Are we to accept this ignorance as comedic? A look at the "greatest books ever"

So the word on the street (the street being Internet Meme Crescent) is that most people have only read about 6 of the following 100 books. Since one of my causes is making sure that the world learns how to read better, I ought to make sure that I qualify first, right? There's an X next to every book that I've read. Here goes.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa Mae Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (X)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (X)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante (X)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (X)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

So, in the end, I have read 46 of the 100 books on the list. But really, is that a critique of me as a reader? Let's examine this list a little closer, and maybe we can get a better idea of exactly who the BBC is trying to position:

First of all, the list is not a reference to the BBC's Top 100 Reads, rather, it's an article from The Guardian, called "Books you Can't Live Without". However, this is not a list as compiled by critics (like the Modern Library's Top 100 Books, for example), but rather a popularity list, made from votes readers submitted. This illuminates more on what the actual list represents: the reading done by the average UK citizen. Thus the emphasis on British authors, especially Austen and Dickens (with about five books each, meaning that they represent 1/10 of the list) and little recognition for recognizable American authors (they mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee, but omit the likes of Mark Twain, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway). There's also a poor representation of relatively advanced writing: for example, Joyce's Ulysses is mentioned, but his other notable works–Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners, for example–are omitted, as well as other Modernist texts, such as Joyce's contemporary, Virginia Woolf, or other notable twentieth-century authors, such as Kurt Vonnegut or Zora Neale Hurston (also, I should point out the tiny number of non-white authors).

There's also a staggering number of what I'll call Grade School texts; works of classic literature that are typically read in secondary school (High School here in the States). That's just an assumption by myself, but at least 1/5 of the texts mentioned are likely to be required reading for many students before they graduate high school. Not only that, but works of Children's Literature are almost as prominent. And while I don't ever discredit the importance of Children's Literature, I don't exactly see why The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh is better than Hamlet. And speaking of Hamlet, I find it hard to believe that people have really read "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" as the list describes it, while still allowing Hamlet its own spot, there, at the bottom, below The Five People You Meet In Heaven.

Most of the list is, as I mentioned, British Literature. The lack of American authors is pitiful, and the attention paid to so few Russian, French and other international authors is equally unsound. Plus, no Germans. And there are enough books that I can credit gaining popularity due more to hype, controversy, and the Oprah Book Club than to their actual artistic merit.

What do these submissions–and omissions–tell us about the average reader? Well, at least the average reader of the Guardian, who lives in Britain. Let's look at the top 10 books that they picked, which are (apparently) the 10 greatest books you could possibly read. Look out, guys, I'm going to get snarky:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This novel seems to fit most of what we're looking at with the rest of the list: British author, an acceptable piece of literature in its own right (if we were to look at any other top 100 lists, I doubt there would be an omission of this novel). But on the minus side, Pride and Prejudice is a relatively simple piece of literature. For its time it was groundbreaking, and though it serves as an excellent look into 18th century society, it is also a romantic comedy, and is not particularily well-written, being more revolutionary in what it is saying as opposed to how it says it. In many ways, Pride and Prejudice is the Wizard of Oz of books: everyone knows it, everyone gets it, everyone likes it, but does that make it truly great?

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
You know what, I hated Lord of the Rings. I didn't like The Hobbit that much either. Tolkein's overlong, plodding, and dull-save-for-some-battle-scenes saga is, perhaps, one of the best works of Fantasy Fiction. In my opinion, though, that's like saying that Independence Day is one of the best disaster movies ever. Yes, it's an anti-war book, but is it so hard to think of a hundred other anti-war books? Also, this series is responsible for practically creating the genre of Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy, which I'm not sure is a great thing. The worst crime, perhaps, is that there is little in Tolkein's thirty thousand or so pages of walking across Middle Earth that opens up any insight into the human condition.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre falls under a lot of the same categorials as Pride and Prejudice, though I'm happy to say that, at least, it's a better book. Virginia Woolf, in her introductory pages to A Room of One's Own, actually mentions that one is almost required to mention Austen and the Brontes, but this doesn't mean that they're necessarily great authors, just that they're the only women available. Jane Eyre is a good enough story as it is, and Charlotte is by far the most skilled of the Bronte sisters. Again this is a novel that must be remembered for its significance, but it is far from the best, even Bronte's later novel Villette is a better read.

