Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

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That thing where I haven’t seen a movie in forever? I aim to remedy that. In fact, I’ve already made a bit of a start. Of course, my start was kind of unexpected, in that I went to see a movie based on a character from Da Ali G Show, which I thoroughly disliked the one time I watched it. But it was a group friend outing, and I haven’t been to anything in so long that I went for it. Plus, the previews have amused me from time to time. Plus plus, I read a review of it by someone I trust, which let me know that despite the majority of the people on film not being aware it’s fake, there is still a coherent plot during which characters grow and change. Well, okay, that might be taking things a bit far, but the plot is coherent.

Our hero, Kazakhstani newsman Borat Sagdiyev, has been sent by his country to America to film a documentary that will use us as an example to teach them how to become a great country that can overcome its problems (economic, social, and Jew). Along the way he meets a lot of people, demonstrates that they are perhaps even more racist and sexist than he is, and falls in love. Except, of course, that the joke is on all the people he encounters, because he’s only pretending, and they really, really aren’t. It’s a weird movie, in that I spent equal time laughing and cringing, sometimes at myself for laughing. I’m going to steal the metaphor that sold me on the movie, though, as it explains it better than anything new I could come up with. Sacha Baron Cohen is playing a game, with his subjects and with the audience. It is possible to win the game, but only by either rejecting most everything that he claims to stand for, or else by understanding the joke and spending most of your time laughing (but still cringing, a little, for the sake of humanity) at the people who are losing the game. And my word, how easy it was for him to find people willing to step up and lose big. And without even the excuse of not knowing they were on film at the time.

In any case, I can easily see why it’s not for everyone, as nearly all of the humor has the potential to make you uncomfortable. But Borat the character is endearing despite how awful he is, and unlike most of the folks whose path he crosses, he even seems to come out of his journey a slightly better person. As, one hopes, will most of the people leaving the theater.

Agyar

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The most awesome thing about travelling, aside from the destinations tending to be filled with people that make me happy (because, apparently I am a traveller for visits vastly more than I am a traveller to see new things; I don’t think of that as a bad thing, because while I may eventually fail to see the world (but I may not! it remains to be seen (ha! I just got that)), I’m also pretty much guaranteed that every trip will be a good trip; but I digress), is that it leaves me with far more time to read than I have in my normal life. Mostly while sitting around in airports and on airplanes at way too early in the morning, it must be admitted, so I also use some of that time to sleep. Nevertheless, between long works hours, good things on TV, and moving (mostly moving, and I am so very, very ready to be done, I can tell you), I’m left with only wee amounts of time to read, usually at lunch or right before falling asleep. So that airport time is pretty awesome indeed.

As a result, I’ve already finished another, albeit short, book. It’s by Stephen Brust, so you’d think it would be Dzur, but I keep forgetting to look for it in the used bookstore, and I frankly have too many books in my pile to justify buying it new right now. (That’s probably not true, and I bet that as soon as I remember to go to Amazon and snag Lisey’s Story, I’ll get Dzur too. Or I could go back and reread the rest of that series first, but that seems unlikely right now too. So. It is a quandary. And man, can I not stay focussed today. My employer must be thrilled.) Anyway, what it actually is is Agyar.

It’s interesting. The eponymous John Agyar is writing the story out on a typewriter just for the sake of writing it. He has no particular audience when he starts, although he occasionally acquires one; mostly the ghost with whom he shares his house, an ex-slave named Jim. (I spent a fair amount of time wondering, incidentally, whether I’m meant to believe we’re referring to Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, here. Ultimately, I could not decide either way.) He is chronicling his short-term stay in suburban Collegiate-Anywhere, Ohio just for the sake of doing so. It’s not that he’s an unreliable narrator so much as that he doesn’t present information that he takes for granted, only information that is novel or exciting to himself. I don’t think I’m going too far, therefore, to say that there’s a fair amount of information that is left for the reader to unravel from context.

So, that’s how the story is presented. As for what it’s about? It’s a combination of murder mystery, love story, and study of unhealthy power relationships. Nearly every character is in some way despicable, and nearly every character has the hope of and chance for redemption. So I guess what I’m saying is that it’s populated by, y’know, actual people. Which is not as common as it could be in the fantasy/sci-fi section of any given bookstore. Plus, the story was interesting and the prose quite good, which is not as common as it could be in the general fiction section of any given bookstore. My point here is ‘yay’.

