Friday, October 14, 2011

Sign of the Times, Part II

Some context for the previous post: The message itself is from a handmade sign spotted at an Occupy Wall Street rally. I found the ineloquent wording surprisingly adept at capturing how messed up our system is right now. The success of know-nothing, corporatist conservatives in pushing us back to the 19th century, if not the Middle Ages, is especially dismaying (read the Jane Kramer article in the latest New Yorker on the influence of one wealthy conservative activist has on the politics of North Carolina and ultimately the lives of North Carolinians). Shit is fucked up, indeed. This sour mood has been magnified personally by my slog through Denis Johnson’s Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke. I’m not sure if it’s a great, or even a good, novel, regardless of the gold “National Book Award” stamp on the front cover. What it is is a literary quagmire full of pointless dialogue, opaque characters, and thickets of gnarled sentences and half-sentences. Yet I can’t seem to extricate myself from the book (now 500-some pages into it) despite it affecting my sleep and putting me in a foul mood. In that sense, I feel like one of the characters in the novel who decides to re-enlist for a second tour in Vietnam without any explanation, despite the hellishness of his first tour. The book does not illuminate the subject or the characters. Instead, it pulls the reader into the confusion felt by the characters and the incomprehensibility of their predicament. In other words, you really feel that shit is fucked up and bullshit. I’m really looking forward to reading that baseball novel, but not until I finish my tour of duty.

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