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
First of all, don't put an entire series as one book. This happened with The Lord of the Rings as well, and I let it go as it was three pretty closely constructed books, but the entire Harry potter series? The list makes this error further down with The Chronicles of Narnia (despite how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has its own place). To be completely honest, I love the shit out of Harry Potter. But is it better than the next book on the list, To Kill a Mockingbird? No. Have more people read it? You bet. The series is the biggest thing to happen in literature in the past fifty years. But this isn't a list about what books are the most familiar, it is the books which are the best. And, though JK Rowling is a pretty good writer and she managed to make a series that was as good as the hype suggested it to be, I'm not sure that it deserves to be placed on the top shelf just yet.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Finally, something I can agree with! Well, at least I agree that it should be in the top 10. This is also the only American novel to rank this high (sad), and the only one that was written in the twentieth century AND isn't a fantasy story. Does that seem weird to anyone else? That there are no books about modern life this high up?

6 The Bible
Okay, look. The Bible is a great work of literature. But what does this exactly say? Most of the time when I see people list "The Bible" in their favorite books, it just seems like they're making a point of saying how Christian they are. I've read the Bible, but I wouldn't say that it's a favorite work of literature to me; I would just say that it's very essential reading for anyone who ever wants to find out what Western Society is talking about most of the time. If this was a list of Most Influential Books, then the Bible would be at #1. Also, I'm a little bugged that it's just "the Bible" and not something specific: King James Bible, New Testament, Old Testament, and so on. Also, look at the books that beat it.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I don't know what to say about this. Wuthering Heights is the most dull, insipid book that I've read and I will never understand why people love it so much. Do you get me? It's like the 19th century's precursor to Twilight; it's nothing but a book about people who love each other so passionately that they will ruin the lives of nearly everyone in England just so that they can die in the end and haunt their children.

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Blah blah blah social commentary. Orwell did a damn good job of scaring the pants off of me, as well as most other people in the First World, when he came out with 1984. Orwell's novel is suspenseful and well-written, but I find it to be heavy-handed and, over fifty years later, pretty terribly dated. Like the Bible, I would place this close to the top of a Most Influential list, but I'm not sure that it's top 10 material.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
I love these books. I love the characters. Philip Pullman is a better writer, to me, than Tolkein and Rowling. What bothers me most about this inclusion is that, besides the already obvious anger at snubbing dozens of other wonderful works of literature, they include His Dark Materials while at the same time no one thought of the literary masterpiece that serves, more or less, as Pullman's source material: John Milton's Paradise Lost. But hey, it's only the most influential and beautiful work of poetry in the English language, you don't have to read it.

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
This is the first of what appears to be hundreds of Dickens novels on the list. At least they chose the best one of the bunch. I'll go off on a tangent about this: I don't understand what's so great about Charles Dickens. When I was studying in England, I realized that almost everyone had read Dickens, while I was hardly ever introduced to his writing growing up in the States. In the same vein, the only way that British children seemed to be familiar with Mark Twain was to take a literature class that specialized in American Lit. That might be a misunderstanding on my part, of course. But maybe that's why I just can't get into Dickens: he wrote nothing, as far as I can tell, that has any remote interest to the American reader; whereas Twain practically invented the American Reader.

Let's take a moment and look at the original list, the BBC's "The Big Read". Here are the top 10 books from that reader poll:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Oh god damn it. Is this really all that people aspire to read? At least they only named one of the Harry Potter books (don't worry, there are at least five more on the rest of the list). I'll count His Dark Materials as a single volume, since it works best if read that way anyway. Why do people love The Lord of the Rings so much? If these lists are proper reflections of the population of the United Kingdom, I'd say that everyone in the UK is fifteen and simply listed the only books they have ever read.

In order to make this fair, here's another Top 10 list, this one compiled by the apropriate Best 100 Novels website. Once again, I've X'ed the ones I know.