Watchmen

And so I continue through my list of genre greats. I avoided reviews of stuff while I was reading these, because I’ve mostly been able to not spoil myself on any given comic up to now, and it would be pretty awesome to not do so now that I’m actually reading lots of them. But I’m pretty sure that any random review of Alan Moore’s Watchmen will tell you that it’s a seminal masterpiece, or a watershed moment for the genre, or some other such reviewer-speak for ‘I liked it; now, you must also like it’. So, I’m going to cut to the chase: I liked it. I am enlightened enough to know that my tastes are not universal, for some inexplicable reason, so I will not proceed to tell you must also like it. But you probably will.

Now is where a weekend of debauchery is causing me to struggle to remember what kinds of things I can say about it. In short, it’s an alternate history where the comic book heroes of the late 1930s caused real people to start donning masks and outfits and engaging in enlightened vigilantism. Which was all well and good until the second generation of costumed heroes in the 1960s changed the world in drastic ways; by 1977, nearly all of them had been outlawed. Now, in 1985, the world hovers on the brink of catastrophe and, as ever, only the heroes can save the day. The problem being, most have retired; one still operates due to his uncompromising moral code, despite being more wanted by the law than most of the criminals he continues to take down. And of the two who are still government-sanctioned, one has just been murdered. The most important question being, was it random, or was it part of a far-reaching plot to neutralize any and all of the heroes who might yet be willing to step in and stop the clock before proverbial midnight?

Okay, I’m forced to admit that wasn’t short. And yet I’ve barely scratched the surface. That’s because the book is about almost everything: the relationships among heroes, of course, and between heroes and the public they serve or menace (depending upon who you ask); from where power most justly derives, and to where (“Who watches the watchmen?”); whether governments or lone vigilantes, either one, can justly use the power they have rightly or wrongly acquired; and whether it is permissible to sacrifice the few to save the many, at both the macro and micro level. Less thematically, it’s about how close to the brink of nuclear war we really were in the 1980s, and about noble last charges, and about allegorical pirates. In the words of a certain pirate in the current popular consciousness that, when taken allegorically themselves, very nearly fit: “You’re off the map. Here there be dragons.” And as much as I really approve of maps, the most interesting things happen when off them.

The Knight

Hard to believe, but true: I actually haven’t done anything in the past month or so. Well, okay, completely untrue. I’ve done lots of stuff in the past month or so. But they’ve all involved being at work a lot or hanging around the house catching up on my TV watching (alas, not reviewed here; but you should be watching Veronica Mars) while my house guy makes various improvements or moving stuff from my storage unit to my house and unpacking and sorting and cleaning and the like. What I haven’t done is play more than about 10 hours of video game total, or watch any movies, or finish more than one book.

Luckily, I did finish that one book, earlier in the week, and that means I get to be here and talk about it. A long time ago, we used… no, that’s wrong. A long time ago, I was in a book club in San Jose. It met for (I want to say) two books. But one of them was the first part of a Gene Wolfe series, the Book of the New Sun. And although I can remember few or none of the plot elements at this particular moment, I distinctly remember liking the main character, the setting, and the prose. A lot. So I’ve had this low-grade interest in Wolfe ever since. And now, I have finally exercised that by reading the first of his most recent pair of books, The Knight.

In what is apparently a common theme of Wolfe’s writing, the eponymous knight is a first-person narrator of dubious reliability. Despite his size, strength, and apparent wisdom, he is in reality a young boy (no older than teenaged) who wandered off unsupervised one day, Alice-style, and found himself in a fantastical (and apparently multi-dimensional) medieval world; and who, a short time later, found himself grown to adult size via enchantment. So, like any boy probably would, Able determines to become a knight and seek adventure and the favor of a lady.

And now, an undetermined period of time later, he appears to have found a way to communicate with his older brother back in America. The story is entirely his very long letter to that brother. Unfortunately, Able still has the mind of a child. He presents information haphazardly and out of order, often whenever it occurs to him without respect for the narrative flow. What he finds important is not always what the reader would, and he puts his trust and faith misguidedly at times. The result is a mish-mash of fact and speculation and almost certainly outright fiction, too. (I mean, internally fiction.)

I say all this like it bothers me. It really did not, though. Sure, it’s a little bit harder to read and work out exactly what’s going on, but I’ve always gotten something out of puzzling out events and peoples’ motivations and so on. It’s like history; it can’t always be clean and orderly and straightforward, because history (and books) are populated by humans who are flawed, wicked, stupid, and often many of these at once. Unlike history, it’s also rife with metaphor, allusion, and dreamlike fairy tale prose. I can dig it.

