With Thanksgiving break just ahead, and Winter break not far behind, you will have the opportunity to catch up on reading you actually want to do, or have time to rent movies. These are some recommendations from our staff.
Howard Megdal
The Corrections
In a previous edition of The Outside World, I criticized Jonathan Franzen's decision not to appear on Oprah. That said, he has created a truly remarkable book. It is worth the time investment inherent in any 600 page read. Plus, when it wins the National Book Award, you can casually say to your friends, "Yeah, I read that months ago." Even if you identify with none of the characters, you will understand and recognize all of them.
Family Guy
A show many of you are probably familiar with, but for those that aren't, hurry up and become familiar. It premiered three years ago after the Super Bowl, and for some reason, Fox has been much more willing to promote ridiculously bad shows like Titus instead of Family Guy. It has suffered from being moved to four different time slots, but is the sharpest, funniest show on television since the noticeable dip in the quality of the Simpsons.
The Third Man
The 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles is different from any movie you'll see today. Set in 1940's Vienna, the wit and plot turns in the script and on-location shooting of the post-war city is gripping. The film is visually interesting at every turn, and many people think the film was actually directed by Welles, rather than Carol Reed.
Drew Schulze
Emily Bronte's fame is usually overshadowed by the success of her sister Charlotte. Though Charlotte Bronte was indeed a playboy centerfold, Emily was the writer. Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, tells a dreary tale of passion and vengeance set in windswept England. Her classic style and intense characters create a brilliant work, and a great winter read.
Adam Sandler's second album, What The Hell Happened To Me, is easily his best. The perfect combination of sketches and sing-alongs endures through all twenty tracks. Sandler sings about his car in "Ode To My Car," impersonates a Jewish grandmother obsessed with masturbatory practices in "Do It For Your Mama," and assumes the role of the man on the street in "Sex Or Weight Lifting." The laughs never end.
If you're ever traveling the information superhighway and just need to make a rest stop, I recommend Tom Winker's potty humor animations (www.doodie.com) are simple and effective. Beware-this site is addictive.
Dave Tomar
"Duckman"
In the mid-nineties, when the monumental success of The Simpsons inspired a horde of far less successful primetime cartoons, a program of gleefully sleazy caliber immerged on the USA cable network to the attention of nobody at all. But for three seasons, Jason Alexander, best known as the title character on the smash hit show, Bob Patterson, as well as some side work with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, provided the voice of Duckman to hilarious effect. This half-hour program about the dirt-poor and futilely horny private dick, his pig sidekick and his ugly family , while extremely strange at moments, is hysterical at its best turns. The cancelled show is now being revived in reruns on Comedy Central and while its time slot (back to back episodes, Monday 1:30 AM to 2:30 AM EST) suggests that Duckman is not necessarily receiving the respect it deserves, its airing highlights a programming hour usually reserved for infomercials and televangelists so you've got nothing to lose by watching it.
Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot by Al Franken
The book, a liberal mudslinger's fantasy, is the Saturday Night Live alum's triumphant venture into literature. The book is really just a compilation of first person accounts that the writer and political enthusiast relates to the reader about his experiences and encounters in the realm of American governance. Essentially, the piece is a platform for Franken to openly criticize and deconstruct a tribe of well-regarded conservatives including the likes of Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, Bob Dole and of course, Rush himself, whom the writer goes to great lengths to prove, through strictly scientific measures, is indeed a big, fat idiot. The book is funnier than it is well-written, but the selections are the perfect length for a good laugh on the s--tter.
The Hudsucker Proxy
Starring Tim Robbins as a dumb Oakie and Paul Newman as a ruthless businessman, the Hudsucker Proxy is a nearly perfect and mostly disregarded film from the increasingly impressive Coen Brothers canon. Somehow, this satire about capitalism and corporate soulnessness was lost in a shuffle crowded by undeniable classics like "Raising Arizona", "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski", but the film is razor-sharp, the characters immediately engaging in this quirky Wall Street situational set to the backdrop of pre-Depression era America.
Ryan Maresco
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) is as dense as any novel one will come across. It is dense in terms of its language, plot, and structure. McCarthy's influences for the novel range from Homer to Melville to the King James Version of the Bible. This fact alone sets the pace for a novel with themes such as the endless cycle of violence, Manifest Destiny, the "Wild West" and so on. It is important to note that the novel is based on factual events. McCarthy's novel tells the tale of the Kid, who leaves home circa the 1840's and joins the Glanton Gang, a group of outlaws contracted by territorial governors to kill Indians, and subsequently Mexicans, along the Texas/Mexico border. But the novel encompasses much more, especially as regards characters. One of great interest, which will be discussed in depth, is The Judge, a member of the Glanton Gang who is seven feet tall without a whisk of hair on his body.
