Blah and more blah

I'm reading Michael Dibden's Vendetta and so far I am a little under awed. My parents really like his books so I thought I'd give him a try. This is an early Aurelio Zen book and it feels like he's more interested in showing off his knowledge of Italy than writing a story. It's good, no doubt, I just wish there was more happening and less description. The cover blurb promises me that the ending will shock the unshockable reader but I remain doubtful. I'll try more of his books later because supposedly there's more about Zen and his life in them. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or what but the way my bosses write emails really ticks me off. They're so formal, like what you'd write to someone you barely know rather than to a coworker. They also come off as very patronizing/critical. It's the language they use. Maybe I'm too sensitive, I don't know. Also their lack of understanding of the Internet depresses and baffles me. I wrote a Wikipedia page back in November as part of our marketing campaign. This was discussed in committee for over a month; I read the text out loud to get feedback and then I posted it, trying very carefully to keep it neutral in tone. I put a few pictures up as well. Another member of the marketing committee sent an all staff email out informing everyone it was up. I heard nothing about it. About a week ago we all got an email about new rules concerning the dissemination of information and pictures on the web and how they have to be approved by the director first. Fine, I understand that's fairly normal. Yesterday I get a formally worded email about how it is so nice that I want to help with things's but the info has to be reviewed first and my Wikipedia page was jumping the gun. "Your well-intentioned move" my ass. That rule didn't exist when it was written. There was no objection for over a month. Then he wants me to take the Wikipedia page down. I told him I would try but didn't expect much luck. I know the formal writing I'd partially his training from elsewhere and might be to have something on record for obscure reasons but it doesn't do any good by the fact that I feel like I'm criticized more often than anything else. Hell, I'd take no praise over getting some fucking supplies and resources. Finally the second shipment of books is coming in. In short, don't criticize your employees for breaking rules before they have been written. I, at least, am not psychic.

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk or stop trying to be shocking you're not 12

Like my yellow nail polish?

So each chapter of Snuff is from a different character’s POV and there are four characters: Numbers 72, 137, 600, and Sheila and it’s a good thing each chapter is labeled whose POV it currently is so you can go back and see who’s thinking because otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference. Well, that’s not entirely true as a couple of them had verbal(mental?) ticks. Number 600 called everybody “dude”; kid dude, pizza delivery dude, dude 137, television dude, dude 72, player dude, dude with the roses, ugly dago dude, ugly wop dude, teddy-bear dude, dude, dudes, dude, and if you think that was annoying to read imagine several pages of it. Sheila relates obscure tidbits of information and afterwards thinks, “True Fact” about twice a page. If she’s not dishing out depressing (sometimes inaccurate) historical factoids her boss Cassie Wright is. Or number 137 is. And they all have their own sad and pathetic life story to tell with a side helping of daddy issues. And in the cases of number 72 and Sheila, mommy issues.

                So what is this steaming pile about? An aging porn star by the name of Cassie Wright wants to end her career with a bang by setting the all-time gang bang record of 600 men. (The internet claims that another woman already set the record at over 900 before this book came out but shh! Palahniuk has a gimmick to sell. I mean tell. No, I mean sell.) Sheila, her assistant, is in charge of managing the “pud-pullers”. (She has many more euphemisms for masturbation to insult all men, regardless of occupation or status among the living, but I’ll spare you. Take it as read that they could be confusing and distracting, and became obnoxious after the first three pages.) The three men are part of the casting call. 137 lost his acting career when it surfaced he had bottomed in a gay gang bang porno and hopes his performance will convince people he’s really straight so he can be on TV again. (God alone knows how he thinks participating in another gang bang, even if it is heterosexual, will get him back on a mainstream show.) 600, another aging porn star, worked with Cassie for many years and is also hoping to revive his career. (Although he portrays things like he’s doing this as a favor to give the production star appeal.) 72 was told by his adoptive parents that Cassie was his biological mother and he’s here to “save” her. So they all stand around reminiscing and interacting while they wait for their turn on the sheets, giving Palahniuk enough time to create a lot of stupid porn titles. (The movie they’re currently creating will be titled World Whore Three. Creative, right?)