Preacher: Until the End of the World

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When last we saw our hero, preacher Jesse Custer, he was on his way back to Texas to follow up some leads on the whereabouts of God, who to Jesse’s way of thinking owes him an explanation or three. But if there’s one thing that can get in the way of a perfectly good spiritual quest, it’s family business…

I said that unless something went horribly wrong, I’d be buying more of this series. I can say with a great deal of assurance that something has gone horribly right. Until the End of the World, the second volume in the Preacher series, ratchets up the sex and the violence and the fiery theological debate, and adds in family themes with depth that would feel right at home in a Gaiman comic and a love story that could measure up to anything written by S. Morgenstern. Can I hear an Amen?

Also, I’m really curious to discover what Skwid was referring to by conspiracy theories. So yeah, I’ll be ordering more of these as soon as I can feasibly do so, I think. In the meantime, still a couple of entries in the gift pile yet to go.

Xombies

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Here’s what makes zombies work for me. They are the perfect mixture of two of my favorite subgenres of fiction: horror and global catastrophe. There are bits and pieces of specifics, but that’s the lion’s share of the appeal, right there. The fact is, I get a childlike glee out of both the idea of an empty world and the idea of an unstoppable plague of the undead. One presumes that my actual reaction to such events would be, at the least, more sober and thoughtful. It remains to be seen!

The point of all that being that I’ve found a book that breaks with all previous reader conventions on my part. Xombies is the story of the end of the world at the hands of all women of childbearing age, who all at the same time became blue of skin and started to perform the function for which zombies are second-best known: killing everyone within the reach of their arms and replicating themselves. And it is the story of the aftermath, the struggle for survival of dozens of military men tasked with saving civilization and the hundreds of boys who managed to come along for the ride. And of course it is the story of our narrator, a seventeen year old girl who, thanks to a medical condition, is unable to menstruate and is therefore immune to the initial phase of the disease. (Nobody, of course, is immune to the methods by which it is spread.)

There are layers upon layers of depth to the story. The point that only menstruating women initiated the disease was not lost on me; neither was the bitter irony of the narrator’s surname being Pangloss. Inevitably, I skipped by many of the layers, because, English degree or not, I’m a pretty simple guy at heart, and I mostly wanted to see how the world ended and how our heroes survived it. I’d probably consider going back and reading it again sometime in the near future with an eye on plumbing the depths more fully, except, as I said, it broke my conventions for this genre.

At no point, from the first few chapters through the climax, was I filled with childlike glee at the end of the world. Instead, I was filled with the thick, choking oppression of an actual world’s ending. The sense of things winding down, of people losing purpose and hope hand-in-hand, of the inherently contradictory senselessness of the situation: all of these things accompanied me throughout the book. Having gotten an impression of what the end of the world would really feel like, I find that I prefer my childlike glee. So I probably won’t read it again anytime soon after all. It was good, but not spectacular enough to overcome the unpleasant feeling of reality.

Preacher: Gone to Texas

When I received all of these graphic novels, it was in response to my thinking aloud over a period of time as to how I have so little grounding in especially the history and high points of the comics universe, despite knowing pretty well what’s going on in any given movie. So, I got some old stuff as well as some landmark entries. It could be that the Preacher series is such a landmark, but it could also be that my fascist friend was simply tickled at the idea of a violent theological epic playing out in my home state.

Whatever the case, Gone to Texas, the first volume in the Preacher series, is an excellent book. A Romeo and Juliet story on a slightly larger scale than Verona results in a small town preacher with a murky past given power that is on the same cosmological scale as God’s own, or so it seems for now. Together with his ex-girlfriend and an Irish fellow with an aversion to tanning, he starts on a quest to find God and ascertain why He has abandoned His creation to the forces that have affected him so drastically, and which most recently have unleashed an unstoppable killer to end him for good.

The story is by turns horrific and hilarious, amoral and yet with an unshakeable sense of justice that nevertheless allows for the unlikelily absurd. And best of all, there’s no question as to whether you want to know what’s going to happen next from issue to issue, and frankly from page to page. After the trouble I had following the Dark Knight, I was pleased at the skill that must have gone into making each page chapter-like in its self-containedness. Not to mention that the art is pretty traditionally interpreted as well. Which it should be, because it allows the gruesomeness to be viscerally felt instead of disguised by the stylistic art that’s present in so many other graphic novels I’ve read.

I only have two of these, and I think there are nine in the series. Unless something goes drastically wrong with the second volume, I’m going to have to buy the rest of these and see how it turns out.

Blue Moon

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I’m not sure what happened, here. I’d swear I waited longer than a month or so between the vampire porn this time. And yet, the evidence suggests I finished the last one no later than the beginning of August. Perhaps it’s some kind of compulsion. Because I know, I know I was going to wait longer, and then I thought I had. I’d still think I had, if the evidence wasn’t right in front of me. All I’m saying is, this can’t be a good sign.

