artoftuna:

No more art school drawing for me.

Ben’s shit is the shit.

Reading this for review. Really good so far. (Taken with instagram)

Also, my mum’s sheer incredulity that ‘graphic novel’ referred to a book-length comic, and not a regular novel with a particular abundance of tits and violence.

I wrote the following on Jonathan Franzen some time last year, before his recent reactionary outbursts on the evil internets. I haven’t edited it in any way, although I wanted to. I still pretty much believe this but will probably find it harder to read his next book knowing he believes so much of the shit that flows from his characters’ mouths.

It feels somewhat frivolous at this point to be writing about Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Not only was it last year’s “big novel”, but it rode in on a gargantuan wave of journalistic attention and praise. If it was not book of the year in your broadsheet of choice, it was certainly in the top three. In fact, it was so universally acclaimed that a backlash over the scale of its appreciation was simultaneous with the aforementioned wave prematurely cresting. Anticipation of its worth had become conflated with its actual worth and this was of course something one could not fully assess. I say fully, as excerpts were previewed in The New York Times, Franzen had given a substantial amount of publicity readings, and of course, most importantly, it was the end of our nine year wait for the writer of The Corrections to offer something new. Now, I am aware we have How To Be Alone (2002), which is wonderful, and The Discomfort Zone (2006), which I have never read. However, this was the clearly tortured composition of a novel that was to try and at least rival one of the most critically acclaimed works of our new century. And it was better! The backlash was overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of material proclaiming the social commentary even more nuanced and far-reaching; the characters better realised; the terrifyingly recognisable, self-evident truth of their familial relationships rendered in crushingly accurate detail. Critics willingly exposed themselves to the vulnerability inherent in definitives and declared Franzen the torch-bearer of “serious fiction”; a term I saw bandied around with an ironic joie de vivre that said ‘With this book we refuse to pussyfoot around relative value. Franzen is the most important writer of the century so pay attention!’ Even Oprah put her beef with Franzen to bed! His reluctance to be included in her book club the first time round was forgiven as she recognised the undeniable greatness of the five hundred and sixty-two page American epic, declaring ‘this book is a masterpiece.’

[Tracy Jordan: So, what’s your religion, Liz Lemon? Liz Lemon: Hmm, I pretty much just do whatever Oprah tells me to.]

However, I write all this to give you some sense of scale when it comes to my own personal assessment of Freedom. You see, I have observed a phenomenon that uniformly destroys one’s enjoyment of a work of art, perhaps most acutely in books you might otherwise be predisposed to enjoy. In The Observer review of the novel Curtis Sittenfeld says that Richard Katz is ‘the book’s best character, an unrepentant speaker of truths…’ This is the antithesis of what I feel about both the novel and the character. Richard Katz is the invading force in the marriage of Patty and Walter Berglund, the best friend of the latter from their college days and an alternative musician who Sittenfeld worryingly argues is a substitute for Franzen himself. Katz almost ruined this novel for me in two ways. Firstly, he is in fact one of Franzen’s least convincing creations. The intensity of focus the author places on his characters offers the reader a distillation of their very essence which, when it works, may be his greatest asset. However, at no point can I reconcile Katz’s posturing and adolescent attitude with the supposed depth of his intellect and charm. Like many of Franzen’s characters he is loathsome, but it is not this in itself which pushes me away. It is that in a novel written in an essentially traditional mode, I cannot escape my incredulity that the Berglunds would be taken in by this cliché of a man and tied to him through the decades. He is nothing but a caricature of the alt-rock musician. From his penchant for fucking anything that moves, through his shamelessly selfish behaviour, right down to his unsurprisingly soulful core. If you are unlucky enough to find these character traits attractive past your teens then I am giving you a condescending pat on the head. However, I cannot believe that two adults with as much intelligence, depth of feeling and life experience would not have recognised this leech for what he was and cast him aside accordingly.

