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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
The story picks up in the second half and I had a bit of a hard time sticking to the book. There is an uncanny resemblance to Hannah Gadsby's Nanette. I wish I had liked this more.
well I learned the reason why I don't like Stand-up comedians -.-
emotional
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I teach kids for a living . . . less teacher, more of a tutor to be frank. I have had some shitty, terrible classes which made me desperately want to hurl myself out of the class window. Dovaleh's stand-up comedy reminded me of my old classes where i was at my wit's end to control the gathering of students (ar** hol**). One of my friends who is an academician and a stand-up comedian always comments on the fate of teachers who have to engage a 'hostile' crowd for nearly an hour, and how teachers have to learn a bit of stand-up to survive.
Beyond that i loved David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar. It's about all of us and our attempts at finding the true us in a world which would rather embrace the fake us than tolerate the true us.
Beyond that i loved David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar. It's about all of us and our attempts at finding the true us in a world which would rather embrace the fake us than tolerate the true us.
A short, almost in-one-breath novel, relentless and excruciating. I can't but read an allegory of the state of Israel in here. Though it may seem so initially, this story not a character study. It's a sort of Sophie's choice. The stand-up comedian of the novel will eventually get to the point where he'll recount his Sophie's choice moment as a fourteen year-old boy. What he chooses and what he declines to choose are different embodiments of the idea of Israel, what it could have been and what it's become. No wonder the narrator is a judge, a judge the comedian asked to go see the show. And present day Israeli (Jewish-only) society is watching his stand-up act. So the book ends in something like a punchline, but it's no joke. I thought it was brilliant.
dark
funny
reflective
sad
(I wrote this in November and forgot to publish it for some reason)
Yesterday I went on a bit of a splurge and bought myself a hardcover. I’d have bought the paperback; I’m not a snob. Paperbacks are not only more democratic, but also more cooperative to extreme bending and scribbling and dog-earing. One does not feel as guilty as one does carrying around this pompous brick. Hardcovers are way too heavy. Lucky for me this was a short one; didn’t even make it to 200 pages. A Horse Walks into a Bar, by David Grossman. It’s a pretty recent work; actually, it won the Booker Prize last year. One hell of a ride, though. I am even willing to forgive Grossman for giving his novel such a misleading title- before you go in blind, I should tell you, there’s no horse. I mean, you get the point of the title- precisely that there is no horse- but still, my bones were craving for some absurd scenes. Oh, well. We all know I say that but in reality if there actually were a horse I’d be complaining like “Oh, such a subtle allegory, Mr. Grossman”. Plus, the whole thing about this other thing is that at one point the main guy starts telling a story that involves a guy telling joke after joke to cheer him up, and it just so happens that one of them starts that way; A Horse Walks into a Bar… But of course he doesn’t really remember the punchline, and if he does he does not bother to tell it to the audience, and the guy in the audience who’s narrating the thing does not pass it on to us. Now, that might not be the most subtle thing ever, but it will get passed some dummies. So, afterwards, you can just explain it to them- how it’s interesting to observe, in the book, that the title relates to a joke that turns out to not have a punchline, or of which the punchline was forgotten- what a wise metaphor for…life! And they’ll be like, What an observant observation!
Of course, one could further develop this to say that the whole lack of punchline is connected to the lack of closure that has been the tendency in novels dating as far as the 19th century, when some Avant-guard folks decided that Victorian shit of having someone either die or marry by the end of a book was getting mighty old already. If we want to get even cleverer about it, we could suggest that the whole charade of endings was a side-effect of the growing pessimism- or, as our buddy Freud would say, Malaise- in the turn of the century. I’m talking about that whole, Maybe-the-French-Revolution-Only-Helped-Some-People-Not-Everyone-And-Now-We’re-Being-Oppressed-By-Someone-Different-But-Still-Are-Oppressed thing.
