Reading this month:

Kubrick
Michael Herr

In terms of size, this is more or less a hardcover pamphlet; if I had to pay for books, I'd probably never buy it, but since I don't, I'm all over it. This is the sort of book I love reading about artists I admire. Not much more than a personal account from a friend of the man, it's composed entirely of the fun bits usually scattered in mammoth biographies (without the detail and accounting usually found between): what it was like talking to Stanley Kubrick, what he read, what he watched on TV (Kubrick was "crazy" about The Simpsons), his sly conversation tactics, etc. Nothing radical, but a total pleasure nonetheless.

Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis
Alexander Walker

This is one of those books that would be well-suited for use as a weapon. Pow! It's pleasant but light (in content, not weight); most of it reads like a pretty good essay from an English 273 (Film: Directors, Genres) class at some midwestern university. Has gobs of well-chosen stills, and the maddeningly infrequent glimpses of Kubrick's working methods are really interesting. There's probably a better book for those purposes, though.

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Garcia-Marquez's books are so absorbing. The period of time that I spent reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is completely defined in my memory by that book; in retrospect, the same will probably be true with this one. I don't know a thing about powerful love affairs and I certainly don't know anything about the emotional passage of an entire lifetime, but this book just feels so true. I've been meaning to read Love in the Time of Cholera ever since Justice League International #22 or so, in 1989, when Fire (formerly the Green Flame from Brazil, one of the most gorgeous comic book characters ever) and Oberon (the wily midget who worked with Mister Miracle) talked about it. She was in a hospital bed recovering from INVASION!, wherein evil aliens dropped a metagene bomb on the Earth and invaded (whereupon Earth's superheroes beat them senseless), and he came by to visit, and she was reading it, and they got to talking about the book; she said that he should read it in the original Spanish, and he said that he did, and they went on to have a brilliant, understated romance through the rest of the series.

Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills
Cynthia Gibas, Per Jambeck

This is a very good book. Although the word 'wily' is not specifically used in the text, the underlying focus of this book is wiliness; not only teaching readers about a rapidly evolving and important scientific discipline, but also how to be wily practicioners of that discipline. Nice.

Days and Nights at The Second City
Bernard Sahlins

A book in two parts: the first half is a breezy memoir of Second City's history that trails off somewhere in the mid-70s. The author was one of the three original partners who founded it, and wound up directing SC for many years. He's too polite and reserved for the memoir to be especially interesting, and the book doesn't try to incorporate anything other than his experience, so it doesn't really have any information that any of the other SC books don't (aside from a funny bit about the mob trying to extract protection money). It's not bad, just light.

The second half is more interesting, although still fairly light. The author talks about the process of creating and staging shows at the Second City, the first book to my knowledge to do so - last year's coffee table crapfest, like most books on the topic, only talked about what the Famous Actors did after leaving Second City. It's alright, but not indispensable. (The PBS documentary a couple years ago was much better.) I definitely don't agree with his idea that comedy is the theater without heroes, but there are some sterling passages - especially the section on parody - and the basic thesis, that truth should be at the heart of comedy, is right on.

Time Flies and Other Short Plays
David Ives

A new collection - and it's been a while - from the author of All in the Timing. Like a writer said about Ken Nordine and Word Jazz, mentioning David Ives gets a knowing smile in all the right places. He writes great big swooning goofy intellectual love stories in a style all his own. Seeing a collection of his work back in the day really impressed me with what short plays can achieve, that sketch comedy can be as well-written as any other form of literature and still rock an audience.

There's nothing on a par with The Trotsky Variations in here yet, but it's really not fair to hold him to that standard. (If I didn't say that, though, people would ask.) The ideas are just as rich, though they don't have the sense of absolute precision that, say, Sure Thing did. An unfortunate slight streak of self-awareness holds the best one, about two construction workers trying to build the Tower of Babel, back from perfection. In the introduction, David Ives says that the original actors are "as audible in these plays as I am", and as a writer, I'm always willing to blame things like that on actors heading in awkward moments for the cheap laughs that self-aware theater usually gets at the cost of sincerity. Dang actors. Still! Very good.

Smoke and Mirrors
Neil Gaiman

A collection of short stories (and 'illusions', insists the subtitle, which probably doesn't make things any clearer for you, dear reader, so I will focus on 'stories') by Mr Gaiman, a top fellow. My friend and I acquired copies during a recent stop on Neil's book tour. (That doesn't make things any clearer either, does it? Curses. O, damned elusive clarity! If you come to my house and bring me a cookie or a milkshake or some cake that doesn't have strawberries, I will show you my copy, and then things will be as clear as can be. I will even read you a story from it. But not one of the long ones, because I have to go to the post office later.)

Boy, what a great book! Neil is on top form throughout. I was an especially big fan of The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories, Shoggoth's Old Peculiar, Queen of Knives and Murder Mysteries.

Complete Works: 1
Harold Pinter

I read The Birthday Party in Seamus's class, but had to return it to the bookstore as soon as I was done. I never had enough money to buy books in college; I'd buy them, read and take them back for a refund within the seven day return period. I will say little else about Seamus's class, because I trust your imagination to envision a great time that was had, reading plays and living it up with Seamus.

Anyway, Harold Pinter is a lot of fun. The plays herein teach a healthy distrust of mysterious figures who show up all of a sudden, which is a good value. They are probably a fair amount better in performance, given the quick dialogue exchanges, notable for what the characters don't say, etc, but they're still fun to read.

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, in Theory : Histories of Cultural Materialism)
Jean Baudrillard

I have no qualms about admitting that I just don't get about a third of this. My soc thesis advisor in college used to shake his head about books like this, steeped so heavily in jargon as to be nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't actually sat down with the author and defined terms with him beforehand. (This kind of philosophy is characterized by questionable use of adjectives as nouns, such as 'the social'.) It's worth slogging through, though, because it does feature a dead-accurate description of the construction of history and media today (having been written in 1982), all sorts of things that you know in your gut but don't want to admit, though stated a bit more stridently.

Woody Allen
Eric Lax

Not too good. The book has no actual research; almost all of the material comes from interviews with Woody, which would be fine if it weren't presented in the form of an objective biographical document. As such, it's awkward to read. The author had full access to Woody but squanders it with obsequiousness; the only criticism of Woody's work in this book comes from Woody himself. The account of his pre-film career is fairly good, but it covers an inexplicably large part of the book; for the films, certainly the most important part of a Woody Allen bio, the author drops chronological narrative and wanders off into a rambling essay of praise that reads like a defense against invisible critics real and imagined. There are some good fly-on-the-wall moments, but the book is mostly useless. If you're interested in a Woody Allen book, get the Allen on Allen (w Stig Bjorkman) book.

It's almost worth reading, though, for the epilogue added for the updated edition. Most of the book was written in 1989, and has some painfully bad sections about why Woody and Mia Farrow are absolutely perfect for each other and how well their lives fit together; in view of the events a couple years later, of course, the epilogue has no choice but to open with an "Um, I guess I was wrong".