That said, it is the second way that Katz almost destroyed Freedom I really want to get at. Have you ever found, when reading a book, a reference to “alternative music” that has completely annihilated all love you may have had for said work? You see, we are not given Katz as frontman of a generic, obliquely referenced post-punk band. We are given Katz as co-founder of The Traumatics: a fully realised, marginally appreciated three-piece who are given a fictional life alongside recent musical history. This allows Franzen to include many observations on music of the era, although not usually in the form of listing obscure bands, but rather in close observation of the tropes that characterise these scenes. Believe it or not, this makes it worse. Franzen participates in the mythologising of musicians, bands and scenes in a way that is hard to stomach. Walter observes that ‘Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.’ This is an attitude one should really grow out of and for it find its way into the novel shows poor judgement more than anything else.It is that Franzen perpetuates the completely hollow importance of anything greater than the sum-total of a musician or band’s output. I am not interested in the VH1 behind the music special on the records I like and neither should someone as otherwise wonderfully gifted as Franzen. Returning to Oprah (really? again?), if you visit her book club website you will find a playlist of songs Katz, ‘the rebel rocker may have reluctantly offered up.’ Now, this playlist was written by Franzen himself and what it does, like the inclusion of The Traumatics lyrics and the way Patty and Walter Berglund feel about Katz and his band, is to lead you to believe Franzen buys into it. He really still thinks of music in that way, attaching value to the utterly uninteresting detritus that surrounds its making.

[What a dork.]

This may seem fairly trivial and in fact I was so worried this anxiety may have been part of a larger cringe problem I have I consulted some friends. I was relieved. We discussed further examples from different genres and ended up way left-field: The realisation ‘the final five’ in Battlestar Galactica are all hearing the same ancient song, which then turns out to be All Along The Watchtower; the tendency of comic writers to include lines from songs in their work (Alan Moore - not so bad, Marc Guggenheim - very bad); and the admission from one friend that he could not even approach a book in an unbiased manner after he learned the author was happy to have an appraisal from Paul Weller on the back cover. These weren’t even as bad as Freedom. They were diminished by association, not by the mythologising we have in the novel. But here is the dénouement. Despite the inclusion of Traumaticslyrics so banal you cannot fathom why Franzen would include them, if not to further dislodge any belief the purveyor of this drivel could also appeal to the Berglunds. Despite descriptions of songs ‘consisting mostly of guitar noise reminiscent of razor blades and broken glass, over which Richard chanted poetry.’ Despite the fact ‘his slow, country-sounding song, “Dark Side of the Bar.” dampened Patty’s eyes with sadness for him.’ Despite Walter bemoaning ‘an American public that turned out by the millions for the Dave Matthews Band and didn’t even know that Richard Katz existed.’ Despite all of these things, Freedom comes out of the other side clean. Well, almost. The capturing of this particular slice of domestic life caught in this particular set of moments is not perfect, but then again neither was The Corrections and it is still a work one reads over and over in the mind. Books as inclusive of so much we recognise as true in the human condition are just too grand to be without flaws. They mirror the disjointed nature of our very existence and are a richer experience because of them. That’s right, I am saying it. Jonathan Franzen is a serious writer so pay attention!

If you have seen any of the press on Dear Esther then you will have probably noted the burning question for journalists is whether this qualifies as a game at all. The gameplay is so minimal in terms of what it requires of the player (all walking, no interacting) that it seems we need to invent a new name for this medium that falls somewhere between games, cinema and, perhaps most appropriately, the novella or short story. However, to be honest, these questions of generic definition and correspondingly apposite terminology are boring and kind of pointless in the way any speculative discussion on the nature of art tends to be.

What I really want to talk about is the storytelling in Dear Esther and Journey, which has also been released recently. For some time I have realised that my enjoyment of a game is probably most dependent on the strength of its storytelling. This is why I enjoy Half-Life so much more than its usually greater acclaimed sequel and why Bioshock has been my favourite game of the past five years. The care and attention to revealing, by degrees, an enthralling and complex story within an immersive world in both of these titles is what brings me back to them time and time again. Right from the purposefully restrained monorail journey into the depths of Black Mesa that opens Half-Life I knew I was in for something fundamentally different.

In general however, these games are few and far between. Most seem to have a Michael Bay or a McG at the helm, rather than someone who can offer that rare balance of intelligent narrative/gameplay and commercial success. I would say that I can understand the reluctance of game studios to attempt the latter when they know they will have a guaranteed hit with a franchise series for example, but I don’t really believe that. These ambitious titles that give the story of the game the prominence it deserves and treat the gamer with an intellectual respect tend to clear up in game of the year awards and sales too. Portal 2 is the glaringly obvious example.

One of the consequences of home entertainment being something we now largely obtain online, rather than in shops, is that a greater variety in the way we consume these things becomes available. Through platforms like PSN and Steam, independent game studios are offering smaller, cheaper titles that are at the forefront of innovation and dispense with many of the prescriptive tropes that dictate a blockbuster offering. Two notable examples are Dear Esther and Journey, but one could also mention Limbo, Gemini Rue or Braid. For someone who plays games as much for the story they tell as the gameplay they employ, this shift has been supremely heartening.