1. 1984 by George Orwell (X)
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (X)
3. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (X)
4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (X)
5. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (X)
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (X)
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (X)

This is a little better, in terms of what I would consider important literature. Am I happy about the order? Well, not really. Once again, of course, this is a popularity list (people sign onto the website and submit their 10 favorite books), but it looks like the contributors included more than just British Housewives.

TIME Magazine created a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. I like this list for a few reasons: first of all, it's a narrowed-down selection, which means that it's a bit more fair (the earliest published novel is 1923, which can more or less be called the kickoff for what would define 20th century literature). Second, it was compiled by only two people, editors at TIME itself, meaning that they know what they're talking about, and the novels didn't just arrive on the list by overwhelming vote. Finally, the list is alphabetical and not done in a best to worst sort of way. This makes the books even in their heft on the list, which makes sense: after all, can you really compare science fiction, modernism, and fantasy in the same way?

The last list that I'll mention is the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels. This one's a little skewed, after all, the only eligible books are ones that have been published by the Modern Library, which means that it's sort of the Critereon Collection of books. Still, it was compiled by a board of literary experts, and is pretty formidable. You should go check it out, if only to see how many scientologists contributed to the Reader's List (that's the one on the right, with all the Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard).

So what is it that makes the best novels of all time? Obviously, polling people won't produce the right answer. On the other hand, simply relying on the Literati to produce the answer alienates most people who read for the sake of reading. Of course, in the end, the "Best Novel Ever" doesn't exist, at least not objectively. What would make me happy would be something like TIME's list, more of a survey of great literature, but divided by era, genre, etc. What people fail to realize all too often is that literature is as complex and interesting as music. What the Guardian's list clearly shows, to me, is the general ignorance of this fact, the ignorance that leads people to believe that something like The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is more worthwhile than Dante's Inferno, Joyce's Ulysses, or dozens of other books that were ignored for the sake of a book-club populist grouping of literature that is choked by novels that, in twenty years, will lose any sort of relevance.

The solution? Easy. Let people know that they can and should read better books. They also can and should see better movies, while we're on the subject. People go about their lives ignoring some of the best artistic experiences that they could have for the sake of something that is "easier" or "more accessible", when the truth is....it isn't. You can go to MacDonalds and get a Big Mac meal for the same price that you could probably make a healthier, more delicious sandwich at home, you just have to be willing to put in the effort. The tragedy is that, the more attention that gets paid to mediocre talent, the less and less gets paid to the better, rarer works of literature. And true, reading something like Joyce or Woolf isn't easy, but I promise you that its worth it. And the more people read better things, the more their vocabulary and their world view expands and blooms. Reading great literature is, to me, not a requirement (like Summer reading), but is essential. I only wish that I could share that idea with more people, and that I could open up that understanding. I'm not going to give you my Top 100 novels, but I could always try...for now, though, I have too much left to read before I can feel happy with my understanding of it all. No matter how many great books you've read, there will always be more.

Get your Google on

Or Wikipedia. Whichever.

I don't know how many of these I'll do, but these are a couple people whom I believe the Googling of and knowing about would probably do most people good. I've had them all on my mind for a while, but now they are true, because they are blogged.

1) Clara Bow. Hollywood's first sex symbol, "it" girl, flappper, took a terrible life and enchanted the world.

2) Zelda Fitzgerald. Wife of F. Scott, gifted and troubled, remembered more for her insanity than for her own writing.

3) Franz von Stuck. German Symbolist painter extraordinaire, almost forgotten outside of Munich, many paintings border on erotica, designed his house from the floor to the dome.

4) Ralph Ellison. Wrote a novel that fits between DuBois and Dostoevsky, blew Faulkner away, and made Jazz work on the page like no other.

5) The entire cast of Amadeus. Despite having three hours worth of incredible performances, no one really did anything after this film, find them and bring them back. Seriously, only three members of the cast have pictures on IMDB, and two of them are pictures from Amadeus.

