Ada Palmer, 2016
the sixty-fifth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Jake Eakle, Matt Granoff, and Patrick Schmidt
As I’ve slowly and sporadically worked through my reading list, I’ve had an eye on this one, because not only was it recommended by three people, but I recognized the author from a different context: back in 2015, I extensively cited an article by Ada Palmer, in her capacity as a professor of Renaissance history at the University of Chicago, in my post about two TV shows about the Borgias. Her article was great and I was hoping her novel would be even better. Unfortunately, I just bounced right off it. I made it about fifty pages in before I just couldn’t take it anymore.
The book is set in the year 2454, with the conceit that it is written in the style of the eighteenth century—i.e., one that is comprehensible to us, without being so convenient as “oh, yes, I will be writing in the style of 2016 because of reasons”. Nevertheless, once you get more than twenty minutes into the future you’re writing about an alien world. Imagine a conversation between my 2016 self and one from barely a decade earlier:
2003 me: “Wow, so tell me about our life in the future! Like, what did you do today?”
2016 me: “Well, first I drove to Walnut Creek to go tutor…”
2003 me: “Okay, so we’re back in California, but still doing the tutoring job. Gotcha…”
2016 me: “Swung by Zachary’s Pizza on the way home…”
2003 me: “Glad to hear they’re still in business after all these years!”
2016 me: “Then I got home and tweeted that my podcast was now up on Youtube.”
2003 me: “…”
2003 me: “Huh??”
Palmer tries to balance the sense that the future is foreign with the need to make her story comprehensible by initially using unfamiliar terms without explanation, for a long enough stretch that it seems like we’re only going to gather what they mean from context, then circling back to finally define them. So you end up with sentences like this: “The Conclave picked carefully assigning a new sensayer for your bash’ of all bash’es, of course they did.” And that runs right into Pattern 30:
The prose in a written work doesn’t need to be completely transparent. I’m all for style points. But the meaning of each sentence should be transparent. No colorless green ideas sleeping furiously. If the world of the story is sufficiently surreal that some strings of words might need a bit of setup, do the setup first. If it’s full of homcom slugs and lo-index sub-subems, recognize that just dropping those terms before explaining what they mean creates a great temptation to bail.
In this case the temptation was too great. Even though by page fifty I knew what a sensayer and a bash’ were, the opening pages were opaque enough that I no longer cared. Nor did I care about the characters, nor did I follow the plot. So, yeah, I’m glad all y’all got something out of this, but it was not for me at all.
Thomas Savage and Jane Campion, 2021
#10,
2021 Skandies
I rarely have any idea what I’m getting into when I fire up one of these movies, so I’m never really expecting anything, yet somehow I feel like I was expecting Benedict Cumberbatch playing a Montana cowboy even less than most other possibilities. Anyway, I got forty minutes into this and then put it on pause because I felt like it really should have given me a reason to want to keep watching by that point, and it hadn’t. We have Cumberbatch playing a mean-spirited cowboy circa 1925, and Jesse Plemons, who I guess is now this generation’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing his more benign brother. They and a dozen other cowboys who work for them stop at an inn for dinner, where the mean cowboy mocks the innkeeper’s ungainly son for his interest in making origami flowers; this makes his mother, a fortyish widow, cry. The nicer cowboy starts making trips into town to visit her, initially to make amends and then to court her, and soon they are married. That’s where we were when I paused.
I looked into this movie to see whether I should continue. It was only #10 in the Skandies, but I saw that it had won twelve Oscar nominations and had been picked as the best film of 2021 by the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle, so I gave it another twenty minutes to see whether it would pick up. A bit of a plot does start to get going in this section, as the mean cowboy takes a dislike to his brother’s wife and starts to torment her in particular and act like (even more of) a childish, passive-aggressive asshole in general, and I didn’t want to watch that, so I officially gave up on this at the one-hour mark. Maybe I would have had more patience for it in another era, but these days I get my fill of malevolent adults acting out like petulant toddlers just by reading the news.
Roman Coppola, Hugo Guinness, Jason Schwartzman,
and Wes Anderson, 2021
#9, 2021 Skandies
But I didn’t want to post an article consisting solely of writeups of things I hadn’t finished, so I moved on to the next movie. Again, I had no idea what was coming, but within thirty seconds it was obvious that this was a Wes Anderson movie, at which point I had an extremely good idea of what was coming. Well, mostly. I wasn’t expecting to see Léa Seydoux again so soon after France, but I guess this movie has “French” in the name so it wasn’t a total shock. But yeah, you kind of know what you’re getting with a Wes Anderson film, and this is certainly one of the Wes Anderson films of all time, as the kids say. Or I guess it’s actually three of the Wes Anderson films of all time, because this is an anthology of three short films (about half an hour each) plus an introduction and an epilogue. The conceit is that these films represent articles in a New Yorker-style magazine pitched to an American audience but operating out of the city of “Ennui, France”. Each is supposedly by a different writer, but certainly no trace of individuality is left after Wes Anderson gets through with them. I dunno—when your critics grumble that all your movies are the same, stringing three extremely similar short films together doesn’t seem like a great way to beat the charges. But while my patience did start to wear thin, I did stick it out to the end, so that’s something!
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