Bonus Tuesday: Arts!

That's right, I'm not only back, but I'm throwing in a bonus Tuesday post this week.  It's more of an announcement, but still: Tuesday Post!

I know I announced the website when it was launched, but head over to Allison Mosher's website to see the new design and a bunch of new paintings.  And while you're there, you can check out her new blog, Her Digital Memory (or you can click that link).  On the blog, she'll be posting works in progress and announcing upcoming shows.

That's all for today.  Go look at some paintings!

Fiction Mondays: Carter Beats the Devil

Despite being a little busy with moving, I found time in the past few weeks to read, from start to finish, Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, a book that has been on my radar for several years.  It's one of those books that I would look at every time I was in the bookstore, read the back cover of, and tell myself I had to read it eventually.  Finally, I decided it was going on my summer reading list, and I am so glad I made that decision.

The book is pretty big, somewhere around 650 pages, all of them bursting.  There are reprints of posters from magic's heyday around the turn of the century, and a playbill in the beginning of the book that turns out to be something of a table of contents.  The story revolves around Charles Carter, a real-life illusionist who was a contemporary of Houdini and Thurston, diving back into his life story and the events surrounding the death of President Harding in 1923.  As he begins his career, Carter meets the Marx Brothers (back when they were still Julius, Adolph, and Leonard on the vaudeville stage), as well as "Borax" Smith, a real-life business magnate; he makes a nemesis, Mysterioso, and is promoted by Houdini, leading him to worldwide fame and success.

Much of the book revolves around the aftermath of President Harding's death, with a large section delving into the hapless Secret Service agent who is investigating Charles Carter.  The agent, Jack Griffin, is desperately trying to regain his reputation after failing to prevent the assassination of McKinley.  While Griffin is kind of a moron, he does manage to make one great discovery, and toward the end of the novel, Carter calls him "the greatest audience member I ever had."  I don't want to spoil anything, because there are so many great twists and turns, but the last third of the book is extremely exciting, and revolves around a technology invented by a young man named Philo Farnsworth.

I really loved this book, and it made me think of two others: Water for Elephants and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  I love when a work of fiction creates a world that's so large and encompassing that it surpasses the idea of historical fiction--I don't know what you'd call it, really, but some books just have this way of pulling in people and events from history and making you believe they really interacted with these fictional characters.  It almost seems more real than history, in its way.  Whether it's Kavalier and Clay at a party with Salvador Dali or Carter the Great receiving a motorcycle from BMW's co-founder Max Friz, I really enjoy when a story jumps off of the page and wanders into the real world.  What is interesting about this book's connection to Kavalier and Clay is that the two novels were published around the same time, are both enormous, and were both written by authors who graduated from the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine.  Must have been something in the water.

I could not stop reading this book once I picked it up.  It has mystery, suspense, and perhaps most importantly, wonder.  That's kind of the theme of the novel, I guess, this idea of a loss of wonder and how it is regained.  For a long time in the middle, Carter is depressed and detached, so much so that he often feels he is looking down on his life happening.  What saves him is his ability surprise and to be surprised, his ability to elicit wonder.  I think this makes him a really admirable character, and is a characteristic that comes through in the writing: through the book, there are some incredible feats of misdirection and surprise, the work of a writer who is something of a magician himself.

Not Quite Back, But Getting There

I haven't updated in a few weeks, but I should soon be back to my regular schedule (that is, Monday-Wednesday-Friday) starting next week.  We just moved down to Philadelphia, so we're still getting settled in. 

Two new developments here on the Short List: you can now "follow" the blog (and have your picture in the new box to the right) and share the links on Twitter, Facebook, or whichever social networking site you prefer. 

Come back next week for a review of Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil, music to get you through the heat wave, and (hopefully) a review of Inception, the new movie by the director of The Dark Knight and The Prestige.  Or a review of the new Toy Story, which I saw last weekend.

So that's it for now, but I'll be back soon.

Fiction Mondays: American Gods

I recently finished the first book on my summer reading list, Neil Gaiman's epic American Gods.  And when I say "epic," I mean it: the story involves a man tangling with gods, going to the afterlife, and making a long journey to several "sacred" places in America.  I loved this book for its story, its characters and the weird sense of humor Gaiman brings to creating characters out of larger-than-life beings.   He's an author who really creates a universe with his writing, and it's a universe I like to visit.

The novel revolves around Shadow, who is recruited by a man named Wednesday to protect him while he's on a mysterious mission.  That mission turns out to be recruiting other gods, from every imaginable pantheon, to take a stand against the "new gods" who are taking root in America.  There's a war coming, Wednesday tells Shadow, between the gods the immigrants brought over and the new gods, like the Internet and Media.  They travel to recruit Easter, Anansi, Czernobog and a large contingent of obscure and half-forgotten gods and legends.  There's a brief meeting with Wisakedjac, the Algonquin trickster-god, and Johnny Appleseed.  With every god introduced, I was more and more impressed with the breadth of research that must have gone into this novel, the amount of knowledge just barely hinted at throughout the story.

One of my favorite moments in the book seems like something of an easter egg, there specifically for readers of Gaiman's Sandman series.  Shadow walks by a seemingly-homeless woman with multi-colored hair and a dog, and he gives her a dollar.  She looks confused by the money.  She's Delirium, one of Gaiman's "Endless," and the dog is the guardian she inherited from her brother, Destruction.  I love a book where an author's other stories can wander in without fanfare or distraction from the plot, and Delirium's presence almost seemed like a reminder that the story of the Endless went on, even if the comics ended.