Also, I want to say something about True Blood. After every episode of True Blood, I feel as though I've been beaten over the head with a Stupid Stick, that is also full of heroin, and thus I keep doing it. Luckily for me, I now have a membership at Movie Madness here in PDX, which means that I can just grab Nosferatu or Christopher-Lee-As-Dracula anytime I need some real Vampire shit.

Can anyone ever do Vampires right again? Should I try? I don't know.

Lovely Painting Break

I'm wasting my evening watching The Da Vinci Code on TNT, which means that I'm watching a combination of watching the movie itself and late-night infomercials, for things such as "Ultimate Love Songs" (in two volumes!) and RePhresh, which relieves "feminine odor and itch...forever!" (use it after your period! Rephresh! After intimacy! REPHRESH! After doucheing! REEEEEEPHRESH!)

And I should say right now that I enjoy watching The Da Vinci code, not because it's particularly good, but because it relies heavily on something I loved as a youth: hostorical re-enactments with narration. I grew up with The History Channel before it was all about technology, and The Discovery Channel when it was more about haunted places and less about blowing things up. And it's impossible for me to hate anything to have to do with Tom Hanks. Oh, and there's a little of this in it:

Anywho, here's what it led me to: a lovely painting of The Penetent Magdelene, as painted by Francesco Hayez:

Now I'm back to discovering the secret codes of stuff and learning where to call to meet lots of local singles!

The Ten Dumbest Things To Do On Facebook

Now that Facebook has pretty much destroyed every other social networking site (though I'm looking for a literature themed one, a la last.fm, and if it doesn't exist, then I will call it BookBook), it has become the haven of everything that you can possibly imagine. Everything that we hate about the internet is there now: old people, fandoms, forums, personality quizzes, and the people that, in truth, you once used the internet to avoid. Still, it's the best option out there; less garish than Myspace, less whorish than makeoutclub (or any of the dozen other sites like it), less elitist than last.fm, and more useful for the billions of forums out there. I've had my Facebook page for four years, was there when it let in high schoolers, then corporations, then pretty much everyone, created groups, a newsfeed, applications, games, and fan pages. This means that I witnessed the backlash against every single one of those things because the truth is that if you give people something for free, they will find reasons to hate it. I've avoided joining most of the backlash discussion, since the majority of the time it's pointless. The real problem with Facebook isn't the website, it's the people who use it and often abuse it. And no matter what I do, there's nothing that can keep these things from clogging up any sort of unfiltered News Feed, so here is my list of What Not To Do when it comes to Facebook:

The Ten Dumbest Things To Do On Facebook

10) Treat your Facebook like a Twitter Feed
Twitter, if you care, is meant to be the future of social networking, which is code for "in three months, no one will care about it". The idea is simple: a user writes about their lives in 140 characters or less. I have one. It's a fun experiment, like when your English teacher tells you to write a story without adjectives. Also, famous people have Twitters, so you can feel like you're best friends with, I don't know, Al Gore. Facebook changed their News Feed layout shortly after Twitter's rise in popularity, making it apparent that the creators of Facebook really didn't want Twitter to steal their thunder, in an internet game of "anything you can do, I can do better". Facebook had already had status updates for a while, now they just spiffed them up with the option of "sharing": posting links, pictures, whatever. While the idea of this is decent, it is the root of most of the clutter problem with the News Feed: people do share, and they share a lot. Hey, I liked a movie. Let me tell you about it. I had a test today. Here's how I feel about it. I took a quiz about what "Twilight" character. Let me tell you how surprised I am! Thankfully, one has the option of NOT sharing every last detail of their life on Facebook, but people either don't use that or they don't want to. The result is a News Feed clogged with a billion off-key rusty horns blowing a billion innane songs at my face at the same time, which takes me right from "being interested" to "hoping you will die and not update about it".
Where you can do this without repremand: Twitter


