Here's a city-drift I did of Bangkok walking home drunk one night. I typed it in a raw text file, to be edited later. Enjoys.
Some people would call this city, the city of Angels. I would call it the city of lies; but then all cities lie. Underneath all the bill boards, LCD screens, and facades, it's a mess of congrete, swet and exploitation. There hasn't been a major city I've been to that isn't built on the backs of provincial indentured servants. Attracted by the lure, the glitter and glamor from the electrotube they come in trains, buses, even sometimes planes. In beat up cars they come, walking in on the mass transits. They walk the street brown skin, and stinking, or sell trinkets on the walk ways in front of department stores.
They are my companions in the night.
Some people try to make it in the city. They say there's more opportunity. This is a city where people who fail come. In Isaan where havest season comes only a year, people move to the city to drive taxis. People will always need a taxi, as they say. Because walking is so passe.
People think it's dangerous to walk at night there. Watching the news, they spread the fear. Yet as cities go this one is quite safe. Of course, that usually a function of how you dress. Black supermarket Tees and my mom's hand me down jeans, a chain for the wallet and a fist full of change. And only fools joj down dark dead-end alleys. It's safe until you meet a police man. After all, you know that one has a gun. There's usually a problem when one man has a gun, and not the other one.
Most of all it's important to smile. Especially to the waiter boys, the flower merchants, to give them a small time, don't wince, but smile. Smile don't say a word. Let the smile say that I know the struggle brother.
But I stand apart.
People have confused selling themselves to art. Its all self-promotion, the propaganda people say. You've got to sell, make money, slave. You don't need that much money to live, you probably need more to die and expect to be burried.
Those that never wrote, and tire of their souls wouldn't know. They wouldn't know, nor taste the bitterness in this, the sweetness in that. Each line a hit of acid, searing away memory, rewriting history. I'm uncovering the secret... my secrets. Those that I hold so dear that I won't let myself know.
You can look at a mirror for your own reflection; but the mirror lies those aren't my eyes. Faded innocence.
Encarta used to call it the city of whores, until the government had it removed. Many things are removed. Like rotting waste food on city streets, or glue bags, child prostitutes. It's all the same really.
I stay up and watch the street clearers wait for the sunrise. They recycle the plastic, the glass. Rubber gloves, and face masks, the brooms, the sweeps. A water truck and gardeners.
The trees can't water themselves, someone has to do it. That someone also had to sleep with another or not get shelter?
But it is a city. For one that barely sleeps, to walk a city that never does, we know the expression is a lie. You and I. It's always you and I. Do we dance to regret?
I dance under the city light post, tracing the shadows with my arms. You could learn to love the spots in the shadows of the canopy.
It's a drug hallucination; charm.
We were built as a fortress.
I refused to work. I don't want exploitation. I come from a cross the river and the cannals. I say. A place far and far away.
I couch surf, and I lie still for days, looking out at parking lots; nursing the drug. The drug that shafts my hands, and burn my eyes.
Some would call it sleep. I call it a compromise.
I'm fighting for this existence, every minute, every hour, ever day. I'm fighting to keep these eyes from shutting. From the dream of being dead and gone, from the dream of being forgotten.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Begining ear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72
Wrote this about two weeks ago while reading... well it's in the title ;)
I am sitting here nursing a midnight hangover (don’t ask), trying reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Ah, what a world it must have been to be back there in that age and writing for Rolling Stone magazine! If only these things were possible now a days. It is partly publishing’s fault, though the blame is constantly shifted to ‘the Reading public’. Yet as an unorthodox social scientist in training I can safely say ‘that just ain’t so’.
A word before I start the ritual massacre of modern customs and conventions. We had an interesting discussion at the last Bangkok Writer’s Guild meetup about editors, after the official meeting of course and everyone had had enough wine and food, those that had better places to go went, and those that could stay were really getting into the bare knuckle parts of being a working writer.
We’d somehow gotten onto the topic of Raymond Carver and his editor (his name), and how that heavily influenced his style. I remember window reading up the only copy (no, no I will not blame the reading public) of at the biggest, most modern bookstore which shall remained unnamed (because I refuse to name drop them), at the swankest department store in the capital (I was awaiting a FREE emerging female Japanese directors film festival; now if that doesn’t give it away, then you don’t know our lovely capital. NOTE: Awesome indie films, but the theater location still made me feel guilty) finding that the later stories didn’t seem like the Carver I studied in school. I could think of about a good dozen examples of such editor/mentor figures in the memoirs of great writers, a list which included the likes of Thompson, and Hemingway.