Anyhow, I read Blue Moon. One thing good I can say for it is that the plot was vastly improved over the last one. Although aspects of it were a bit predictable, I definitely wanted to find out what was going on and how it would all end. Another thing I can say for it, which may as well be classified as good, is that it really lends itself in visuals to a comic format. Now, sure, I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels lately, so I may bias in that direction. But I haven’t noticed it with any other books, plus the art style in my head does not match the art style in any of the graphic novels I’ve been reading. There may have been a third good thing. If I remember it, I’ll probably edit these lines out and replace them with the thing. But don’t hold your breath.

The plot, then, which I have deemed good: an unscrupulous and wealthy fellow is trying to acquire a piece of land for what will no doubt turn out to be nefarious reasons. Unfortunately for him, a post-grad research team is observing a tribe of peaceful trolls with sentient characteristics that live on the land. Even more unfortunately for him, one of the post-grads is the werewolf ex-fiance of our perpetual necromantic heroine, Anita Blake. So when his tactics to remove the research team from the area (so he can dispose of the land as he sees fit) go beyond the ‘Pretty Please’ phase, he’ll no doubt discover what a mistake it was to mess with anyone that Anita feels a tie to.

As for the bad stuff, well, it was basically everything that occurs in and around the plot but isn’t directly related to it. For one thing, there is no more porn bloat. This is actual porn. Sure, Ms. Blake has the excuse of a vengeful spirit inhabiting some portion of her psyche for actively seeking a hard lay from anyone close to her (including, in one memorable event, an entire werewolf pack). But that only excuses her. The book, on the other hand, has none. Along the same track but even worse, through her ignorance, the audience is provided with exposition illuminating BDSM terminology. I really fear for what will happen in the next book, since there was no payoff in this one. (I mean, people can live their lives as they wish, and I don’t judge, nor do I confirm or deny my own opinion on the topic. All I’m saying is, it does not make for compelling literature.) And we’re informed that Jean-Claude (the main vampire of the series) gains power through the sexual pleasure of people around him. (No payoff and correspondingly more fear for the future on this one, too.) Worst of all, though, Anita has graduated to full-blown Mary Sue status.

You know, I say that’s what’s worst of all, but it isn’t. If it was just the necromancy stuff, I could see it as growing powers where each step along the series made logical sense. But the werewolf stuff, in addition to appearing without much logic involved, doesn’t really add anything to the stories that’s at all necessary. This book could drop about a hundred pages to be as long as the first one in the series, and it would be much better as a result. So the worst part isn’t the Mary Sue thing, it’s that there’d still be a story without it, and not only that, a fairly good one. Instead, Anita seems to live in a consequence-free world where her biggest problem is whether one or the other of her boyfriends will be jealous when she has sex with someone other than him. She can stop anyone around her from dying, kill anyone in her way, and nobody seems to mind or expect much different.

And yet, God help me, we all know I’ll have read the next one by November at the latest. What is wrong with me?

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

61H8BOtqAbLThrough chronological coincidence, my next comic entry is an excellent choice to follow the previous one. Having seen where the Batman got his start, The Dark Knight Returns gives me a chance to see where he ended up. And where he ended up isn’t pretty.

One Robin, Boy Wonder has left him and a second has died in his arms. He has been retired for ten years, due to a nebulous agreement that retired or co-opted the other superheroes at the same time (save for Superman, who is now employed by the US Government). Gotham is overrun with crime, filled with gangs of teenagers who own the streets and can make and carry out threats at will. Commissioner Gordon is facing mandatory retirement, and among most of the talking heads on TV, the rehabilitation into society of such criminal masterminds as Two-Face and the Joker are cause for celebration at the success of the system rather than horror and fear at its failure.

Whether because of the declining morality of the youth population, because of guilt over his involvement in Harvey Dent’s (that is, Two-Face’s) inability to cope with his freedom and subsequent return to villainhood, or simply because he doesn’t feel like an entire man without the Bat, the re-costumed Bruce Wayne hits this socio-political climate like a thunderbolt, taking on the gangs, old enemies and old friends alike, condemned by cartoonish liberals for what he is doing to criminals and by cartoonish conservatives for what he is doing to law and order, and joined at an opportune moment by a new Robin. It’s a very raw take on an old man’s unstoppable crusade against everyone who brings society down instead of building it up.

