The Little Stranger

I just finished reading Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Little Stranger, and I'm pleased to report that it's something of a return to form for my favorite contemporary novelist.

Not that I thought The Night Watch was a bad novel. Quite the contrary, in fact. It's just that after her first three novels, with their engaging narrators and fascinating fusion of the genre conventions of the Victorian era with insights into elements of Victorian culture that the Victorians themselves would never have discussed (for instance, unless Silas Marner or Romola turn out vastly different than I'm expecting, I don't think George Eliot ever gave us an informed look into the wide, wonderful world of Victorian pornography), it was a little jarring to read a very modernistic tale of WWII era England delivered by an utterly dispassionate 3rd-person narrator. I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments of Rohan's:

I would also appreciate some exposition, a thicker layer of narrative commentary, even some philosophizing! Waters's touch is so light that I find it hard to be sure what she thinks is important about the moment she has chosen, or why she develops the kinds of characters and linkages she does.

Where Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and especially Fingersmith all draw the reader in to their richly imagined worlds, The Night Watch almost seems determined to hold you at arm's length. Again, it's not a bad novel; in fact, it's an excellent read. I'd certainly rate it higher than Tipping the Velvet, which, for all that it's a fun read, is more than a little overstuffed and less than a lot focused. But, all the same, three years after I first read them, I can still intimately remember the plots of her first three novels. Hell, I can still shut my eyes and imagine myself into their settings, as though I were a fly on the wall watching Sue's first departure Mrs. Sucksby's home, her final showdown with Gentleman, or (*blush!*) her first awkward lovemakings with Maud. I read The Night Watch more recently than all three of those, and all that springs to mind when I think of the novel is it's reverse-chronological structure and one particularly squirm-inducing scene involving a botched abortion.

So I opened up The Little Stranger with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I was certainly expecting a great read, but would it be a great read like The Night Watch, or a GREAT read like her previous novels? Turns out it's GREAT. Not on the level of Fingersmith, but certainly a cut above Tipping the Velvet and maybe even Affinity, to which it bears the most similarities.

Waters doesn't return to the Victorian settings of her early works: we're dealing again with post-War England. What she does return to is a heartfully (my spellchecker claims that's not a word, but fuck it, I'm coining it) rendered first-person narrative that draws you in to the emotional lives of its characters, all the while confronting you with more interesting questions to ponder than "are we going backwards in time for a reason?" and "why is the narrator so bored with its own story?" Here some thorny, fascinating thematic issues are presented without the aseptic subtlety of The Night Watch. Hell, without any subtlety at all: Waters probably could have cut ten pages worth of narrative asides from her final draft had she simply opened the novel with a disclaimer announcing "This is a novel that considers the complex thoughts and feelings people of both the upper and lower social classes have to the stratified history of English society, and how those thoughts and feelings are upended by the rapid social change of the post-War era." I don't mean that as a criticism, mind you. While Waters' chosen theme is very, very obvious, it is skilfully used to inform every aspect of the book, from the possibly supernatural "ghost story" elements of the plot, to the motivations and aspirations of all the beautifully realized characters.

At the same time, Waters' outright abandons the lesbian themes of her previous work. We're dealing here with a straight male narrator, surrounded by a handful of well-developed straight supporting characters, both male and female (well... one of these women might be gay, but the thought certainly never occurs to the other characters, or especially the narrator). And, being a red-blooded young straight male, it's a relief to be able to report that I find Waters' ability to weave a compelling narrative in no way diminished by a lack of hot lesbian sex scenes.

To sum up: this is a well-crafted, occasionally suspenseful, definitely gothic, possibly ghostly novel that makes up for any occasional lapse in the momentum its gothic narrative by simultaneously telling a compelling human story about some fascinating characters. This is a great novelist at work, people. I don't really care what your usual literary tastes may be: do yourself a favor and pick it up as soon as it hits paperback.

B.I.G. and Me: Things Done Changed

Banger, who I'm told by XXL was a member of Biggie's posse, Junior M.A.F.I.A., said of his mentor that he "absorbed his whole life;" that when anything happened to him he'd "analyze it and absorb it and suck it up and then make a song about it."

Ready to Die, his debut album, is riddled with social observations, but they aren't phrased overtly in the way the commentary on a song like 2pac's "I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto" is. Where Pac would takes a more global view with a line like "I see no changes/All I see is racist faces," Biggie maintains a street-level perspective: "I hear you mother fucker's talk about it/But I stay seein' bodies with the motherfuckin' chalk around it."