Firstly, the novel discusses many themes, most prominently the ceaseless cycle of violence surrounding the Westward expansion of the United States, but also deeply ingrained in man's soul. McCarthy dispels the myth of the "Wild West" by showing its brutality. This is a "Wild West" where all of the cowboys wear black. Whether McCarthy describes "cutting up the gutted antelopes in the floor of the wagon with bowieknives and handaxes, laughing and hacking in a welter of gore" or how "The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head," violence is imbedded in the novel. McCarthy's purpose is to show how the United State's Manifest Destiny was not for the good of the nation or the glory of God, but a violent, brutal process that, if anything, perverted the morals of the country and killed many. The novel turns the theory of civilizing Indians or taking land the country believed belonged solely to Americans upside down. The violence of the novel paints a terrible picture of this process. Here, victims are "rawskulled" and in another example, "…one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against stones so that the brains burst forth. . ."
McCarthy believes this violence to be repeated through time though and writes, "Then they all move on again." The "they" refers to men laying down railroad tracks in the epilogue. This is a sign of continuing expansion, and, if anything, the goals of this expansion will be reinforced by American dominance and advancement (i. e. the creation of a railroad taking one from East to West and so on).
The violence McCarthy speaks of is mysterious though. He writes of the Kid, "He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence." He continues, "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there…You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it." McCarthy does not account for the source of this violence, just that it is has been ingrained in man's heart from the time he was created. So, we may not find an immediate cause, but we know that it is there.
The two main characters of the novel are the Kid and The Judge. The Kid remains nameless throughout the novel because this is a time where men do not live long and their names are scarcely remembered. One can be shot for a queer look or accidentally bumping into another man. The reader travels with the Kid, much like Ulysses, through prairie after prairie, desert after desert. He sees the tragedy of Westward expansion through a child, a "kid." The Kid and the reader are simultaneously exposed to the aforementioned brutality occurring along the Texas-Mexico border in the nineteenth century.
The Judge is not a Judge in a court of law, rather a Judge in the same way that God is believed to be a judge. In fact, The Judge is often portrayed in the novel as being a deity, one with supernatural elements. For instance, he appears in a bar before the Kid, many years later when the Kid is now the Man. The Judge has not aged a day, whereas the Kid is much older. When The Judge says, "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent" he speaks like a god, like one who has power over others. The Judge also represents McCarthy's theory of violence in the novel. McCarthy writes, "He never sleeps the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." The Judge, or brutal violence, will never die. He represents this not only in his actions (he murders many men and animals, and molests children) but also in his speech. The Judge says of war, "It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. . . War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god." He wants to own or preside over all that is. He gathers information, fossils, and draws sketches in a notebook he carries. It is as if he is taking an inventory on his stock. He marks down all he sees and finds, as if he is creating a history of the world. In the judge there are also echoes of Moby Dick, who represented evil and its elusiveness. The Judge can also be compared to Satan in Paradise Lost because he is the most evil character, yet far more interesting then the others. He even has dialogues in much the same way that Plato did, with other men in the gang gathering around him and asking questions. The Judge, of course, always has the answers.
The language of the novel is interesting as well, as one may have already noted. McCarthy uses "thee", "thy", and "thou" with such frequency that one feels one is reading the King James Version of the Bible. For example, McCarthy writes, "This night thy soul may be required of thee." One can read chapter nine, verse thirty in the King James Version of the Bible similarly, "But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not fear the Lord God." The sentence structure is very close. Also, McCarthy writes sentences such as, "The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature that would carry her off." This neo-biblical writing is interesting because man is made of violence and the writing reinforces this because, like Genesis describes a birth, McCarthy describes the birth of an era in American history. The beginnings of the empire are etched out in Manifest Destiny, expanding because it was believed it was the country's God-given right.
Now we turn to the novel's importance. McCarthy, through skillful writing, research, and infinitely complex characters, succeeds in dispelling the romantic myths of Manifest Destiny and the "Wild West." Violence to McCarthy has been since the beginning of time and will not end. "Before man was, war waited for him," writes McCarthy, "The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way." McCarthy is brave as an American author by exposing the hypocrisy of American expansion and all of the damage done along the way. He describes the repetition of this violence throughout time through characters, such as The Judge, and this makes the novel important because Blood Meridian does not attempt to glorify America's past which has included the mass murder of Indians. As far as American literature is concerned, the novel is written unlike any other recent novel, employing biblical language. He has created one of the most evil, memorable, and complex characters in The Judge, who is at once Buddha, Plato, and Satan. He is Moby Dick, the elusive representation of evil. He is knowledgeable on all subjects, yet molests young Mexican boys, and then murders them. He is a supernatural deity, never aging, never dying. Influences such as Milton and Melville serve to create an important, beautifully written novel of violence.