Being raw, though, it does have its flaws. The stories are held together by the world around them, but seem pretty episodic in nature on their own. The art, while excellently frenetic, occasionally lends itself to being difficult to follow. It’s hard to really like any of the characters on a consistent basis (with the exceptions of Gordon and Robin). But flawed or not, it has the power of its rawness, and I’m not a bit surprised that the Batman mythos since this work has owed far more to it than to anything that came before, outside of those initial episodes that first set the character down on cheap pulp. (And which, frankly, were a lot like Frank Miller’s vision in this book. It’s much easier to imagine a straight line between the two graphic novels I’ve read that doesn’t go through Adam West than one that does.)

Also: as you’d probably expect, the Joker (newly revived from catatonia at the news that he once more has a nemesis worth committing senseless murder for) steals every scene he’s in, whether it be praising the media for being his own personal fan club, highlighting all of his criminal activity on the evening news so he doesn’t need to keep track of it himself or whether offhandedly promising to kill everyone within sight of his face and being laughed at for, well, joking (he was not, of course). It’s easy to make an argument that the Batman needs a Joker, an enemy that the forces of law cannot hope to cope with, that justifies his vigilantism. This story makes the far more compelling argument that the Joker needs a Batman; because, if there’s no chance of failure, is there really a point in proceeding on the basis of sociopathy alone?

[Late-breaking full disclosure: I actually read this in the Absolute format, but it contained two books, of which I still in 2015 have not read the second one. So it’s hard to produce a link and image for only half of a book, much less one that is by now long out of print.]

Homeward Bound

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Ironic that after my complaints about the editing of Nuklear Age, the next book I should read (well, sort of next) would be an advance uncorrected proof. (Also ironic that despite being “advance”, it’s actually for a book that’s two years old.) Most ironic of all, though, is how very few incorrect edits were present in Homeward Bound, the (as far as I know) last book in Turtledove’s alternate history series where aliens attacked the Earth just as World War II was picking up steam. How very few when compared to the purportedly completed and publishable Nuklear Age, that is.

But enough about that unpleasantness. There’s plenty enough unpleasantness to be had here. Which is odd, because I was looking forward to the book, and throughout it I was eager to know what was going to happen. It’s not like I can say that there was no ultimate resolution in the ongoing cultural (and sometimes military) struggle between humans and the Race. I mean, there wasn’t, but in the acceptable ‘I’ve shown you enough that you can draw your own conclusions’ sense. The same is true for many of the individual character story arcs. So you’d think I’d be happy.

I guess my complaints are all about the execution. There’s a fairly large spoiler on the inside cover that meant my perceptions of the first part of the book were colored by waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since it didn’t until three-quarters through (which is what makes me call it a large spoiler instead of a small one), it seemed like I was killing time waiting for the climax. But then, after the big event, it seemed like I was killing time waiting for the fallout to become apparent. Since it did become apparent but only over an accumulation of data, I’m willing to call that my own fault for being impatient.

Even leaving aside my pacing complaints, though, there were still other issues. There weren’t enough character viewpoints to spread the story around, although I think that ties into pacing too. I came back to characters so quickly (relative to Turtledove’s same formula in his other books I’ve read) that I expected more to have happened by the time I got back. But it wasn’t really a Things Happen kind of book, so much as an exploration of the culture clash between two alien species. Which is also not what I was expecting.

Another unexpected thing is how I keep forgiving the book and blaming myself for its shortcomings. So, I’ll close on a note that I know wasn’t my bad. Among the aliens, there’s a fairly amusing Colombo rip-off who’s trying to get to the bottom of an illicit drug trade. Except for the amusingness, the subplot went absolutely nowhere and seemed to have no consequences for any individual character nor for the story as a whole. The amusing part would have been enough to forgive that if it had only appeared once and faded back, but it was still an issue through the penultimate chapter of the book, and then, nothing. So, that’s lame. And the pacing problems were too, even if they were directly caused by my expectations. Because books should entertain me correctly, dammit.

I’ll certainly keep reading Turtledove, as I have no reason to expect this to be a new direction for everything he writes. But I’m glad this was the last of this series, because I’m not sure I’d read the next one, if there were going to be more. And now I don’t have to wonder what I’m missing or (more likely) cave and read it anyway, despite expecting not to enjoy myself. So you see.

If I had to guess, I’d say the failure of the book is that it was an alternate future, which is to say science fiction. What makes him so good at alternate history is his understanding of actual history. In this case, he had to wing it, and that’s probably what kept the story so static compared to the other ones, where he knew what had to happen next simply because it would make the most historical sense.

Or maybe it mostly was just me after all. But probably it’s the other thing.