The opening lines of "Things Done Changed," the first song on Ready to Die, illustrate Banger's assessment of Biggie beautifully. "Things Done Changed" is not the first track on the album. True to Sean Combs' love of excess (for the uninitiated, that's Puff Daddy, or P. Diddy, or Diddy, CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment and Ready to Die's producer), the album opens with a nicely constructed audio collage that introduces you to Big's world: a medley of song samples and urban ambiance that takes you from Big's birth in the comparatively peaceful Harlem of the early 1970s to the then-present urban hellhole of the early '90s. Like I said, it's nicely constructed, but you have to wonder why anyone thought it was necessary when Biggie opens the album up with:

"Remember back in the days? When niggas had waves,

Gazelle shades and corn braids,

Pitchin' pennies, honeys had them high top jellies

Shootin' skelly', motherfuckers was all friendly,

Loungin' at the barbecues, drinkin' brews,

With the neighbourhood crews, hangin' on the avenues,

Turn your pages to nineteen-ninety-three,

Niggas is gettin' smoked, G: believe me."

Few novelists can paint a picture for you with so few words. I'll tell you right now, I do not have any memory of back in the days, when African-Americans had waves. But with just seven lines (or approximately seven lines... obviously there's some degree of arbitrary editing on my part to put a verbal art form into written words), half of which focus on nothing more than fashion trends, Biggie puts you in a sepia-toned idealization of a thriving community and subculture. Your brain almost wants to block out the harsh street beat he's rapping over and replace it with some Motown. And then at the end of the stanza, with a single line, he flips the script on you: this isn't a song about nostalgia; it's a song about the horrifying contrast between what once was, and what is now.

From there, the song stays focused on the urban blight of post-crack Harlem, presenting a street-smart and brutally blunt assessment of the social mores of Big's mileu ("Instead of a Mack 10, he tried scrappin'/Slugs in his back and that's what the fuck happens") that can resonate even with those who have no personal experience of those conditions (like me!).

At the same time, Big crafts a deceptively broad social comment, that ranges from depicting the horrors of the endemic poverty that pushes people into a life of crime (Shit, it's hard bein' young/From the slums/Eatin' five cent gums/Not knowin' where your meal's comin' from"), to calling out the political establishment's apathy to the blight afflicting Harlem (the aforementioned "I hear you mother fuckers talk about it..."), to warming Republicans' hearts by refusing to absolve his own generation from at least a partial share in the responsibility for their situation ("Back in the day our parents used to take care of us/Look at 'em now, they even fuckin' scared of us"). And then at the end, he brings it all back to the personal, opining "shit, my Mom's got cancer in her breast/Don't ask me why I'm mother fuckin' stressed/Things done changed." Even in the midst of this social horror, the universal horrors of every day life go on.

Not too shabby for a single song from an artist who's never really gotten props for his political side.

Next up: we discuss "Gimme the Loot" and whether Biggie glorifies violence. And we make fun of my least favourite widely-respected music critic (who's that, you ask? Stick around and find out!).

B.I.G and Me

I know everyone says they have eclectic musical tastes, but they're all lying except for me. If I bought more CDs online, it would totally screw up the Amazon recommendation list: you'd go to buy a Snoop Dogg album, and it'd say "Customers who bought this also bought Rod Stewart's The Great American Songbook Vol. 3 and Jets To Brazil's Orange Rhyming Dictionary." And when I really love an artist, I buy all of their albums.

One big result of this is that I end up with a lot of albums that I don't listen to regularly because my tastes have moved on (my complete collection of Get Up Kids CDs doesn't really see a lot of play, for instance). I try not to be one of those people who constantly assumes that now is the moment where he's achieved real musical maturity and that those CDs he bought a year ago are kids' stuff now. I can pop in 24 Hour Revenge Therapy now and then, and I still quite enjoy a song like "Do You Still Hate Me?" even if that kind of naked emotional earnestness stopped being the main thing I looked for in music somewhere around grade 11. So I listen to an oddly broad range of music at any given time: a little jazz here, a little classical there, some pop-punk now and then, a whole lot of hip hop, etc.

But there are a select few artists for whom my love runs just as deep now as it did when I first encountered them. And since they are few, I make a point of, at least once a year, taking a couple of weeks to re-engage with their entire oeuvre. I think most of these tend to be bands with multiple writers, who have a large body of work and a great deal of musical and lyrical variety: the examples that spring to mind are They Might Be Giants (surprise! I'm a nerd), Barenaked Ladies (fuck you, they're massively underrated), and the Beatles (yeah, that's right. I like the Beatles. Deal with it).