“These days, it’s just not the same,” our guest speaker said, in that pleasant American drawl I associate with being born a generation before my time. “These days’ editors just want to sell what you give them. They’re not interesting in mentoring the young writer anymore.”
“If you look at his earlier work, as compared to his later, even the meaning’s changed.” Phillip said.
“You know, you could try writing a story about that. About trying to find such an editor or agent.”
“Good idea,” I said. “As an idealist young writer fresh outta college I want to develop fast, and I know I’m going to need someone like that if I’m going to get to my goal at the end of the year.”
Very good idea. I thought. Very good idea. I want to learn to not only express myself, but do it good.
“Like in the music industry,” another member said, “you develop talent.”
Catching a cab home (protesters had just bombed the subway that night, so I figured I could justifiably afford a bit for safety) I then thought of those other group of writers though that had their peers acting as mentor and editors, like the Beats, the mud raking Socialists, the post-war Paris Americans, and the even the Auteur in film. Perhaps as a young writer attempting to find the voice to bend into control chaos (your controlled chaos) on that empty canvas, it might not be such a good idea. Hemmingway might bully Fitzgerald into tips about writing, but I bet he would’ve have gotten so insane and great without Zelda, nor Henry Miller without June or Anais. Perhaps where I’m going I can’t ask for traditional mentors, not from the writing world, nor from the ideals of an anti-heroic society. Perhaps where I’m going I need more than just words, thoughts, egotistical rationality, and my dulled senses. In trying to light my own fire I can’t keep looking off at distant flames across mountains for guidance. I’m on a strange mountain of my own shrouded in darkness and immense beauty. Unexplored wonder. Like a pioneer, like an impotent caveman, I’m peering into the mist not knowing what will come next. The voices in my head, my mentor and muse, can only extract me from the mundane into this reality but they cannot help with the exploration. They can help keep me strong, but they can’t learn my dream, nor learn my song for me.
Like an act of faith, I’m stumbling blind into rapture.
Long interlude aside; it’s pleasant to read a mind attempting at grasping something. The author’s note about jettisoning hindsight is a rare gem amongst books written about a subject. Why must people constantly want that 50/50 look at things? Historicism will kill, it has killed. The very notion of comparing past events to predict the future is as good as driving an oil tanker with the rear view mirror that instead of reflecting, is painted of a congealed consensus of all the passengers on board. And people wonder when it hits an iceberg, or runs aground on a reef!
To quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘We don’t learn that we don’t learn.”
Getting that blow-by-blow account of attempting to understand an event is a better example, perhaps the only true account of what’s actually going on. After years of college I’m tired of arguments, and studying politics, I’m especially tired of arguments over nothing, about nothing, or doing nothing definable. I’m convinced that there are enough experts and talking heads on TV to drive pharmaceutical sales that I’d be quickly out of job if I’d even wanted to join the peanut gallery. They can make a rat-race about anything thanks to those damn people who clap at the wrong moments (refer to Catcher in the Rye, pg. 84), if you know what I mean.
I’m more interested about how one gets the story, and what that speaks about the process. Anyone and everyone with a little bit of fame in the social sciences have written a book whose title could have all been switched to: ‘Where we went wrong’. We’re endlessly discussing problems, and possible solutions, and the problems with those solutions. Meanwhile, actors influence global politics, incompetent politicians are allowed to continue to mumble through their ‘political careers’ while bankrupting countries, and a new generation of young people become zombiefied, raterized, and chop sues and stir fried rice to feed the pigs. The really, really fat pigs.
Side-note: I don’t know why, but CEOs always look like they want to eat you smiling in front of their corporate logos.
And unlike people who speak at air-conditioned, climate change conferences in suits, I’ve neither solutions nor facts to awe nor scare. I’ve got no call to action, and in fact I’m not acting at the moment because I have no life. I don’t know what life is. I do know that it’s not a knowledge problem, though. I don’t know where we went wrong, nor do I particularly care at this point. I don’t even know where we’re going, or where we came from. In a society that denies first-hand experience of self-knowledge, but increasingly manufactures and sells second-hand experiences of it, I’m content to be a little man living under a rock right now to figure out certain things. I’m contended to represent the disunited republic of myself, but I wonder… Am I a toad, or a frog? Are my hallucinations revealing, or are they concealing (please don’t tell me they’re not real; everyone hallucinates, everyday. Read a Zen story.) what I want to know? What do I want to know? Aren’t they just as valid as blue or red for spring fashion? Some wouldn’t like to think so.
