Compendium

Benjamin Button
So, there I was last night, doing some online banking or something, and Liz was fast forwarding some commercials to get to the meat of the latest John Stewart (we videotape the previous night’s shows—no tivo for us) when she stops at a commercial. The commercial quick cuts to some pop song I’ve never heard and features more production value than your average Coke commercial (although you’d be shocked at the price tags for those babies). I sit mesmerized at the breadth of the thing. What the hell is…oh, it’s a preview for Benjamin Button, the new David Fincher movie. Or the new Brad Pitt movie, depending on your preference. It’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, of all things. But the trailer makes it look grandiose, epic.

Here's another trailer to the movie (not the one I caught on TV):


I used to go see every movie that came out. Every Friday night I’d head over to the Orleans Cinema on the Cape and check out the latest lame-brained comedy, monster movie, or thriller, no matter what it was. I may not have even heard of the movie, the reviews not having made my little outlying burg two hours from the nearest major city. Today I just can’t see every movie that comes out. Physically or fiscally. There are too many movies. Too few art house cinemas. Just too much product.

So, I’m admittedly intrigued by this Benjamin Button movie, based on a few things. No, I won’t see a movie based solely on a trailer. But, it will focus my attention to take a closer look. As a filmmaker, David Fincher has a singular style and is drawn to particular types of material that often align with my interests as a movie goer. His movies are always beautifully rendered slabs of celluloid magic. His attention for detail and for the craft of storytelling is pretty enviable. So, you sort of know what you’re in for when you see his movies. I will probably go see this movie. I’ve read an early review (Variety is a good source) and it was mainly positive. I don’t go to a movie based solely in a positive review either, but when there are so many movies to choose from, yes, a litany of predominantly good reviews may send me to a movie faster than an army of bad ones.

Benjamin Button comes out Christmas Day. I’ll let you know what I think. Maybe I’ll even read the Fitzgerald story, too.

2666 on Bestseller List. Savage Sold Out.
With Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 perched on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller lists (33 the last I checked) it is apparently affecting sales of his other work, specifically the already successful The Savage Detectives. Frequenting bookstores this past weekend, I discovered that at least two book stores were sold out of the title. You’d think these savvy booksellers would have seen the interest in ancillary Bolaño some distance off and made preparations. Note to booksellers: Get Bolaño savvy. It just makes good business sense.

Harvard Book Store Warehouse
Discount bookstores must be the shit these days. I visited my third one in the past month or so. Sunday I drove into Somerville in not-so-bad holiday shopping traffic to brave the Harvard Book Store Warehouse. Harvard Book Store is wonderful independently-owned bookstore in Harvard Square, not affiliated with the university as far as I know. They carry new and used books along with an impressive, thoughtful selection of remainders.

The warehouse version of their store has remainders of every stripe (including some great deals on art and photography books), plus stacks upon rows upon more stacks of used books, including dollar aisles and rare used books. I admit I only bought one book. A gift. For 50 cents. I was ashamed to check out with one piddly book, but the checkout girl told me she and her cohorts had been reading the book out loud all morning and deemed it hilarious. Also, a bell should ring every time somebody buys the book. She thought. That made me feel better.

Note: this may have been a special event. Not sure their warehouse is open to the public on a regular basis. In case you were ready to run off to Porter Square to track them down.

Here's a shot of their Harvard Square location:

Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit
I know there are millions of blogs all over this series of tubes and wires. But I’d like to take this opportunity to interrupt your busy holiday shopping schedule to tout a new voice on the scene. A new prolific blogger whose insight into the daily plights of the average (and maybe in his case, not so average--I mean this in a good way) college student is cast in bold, shiny relief for all to witness. When you need a smile, when you need proof that kids these days aren’t just gun toting, drug-snorting thugs, cleavage-baring billboards of vapidity, or super-nerd video game txting fools, tune in to the gentle musings of one Neil Everett and his Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit. Sure he’s my nephew, but I think you’ll agree that his daily epistles will wrest a smile from your weary mug or make you mist up reading his cutting, spot-on insight into life’s bittersweet moments that maybe only a kid today can make you feel nostalgic for.

2666, the New Novel by Roberto Bolaño

A few months ago I finished reading the English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. I’m a slow reader, plus I read more than one book at a time, but the time expense was worth the enviously dizzying, meandering, and generally satisfying result. The Savage Detectives doesn’t feature any detectives in the classic Merriam-Webster definition. Instead its pages are populated by hundreds of Latin American poets, wannabes, groupies, and hangers on. This mammoth book’s plot, if you can call it that, is a fractured, voluminous story of renegade Chilean poets who start an extremist poetry movement. These are young men and women using poetry to rebel and grow up and run off and make love and slowly or quickly die. The book reads like a progression of short stories, all connected, sometimes tenuously, by a core of poets that realizes the only way to speak out against repression in 1970s Central America is to kick in the teeth of established literary greats like Pablo Neruda.


The Savage Detectives shouts to the rooftops in a style that reminds me of sitting around a huge campfire with a hundred guests telling their stories of events surrounding the core poets. Imagine writing a book with a hundred different voices, spanning decades, and covering thousands of miles. Bolaño wrote like a man on fire. Which he sort of was: he died in 2003 at age 50. In the 1990s he knew he was a goner and he pushed his poetry aside and feverishly ground out short stories and novels. English translators are still catching up.

Just before he died, Bolaño completed what many critics are calling his greatest accomplishment, 2666, a novel published this week in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I don't have my copy yet, but it sounds sprawling, split into five sections that, from what I’ve read, could be five separate novels and is “…based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, in the Sonora desert near the Texas border.” It also no doubt touches upon many themes struck in Detectives (and it should be said, his short stories and other novels): literature as journey, as country, as a political ideal; sex and violence; spiritual longing; the search for home/country.

Adding to the mystique is that, while getting a proper release in hardback, it’s also being published concurrently as a set of three paperbacks. In a sleeve!


I love packaging: if the book looks unique, I’ll consider buying it based on physical merits. Plus 2666 is big. 900 pages big. I love big books. Well, the idea of them. I love picking them up and walking around the bookstore with them. And if I buy them I will certain start them and maybe the story will hold my interest enough to get to the end (often by page 200 you pretty much get the idea of any novel) and then I can let it sit like a trophy on my shelf. That’s what happened with DFW’s Infinite Jest; I never got past page 200. But I will come back to that one day. Promise.

2666 sounds irresistibly nuts and maybe groundbreaking and possibly disappointing and wonderfully huge. It’s one book, it’s three books, it’s one book. I guess the idea is to read it and find out. Coming so fresh off of The Savage Detectives I’m not sure I’m ready for another heady, heavy dose of Bolaño. But one thing is certain; I won’t be able to stay away for long.