I’m just saying, an Ending, a proper Ending, provides Meaning, and as soon as people realized nothing really means anything, they had a full-blown existential crisis. Then I would go on to cite some works that saturate my thesis, such as Ford’s The Good Soldier and the more obvious The Sense of an Ending. All that to argue that, in the end, you can never really know someone, you know?
Because, even if an author did say to you: this represents That, and this; That, would you even trust them? They know as much as you do, really. And, if they assumed they knew more, they shouldn’t have been asking in the first place.
See, the Author is Dead. He was pronounced dead by Dr. Roland Barthes, who, if you ask me, didn’t really make much of an effort to save him. Although, authors were never really God-like forces in novels. Even if they were assertive, like Austen, there was always a question behind that assertion: why? How? If you’re not thinking about that, why even write? If you know what you’re going to write before you write it, you’re not a real writer- you’re a preacher. And if you’re looking for answers, you’re not a real reader: real readers are looking for questions. And I think that, in a way, Grossman provides us with exactly that.
It’s all about Pragmatics, really. Even if you say something as banal as “The sky is blue”, what you’re really saying is, “I’m saying that the sky is blue; that is what I think and I stand by it”. That’s the first step to humility; Pragmatics. No matter what you do, there is always an isolating, degrading factor of doubt (I think so, at least. I stand by it). So, you can never really be absolute- I think, in my humble opinion. Unless, of course, you’re being poetic. Then you can be ephemeral or whatever. That must be nice. But I think it requires some sort of soul sacrifice, which seems a tad too messy for me.
But I was talking about the horse book, which had nothing to do with horses whatsoever. Look at me, I wrote a whole text and didn’t even get to the point- maybe that’s what that sneaky book wanted from me all along? To make me out like it? I’m the punchline, you say?
Anyway, what a wonderful, wonderful book! I’m thinking it would make a great play, and to mimic the effect Greenstein’s performance has on the audience the director or producers or whoever should hire herds of people to just stand up and leave whenever the stuff got too cringe-worthy. And they should hire an actual stand-up comedian with a decent acting range, and advertise it as a comedy. A comedy about a stand-up comedian- I was going to make a joke about that, but that’s what Seinfeld is all about, I guess. And that other movie where Jenny Slate gets pregnant and then an abortion. It’s a whole genre -- comedians really are self-obsessed, hum? Not like writers. Don’t look at me. I’m writing about reading; not writing. They are reverse processes; multiplication and division, synthesis and analysis.
There was something else I wanted to say about this book before my poor brain starts its complex selection of priorities, which will decide to keep a list of every episode of Friends, in order, but will dump my precious, sophisticated annotations on this intriguing Israeli masterpiece.
Oh, right, Bakunin, and the “verbal contract”. I remember it now- not clearly at all, though, because that was the class that had a massive falling out with the professor. Oh, get this: the professor decides to bring up the discussion of whether Monteiro Lobato, an old Brazilian writer, was a racist- which she was quite adamant in denying. That was probably the second class of the semester- the rest of it we spent debating this issue. In the end she was written up, or someone said she was, and then a black girl went into our class, delivered a heart-felt speech about racism and how she worked towards shit like that never happening again… Everyone applauded her, even the white people like me who didn’t really feel entitled to an opinion- either because we felt like it wasn’t our place to determine what was racist or used that as an excuse not to participate, given that as long as that argument kept on going we did not have normal classes. To be honest, I don’t think the Professor was being racist at first- she was just trying to explain why we couldn’t interpret old texts the way we would interpret new texts, but it was such a mindless example. And then she just started saying a lot of nonsensical shit, like “comparing a black person to a monkey is just a stylistic choice of description; he could just as easily have chosen to compare her eyes to those of a cat…” and it just kept getting worse and worse… Her word choices were the actual worst. It was a bit like reading Dovaleh’s performance in the book- people would just get up and leave… I know I did- it was just too hard to watch. Cringe-worthy.
The fact that this was a class about efficient communication just made the situation even more…cautiously ludicrously absurd?