Whatever solutions I’ll come up with, I can guarantee this: it won’t be rational. I’m traveling a different path. If like Don Juan reflects, all paths ultimately lead to death, I’m just hoping this path I’m a walking has a heart.
Ah… what is heart?
I am sitting here nursing a midnight hangover (don’t ask), trying reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Ah, what a world it must have been to be back there in that age and writing for Rolling Stone magazine! If only these things were possible now a days. It is partly publishing’s fault, though the blame is constantly shifted to ‘the Reading public’. Yet as an unorthodox social scientist in training I can safely say ‘that just ain’t so’.
A word before I start the ritual massacre of modern customs and conventions. We had an interesting discussion at the last Bangkok Writer’s Guild meetup about editors, after the official meeting of course and everyone had had enough wine and food, those that had better places to go went, and those that could stay were really getting into the bare knuckle parts of being a working writer.
We’d somehow gotten onto the topic of Raymond Carver and his editor (his name), and how that heavily influenced his style. I remember window reading up the only copy (no, no I will not blame the reading public) of at the biggest, most modern bookstore which shall remained unnamed (because I refuse to name drop them), at the swankest department store in the capital (I was awaiting a FREE emerging female Japanese directors film festival; now if that doesn’t give it away, then you don’t know our lovely capital. NOTE: Awesome indie films, but the theater location still made me feel guilty) finding that the later stories didn’t seem like the Carver I studied in school. I could think of about a good dozen examples of such editor/mentor figures in the memoirs of great writers, a list which included the likes of Thompson, and Hemingway.
“These days, it’s just not the same,” our guest speaker said, in that pleasant American drawl I associate with being born a generation before my time. “These days’ editors just want to sell what you give them. They’re not interesting in mentoring the young writer anymore.”
“If you look at his earlier work, as compared to his later, even the meaning’s changed.” Phillip said.
“You know, you could try writing a story about that. About trying to find such an editor or agent.”
“Good idea,” I said. “As an idealist young writer fresh outta college I want to develop fast, and I know I’m going to need someone like that if I’m going to get to my goal at the end of the year.”
Very good idea. I thought. Very good idea. I want to learn to not only express myself, but do it good.
“Like in the music industry,” another member said, “you develop talent.”
Catching a cab home (protesters had just bombed the subway that night, so I figured I could justifiably afford a bit for safety) I then thought of those other group of writers though that had their peers acting as mentor and editors, like the Beats, the mud raking Socialists, the post-war Paris Americans, and the even the Auteur in film. Perhaps as a young writer attempting to find the voice to bend into control chaos (your controlled chaos) on that empty canvas, it might not be such a good idea. Hemmingway might bully Fitzgerald into tips about writing, but I bet he would’ve have gotten so insane and great without Zelda, nor Henry Miller without June or Anais. Perhaps where I’m going I can’t ask for traditional mentors, not from the writing world, nor from the ideals of an anti-heroic society. Perhaps where I’m going I need more than just words, thoughts, egotistical rationality, and my dulled senses. In trying to light my own fire I can’t keep looking off at distant flames across mountains for guidance. I’m on a strange mountain of my own shrouded in darkness and immense beauty. Unexplored wonder. Like a pioneer, like an impotent caveman, I’m peering into the mist not knowing what will come next. The voices in my head, my mentor and muse, can only extract me from the mundane into this reality but they cannot help with the exploration. They can help keep me strong, but they can’t learn my dream, nor learn my song for me.
Like an act of faith, I’m stumbling blind into rapture.
Long interlude aside; it’s pleasant to read a mind attempting at grasping something. The author’s note about jettisoning hindsight is a rare gem amongst books written about a subject. Why must people constantly want that 50/50 look at things? Historicism will kill, it has killed. The very notion of comparing past events to predict the future is as good as driving an oil tanker with the rear view mirror that instead of reflecting, is painted of a congealed consensus of all the passengers on board. And people wonder when it hits an iceberg, or runs aground on a reef!
To quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘We don’t learn that we don’t learn.”
Getting that blow-by-blow account of attempting to understand an event is a better example, perhaps the only true account of what’s actually going on. After years of college I’m tired of arguments, and studying politics, I’m especially tired of arguments over nothing, about nothing, or doing nothing definable. I’m convinced that there are enough experts and talking heads on TV to drive pharmaceutical sales that I’d be quickly out of job if I’d even wanted to join the peanut gallery. They can make a rat-race about anything thanks to those damn people who clap at the wrong moments (refer to Catcher in the Rye, pg. 84), if you know what I mean.