9) Join/create groups that are numbers
This is on the way out, since groups are also on the way out in favor of the simpler pages. Still, you see tons of these all around the 'book: "1,000,000 Strong for Barack Obama" "2,000 People Against The Golden Compass" "A Million Christians on Facebook", and so on. And after that you have the second type of number groups, the result number groups: "For Every Person Who Joins This Group I Will Send $1 to Darfour" "If 2,000 People Join This Group, Doug Will Eat Dog Food For A Week" "If 4,000 People Join, I'll Lose My Virginity". Sure you will, kid. If Facebook says so. The entire message behind these groups isn't "hey, look, there are thousands of people who are like you!", because you could easily find that out...just by looking the number of people in the group. What it really says is "let's see how many people we can rope into thinking this is funny/clever/relevent! I'll bet it's at least 1,000". The worst part of this is that the groups seldom reach the level that they intend to, and still, people join. They love doing it. The worst offender of them all? "If 1,000,000 people join this group, nothing will happen", or as I like to call it, "If 1,000,000 people join this group, then we will have evidence that there are at least 1,000,000 douchebags on Facebook."
Where you can do this without repremand: On some forum that is tucked far away from the world so that I can't see it.

8) Post profile pictures that are not of you
First of all, it's dishonest. People want to see what you look like (even if you're ugly. We need a warning). Secondly, it's immature, you're making your Facebook profile, which you plan to use for "Networking" or "Random play", the same as your gamer profile on XBox Live. Third: it's generally a dickish and pretentious thing to do. What, you really think that you're just like The Terminator? You want to put up some cubist painting to say, what, "I'm too artsy for my face"? What's that? A LOLCat? Man, those aren't even funny by themselves after ten seconds.
Where you can do it without repremand: Myspace

7) Post vague, self-involved status updates
I know, I know, everyone's a poet. We all love the idea of saying beautiful and profound things, and on Facebook, you have the ability to say them to hundreds of people at the same time, and then wait on edge to see if they will Like it or Comment. Let me put this simply: Facebook is not a place for poetry. Actually, most of the internet isn't, as most people learn by the time they're 16. Still, people post sentences that are not sentences, usually having to deal with breaking up with someone or hating someone or sunflowers or how they hate someone they broke up with, but the updates are so vague that it's like they're wanting everyone on Facebook to comment enthusiastically, "what do you mean? My god, tell me, you're so mysterious!" No you're not. Stop trying to be artistic on Facebook. Remember: you're on Facebook.
Where you can do it without repremand: LiveJournal

6) Randomly friend people
On Myspace, the idea was to have a thousand friends; not really to talk to them or find out what they were doing with their lives, but to just have them, like a collection of action figures. Occasionally, you friended someone you actually knew. Rarely, you met someone on Myspace and met them in real life (presumably for sex). The beauty of Facebook is the exclusive feel to it. It started as a place where you could only add other people who were in college, and even though it grew from there, the idea was generally the same: only add people that you at least know personally in real life. This is mostly due to the limited profile that Facebook shows to anyone who doesn't know you. It keeps Facebook clean, for the most part. Still, though, there are plenty of people with hundreds of friends, and this seems to be for no other reason that they just decided to blanket friend everyone they could have met in their lives. And true, I could say no, but still, I hate the idea of having my Feed clogged with updates from people who are, at the very least, strangers that I don't feel scared around. The way to solve this? Ask someone if they're on Facebook first. And ask to friend them. At least there will be some real world interaction...
Where you can do this without repremand: Myspace

5) Create/attend events that are not really events
This is what an event is: an event is a party. It is a party for people to get together at. Here's what an event isn't: a place where people can give someone their phone numbers. A vague reference to something, such as "Mary is attending the last day of school." And it's not really a nation-wide thing, either. You don't "attend" the first presedential debate on TV. You don't "attend" voting in American Idol. It just doesn't make sense; it's almost the same as one of those pointless groups, only it seems immediate and important. I remember a time where I was invited to FOUR events where someone had lost or gotten a new phone, and needed my phone number. How do you RSVP to that? Why not just send people messages?
Where you can do this without repremand: Eh, nowhere really