You could feel the racial tension hanging on the air- that’s no environment for a well-meaning white person such as yours truly, who’d never experienced anything quite like that in her private school, even though we’d had that same discussion about a thousand times in Literature classes. See, no one’d ever picked on it like people were now. Of course, maybe that had something to do with the fact that my high school’s demographic hardly expanded beyond German and Italian-sounding surnames. Once in a while, you would find someone with a Brazilian surname, but those had been here since the very first Portuguese settlements and earned their place in our hearts. So, no one really contested the whole racism thing because the whole racism thing had systemically oppressed black people from getting a private education. We discussed these social problems, in our school, like one discusses the situation in Syria- we knew it happened and that it was wrong, but it was hard to assimilate. It never even occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t up to a class full of white kids to discuss what was racist, even if most of us were white only per Latino standards and, if living in the US, would be making less than a black person’s white person’s cent an hour.
So, back to the university class- after the girl finished her speech, she started packing her things to leave. The professor then yelled at her- how can you slander me and then not even stay to hear what I have to say? But it turned out; the girl didn’t even take that class. She’d just decided to stop by and call the woman a racist. So the woman said, Now you’re gonna sit and stay and listen! How dare you? You weren’t even here! You don’t even know what happened.
Whereas that was true, the girl could not move without the woman yelling at her- so, maybe she hadn’t been racist at first, but now that she was keeping a black girl from leaving the classroom…?
So there you have it; the heaviest pint of drama I have ever come close to experiencing in a classroom- though, the other day when I refused to pick up a kid’s pencil sharpener from inside a trash can, definitely came close to it. He is really attached to that sharpener. I was afraid I was gonna get fired.
But enough of this racially charged talk! Yes, in case you haven’t read the horse book, I’m imitating Dovelah, the stand-up comedian. You know, I think I’d be a decent stand-up comedian. I’m a pretty good performer, except when it comes to dancing. When I was a kid my mom tried to force me into ballet and it was basically like doing PE, but in tutus- it’s like a group of my kindergarten arch-enemies had gotten together and elaborated the eternal torture for me: you need to exercise, but gracefully! And with some stuck-up girls who were more feminine and more coordinated and pinker that you, because you had the mostly transparent ballet skirt that your mom had bought after she realized all of the nice, shorter, rounder, pink ones were out. That was also when I discovered that it doesn’t really matter which sock you put in which foot. It was liberating.
Anyway, I was talking about the theories of Bakunin before that. How you have an unspoken contract with the person you’re talking to, and it’s subconscious and there’s so much more going on than words being exchanged, and how it’s all part of how we perceive ourselves, in the end. That’s what Dovaleh wants, isn’t it? To know how he comes across to a stranger? What it is about him? His essence. But how do you know what your essence is when the moment you pick to determine it is a performance? Maybe our essences are just performances. Maybe they just die down when we’re alone, and we’re just like everyone else. When there are other people around, we have to defend it with our teeth, and with a grin. Authenticity. That’s maybe a dream. Maybe only self-escaping things, far from self-awareness, like animals, have a semblance of it. Us; ever since we found out things happen for reasons, we haven’t stopped things from happening. Oh, there’s a reason, so that’s okay.
It’s a game of lenses. We’re going to the ophthalmologist, trying on personalities; seeing ourselves differently, seeing everybody differently. Granted, this isn’t a smart comparison; there’s a whole expression based on it. But there’s something annoying about getting help from a lens. Even if it does help you see more clearly, you’re still cheating. That’s not how you really see it. The world is too full of filters- Instagram, coffee, things we are allowed to say… You can’t really grasp anyone, ever. That’s why we’re so drawn to God; because we want Him to know us and grasp us. But we’re at a loss here, too. If God existed, he’d still be seeing things through a lens- He’d say I built the world in six days and on the seventh I rested, I confirm. I think. I guess. I do endorse this statement.
