneous crassness and sophistication that the main character has. Not even this one.
I guess I should actually talk about the book itself. It goes like this. Walt is born in 20s America into a particularly base geneaology. Some urbane dude called The Master finds him in the street and promises him fame and riches. If Walt is not famous by his 13th birthday, the Master agrees to let Walt chop off his head.
The Master teaches Walt how to levitate. He does this through a 33-step program, most steps of which involve some sort of torture. At first, the Master appears to be completely infallible, and mostly evil fellow. As time goes on, you find out that he does have many flaws, and that he is actually quite a stand-up guy. It is really hard not to like him. He and Walt bond closely.
The rest of the story describes Walt’s (literal) rise to fame, which is quickly followed by massive failure and the death of the Master. In the wake of Master Yehudi’s passing, Walt occasionally picks up a successful venture by virtue of his own grit, but without the strong value system imposed by the Master, his victories are always fleeting.
I guess the Master is supposed to represent the combination of virtue and ambition (and the willingness to trade them off) that was the spirit of the early 1900s America. Auster practically rams the spirit of the book down your throat on the last page, but the way it is done was actually rather enjoyable, in my opinion:
We’re not as tough as we used to be, and maybe the world’s a better place because of it, I don’t know. But I do know that you can’t get something for nothing, and the bigger the thing you want, the more you’re going to have to pay for it.
…
Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy.
Mother Sioux, on love
They love and they hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to donuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.
From “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster
“The future is here — it’s just not evenly distributed”
Just finished up Virtual Light, the first part of William Gibson’s second trilogy. Not as breakneck as anything in the Sprawl trilogy, but it was interesting nonetheless. One thing that really stuck out is that, in the Sprawl trilogy, the characters can barely even be considered participants in the events that are unfolding — usually they’re being manipulated by something or someone. So, it doesn’t seem strange at all when they pull off a daunting escape or some other superhuman feat.
Not so in Virtual Light, which makes some of the more adventurous scenes appear overconstructed. One that sticks out in my mind the most is when an assassin asks his soon-to-be-victim for a Coke, giving her the chance to spike it with a massive overdose of drugs that she just happened to find a few moments earlier.
I also FINALLY finished Eric Brighteyes, after starting it almost 6 months ago now. It was good, but very, very long. The Broken Sword is a much more distilled experience, and more interesting to boot, but it’s also a hundred-odd years more recent so it’s hard to knock Brighteyes for that…
It’s weird how I won’t read any fiction for a year, and then I’ll suddenly devour thirty books and then stop again. Like, whoa.
Amberite optimism
Seeing it from up there, a certain nostalgia came over me, a wistful rag-tail of a dream accompanied by a faint longing for the place that was this place’s namesake to me in a vanished shadowland of long ago, where life had been just as simple and I happier than I was at that moment.
But one does not live as long as I have lived without achieving that quality of consciousness which strips naive feelings as they occur and is generally loathe to participate in the creation of sentimentality.