                It comes out that Cassie really did have a baby she gave up for adoption around twenty years ago. Feeling guilty and like her life is a waste, she’s actually planned this porno as a (not very) covert suicide. She expects to be fucked to death and wants the proceeds of her life insurance policies and the income from the movie to go to this abandoned child. Sheila muses how smart this all is because the way they’ll cut the movie together the insurance investigators won’t be able to tell which guy is fucking a live body and which is fucking a corpse. That way they’ll be able to deny knowing at what point during the shoot she died. (This would be a great plan if insurance companies were a) not stingy as hell and b) composed of morons. Never mind the fact that it’s completely illegal to profit from a crime and the way these four were yakking on CNN would have the news the day after the thing was released. And forget internet sales. You’d have to set up a ton of proxy sellers to avoid attracting attention and anyway who would handle the transactions? Paypal? Credit card companies? Great idea if you have many different accounts to funnel the money through and a way to report it legitimately. And you better have a way to pay off, generously, all the dozens of crew working the set so they don’t narc on you when the cash starts rolling in. And if this all goes to the unknown child how are they going to set this up to make a profit off the snuff video of their mom if it is deemed illegal? Through their lawyer? That’s assuming you get the raw footage back after the police have confiscated it for evidence during the investigation into Wright’s death by sex act. But I digress. This point just really annoys me it’s so stupid.)

                I also want to talk about the imagery in this book. It’s gross. He describes the room these 600 naked, bronzed, sloppy men are waiting around in, one hand down their shorts and the other in the chip bowl. How the one restroom is covered in human waste and the floor of the waiting room is sticky with bronzer. Everything is sweaty, oozing, soaked, and covered in junk food crumbs and saliva. There’s no real purpose to this other than as an attempt to be shocking. I’m sure part of this approach was to show the seediness of the sex industry but I’m sure that could have been accomplished to better effect through the degradation of the characters and how the industry has befouled each of their lives. They have all hit rock bottom due to pornography in one way or another. A good writer could easily do something with that rather than slop down the melodramatic horseshit Palahniuk gave us instead. (137 participated in the gay porno as an attempt to prove that he really is gay and not just confused like his daddy said. His daddy says getting “diddled” as a child made him that way. “Oh yeah, son, I’m sure it happened. I did it, after all.”)None of this tawdry, overwrought imagery will stay with me, either. You want something disturbing that will pop into your mind at random moments read Yasmina Khadra’s In the Name of God, a description of the rise of religious fanaticism in a village in Algeria, or the indifference with which the main character of Fudoki by Kij Johnson kills women and children during a night-time raid, or even the end of David Markson’s Vanishing Point which culminates in a spiraling description of death and loss or anything by Arnaldur Indridason. The description in this book can best be summed up with the word “cheap.”

                Of course this entire book is an attempt to be shocking, from the gang bang aspect to the talk of blow-up dolls and dildos to 600 pondering about having sex with a dying, comatose woman. The premise of this book is based on the gang bang record set by Annabel Chong back in 1995 of 70 men and 251 sex acts in one 10 hour shoot. This, coupled with the fact that a woman can die from sex, fascinated Palahniuk enough to set an entire story around it. The characters are so contrived, and in the case of 600 disgusting, that most of the book is an eye-rolling annoyance. The prose is horrible. I don’t care if it’s supposed to “sound like how people talk”, I hate dialect writing. It was irritating in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and it’s still irritating 150+ years later. The ending is stupid. I mean, really stupid. There’s a “twist” but it’s not much of one and the whole mess dissolves into a confused scene with cyanide, defibrillators, and unresolved plot threads. If you’re running up to a particular climax, don’t suddenly make a left turn down a side alley to stand giggling while your audience tries to figure out where the hell you went.

Faculty meeting tonight! Wooo!

I am so excited! A 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting at 6:00pm so we can prove to the accreditation committee that we have faculty meetings! I bet this will be just as awesome as the 2 1/2 hour staff meeting we had last Thursday, though unfortunately I had to leave at the two hour mark to go close the library. :( I'm sure no students actually needed anything in the hours I wasn't there. At least this meeting will be after I technically finish work so I'll be all free! They damn well better feed us.

Seriously, last week's staff meeting consisted of people talking about the progress their departments have made toward accreditation. Most of us had very little to say; Our director of education wasn't there and our director was in a meeting. Once the director joined us one of our newest members, the registrar, decided to hijack the meeting to complain about all the things she doesn't understand and how she hasn't been able to get the director of education to sit down with her to explain them. She held us hostage for close to an hour whining about little things most of us had no interest in and which none of us could solve.