The Sublime is sublime only because it is impossible. It’s like powering a number to zero; the result will always be 1.
We’re all miserable creatures and we are the same in all miserable ways. That’s why sometimes it feels better to cling to a personal memory, a personal amount of pain which validates you. Even if it’s the most heart-ripping shit he’s ever been through, that was the rawest, most authentic experience that Dovelah has ever had. Sometimes when a bullet hits you from nowhere and you see everything crumbling down all over you all over again, you are still shocked at how fragile this whole reality is. At how numb you are. Numb, but in a good way. Like you couldn’t bare knowing it all the fucking time that you’re living in a hologram, even though you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Okay, now I’m mixing things up with season four of Agents of Shield. Great season, by the way. They really found their way back after an uneven third season. I’d talk more about it but as a writer television is beneath me. Actually, it’s right in front of me. On. But who even cares?
Yesterday I went on a bit of a splurge and bought myself a hardcover. I’d have bought the paperback; I’m not a snob. Paperbacks are not only more democratic, but also more cooperative to extreme bending and scribbling and dog-earing. One does not feel as guilty as one does carrying around this pompous brick. Hardcovers are way too heavy. Lucky for me this was a short one; didn’t even make it to 200 pages. A Horse Walks into a Bar, by David Grossman. It’s a pretty recent work; actually, it won the Booker Prize last year. One hell of a ride, though. I am even willing to forgive Grossman for giving his novel such a misleading title- before you go in blind, I should tell you, there’s no horse. I mean, you get the point of the title- precisely that there is no horse- but still, my bones were craving for some absurd scenes. Oh, well. We all know I say that but in reality if there actually were a horse I’d be complaining like “Oh, such a subtle allegory, Mr. Grossman”. Plus, the whole thing about this other thing is that at one point the main guy starts telling a story that involves a guy telling joke after joke to cheer him up, and it just so happens that one of them starts that way; A Horse Walks into a Bar… But of course he doesn’t really remember the punchline, and if he does he does not bother to tell it to the audience, and the guy in the audience who’s narrating the thing does not pass it on to us. Now, that might not be the most subtle thing ever, but it will get passed some dummies. So, afterwards, you can just explain it to them- how it’s interesting to observe, in the book, that the title relates to a joke that turns out to not have a punchline, or of which the punchline was forgotten- what a wise metaphor for…life! And they’ll be like, What an observant observation!
Of course, one could further develop this to say that the whole lack of punchline is connected to the lack of closure that has been the tendency in novels dating as far as the 19th century, when some Avant-guard folks decided that Victorian shit of having someone either die or marry by the end of a book was getting mighty old already. If we want to get even cleverer about it, we could suggest that the whole charade of endings was a side-effect of the growing pessimism- or, as our buddy Freud would say, Malaise- in the turn of the century. I’m talking about that whole, Maybe-the-French-Revolution-Only-Helped-Some-People-Not-Everyone-And-Now-We’re-Being-Oppressed-By-Someone-Different-But-Still-Are-Oppressed thing.
I’m just saying, an Ending, a proper Ending, provides Meaning, and as soon as people realized nothing really means anything, they had a full-blown existential crisis. Then I would go on to cite some works that saturate my thesis, such as Ford’s The Good Soldier and the more obvious The Sense of an Ending. All that to argue that, in the end, you can never really know someone, you know?
Because, even if an author did say to you: this represents That, and this; That, would you even trust them? They know as much as you do, really. And, if they assumed they knew more, they shouldn’t have been asking in the first place.
See, the Author is Dead. He was pronounced dead by Dr. Roland Barthes, who, if you ask me, didn’t really make much of an effort to save him. Although, authors were never really God-like forces in novels. Even if they were assertive, like Austen, there was always a question behind that assertion: why? How? If you’re not thinking about that, why even write? If you know what you’re going to write before you write it, you’re not a real writer- you’re a preacher. And if you’re looking for answers, you’re not a real reader: real readers are looking for questions. And I think that, in a way, Grossman provides us with exactly that.
