Chuck Palahniuk, �Haunted�
I remember when I first started this project, back when I was putting up around four reviews a week, Danny B asked if I could start posting the length of the book so he could figure out my page-per-minute ratio. I don�t remember what it was but I think it was somewhere between a page and a half to 2 and 3/4th a minute.
Of course, that was then. Now it takes me over a month to finish a novel that�s just over 400 pages.
There�s a reason. My crazy old girlfriend referred to the phenomena as �The Bookening.� She went into Graduate school, she explained, and she suddenly had so much to read that trying to find any time to read simply for pleasure never seemed feasible. And she used to read a lot, though still nowhere on the level that I did � she had to save time for psychotic episodes. Still though, I can relate, though I got out of Graduate school � I know enough already. I don�t have a case of The Bookening.
But I do have my job with the newspaper. And the duties of that job entail reading every bit of email, fax, and postal press release that comes in, typing them up, reading over what I wrote, then printing it out and reading it again, looking for a missing period or dropped letter within the 25 columns of broadsheet text.
That I can manage, but then I�m also responsible to read every other section in the newspaper. All the editors have to do this, though the calendar section (which is under my responsibility) is the only one that doesn�t have to get checked by other editors, presumably because they would quit if they had to read my section every week. Still, I find myself reading over every word of sections that I never read previously.
Take the food section. (Please?) I never bothered to read this except for the occasional first two paragraphs, because I didn�t care. I wasn�t interested in reading about some steak house on the North Shore with $45 entrees, because if I decided to go up to the North Shore, by the time I paid for the gas to get there I wouldn�t be able to afford eating.
And then there are the cover stories. We have a small rotating number of freelancers, and the majority of them write about what they�re interested in. The majority of them happen to be into things like fitness and yoga and vegetarianism. Previous to my employment, I never read any of these stories past the third paragraph. Now, I have to read every word. This Wednesday, the paper puts out its annual �Health and Wellness� issue. As you might expect, it�s full of people who espouse raw food diets, detoxification, sustainability and generally acting like a goddamn filthy hippy. I read about ten pages of this crap, making marks when needed and generally being in a rotten mood. By the time I finished reading the Health and Wellness issue, I wanted to punch somebody. A lot.
So you see, a good way to state my problem, I suppose, is to say I have a case of �The Wordening.�
The Wordening involves reading so many words, whether on a computer or in print, in such a compacted time frame for five days a week that your eyes melt and your head hurts and you find it impossible to concentrate on another written word, whether it be a book for pleasure, a menu in a restaurant, or a stop sign.
There are other things slowing down my consumption of books, of course. I used to show up to work at the bookstore about an hour early so I could go to the coffee shop around the corner, drink buttloads of coffee and read a hundred pages or so before starting work. Now my job starts too early to do that, and besides, there�s a coffee machine in the office. I didn�t have cable before and while that doesn�t really matter � I had cable in the apartment I lived in before I moved to Hawaii and still managed to be fairly consistent � but I learned about [adult swim] shortly before I left. I also had roommates at the time who refused to stop watching Cops or Golden Girls just so I could watch me 15 minutes of Harvey Birdman.
Now I have cable in my room, so I can get my [adult swim] fix. But that�s only a small programming block late at night, so there are still plenty of times where I could pull open a book and a beer and lean back on my bed, the same way I�ve been doing for at least a decade. And I still give it the old college try, except, you know, while not actually being in college. I�ll start reading, only to have my focus fade out after the first paragraph. So I�ll start again, but find I�m not reading for content, instead just looking for errors. I�ve been reading the same Molly Ivins book for the last five weeks, and I�m only a hundred pages into it. Forty-five of those pages were read today.
Really though, none of that is pertinent to this book, which I read before I started at the newspaper. But I still have another culprit, sucking up my time, which would be Netflix.
Netflix has taken over as the Sisyphus myth in my house, except that I don�t have to store all the unwatched movies in a corner of my room like I do with the unread books. There have been, however, lots of sleepless nights where I�m just trolling through genres, adding movie after movie to my queue, which now stands at just over 400 films. (Worse is that I�ve rated 1,400 films that I�ve seen, proving that one, I�m old, and two, I haven�t done anything meaningful with my time on this earth.)