4) Make groups/pages about what pisses you off on Facebook
If sayings were literal, then Facebook is a big giant gift horse, and there are hundreds of thousands of people clamoring into eyesight of its mouth. Every day people join more and more of these groups. Facebook, in the beginning, was so popular that every small development was noticed by more and more people, generating more and more of a backlash against it. It started when Facebook opened it's e-doors to high schoolers and then the real world. People hated it. Then they created the news feed. People hated that. Every single formatting shift, every tiny change in the site's design, hate hate hate. Most of the time the changes didn't really effect the overall accessibility and use of Facebook, and I've yet to hear of someone destroying their Facebook because they moved the wall from one side of the screen to the other. And if it isn't things that Facebook is doing wrong, it's things that people think the site would die without: colored themes, music, HTML coding (basically, everything that Myspace has). Facebook, of course, has never taken any of these suggestions to heart. The new popular one is the idea of creating a "Don't Like" button as a contrast to the "Like" button, which is sort of a symbol for Facebook in general: we want the option to hate what we're getting the priveledge to see. Now, you could say that I'm doing the same thing by harping on it right now, but rest assured: I'm not making a group about it. The whole thing reeks with what I call the You Think You Know Better fallacy: for example, when you're at a store and someone says that it's organized wrong, or that the computer should work in a different way. It's the idea that the system isn't broken, the system is just stupid, and thou art the bearer of common sense in a mad world. The truth is that, most of the time, things work pretty well, and are pretty well designed, and if there's a problem, you aren't the only person who knows about it. If the designers at Facebook thought that customized profiles and Don't Like buttons were good things to have, then they would put them up there. The flipside of all these groups are the conspiracy ones, the "join this group if you don't want Facebook to cost money/be racist/give information to the government". These, of course, are fed with a nice thick slice of bullshit pie.
Where you can do this without repremand: Anywhere in Boca Raton

3) Becoming fans of things that are concepts
At first, pages were a great idea: it's like a group, except that it's consolidated (for instance, instead of having thirty groups that are Virginia Woolf fan clubs, you could just have Virginia Woolf herself). During the presedential elections, Obama and McCain groups could use their wide Facebook audience of "fans" to send out notifications, news items, etc. They were a sort of addition or substitute for your Interests, a more colorful way to show people what you cared about. But, like anything that a million people are given influence over, the Pages were led astray. Now you can become a "fan" of cuddling, morning sex, summer vacation, sleeping, waking up, playing video games, driving a car, speaking french, eating meat, being vegetarian, kicking puppies into the faces of babies, etc. The problem with this is that it's stupid: you end up with tons of pages that aren't of actual things, but just concepts. I suppose that people think that they're being clever, it's one of those phrases that I can see the Cohen Brothers giggling over five or six years ago. The truth of the matter is that saying "I'm a big fan of cuddling" wears out its welcome the first time, and finding out that there are a thousand "things that are not things" to "be a fan of" makes you sort of want all that 2012 stuff to come true.
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere. We're getting into no man's land here.

2) Add applications like it's going out of style
Do you play Mafia Wars? Put "flair" on your wall? How about bumper stickers? Got any fake pets? Wanna write a movie review? Show off every bit of "Office" trivia that you know? How about a quote generator? A LOLcat generator? How about give a gift? Or a poke? Or a hug? Or a fake trip to Tahiti? How about a hatching egg? Growing flower? Free gift? Rank your friends? I know! Do all of those things, and then send me invites to do them as well, because everyone is interested in those things. Everyone wants to join the "I'm gonna clutter the fuck out of my Facebook page" group! Or they can be fans of it? Yeah! We can be like those people who get so many tattoos that you forget that they're someone who has feelings or, you know, a life. Who needs a life? I'm playing Risk!
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere

1) Quizzes
These just need to stop. Unconditional surrender. Quizzes are not only applications that you have to add that plaster themselves all over your page, but they also take up plenty of space on the News Feed. And there are quizzes for everything, which means that there are thousands of people taking them and dozens of them posting them on my home page. And to what effect? Are they bragging? Do they think I'm interested? I get that it's fun (which is why people plastered Quizilla results all over their myspaces back in the day), but must we do it all day? Facebook is meant to be a networking site, not a place for wasting away trying to learn what sort of disney villain you are. Not only are the regular quizzes annoying and pestering, but now people have gotten the idea of creating quizzes about themselves, with a "how well do you know...." title. To which I kindly say: you are not that important. Please grow up, at least a little bit. The Quizzes have become terribly unsightly and second-hand embarrassing, and reduce the Facebook news Feed a little closer to the level of Blaring Myspace Page. And no one wants that again.