I’m more interested about how one gets the story, and what that speaks about the process. Anyone and everyone with a little bit of fame in the social sciences have written a book whose title could have all been switched to: ‘Where we went wrong’. We’re endlessly discussing problems, and possible solutions, and the problems with those solutions. Meanwhile, actors influence global politics, incompetent politicians are allowed to continue to mumble through their ‘political careers’ while bankrupting countries, and a new generation of young people become zombiefied, raterized, and chop sues and stir fried rice to feed the pigs. The really, really fat pigs.
Side-note: I don’t know why, but CEOs always look like they want to eat you smiling in front of their corporate logos.
And unlike people who speak at air-conditioned, climate change conferences in suits, I’ve neither solutions nor facts to awe nor scare. I’ve got no call to action, and in fact I’m not acting at the moment because I have no life. I don’t know what life is. I do know that it’s not a knowledge problem, though. I don’t know where we went wrong, nor do I particularly care at this point. I don’t even know where we’re going, or where we came from. In a society that denies first-hand experience of self-knowledge, but increasingly manufactures and sells second-hand experiences of it, I’m content to be a little man living under a rock right now to figure out certain things. I’m contended to represent the disunited republic of myself, but I wonder… Am I a toad, or a frog? Are my hallucinations revealing, or are they concealing (please don’t tell me they’re not real; everyone hallucinates, everyday. Read a Zen story.) what I want to know? What do I want to know? Aren’t they just as valid as blue or red for spring fashion? Some wouldn’t like to think so.
Whatever solutions I’ll come up with, I can guarantee this: it won’t be rational. I’m traveling a different path. If like Don Juan reflects, all paths ultimately lead to death, I’m just hoping this path I’m a walking has a heart.
Ah… what is heart?
Monday, May 10, 2010
A month's absence
Well, it's been a month since I wrote last but that's all good. A busy month of traveling, reflecting... and what do you know the writing has improved. Now it's just about forcing myself to get it down on paper. I'm going to make an honest shot of attempting to get this blog to do something again.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Wet rag
Ah, food and I'm starting to get back on track again. For the record, attempting to stave off hunger by whiskey does not work. When the meal finally comes your stomach is in no condition to actually take it down. Sure you're not hungry, but whenever you come off it you feel weak from lack of food and still not hungry enough to put something down your stomach. If you're really in a pinch, like you're really on and the voice is yelling and screaming in your head and there's barely white on the note paper in front of you, then yeah maybe... but don't keep it up for more than a day. After more than a day when you're not on a buzz (and even sometimes when you are) your body feels like a wet rag.
It's been getting hotter the past couple of days. Increased traffic jams from protests and the approach of summer has turned me into a swamp of shirt and boxers. Even the baby powder's not keeping my ass dry anymore, and I'm a bunch of rashes where clothing chafes. My shirt feels as if I've been on the treadmill in low all day. Coincidentally, the gym is the only place besides the bus where I'm in air conditioning. Not that I like air conditioning, I like to be dry. Those who like showers have the blessing of taking a quick cool in the rushing water. Those who fight the stickiness of being dirty, with the horror of having to scrape it off yourself while applying chemicals to your body like me (not to mention getting sprayed by water) are left with a constant dilemma: to wear a sweaty wet rag, or be a sweaty wet rag?
And in this case, alcohol is definitely not an answer.
It's been getting hotter the past couple of days. Increased traffic jams from protests and the approach of summer has turned me into a swamp of shirt and boxers. Even the baby powder's not keeping my ass dry anymore, and I'm a bunch of rashes where clothing chafes. My shirt feels as if I've been on the treadmill in low all day. Coincidentally, the gym is the only place besides the bus where I'm in air conditioning. Not that I like air conditioning, I like to be dry. Those who like showers have the blessing of taking a quick cool in the rushing water. Those who fight the stickiness of being dirty, with the horror of having to scrape it off yourself while applying chemicals to your body like me (not to mention getting sprayed by water) are left with a constant dilemma: to wear a sweaty wet rag, or be a sweaty wet rag?