To really obliterate any subtlety in the analogy I am making I should spell out that the greater availability of requisite technology and platform has mirrored independent cinema. The process of making and selling these works has been brought closer to a universal possibility than ever before. In fact, one might argue that games have surpassed cinema, at least in terms of the distribution options available. Without the huge risks involved in a colossally budgeted game, a thing as wonderful as Dear Esther can come to exist.

This game is doing something very distinct with the presentation of its narrative that, in my pretentious liberal arts educated brain, reminded me most strikingly of B.S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates. This experiment in fiction came in a box, which contained a series of chapters presented as pamphlets. The idea was that, with the exception of two chapters marked first and last, you shuffled the rest and read them in an arbitrary order. Dear Esther achieves something very similar, in that as you walk around this Hebridean island a voice-over reveals fragments of a narrative that we then assemble in our own heads. Since completing it I have read that there are variations in which of these fragments a particular play-through might offer, which makes the comparison all the more compelling.

On the other hand I played Journey shortly after and received an entirely different narrative experience. This game contains no voice-over, no cut-scenes and no text at all. Its main similarity to Dear Esther is you are drawn throughout to a dominating landmark in the distance. Both are truly beautiful games, but Journey achieves something with its harsh, awe-inspiring environment that connects with the player at a fundamental, prelingual level. In fact, returning to where we started, the status of this game as a game is a much more interesting issue. Not because it offers minimalist interaction like Dear Esther, but because the storytelling experience it offers could only come in the vehicle of a game. We could be presented with this story visually, but the emotional responses engendered by it come directly as a result of our control over this character’s overwhelming task. The isolation we feel is both relieved and punctuated by interactions with our doppelgänger other players, who, through the PSN platform, wander in and out of our own story, unreachable through language but magnetic through collective need.

This is probably enough hyperbole on why these games tell equally engaging stories in diametrically opposing ways. What excites me most is that the whole thing works. Dear Esther and Journey are incredibly successful and are part of a fundamental opening up in game development that should see experimentation in narrative, gameplay and presentation rewarded and embraced.

An edited version of this review has been published in The Skinny. You can find it on their website by clicking above.

Anne Sward’s Breathless is told from the perspective of Lo, who in looking back on her childhood examines a relationship she has been unable to escape.  When she first meets Lukas she is only six years old, whilst at thirteen he is coming into adolescence.  Now an adult, Lo has moved away from the isolated, rural environment she and Lukas made their own and lead a nomadic life, forever changing cities, jobs and partners.  The genesis for this is traced back to the events of her fifteenth birthday; a night in which her relationship with Lukas is changed forever.

My main problem with Breathless is that Lo is defined by her relationships with men.  Removing her from these contexts we find there is very little left of her and such a two-dimensional female protagonist feels archaic in a modern novel.  Translated from its original Swedish the writing is adequate to the story, but has no poetry.  Possibly interesting flourishes, such as the referencing of Godard’s film from which the novel takes its title, fail to resonate with the themes in the way we assume they are supposed to.

Somewhat related to the last post. This is hilarious.

As the residents of The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House would say: ‘I can totally ID with this man.’

‘It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui…

The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete…

Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualises it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.’ 

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

This review has been published in The Skinny. You can find it on their website by clicking above.

Many contemporary writers believe that in order to overcome the sense of ineffability surrounding the horrors of the Holocaust one must attempt radical innovations in form and content. One may initially question therefore what impact an essentially historical novel such as Dasa Drndic’s Trieste can have? Surely at this stage there is little else to be revealed in terms of the events which led to the rise of Nazism, the ruthlessly efficient extermination of so many lives and the eventual downfall of the Axis powers? Perhaps the principle success of Trieste then is the seemingly natural ease with which it weaves its fictional protagonists into the microcosm of real personal histories, previously marginalised local events, and the broadest levels of international conflict.

The novel tells the story of former maths teacher Haya Tedeschi and her Jewish/Catholic family before, during and after the war. Through them we are given the wartime events of their home-town Gorizia and neighbouring city Trieste, both emblematic examples of the persecution Italian Jews faced and that have perhaps been overlooked by history. The novel feels ideal for contrasting the human loss of the Holocaust with the methodical evil that caused it and can be added to the most potent of its genre.