It’s all about Pragmatics, really. Even if you say something as banal as “The sky is blue”, what you’re really saying is, “I’m saying that the sky is blue; that is what I think and I stand by it”. That’s the first step to humility; Pragmatics. No matter what you do, there is always an isolating, degrading factor of doubt (I think so, at least. I stand by it). So, you can never really be absolute- I think, in my humble opinion. Unless, of course, you’re being poetic. Then you can be ephemeral or whatever. That must be nice. But I think it requires some sort of soul sacrifice, which seems a tad too messy for me.
But I was talking about the horse book, which had nothing to do with horses whatsoever. Look at me, I wrote a whole text and didn’t even get to the point- maybe that’s what that sneaky book wanted from me all along? To make me out like it? I’m the punchline, you say?
Anyway, what a wonderful, wonderful book! I’m thinking it would make a great play, and to mimic the effect Greenstein’s performance has on the audience the director or producers or whoever should hire herds of people to just stand up and leave whenever the stuff got too cringe-worthy. And they should hire an actual stand-up comedian with a decent acting range, and advertise it as a comedy. A comedy about a stand-up comedian- I was going to make a joke about that, but that’s what Seinfeld is all about, I guess. And that other movie where Jenny Slate gets pregnant and then an abortion. It’s a whole genre -- comedians really are self-obsessed, hum? Not like writers. Don’t look at me. I’m writing about reading; not writing. They are reverse processes; multiplication and division, synthesis and analysis.
There was something else I wanted to say about this book before my poor brain starts its complex selection of priorities, which will decide to keep a list of every episode of Friends, in order, but will dump my precious, sophisticated annotations on this intriguing Israeli masterpiece.
Oh, right, Bakunin, and the “verbal contract”. I remember it now- not clearly at all, though, because that was the class that had a massive falling out with the professor. Oh, get this: the professor decides to bring up the discussion of whether Monteiro Lobato, an old Brazilian writer, was a racist- which she was quite adamant in denying. That was probably the second class of the semester- the rest of it we spent debating this issue. In the end she was written up, or someone said she was, and then a black girl went into our class, delivered a heart-felt speech about racism and how she worked towards shit like that never happening again… Everyone applauded her, even the white people like me who didn’t really feel entitled to an opinion- either because we felt like it wasn’t our place to determine what was racist or used that as an excuse not to participate, given that as long as that argument kept on going we did not have normal classes. To be honest, I don’t think the Professor was being racist at first- she was just trying to explain why we couldn’t interpret old texts the way we would interpret new texts, but it was such a mindless example. And then she just started saying a lot of nonsensical shit, like “comparing a black person to a monkey is just a stylistic choice of description; he could just as easily have chosen to compare her eyes to those of a cat…” and it just kept getting worse and worse… Her word choices were the actual worst. It was a bit like reading Dovaleh’s performance in the book- people would just get up and leave… I know I did- it was just too hard to watch. Cringe-worthy.
The fact that this was a class about efficient communication just made the situation even more…cautiously ludicrously absurd?
You could feel the racial tension hanging on the air- that’s no environment for a well-meaning white person such as yours truly, who’d never experienced anything quite like that in her private school, even though we’d had that same discussion about a thousand times in Literature classes. See, no one’d ever picked on it like people were now. Of course, maybe that had something to do with the fact that my high school’s demographic hardly expanded beyond German and Italian-sounding surnames. Once in a while, you would find someone with a Brazilian surname, but those had been here since the very first Portuguese settlements and earned their place in our hearts. So, no one really contested the whole racism thing because the whole racism thing had systemically oppressed black people from getting a private education. We discussed these social problems, in our school, like one discusses the situation in Syria- we knew it happened and that it was wrong, but it was hard to assimilate. It never even occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t up to a class full of white kids to discuss what was racist, even if most of us were white only per Latino standards and, if living in the US, would be making less than a black person’s white person’s cent an hour.