If the people at Netflix who packaged outgoing movies actually spoke English, I�m sure they would be mighty confused by my choice in films. The average shipment has one serious drama or political documentary, one cartoon or cheesy horror film, and then something quirky like say, Northern Exposure. And I�ll find myself getting a lot of things that I know are going to be absolutely horrible. After 14 years, Blues Brothers 2000 finally took over the spot reserved for Toys as the worst movie ever made that wasn�t turned into a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.
Weirder still, as most of my reading is used lately for editing for errors rather than deciphering content, I find myself silently pondering the meaning and aesthetic of movies that were probably written by an eight-year-old.
Case in point: Most songs used in films that need a musical montage have something to do with the scene � have people making their way up in the world and saving money, you play �Money� by Pink Floyd. If you show how it�s hard being a pimp, you play a song describing, well, how it�s hard being a pimp. If you have some Pretty Woman trying on a variety of outfits, you play a song about how the pursuit of material goods and wealth make you a shallow person. It just makes sense.
So I watched Jack Black�s School of Rock the other day. I don�t suggest it to others, but for those of you who have seen this, answer me this: When they go into the musical montage showing all the precocious, socially awkward preteens honing their musical skills, why the fuck did they play the Ramones� �Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,� a song about Ronald Reagan visiting Nazi grave sites in Germany? I didn�t like these kids before, simply because they were children, but I�m certainly not going to root for Nazi children.
Anyway.
I�ve put quite a few of the newer cheesy horror films in my queue, things like the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek and the Saw franchise. For the most part, they�ve all been horrible, with the only exception being The Descent and Slither both of which were awesome. What�s particularly crappy about these films is that they have no idea how to build tension. Like the imitators that came after Halloween who only could have things leap out suddenly with a blast of music to try and jolt you instead of concentrating on making you uneasy, the newer batch of horror only concentrates on making you uneasy by being as disgusting as possible.
Don�t get me wrong. I�m far from squeamish. I still can�t help myself from shouting �YEAH!� like some sort of football hooligan from that scene in Dead Alive where the zombie fist bursts through the back of the head of one of the party-goers, the hand coming out through her open screaming mouth. But the slew of newer movies mostly seems like being gross is all they have, and I get sick of them trying to make me sick.
Which (finally) brings me to this book. The storyline involves a group of aspiring writers who go on a retreat. The idea is that they�re all trying to escape from the daily luxuries of things like Netflix, and so, in order to make their experience more rugged, purposely destroy foodstuffs and bedding, not knowing that the other writers are doing the same thing, which soon puts their entire food supply unusable. The situation becomes troublesome.
Interspersed within this narrative are short stories and poems, supposedly written by the members of the retreat. And this brings us back to those crappy horror movies I�ve seen so much of lately.
There�s nothing scary or harrowing or spooky about these stories, or the narrative which connects them. Page 12 starts the first story from the group, involving a teenager who has learned to masturbate in the Jacuzzi, pressing his buttocks against the jet stream for added autoerotic stimulation.
Yeah, I know. Ew. That�s just the beginning. It leads into his intestine being sucked out of his body, trapping him under the water. He has to chew his way through his own intestine to save himself from drowning. The end.
That end comes on page 21. It gets worse. Severed genitalia, cannibalism involving said genitalia, pedophilia and self-mutilation just for starters, all spread out over 400 pages. Obviously this isn�t meant for the Oprah Book Club.
Fine. But there really wasn�t much point to it all except to try and shock the audience. �Ooh, are you grossed out?� Chuck must be thinking. �Aren�t I clever, that I can make you feel so nauseous? I�m a veritable Artiste! I�m so shocking, like Henry Miller!�
Hey Chuck? Henry Miller bores the fuck out of me as well.
Really though, what makes this an absolutely terrible book is all the short stories supposedly written by other people sound like Chuck Palahnuik, specifically from Choke. Perhaps that�s by design, him trying to suggest that we all regress into the same kind of primal animal nature in extreme enough environments, but like I said, the ass-eating commences on page 12. The interlinking story he set out to create had a good premise behind it, a sort of Lord of the Flies of authors and poets. If he had kept with that instead of trying to figure out how to be even viler than before, he might have had something interesting.
But I�ll still probably put the movie in my queue when it inevitably comes out.