Then our director declared that all the shared files (registration forms, time sheets, leave requests, etc.) on out intranet were out of date because they had the old logo on them and they should be deleted right now and turned to the computer to do so amid panicked shouts that we needed to copy them onto our hard drives first. "They're pdf files so that means word copies are on people's computers somewhere. We just need to find them." Yeah but couldn't we wait to find them before deleting things? "I'll print copies out." Some of the files were created by people who no longer work here. "Oh, they didn't really create anything, I'm sure there's a copy on someone's computer." Oy vey ist mir.

I haven't been able to get a second book order. I email and email but the director keeps saying she'll get to it later and my subtle "is there anyone else you would like me to send this to?" has been met with silence. (As happens with most of my emails.) I've managed to bring the matter to the attention of a few other people; here's hoping that works. (They knew I needed books but they thought the director was taking care of it.

I've also somehow been put in charge of fire safety. We needed a fire inspection of the building and the director asked me to set one up. Okay, fine, so I try to go through the proper channels, leaving a message at the correct number so we could have an appointment scheduled for the fire marshal to come out. That wasn't fast enough for her. "There's a fire station across the road. Why don't you go ask there?" I pointed out that they didn't have fire marshals there but that wasn't a good enough excuse and off I tromped through the drizzle (closing the library) and on the knock on the fire house door. The guy there was nice and, amazingly, got things set up. I got a phone call the next day and the next Tuesday I led the fire marshal around the school.

One of the things we needed was a fire evacuation plan. And wouldn't you know it but that got assigned to me as well. (In addition to creating floor plans of our buildings.) Since she wants to "check these things off [her] list" that means I get an end of the day deadline. Something several people would do over a couple of months she assigns to the librarian to do in three hours. Which, as my dad pointed out, is kind of funny.

Epic Stapler!

Oh, yes, have I mentioned that I'm proctoring exams now?

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic, A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, is a lyrical description of the events surrounding the so-called "Khazar Polemic" and conversion of the Khazar people. Written as an encyclopedia containing cross-referenced entries between three different sections (Christian, Muslim, Jewish), it relates the efforts of various scholars to pin down exactly what happened at the Khazar court when the Khagan invited representatives from the three religions to hold a discussion to convince him of which path to follow.

The Khazars were a real people and the Khagan really was their leader but apart from a few names from history (like Saints Cyril and Methodius and Al-Muqaddasi) this is a completely fictional account. This is reality as dreamed by many people from different eras, stitched together and retold a dozen times.

The story starts, for lack of a better way of putting things, with the Khagan's dream in which an angel told him that God is pleased with his intentions but not his deeds. Accordingly, he arranges the polemic mentioned earlier to gain an interpretation. Whoever is most convincing, wins the Khazar people to their religion. The process is helped or hindered by the princess Ateh, leader of a sect of dream-hunters, men who stalk other people's dreams for clues to pieces of the soul/body of the original Adam, from which they will compile the ultimate book. Peeking through the narrative are forces which conspire to stop this book ever being written.

The exact facts of the polemic and conversion have been lost in time and the encyclopedia details as well the efforts of various people to discover them. Unsurprisingly, each faith's source says that their own side won the argument and the Khazar people ceased to exist when they were absorbed into the larger Christian/Muslim/Jewish community. Reading about the Khazar practices, where faiths and peoples other than their own get more prominence in civic life, one gets the feeling that rather than converting to one single religion, assimilation into their own immigrant communities happened instead of the other way around.

Each entry tells a little more of the story and they don't have to be read in order. You can read from cover to cover or skip around. Whichever method you choose you'll get the whole story in a coherent manner but you'll have different perspectives on the scenes you read depending on the order you gain facts. I would really suggest reading the bit about Dorothea and the trial minutes last though.

This is a lovely, poetic history featuring a humunculus, devils, men who walk through dreams, hungry ghosts, impossible feats, and adventurous people. I really enjoyed this book. It is exactly the sort of dream-like, imaginary tale I enjoy, with real moments of horror, excitement, and love. Each entry is self-contained but reading each entry will give you perspective on others. Some of it is thought-provoking, especially on the nature of thought. He illustrates this with a metaphor of two men (author and reader) holding ropes with a puma (text, thoughts, ideas) caught between them. They can't eat the puma...

The book contains many wonderful vignettes and poetic proverbs; the translator did a great job. This book is like a cross between a fairy tale and a myth, dreamed by a storyteller, retold the next morning.