It's The End Of The World As We Know It...

...And I feel blue. There has been a temporary blog slowdown over the last few days, and you can blame Cormac McCarthy for it. Last week I read his breathtaking novel The Road, which paints such a convincing and relentlessly bleak picture of what the world would be like during a nuclear winter that I was propelled headlong into a brainfunk of catastrophic proportions. I can't remember the last time I read something that affected me so profoundly, though I do remember the last film that did; Cronenberg's criminally underrated Spider, doing for my psyche what Cronenberg had previously managed with Dead Ringers many years ago.


Maybe it wasn't just the fault of The Road. Over the last few months I have read Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement (the world has become completely irrational and it's only going to get worse), Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great (religious fundamentalists will be the death of us all), Scott Smith's The Ruins (a metaphor for how we are all doomed due to our ignorance and fear of facing our responsibilities, and a shit-scary horror classic to boot), and Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson's The Gods That Failed (a lengthy and eloquent rant about the forthcoming economic Armageddon that will make paupers of us all). The cumulative effect of all this bleak reading material is to make me even more pessimistic than I previously was.

Maybe if I had followed The Gods That Failed with Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew as planned, I might only be very miserable instead of emotionally washed-out, but it too will be a sobering and downbeat read, even taking into account Frank's deadpan wit. Instead, plumping for McCarthy's novel might have been the worst choice possible. It's all because photos of the adaptation hit the internet last week, showing Viggo Mortenson as the unnamed dad trudging across a blasted and ash-strewn hellscape with his son in tow, waiting for death to take them both before they fall to the hands of marauding cannibal rapists. Well, the photos only showed Viggo looking really miserable, so I went into the book not realising how well McCarthy would paint a picture of a world utterly without hope. Or colour. The inside of my head has been the same ash-gray since finishing the book which, incidentally, I did as quickly as I could in order to get it over and done with.


Though I'm sure most people stumbling across this blog have already read The Road, if you haven't I hesitate to recommend it due to the overwhelmingly negative empathic reaction I had to it. On a non-emotive level I definitely would recommend it. McCarthy is operating at the peak of his phenomenal powers, and with spare poetic prose creates an utterly convincing post-apocalyptic nightmare that has been designed with such rigour that there is no room for hope or optimism (I won't include spoilers that might or might not ultimately qualify that statement. Those who have read The Road will have their own ideas about whether that statement is true or not). It is a totally convincing scenario, and thanks to McCarthy's incredible descriptive facility, there is no escape from his vision of hell on earth. It felt like a mantrap had grabbed onto my soul. So yeah, stunning book, and one everyone should read, but if you don't feel like being really really glum for several days after, skip it.

So, even though I'm not the type to shy away from potentially downbeat material, I figured I needed to take a break from fiction or non-fiction making serious points about how fucked up the world is. Maybe spending the whole weekend watching pretty much the whole third season of The Shield wasn't the best move, but even though it featured nervous breakdowns, beloved characters either killing animals or beating each other almost to the brink of death, rape (perpetrated upon both male and female), dismemberment, moral compromise, racism, homophobia, systemic corruption, unrelenting tension, violence, and a bleak vision of urban decay, at least it was occasionally funny, plotted with astonishing precision, and was never less than riveting. A rewatching of Zoolander was more calming, as was a viewing of the last five episodes of Venture Brothers season three, which would have been an unqualified uplifting triumph if the last two minutes of the finale didn't make me so sad (stupid Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick making me unhappy with the shock ending!).


Nevertheless, the sadness has yet to pass, even with the best efforts of Canyon to cheer me up, which could be evidence that my soul has been tainted by the power of McCarthy's prose even unto its core. After spending some time pootling around the excellent Quiet Earth website, which is devoted to post-apocalyptic sci fi fiction, I realised that that kind of dystopian sci fi can either be depressing (The Road) or kinda fun (they linked to news that a director's cut of the exuberantly daft and entertaining Waterworld is being released, which was one of the few things over the last few days that has cheered me up, and all the Waterworld haters out there can kiss it). As a result, I have gone out of my way to experience less harrowing dystopic sci fi over the last couple of days, in an effort to replace McCarthy's harrowing vision with something that doesn't make me despair, and I shall spend the rest of the week discussing my efforts. If that doesn't appeal to our readers, apologies, but seriously, it beats moaning about Mike Leigh again, folks.