So my abiding love of the work of Christopher Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G, aka Biggie Smalls, aka the Black Frank White sort of sticks out as unusual: not because he's a hip-hop artist (I love a lot of hip hop), but because he only released two albums in his all-too-brief career. When you can spend two weeks every few months listening to nothing but the work of a man who put out fewer than 45 tracks during his life, you know there must be a special connection there. And it runs pretty deep. I go on 2-4 Biggie kicks a year lately, and every single time I end up spending a lot of time feeling really, really upset about the fact that he's gone. And he's been gone for about 13 years. He was gone a few months before I first encountered his music. And it just kills me, because as much as I love the work he completed during his career, I feel very confident I'd have loved the work he would have done in the intervening years even more.

But it can be hard to explain this attachment to other people. What's the connection between a middle class white slacker/academic (slackademic, to coin a phrase!!! neologism!!!) who grew up on the mean streets of suburban Nova Scotia and a black dude from Harlem who came up during one of the most horrifying periods of urban blight in modern American history? What could his work possibly say to me to make me care about it so much? Shouldn't my main engagement with his work be to cluck my tongue and criticize it for glorifying misogyny and violence and crime and materialism? By all rights, if I'm going to feel this passionately about a rapper, it should be an alternative hip-hop artist, a Mos Def, a Kweli, a Jean Grae. And I love all three of those artists. But not the way I love Biggie. Why?

Well, I obviously think there's more to his work than the things obnoxious white music journalists fret about even as they call him one of the greatest MCs of all time. I think there's something wonderful about it. And to try to explain just what that something may be, I'm going to start my blog's first regular feature: B.I.G and Me. I'll go, track by track, through Biggie's body of work, and try to explain what it is that I think is just so damn special about it. I hope you'll come along with me even if you're skeptical. I think I can win you over. Or, rather, I think Biggie can.

So the first song in question shall be "Party and Bullshit," a single Biggie released before either of his albums. And I'm going to say very little about it. I don't have a strong attachment to the song. Almost nothing about what makes Biggie so great seems to me to be in the song. The flow, the rhyme schemes, the beat, the lyrics, and even the voice just aren't there yet. It's mainly of interest so that you can see how quickly he took things to a whole other level once Puff signed him to Bad Boy and he didn't have to split his focus between hustling and rhyming. So in lieu of a discussion for this one, I'm going to post this totally awesome mash-up with Miley Cyrus, and save my energy for the really important stuff (which, I happen to think, is almost every single track on both of his albums):



Next up: "Things Done Changed," the first track on Ready To Die.

This is Calcutta. Bohemia is dead.

I love musicals. Love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. Love 'em when they're mainstream, candy-coated, toothache-inducingly sweet confections like Hairspray. Love 'em when they're dark, serious, literate bloodbaths like Sweeney Todd. Or, at the very least, I love fat girls dancing and over-the-top violence. So I thought I'd take a look back at the very first musical I was ever intimately familiar with: Rent.

Even though an image of the poster for Rent actually appears next to the Miriam-Collins dictionary entry for the adjective "dated," criticizing the play's myriad flaws is an ever-timely endeavour, thanks to the constant presence of poorly-received film adaptations and poorly-received revival tours, all of which surprisingly continue to feature the increasingly grizzled original cast, who I believe are now in their mid-to-late 60s (it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because of the different sample sizes, but it's nonetheless interesting to note that the combined ages of the eight members of the original cast of Rent are now actually higher than those of the four CIA scientists who invented AIDS in the 1970s in the hopes of finally bringing down the Black Panthers).

But I digress. The point is that Rent is a musical that will leave a lasting impact on you the first time you see it, as long as you try really, really hard not to actually think about it. So it's fortunate for me that I first encountered the OBCR (Original Broadway Cast Recording, for those of you who lack my musical theatre pedigree) of Rent in the 11th grade, back when listening to Jimmy Eat World was a profound emotional experience and getting a hand job was a profound sexual experience. So even today, I can watch the Rent movie and actually feel a little bit touched now and then. It can put a smile on my face. And then it ends and all I can think about is how damn stupid it is.

Specifically, I'd like to set aside concerns like how the entire second act has no pacing or structure, or how a play so frequently noted for the ethnic and sexual diversity of its cast has two straight white guys as protagonists, and focus on how, for a play that at its heart is about about artists and their struggle to create, Rent has incredibly juvenile, poorly thought out views on art: views that I've encountered in the real world, and that I think are rather pernicious. And just to drive home the point that I'm a Serious Man With Serious Views On Art, I'll make some reference to Chekhov's The Seagull.