Let's see what Picture Picture has for us today

Here we go: pictures, captions. Life as a photo. Hooraaaaaaaaay.



After months of difficulty, I was finally able to perfectly flip an omelette. I mean, look at that shit. and that's nothing compared to what's in it: egg whites, cumin, salt, pepper, oregano, jack and cheddar cheese, and a slice of avacado right in the middle. Behold!



This here is one result of a shopping trip today: conté crayon! In sanguine, not sepia! The color that I wanted! Not only that, but it's not a bad picture. It's called Tightrope, and you can see a better resolution image of it over here, at my DeviantArt page.

There you go! Pictures pictures pictures. Except that I have one more beauty to show you all: the cover to Bits of Paradise, a book that I was excited to find (for cheap) at Powell's, that's a collection of F. Scott and Zelda Fitgerald's short stories, which all seem either very silly or very sad. Also, I love Zelda Fitzgerald in all her craziness, and it's been nearly impossible for me to get a hold of Save Me The Waltz, or at least a poster of the front cover (please, Gods of Publishing, reprint that book. It is such a loverly book), so I'm tickled to have her on my bookshelf. Anyway, here's the cover, painted by Charles Moll, in 1972:
Apparently, Zelda Fitzgerald invented hairspray. I'm sorry that the resolution is too poor to properly show you Scott's blue-and-teal polka dot tie.

Summer Reading Reviews: Part Three

William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

I have to admit, I got a little gung-ho about Faulkner. After reading three short novels by him (Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear), I went ahead and blew away a few more dollars at Powell's to get an almost-complete Classic Faulkner collection. For those of you unfamiliar with Portland, Powell's is a giant bookstore that sells used books for very low prices which is why, for less than $8, I managed to get myself The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. The Sound and the Fury was the first one that I got into, and boy did I get into it.

Let me preface the body of this review with a warning: make sure that, if you loan or buy this book, to get a copy with the Appendix at the front (my old Vintage edition has it). After Faulkner finished The Sound and the Fury, he wrote the Appendix, which is a more straightforward history of the characters, though it doesn't reveal too much about the actual narrative - it's more like how the menu describes the food but doesn't change how it tastes. Anyway, you're likely to be at a loss without it, so pick it up; if nothing else, it's in The Portable Faulkner.
The Sound and the Fury is a family drama, at its core: Faulkner's narrative is attached to the downfall of the Compsons, a well-bred and formerly wealthy family living in Mississippi. The last generation of Compsons are the main characters and narrators: the oldest, Quentin, then his brothers Jason and Benjamin, and finally the one girl in the family, Caddy. The novel is divided into four sections and with the exception of the final one, each is narrated by a different brother: first Benjamin, then Quentin, and finally Jason.

I should tell you right now that just typing that paragraph took me forever to do. The novel's weight is not in the story that it is telling, but of the men Faulkner creates to tell it. Benjamin, called "Benjy", is the youngest and also mentally challenged (what his exact condition is is never explained), and his narrative is the most well-written mentally challenged character I've ever read. Usually, novelists tend to either write such characters as being too dumb or too poetic; in the end they come off as either disrespectful or pretentious. With Benjy, Faulkner creates a silent man who, though not very intelligent, manages to convey the world that he sees in an understandable, real sort of way. For example, when Benjy talks about a door opening and closing, he says that "the room went away" or "the room came back". It is the narrative that would result if one could watch the world through the eyes of a child, but lacks any sort of cuteness or moments where Benjy is made superior to those around him, the whole "he has a gift of seeing the world in a beautiful way" thing. Anyway, Benjy's narrative focuses on the present, which for Benjy is April of 1928. He is in his 30s, walking along the outskirts of the golf course that used to be the field where he played when he was a child. Throughout the day, Benjy's memory flips back and forth through time, as he remembers playing with his sister, Caddy, who seems to be the only one who loves him. His memories are written with an undefinable tragedy, as the Appendix has already told us, Caddy was disgraced and left a bastard child (a young girl, also named Quentin) for her mother and Jason to raise, their father has died from Alchoholism, and Quentin has killed himself. Yet Benjy continues with little outward understanding of change - the servant that he is walking with is the last of many to take care of him - he is the silent witness to the family's demise. For those of you who aren't familiar with Stream of Consciousness technique, be forewarned: this section is a tough one. The best way to read stream of consciousness, though, is just to read it; and if you do, there's no doubt that you'll enjoy it.