Gaiman also handles his plots really well in this novel: there's an extended subplot involving an idyllic town and disappearing children, and it reminded me very much of Stephen King.  I won't spoil anything by talking about it, but the way it wraps up was one of my favorite twists in this very twisty book.  And it of course has everything to do with the story of the gods that makes up the main story.

There is a theme, repeated through the book, that "this is a bad land for gods," and I think one of the ideas behind this book is that it's not necessarily true.  For the gods that populate the novel, the greatest fear is being forgotten, and I think this book is an exercise in reminding readers that they still exist somewhere, and there is a wealth of information out there keeping them alive.  Maybe they're not actively worshiped anymore, but they are not forgotten.  America might be fickle, and might not know where to put our faith at times, but there is a curiosity and an imagination that might mean these gods can continue to live among us. 

Friday Films: City Island

The theater I work for recently started showing City Island, a new comedy starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, and Emily Mortimer (also Alan Arkin).  It's a hit, as far as small, limited-release independent films go, and despite the very small ad campaign--I've seen one commercial and one print ad--people are coming from miles away to see it based on recommendations from friends and family.  I saw it a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it; it's a short, light comedy with a lot of exaggerated yelling between family members and Andy Garcia playing a type that I don't think he gets to play much, the working-class family man.  In its first weekend here, it made more money on Saturday night than "Sex and the City 2." 

The plot revolves around a corrections officer who is secretly taking an acting class; he tells his wife that he goes to a poker game every week, and she thinks he's having an affair.  He brings home a prisoner for a month as part of an acting exercise, to tell your deepest secret.  The prisoner is his son, who he has never met.  Things start to escalate towards the ridiculous as the film progresses, and the end of the movie culminates in all of the plot points coming together right as Garcia's character lands his first acting gig, in a Scorcese film. 

It's just over an hour and a half long, and I think the script is incredibly efficient at fitting a lot into this running time.  At times it borders on too much, and I think I could have done without the character of Andy Garcia's youngest son (not the prisoner) and it would not have changed the movie all that much.  The kid himself is really annoying, and his plot has no relation to the rest of the narrative.  It's almost like the director realized this, too, because during the climactic scene he is set apart from the action and doesn't participate.  The rest of the plots wrap up in a scene that occurs in the family's house on City Island and just outside of it, which is the funniest point in the movie. 

Because it's a small movie, it's going to be on DVD in August, and for some reason I find that a little disappointing.  It just seems too soon, and I think that this could have been one of those small movies that continues to grow its audience over a longer run.  If a theater near you has it, go check it out while it's still there. 

Musical Wednesdays: Sufjan and the National!

After reading this interview, I was a little worried about Sufjan Stevens' future.  It seems like he was going through a bit of a crisis, in which expectations are so high after you've released a masterpiece that it scares you out of doing anything else (see also: Harper Lee and J.D. Salinger).  I thought maybe he'd vanish, Jeff Mangum style, and become one of those legends who plays at someone else's show every six years or so.  Maybe his BQE project was the equivalent of Mangum's field recordings of a Romanian circus.

For me, Illinois was one of those records that I wanted to live inside of, with songs that haunted me long after I'd heard them.  The song Chicago was so definitive, so descriptive of my understanding of faith in America, that it was almost a hymn.  It stirs me the way Leaves of Grass does, or the way the Band's music does.  And music that has that effect on a lot of people can terrify its creator--so I can understand why Sufjan has acted like something of a hermit for the past few years.  But that interview, like I said, made me worry that he was going to go away.

But there's hope yet!  Sufjan is recording a new album, and he's working with the National!  There's not much more to say yet, but the fact that it's being recorded makes me happy.  And maybe since the National started out in Ohio, that state will be Sufjan's next subject.  Even if it's not an album inspired by one of the states, I am excited to see what Stevens will produce next.   

(Non) Fiction Mondays: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I don't know about runners; long-distance runners, I mean.  I know there's a British "kitchen sink" movie called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I've known the occasional marathoner, but as a group, I have to admit that I'm wary of them.  Maybe it's because the ones in my neighborhood are so unpleasant, acting like the sidewalk was specifically made for them and they're just temporarily allowing you to walk there (and god forbid you walk a dog there).  So it was with this bias that I started reading Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I guess the book is almost more of an essay collection, Murakami's thoughts as he trained for the New York City Marathon.  But I can see where calling it a memoir is accurate: Murakami's life as a runner began with his life as a writer, and so this book acts as an examination of where and how those aspects of his life intertwine and affect one another.  It contains my favorite Murakami legend, the one about how he became a writer: he saw a batter hit a home run and suddenly knew he could write a novel, so he did. 

For a writer who tends to keep his history and personal life kind of guarded, these glimpses into Murakami becoming a writer were really interesting for me.  I mean, there is the Murakami I know from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, but on a level of where he comes from and what aspects of his life led to his becoming a writer, he can be kind of a mystery.  Here, he talks about owning a jazz club, the way his life was before he became a novelist.  In his non-fiction, you can kind of see which parts of him have entered into characters and how his mind works.

I liked this book for the thoughts on writing much more than the thoughts on running, and I can see why Murakami chose to use one as a metaphor for the other.  Writing is a solitary activity that requires more endurance than talent: it's a frustrating occupation, and you need to practice every day if you don't want to burn out quickly.  I agree with him when he says there are writing muscles, that you can work to strengthen these day after day.

I'm still on the fence about runners; after all, I didn't expect Murakami to change my mind about the entire sport.  But I do feel that this book gave me a deeper look at Murakami the runner, and Murakami the writer, who were the same person all along.  And it made me want to start an exercise regimen, because I could use that kind of structure and working out daily would be good for my overall health.

But it won't be running.