The Camera Eye

I told Janet about the Gettysburg's Address PowerPoint slideshow. She looked at me and deadpanned, "Is that an example of Professor Humor?" Sigh.

I am seriously behind in the book review department here. I am still trying to figure out where writing up book reviews falls on the priority list--more or less important than writing letters of recommendation? finishing a paper I promised to have done by the 28th? reading a new book? contemplating the universe while drinking a cup of coffee in silence? sorting out the Town of Granby's finances?

Last week's book for my tutorial was John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel. This is the first book in his trilogy U.S.A. Not too long ago, I saw that trilogy labeled as The Great American Novel (which is, of course, the Questing Book of Scholars). I enjoyed volume 1 of the trilogy, though I now suspect whomever it was who called it The Great American Novel did so because if its scope and not its quality. It reads like a series of short novellas about different characters--but the novellas are interwoven. Some of the people meet toward the end, but their interactions aren't really the point. Interspersed throughout the narrative are: 1) biographies of real people written in a stylistic manner, 2) Newsreels, which are a jumble of newspaper headlines and song lyrics, 3) the Camera Eye, which are first-person stream of conscious entries--sort of like a proto-blog. The biographies of real people were my favorite parts of the book. The newsreels were a mess, but did convey a sense of history and furious pace, which I assume was the intention. The Camera Eye bits--well, I didn't pay much attention to them--they were OK, but they started mid-thought and ended mid-thought and I couldn't figure out if it was worth the bother to decipher them. The volume ends just as WWI is starting. I am not sure if there was a theme--if anything it is that socialists are good, but that doesn't really fit perfectly with the book. I assume by the end of volume 3, there will be some larger message.