Rent tells the tale of Mark and Roger, two young Boho types living in New York in either the very late 80s or the very early 90s, their quirky minority friends, and their struggle to make it as artists while dealing with the ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. Mark, a filmmaker, and Roger, a musician, are both struggling with creative block. In fact, Roger has apparently never written a song. They spend the one night of the first act and the one year of the second act trying to make their respective grand artistic statements. A goal which they pursue primarily not by working hard on their craft, but by congratulating themselves for being poor and living in a rat-hole loft in a crumbling building.

Throughout Rent, emphasis is repeatedly placed on the notion that the main characters, mostly artists proudly living "La Vie Boheme," are inherently superior to their sellout friend Benny, who used to be just like them but now works for a CORPORATION. Owned by his soon to be father-in-law. A rich white man. Benny's black. Mark and Roger are white kids from the suburbs, whose parents leave messages on their answering machine in the first act promising money if they need it. They barely restrain themselves from spitting on Benny when they see him. They openly imply that he's an automaton doing the bidding of his soon-to-be-white-daddy. They deride him for trying to achieve financial security, when their own starving artist lifestyle is a phone call home away from ending if it ever gets too rough. It's more than a little bit tone deaf, though at least they refrain from actually calling him "Uncle Tom."

The conflict beautifully encapsulates the shortcomings of Jonathan Larson's conception of art (oh, right, did I forget to establish that the creator of Rent's name is Jonathan Larson?): simultaneously demonstrating an absurdly reverential view of the figure of the artist (being an artist makes you better than other people!) and the bizarre conception of what an artist is (basically, a poor person who doesn't play by society's rules).

The first act centers around the heroes (everyone but Benny) trying to stop Benny from evicting homeless people who are squatting in a building his company owns. Now, I'm a big ol' lefty, and I think the existence of homelessness is one of the great moral catastrophes of our society. But of the many crimes against the homeless that we're all somewhat implicated in, requiring a tent city to be moved to a different abandoned building than the one you own is just not even in the top ten.

Here's the kicker: Benny wants to use the building to build a community center for artists, a "state of the art, digital, virtual interactive studio" where artists can "do our work and get paid." Benny calls it a "cyber-center." If Benny's nice looking clothes weren't enough to tell you that this center is a sinister thing, the fact that it's "state of the art" and would allow artists to "get paid" should surely get the message across. Technophobia and willful poverty being essential traits of the artist.

Rent romanticizes the artist while presenting the view that being an artist isn't about creating works of art, it's about living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents values. Now, look: the walls, door frames, ceiling, window frames, and doors of my place are done up in a paint color I believe Color Your World calls "white-ish with lots of cracks and blemishes." My mother and father are decent, honest, hardworking people. So I can relate to the joys of living in a shitty apartment and rejecting your parents' values. But you won't hear me calling myself an artist until I've produced some works of art.

Rent's utter unconcern with the creation of art is beautifully underlined by the play's ending. Mark finishes his film and Roger finally writes his song. Mark's film happens to be a shaky, hand-held shot, soundless montage of two-second clips of his friends hanging out, edited together randomly (I've heard it derisively referred to as a home movie, but most home movies I've seen at least achieve coherence). Roger's song is literally the worst song in the play. It's odd. Larson poured himself into creating his works of art. But then, when he wrote a play about artists struggling to create, he gave no thought whatsoever to their creative processes or their results. He venerates the artist as an image rather than as an identity.

Not unlike Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. (See? Name-dropping Russian plays= instant Intellectual cred.) Konstantin, the protagonist and would-be artist, spends that whole play obsessing over his own notably terrible, defiantly non-mainstream play and congratulating himself for his superiority to actual writer Trigorin. He feels this sense of superiority because, even though Trigorin notably produces actual works of art (that even Konstantin begrudgingly admits are good), he doesn't spend all his time acting like an artist (he likes to fish, for instance, instead of sitting around agonizing about how to change the world with his art). The play makes this point quite beautifully, and even Konstantin seems to realize that he'll never actually be an artist due to his inability to create art (sadly, he expresses this by burning his unfinished manuscripts and then blowing his own head off). And yet, when we discussed this in seminar, the average classmate's comment went like this: "Of course Konstantin kills himself! It must be maddening for a true artist who rejects the conventions of society and the tastes of the masses to have to see someone who isn't even an artist like Trigorin succeed while he labors in obscurity!" That's why I said Rent's views on art are pernicious. Because they resulted in me being annoyed during an honours seminar.

So, to sum up: artists create art. Whether they do that while congratulating themselves for "riding your bike midday past the three-piece suits" and drinking "hand-crafted beers" is immaterial. No matter how much you venerate the figure of artist, no matter how superior you show him (or her!) to be to middle Americans, if your primary criteria for identifying who's an artist is a particular aesthetic/attitude, you're not celebrating art, you're demeaning it.