Fake Spies Part II

Cottage season is over at least for me. I did get one more weekend away where I squirreled into a book, although with lamentable less time in a hammock than I would have liked.

Anyway, I took this time to finish off My Life In CIA by Harry Mathews. Harry Mathews is the only American member of Oulipo, and in this book recounts a time in the sixties in seventies when he lived in France. Being an American in a revolutionary period he was often derided by the intellectuals he kept company with, “because of course, everyone knows your CIA”. After one to many jibe he decides to act the part, and begins walking around Paris losing imaginary tails, dropping off fake packages, etc; until his Parisian acquaintances start taking his spy status seriously. This all goes wrong when his ‘cover identity’, a travel agency offering hypothetical routes to Siberia, attracts the attention of real G-men and things start to get sticky.

Now this is a first person ‘memoir’ of questionable authenticity, but it definitely makes for an exciting story, with moments that at the very least feel emotionally true. It’s like, if to be believed, Our Man in Havana come to life. Mathews book however spends as much time on his psuedo-covert operations as it does on, say how many oysters and bottles of wine he drank at his local bistro.  The stuff of everyday life I guess, but definitely let’s you know you’re not reading actual spy pulp. This is balanced by enough fuckin’ to make James Bond proud, all told with a Henry Miller-esque vigor. It’s funny though, those sections were the least believable parts of this book.

Ah Hell AKA the Potter post

Still up you know? Non sequitor here. Can’t get my head around that.

So that’s what this blog does you know. Get up before dawn, for whatever reason, and go adn trip something out. Plug and play, right?

The elusive crossover will appear sooner or later. But in meantime, had a cottage getaway to getdown with Potter.

Now I don’t want to give away the end or anything, but it’s all I’ve been thinking about like all night. Basically… I thought the book was incredible, with individual chapters of damn tight dramatic tension and fucking kick ass punch at the end of each. Powerful cuts and climaxes all the way through. And a further complications to characters who you think would have run out of steam five books ago.

But the end confounds me.

I wish I had finished this book at the cottage where I was reading it, where 3 out of the other 5 people here had already completed it, but were forbidden to speak of it while I was still in the mire of it. But the rest of Potter was pretty much all we talked about while up there– that and what fuckin’ grownups we were because we cook proper meals instead of just eating Kraft Dinner and hotdogs at the cottage now. I guess that statement is kind of undermined by the fact that we were discussing a story about wizards the rest of the time.

But nonetheless– it’s got that kind of pull. It’s not about the book– it’s about what happens after– it’s about the transit of the book as a shared experience in such a massive way. I bet Douglas Rushkoff would have something to say about it. All I can do is ape it, and say, there’s something big going on here. Some kinda magic. Cause all these characters, pages and pages of experience now exist between millions and millions of people.

And all I can wonder, out of those millions of pages turned so eagerly over the last few weeks of Pottermania, how many were turned on the can?