And in this case, alcohol is definitely not an answer.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Human Condition
I just had a good long sleep using delta brainwave technology. After a good evening at my friend's house where I had FOOD. For those who don't know me in real life, I'm quite a thin person though I eat A LOT. My unusual thinness is thus generally attributed to: a) a fast metabolism; b) not eating properly. I like having a), but b) is somewhat deceptive, at least to me. As a semi-workaholic [I spend my free time, reading for my work, taking legal stimulants to keep on working, and in lots of exercise] food is simply something I don't think of on a regular basis. Since I mainly cook at home, this can become a big problem. By the time I'm conscious of that my body needs nutrition (when you're used to staying up for days on nothing but coffee, cigarettes, alcohol and willpower this can come pretty late) I barely have enough energy to make myself a cup of instant noodles, which as soon as I consume realize how empty my stomach is.
In this regard my bad mental habits don't help.
"Just a couple more sentences."
"Another chapter."
"Oh but you're doing so well right now, if you stop it might not come out good tomorrow."
Amongst other things I keep unconsciously saying to myself. Next thing I know it I wake up on the keyboard, and the writing is a disorganized mess. Good ideas; just don't know what order they go into. To illustrate the point, I have on my desk the remain of a pack of anti-acids that I've been chewing on (in semi-spearmint flavor!) to keep the stomach at bay.
Either I'm dedicated, or crazy.
Dread, unlimited.
Remember that loading screen in Baldur's Gate II: "Your characters don't need to eat. You Do! We don't want to lose any dedicated gamers."
I need a sign like that, for writers.
In this regard my bad mental habits don't help.
"Just a couple more sentences."
"Another chapter."
"Oh but you're doing so well right now, if you stop it might not come out good tomorrow."
Amongst other things I keep unconsciously saying to myself. Next thing I know it I wake up on the keyboard, and the writing is a disorganized mess. Good ideas; just don't know what order they go into. To illustrate the point, I have on my desk the remain of a pack of anti-acids that I've been chewing on (in semi-spearmint flavor!) to keep the stomach at bay.
Either I'm dedicated, or crazy.
Dread, unlimited.
Remember that loading screen in Baldur's Gate II: "Your characters don't need to eat. You Do! We don't want to lose any dedicated gamers."
I need a sign like that, for writers.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Attempting a Highspeed education
As if right now it might just be impossible. Perhaps my reading speed is not up to it, nor my writing stamina able to cope with it. As to the workout schedule, that is achieved. So let this be my goal for the end of the year.
Read 2 books a day. One nonfiction, one fiction. [I can do about a half]
Write 6 hours a day.
Exercise 3 hours a day.
Read 2 books a day. One nonfiction, one fiction. [I can do about a half]
Write 6 hours a day.
Exercise 3 hours a day.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Wonder Boys by Micheal Chabon
Tried to watch the movie for Wonder Boys (based on the book by Micheal Chabon). There's just so much alternating of the original story I can take when it comes to adapting a book into film, and after the part Trip calls Walter at 8 am to tell him that he's in love with his wife I had it. I switched it off, feeling so glad that I read the book.
I wonder how many books turn into bad movies. What a shame that is. Wonder Boys might be a passable movie, but if anyone got turned off by it and didn't bother with the book that would be a damn shame. Then again, you can't translate a book with such a cleverness with language, references, turns of phrases, description and wit onto a screen.
I must say though that on the whole the novel had more good points than bad. It's a novel that's good, pushing great, but didn't quite get there. That is the best kind of novel for the learning writer to learn from, in my opinion. I learned a lot from this book.
It's good writing, good craft. There's so many nuggets of gold in there for an aspiring writing, and I have a feeling that this being the difficult novel, and the novel before the The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (Pulitzer) it taught him somethings. As one in our trio reading group aptly said, "The writing is like Hollywood special effects. You're like 'wow, wow, wow' and then it's over, and you're thinking 'that's it? what about the story?" The dazzle of his prose got in the way of the execution of the story and character. You've got to 'kill your darlings' and here his cleverness with words were his.
I love first person narratives, and this one managed to stay in the same POV the entire novel. However, the writing bordered on the style of the the third person too much (the 'special effects'). While clever, the fact of it being 'too clever' at inappropriate places distracted from the situation of the story. I realized what the first person narrative needed most of all: a strong voice. That's essentially what I liked about all the books I read that's written in the first person (for an interesting experience try reading Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City written in second person) from Catcher in the Rye to Henry Miller's Tropics.
I also appreciated the novel not having a standard plot. The characters essentially don't change throughout the entire book. Grady does towards the end, which could qualify it as a maturation plot for both Grady and James Leer, but it's just the barest of changes. This is not bad. Yet a novel without a standard plot is a difficult feat to pull off, and I admire the writer for managing it, especially in a first novel. From what I understood, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had been Chabon's master's thesis.