Adventures In Awesome: New Thomas Frank Book!

It's Anger Week on the Intarnettz this week, according to my experiences jumping from site to site and message board to message board to see that the humidity of summer has made people go, "Bzzzt furious rage!" at just about anything. Seeing AICN melt down over something as innocuous as The Clone Wars and hearing that Latino Review was being targeted by Microsoft for posting a couple of pictures for a movie that isn't even being made was enough to disturb my equilibrium quite badly, without all of the other random snippiness and bullying that comprises about 56% of internet interaction over the past few days, so I shall attempt to make the online world a happier place with an inconsequential post filled with joy over the release of a new book by my intellectual mancrush Thomas Frank.


I'm all a-dither with excitement. In the past I have railed against the iniquities of The Market, and the peculiar popular belief in its impassive, emotionless benevolence, which is something that has irked me long enough that I can remember being very uncomfortable watching pretty much any movie or TV show from the 80s featuring Michael J. Fox in a shirt (i.e. almost all of them). Maybe that discomfort is why I have such a problem with money, and talking about money, and any kind of economic thinking. Or maybe it's the other way around. It's hard to say. What is obvious to me, though, is that my understanding of what money is and how to make it work is so embarrassingly immature that any kind of balance sheet or bill or bank statement looks to me like this.


In an attempt to get over this I read two books that I have mentioned before; The Lexus and The Olive Tree, by Thomas Friedman, and One Market Under God, by Thomas Frank. The utter worthlessness of the first book was obvious even to someone like myself who once thought that newspaper headlines about the IMF were referring to The Impossible Mission Force (I really really wish that was a joke). One of Friedman's arguments, that The Market is riddled with democracy-germs that rub off on countries that make out with it, is backed up with statements barely more substantial than, "this is what will happen because... because... just because, damn it!", not to mention conjuring up the image of goat-herders in the Middle East giving up on their traditional work in order to sit on a rock with a laptop and trying to eke out a few tiyin here and there by day-trading (an exaggeration, but not much of one).

There was a lot of other unconvincing stuff in there, but don't take my word for it. My man Paul Krugman dishes out an entertaining review of it here. My dislike of Friedman's populist drivel is such that recently I potentially alienated a friend of Canyon's after seeing a copy of The World Is Flat on her shelf, which triggered a ten minute rant from me that scared her cats and made her back away from me while reaching for a baseball bat. If you ever read this post, Friend of Canyon, I apologise profusely. The anger management classes are going well, you'll be glad to hear. The point I was trying to get across, behind all of the "GRAAAAR!" and "Noooooo!" and "Banish him to Uzbekistan!" statements, was that if Lexus was anything to go by, I wouldn't be surprised if Friedman was actually trying to argue that the world really was flat. That's how little I respect him.

One Market Under God, on the other hand, was a revelation; funny, angry, and filled with shocking examples of pro-Market propaganda hurled at we, the people, by those who would benefit most from our mute acceptance of the status quo. It was just the tonic I needed. His next book was called by two names What's The Matter With Kansas? in the US, and, rather uncharitably, What's The Matter With America? in the UK, because we Brits have never heard of Kansas and might think he is talking about some village in Greenland or something. It might be even better than One Market. I don't know. I tend to have internal debates about which book is better, like the comic fans who debate whether Superman or Thor would win in a fight (it's Thor, obviously). That said, while One Market made me angry, What's The Matter just made me depressed. Recently I read Matt Taibbi's disappointingly slender but undeniably hilarious The Great Derangement, and it conjured up similar feelings of desperate misery of a "Hell in a handbasket" kind of way.

The Wrecking Crew might make me feel just as bad, but I can't wait for it anyway. I thought it was coming out next week, but it's out now, and I've already ordered it, though my eagerness for it is so intense it's even made me crave a Kindle so I can immediately download it and read it instead of chunter on about it. Until then, check out Frank's homepage, and watch the interview with Stephen Colbert. As a big fan of both of men and their Amazing Powers of the Brain, it was a treat to see that last night (what? Our PVR is full of old Daily Shows and Dexters and we got behind with watching!).