BLOGGING LOOKING FOR ALASKA, pt. 8: Ja, Maar Niet Te Veel

Last time, The Colonel got kicked out of a basketball game for being a jackass. Miles regarded him enviously and expressed his desire to be “intense” like that (Miles, I promise that will cease appealing to you in like, two weeks). And then this happened:

But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.

Huh? This is the first of a few deep-sounding but essentially nonsensical metaphors I found throughout this book. I first clued in to John Green’s tendency to do that sort of thing when I saw this video about the time he spent in Amsterdam (which was the second JG video I ever saw!):

Pretty good video, but then it ends on that part about being a boat half-full of water. What the fuck does THAT mean? Nothing, is the answer. It sure SOUNDS like it does, but it doesn’t, sorry. For a more charitable view of that tendency, read on. 

“108 Days Before”

I noted a few installments ago that Green was probably going to use The Old Man, Miles’s religion teacher, as a device with which to kind of just drop knowledge on his audience, unencumbered by plot or character development. That is more or less what happens in this 2-paragraph chapter--Old Man pulls Miles aside and insists to him the importance of being “present” in every moment. That’s good advice (it’s hard as fuck to do, by the way), but I’m not sure if I like encountering it here, cordoned off from the rest of the book. If these interludes were more frequent, if Green kind of got a rhythm going with Alaska Event/Deep Thought over and over, it might be a little more palatable. I don’t know. I think I am still going to let him get away with it?

(How would I not? I’m gonna show up at one of John Green’s signing with handcuffs? “You are under arrest by the post-modern police. You have the right to remain meta.”)

“105 Days Before”

Alaska spearheads a study group for an upcoming math test (MPDG, emphasis on the NERD) at McDonald’s, and loads Miles, Chip, and several extraneous characters into her car. A cute, vaguely Russian girl (Miles in unsure about her origin, which forces me to assume she is a SPY) is forced to sit in our narrator’s lap, and he has no complaints about that. Nor should he! I’m a little disappointed her name is not Ana, though, because at this point in my life I have been friends with like a dozen Russian girls named Ana (I swear I’m not running some kind of sex worker ring) and I was kind of pretending that “Ana” was the only name Russian girls could have. Anyway Alaska’s shoddy driving in her even shoddier car causes Lara to grind all over Miles for the whole trip--so, well done Alaska!

And then Alaska lectures them about math while smoking and eating french fries. Listen, if you don’t understand why that’s hot, I think you and I can’t be friends. 

“100 Days Before”

On page 53 Miles uses the word “perennially” for the second time in like, four pages. SLOW YOUR ROLL, BUDDY. He’s hanging out with Alaska in the common room watching MTV, and he asks her where she got her name. You know that part in the Adam Sandler movie Big Daddy where Adam Sandler lets the kid pick his own name? Yeah, same thing. “As she talked,” Miles says, “she bobbed her head back and forth to the MTV music, even though the song was the kind of generic manufactured pop ballad she professed to hate.” If I’d been writing this five years ago I might have used that moment to launch into a discussion of hipster ethos, and the hypocrisies that haunt anyone who claims an interest in authenticity (see Del Ray, Lana). And if I’d been writing this five years before THAT I’d call Alaska a sellout and be done with it. But I am writing it NOW, and all of those discussions are fucking exhausting. Also: MTV playing music? Put another check in the anachronistic column. (I’d like to do an architecture joke about anachronistic columns here, but I don’t really have the knowledge base to do so.)

(*I’m a little disappointed--I was hoping Alaska’s parents were like Ron Howard and his wife, who named their kids after the cites in which they were conceived. Bryce-Dallas, etc. So great, right? All my kids are just going to have the middle name “Ibangedyourmom.”)

We learn that the word Alaska is derived from an Aleut word that means “that which the sea breaks against.” That’s pretty cool, and like, vaguely/nonsensically symbolic in a good way. I know I just chastised John Green about this shit, but that one works on me, okay? What he really does is (and this is the more charitable view) he writes novels with rock lyrics. So some of his lines work on you and some of them work on others. Plenty of bands I generally like have plenty of lyrics I hate.

“And [Alaska] was big, just like I wanted to be,” Alaska says. That’s a weird ambition--to be as big as a state--but I kind of have to applaud 7-year-old Alaska for picking the ACTUAL biggest state, mercator projections be damned. And then she--while holding our narrator’s hand, no less--shares with him her idea that she might one day teach disabled children. That’s a decidedly un-MPDG career path. I was thinking she would be want to be a rainbow scientist. Or a pro-bono drug dealer. Or someone who puts birds on things. Miles is unaccustomed to this level of intimacy, and takes it as his cue to kiss Alaska. But she breaks away before he can make a real move, saying that she’s not going to be “one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” That’s deep, Alaska. Wait, or is it? Did John Green just trick me again? Fuck!

Until next time: How do you picture Alaska? How do you picture Pudge? How do you picture The Colonel? For what it is worth, I just go with these three.

The Colonel, Alaska, Pudge

I didn’t much care for Scott Pilgrim as a movie (though I have been meaning to check out the books), but I carry a torch for Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a different kind of torch for that Culkin kid, so it actually aids my enjoyment of the book a lot. But do you have something better?