So, back to the university class- after the girl finished her speech, she started packing her things to leave. The professor then yelled at her- how can you slander me and then not even stay to hear what I have to say? But it turned out; the girl didn’t even take that class. She’d just decided to stop by and call the woman a racist. So the woman said, Now you’re gonna sit and stay and listen! How dare you? You weren’t even here! You don’t even know what happened.
Whereas that was true, the girl could not move without the woman yelling at her- so, maybe she hadn’t been racist at first, but now that she was keeping a black girl from leaving the classroom…?
So there you have it; the heaviest pint of drama I have ever come close to experiencing in a classroom- though, the other day when I refused to pick up a kid’s pencil sharpener from inside a trash can, definitely came close to it. He is really attached to that sharpener. I was afraid I was gonna get fired.
But enough of this racially charged talk! Yes, in case you haven’t read the horse book, I’m imitating Dovelah, the stand-up comedian. You know, I think I’d be a decent stand-up comedian. I’m a pretty good performer, except when it comes to dancing. When I was a kid my mom tried to force me into ballet and it was basically like doing PE, but in tutus- it’s like a group of my kindergarten arch-enemies had gotten together and elaborated the eternal torture for me: you need to exercise, but gracefully! And with some stuck-up girls who were more feminine and more coordinated and pinker that you, because you had the mostly transparent ballet skirt that your mom had bought after she realized all of the nice, shorter, rounder, pink ones were out. That was also when I discovered that it doesn’t really matter which sock you put in which foot. It was liberating.
Anyway, I was talking about the theories of Bakunin before that. How you have an unspoken contract with the person you’re talking to, and it’s subconscious and there’s so much more going on than words being exchanged, and how it’s all part of how we perceive ourselves, in the end. That’s what Dovaleh wants, isn’t it? To know how he comes across to a stranger? What it is about him? His essence. But how do you know what your essence is when the moment you pick to determine it is a performance? Maybe our essences are just performances. Maybe they just die down when we’re alone, and we’re just like everyone else. When there are other people around, we have to defend it with our teeth, and with a grin. Authenticity. That’s maybe a dream. Maybe only self-escaping things, far from self-awareness, like animals, have a semblance of it. Us; ever since we found out things happen for reasons, we haven’t stopped things from happening. Oh, there’s a reason, so that’s okay.
It’s a game of lenses. We’re going to the ophthalmologist, trying on personalities; seeing ourselves differently, seeing everybody differently. Granted, this isn’t a smart comparison; there’s a whole expression based on it. But there’s something annoying about getting help from a lens. Even if it does help you see more clearly, you’re still cheating. That’s not how you really see it. The world is too full of filters- Instagram, coffee, things we are allowed to say… You can’t really grasp anyone, ever. That’s why we’re so drawn to God; because we want Him to know us and grasp us. But we’re at a loss here, too. If God existed, he’d still be seeing things through a lens- He’d say I built the world in six days and on the seventh I rested, I confirm. I think. I guess. I do endorse this statement.
The Sublime is sublime only because it is impossible. It’s like powering a number to zero; the result will always be 1.
We’re all miserable creatures and we are the same in all miserable ways. That’s why sometimes it feels better to cling to a personal memory, a personal amount of pain which validates you. Even if it’s the most heart-ripping shit he’s ever been through, that was the rawest, most authentic experience that Dovelah has ever had. Sometimes when a bullet hits you from nowhere and you see everything crumbling down all over you all over again, you are still shocked at how fragile this whole reality is. At how numb you are. Numb, but in a good way. Like you couldn’t bare knowing it all the fucking time that you’re living in a hologram, even though you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Okay, now I’m mixing things up with season four of Agents of Shield. Great season, by the way. They really found their way back after an uneven third season. I’d talk more about it but as a writer television is beneath me. Actually, it’s right in front of me. On. But who even cares?