We disused universality in our group. One in our group got all the Jewish references, which myself and the other had no clue about. Another referent would be the pot-smoking aspects. If you've never spoked weed, hung around weed-smokers for a long time, had good friends (or spouses) who smoked reefer, then certain parts of the book would definitely get to you. As Grady compounded the problems in his life (and his denial) by smoking and avoiding conflict, each 'shove it under the carpet' scene set up the next. The way these series of effects were connected were masterfully done, but they felt like connecting the dots instead of a resonance. The essence of standard plot are stories which resonate with the unconscious (either that, or we've just been listening to them over and over again from childhood) of a majority of people, and this one perhaps a more niche group.
There are a few other points, but I gleaned one valuable lesson here. The book appeared very autobiographical. All books are, but I got the sense that this book had excellent technical execution also as if it had been a creative writing project that an A+ student wanted to write. 'Write what you know' and all other maxims met. Yet the voice didn't seem to fit or didn't come in at the right time. I saw a writer beginning to understand his craft and style. Perhaps every beginning writer must do this: write an intensely autobiographical novel, just to understand both his voice, his passion, his honesty, and the distinction of that and the story-teller's craft. Every if he/she doesn't show it to anybody, it needs to be written.
So I go to write mine... keeping in mind to kill my darlings.
I wonder how many books turn into bad movies. What a shame that is. Wonder Boys might be a passable movie, but if anyone got turned off by it and didn't bother with the book that would be a damn shame. Then again, you can't translate a book with such a cleverness with language, references, turns of phrases, description and wit onto a screen.
I must say though that on the whole the novel had more good points than bad. It's a novel that's good, pushing great, but didn't quite get there. That is the best kind of novel for the learning writer to learn from, in my opinion. I learned a lot from this book.
It's good writing, good craft. There's so many nuggets of gold in there for an aspiring writing, and I have a feeling that this being the difficult novel, and the novel before the The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (Pulitzer) it taught him somethings. As one in our trio reading group aptly said, "The writing is like Hollywood special effects. You're like 'wow, wow, wow' and then it's over, and you're thinking 'that's it? what about the story?" The dazzle of his prose got in the way of the execution of the story and character. You've got to 'kill your darlings' and here his cleverness with words were his.
I love first person narratives, and this one managed to stay in the same POV the entire novel. However, the writing bordered on the style of the the third person too much (the 'special effects'). While clever, the fact of it being 'too clever' at inappropriate places distracted from the situation of the story. I realized what the first person narrative needed most of all: a strong voice. That's essentially what I liked about all the books I read that's written in the first person (for an interesting experience try reading Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City written in second person) from Catcher in the Rye to Henry Miller's Tropics.
I also appreciated the novel not having a standard plot. The characters essentially don't change throughout the entire book. Grady does towards the end, which could qualify it as a maturation plot for both Grady and James Leer, but it's just the barest of changes. This is not bad. Yet a novel without a standard plot is a difficult feat to pull off, and I admire the writer for managing it, especially in a first novel. From what I understood, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh had been Chabon's master's thesis.
We disused universality in our group. One in our group got all the Jewish references, which myself and the other had no clue about. Another referent would be the pot-smoking aspects. If you've never spoked weed, hung around weed-smokers for a long time, had good friends (or spouses) who smoked reefer, then certain parts of the book would definitely get to you. As Grady compounded the problems in his life (and his denial) by smoking and avoiding conflict, each 'shove it under the carpet' scene set up the next. The way these series of effects were connected were masterfully done, but they felt like connecting the dots instead of a resonance. The essence of standard plot are stories which resonate with the unconscious (either that, or we've just been listening to them over and over again from childhood) of a majority of people, and this one perhaps a more niche group.
There are a few other points, but I gleaned one valuable lesson here. The book appeared very autobiographical. All books are, but I got the sense that this book had excellent technical execution also as if it had been a creative writing project that an A+ student wanted to write. 'Write what you know' and all other maxims met. Yet the voice didn't seem to fit or didn't come in at the right time. I saw a writer beginning to understand his craft and style. Perhaps every beginning writer must do this: write an intensely autobiographical novel, just to understand both his voice, his passion, his honesty, and the distinction of that and the story-teller's craft. Every if he/she doesn't show it to anybody, it needs to be written.
So I go to write mine... keeping in mind to kill my darlings.
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