The second section skips backwards eighteen years, to the day of Quentin's suicide in Boston. Quentin's narrative is less sensual than Benjy's, but is still stream-of-consciousness for the most part, most primarily in memory. Quentin, like Benjy, is pulled back into the past through memories of Caddy, who is getting married to cover her illegitimate pregnancy. Quentin, who has a chivalric sense of duty to his sister, tries to convince his father that he is the father of Caddy's child, hoping that he will be able to bear some of her disgrace and continue to protect her, but Quentin's father lectures him on the myth of virginity, on the place of men in society, and various other things that avoid the point Quentin is trying to make: that he loves his sister, and he will do anything to protect her and, if he cannot, then he will suffer and die for her.

Defeated and hating his life at Harvard, Quentin resolves to forsake his family and throw himself into the Charles River. The rest of his day is spent trying to do just that; yet he is constantly stopped by teachers and friends, and has a long and almost adorable adventure with a young immigrant girl, which leads to more distractions by friends, which almost completely derails Quentin's plans. Quentin's memory is mostly full of guilt over what has happened to his sister: his oath to protect her, his unsiccessful attempt to kill the father of her child, his hatred of her new husband. Quentin, like Benjy, seems to be suffering from silence: though he is not mute as his brother is, Quentin is silenced against speaking up for Caddy and protecting her, as he feels so obligated to do, and is driven unwillingly away from his family by guilt, since his stay at Harvard was bought with the sacrifice of his brother's field.

The third section, the final one told in first person, is from the perspective of Jason Compson. Jason, being the only person in the family who seems to have any sort of coherent thought, tells his story in strictly straightforward prose. His flashbacks are well-introduced, his memories have a beginning and an end. This section takes place around the same time as Benjy's, and rotates around a day where the circus comes into Jefferson, and Jason's aversion to it. Actually, Jason is averse to everything and everyone around him, he might be the cruellest character that I've read in a long time. This may not just be because of his character, but because his storytelling - so different from the fluid and passionate voice of Quentin or the simple sensualism of Benjy - is itself cold and emotionless, and offers no excuse, no sympathy. My deep dislike of Jason made the section hard to get through, but I would never say that it was poorly written. Like any good villain, you cringe, and you love it.

Finally, Faulkner steps back and offers a third person account of the Compsons, or at least what's left of them. Taking place around the same time as Jason and Benjy's section, this ultimate chapter follows Dilsy, the family's cook, through her day. The section goes quickly - really, all that needs to be said has been said - and serves as a fine bow atop the gift that Faulkner has so delicately and powerfully wrapped for us.

And then? You put the book down, you step away, and you feel uniquely satiated. The truth is, that was the hardest write-up of a book I've ever done. The Sound and the Fury is a powerful and poingant book, and any sort of summary is, if nothing else, ill-equipped to explain the story, and I probably made it sound boring and pointless. But trust me: read it. It's worth all the time you've got.

Quick thoughts of the day

Just saw Up, cried my 3-D glasses covered eyes out. So, as a quick thought to round out the day, here's my list of Pixar films, worst to best:

10. Cars
9. A Bug's Life
8. Toy Story 2
7. Monster's Inc.
6. Up
5. Ratatouille
4. Wall-E
3. Toy Story
2. The Incredibles
1. Finding Nemo