The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Black Dossier), by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill :
Many were our adventures of a like to this, although these ceased in 1799 upon the death of our beloved mentor, Lemuel Gulliver. He had, to all appearances, died in the arms (and bedchamber) of a sometime addition to our league, the changeable, immortal warrior Orlando, who was female at the time of Gulliver's demise. With Captain Clegg and Mr. Bumppo having quitted our ensemble some time previously, it was left to Orlando, with the Blakeneys and myself, to see acted our leader's often and fondly expressed wish that he be buried on the isle of Lilliput, so that his grave, a shallow mound to us, should be a grassy hill where youthful Lilliputian lovers should have fine, gay picnics on the gentle slopes. Distressingly, the case of wine we brought with us to toast our comrade's passing fell instead into the tiny hands of Lilliput's native community, and was enough to make them wildly drunken in their thousands. A dreadful, seething orgy then broke out, in which it seemed that every member of their population, young and old, was feverishly involved, so that with clothing ripped or chewed to ribbons, it was only by the grace of Providence that we were able to crawl free and find our ship again.
I made a mistake picking up this one. I’d heard things about a highly recommended graphic novel and a truly terrible movie of the same name, neither of which I’ve taken in. The original was apparently a steampunky adventure in an alternate reality where various characters from late 19th century speculative fiction are hired by the British Government to be super-secret agents against H.G.Wells’s Martians.
Black Dossier is not that story. It’s part “origins” story, part sequel, and spans centuries before and decades after the original. There’s an 18th Century “League” headed by Lemuel Gulliver, Fanny Hill, and Natty Bumppo. There’s also a post-WWII (and apparently, post-Orwell) “league featuring Hugo Drummond and James Bond. There’s also a super-secret government dossier on all of the incarnations of the league, reproduced in mid-comic book for you to read along with the characters, featuring such quirky adventures as Bertie Wooster vs. Cthullu and the erotic adventures of Fanny Hill in Gulliver’s worlds of differently-sized people. Within the dossier documents, too, are clues that lead to a revelation about what’s happening in the “present day” part of the story.
I’d say the whole thing was one big delightful romp, but for the necessity of trying to tie it all together. You have to be a walking encyclopedia (like some say I am, and a lot of it went past even me) to catch the centuries’ worth of cultural references, and even if you do, it’s like trying to eat a stew seasoned with every herb and spice in the entire rack. The very final pages even invite you to put on the 3-D glasses provided and look into pages that may have been drawn by people on LSD, with about as much coherence. Then again, if you’ve read and enjoyed the original, it might make more sense to you than it did to me.
The Bounty Trilogy (Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea, Pitcairn Island), by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall :
I could not turn my eyes away from the boatswain's mate, climbing slowly down the ship's side. If the man had shouted aloud, he could not have expressed more clearly the reluctance he felt. He stepped into the boat, and as he moved among the men on the thwarts they drew back with set, stern faces. At the capstan bar, he hesitated and looked up uncertainly. Bligh had sauntered to the bulwarks and was gazing down with folded arms.
"Come! Do your duty!" he ordered, with the air of a man whose dinner is growing cold.
The man with the cat drew its tails through the fingers of his left hand, raised his arm, and sent them whistling down on the poor battered corpse. I turned away, giddy and sick. Bligh stood by the rail, a hand on his hip, watching the scene below as a man might watch a play indifferently performed. The measured blows continued--each breaking the silence like a pistol shot. I counted them mechanically for what seemed an age, but the end came at last--twenty two, a pause, twenty three...twenty four. I heard a word of command , the marines fell out and trooped down the poop ladder. Eight bells struck. There were a stir and bustle on the ship, and I heard the boatswain piping the long-drawn, cheery call to dinner.
When we sat down to dine, Courtney seemed to have dismissed the incident from his mind. He tossed off a glass of sherry to Bligh's health, and tasted his soup. "Cold!" he marked ruefully. "Hardships of a seaman's life, eh, Bligh?"
This was a trilogy I hadn't made it through by the end of last month (A Month of Trilogies, April 2010 bookpost). In three volumes, it tells the story of the victims of Captain Bligh, a villain distinguishable from his fellow captains, Kidd and Blackbeard, only in that his evil is backed by the full weight of the laws of England.
The first part, Mutiny on the Bounty, is the best known. It tells of the ship’s nightmare voyage during which Bligh steals from his crew, selling ship’s rations for his own profit and underfeeding the men, and of the brutal floggings he inflicts, until Christian the mate has had enough and takes control of the ship, setting Bligh and his loyalists adrift in a lifeboat. There are some who neither take part in the mutiny nor leave in the lifeboat, and one of these narrates volume 1. These men are let off the boat in Tahiti, and are eventually picked up by the English—and tried for treason, Bligh having denounced the guilty and innocent alike. Volume 2 tells of how Bligh and the lifeboat make it across the sea, and Volume 3 tells of Christian and the mutineers, who settle on Pitcairn Island and start a colony with several indigenous men and women.
To me, the most amazing part is the difference between the monstrous Bligh of part 1 and the self-sacrificing hero of part 2. It may be that the narration of one treated badly and that of one whose life was saved by the same man would necessarily be much different; or it may be that a man used to tyrannizing over others in a relatively consequence-free environment, and who suddenly recognizes his own mortality is capable of rising to greater things.
The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells :
"I'll take the risk", said I, at last, and with a revolver in each hand I walked up the beach towards them.
"That's better," said Moreau, without affectation. "As it is, you have wasted the best part of my day with your confounded imagination."
And with a touch of contempt that humiliated me, he and Montgomery turned and went on in silence before me.
The knot of Beast Men, still wondering, stood back among the trees. I passed them as serenely as possible. One started to follow me, but retreated again when Montgomery cracked his whip. The rest stood silent--watching. They may once have been animals. But I never before saw an animal trying to think."
One of Wells’s very short, innovative at the time speculative novels, and not one of his best. If I had been told it was by Poe, I wouldn’t have thought it unusual. Season 4 of Buffy spoiled me on the theme by exploring the issues much better and adding machinery and demons to the whole cross-pollination of man with other critters thing.
About half of the book is exposition, going into detail about how the horrified Arthur Gordon Pym-ish narrator comes to find himself trapped on a remote island with a mad Frankenstein-ish scientist who, instead of trying to create life using a corpse, is stirring up the gene pool by making animal people. I kept waiting for Moreau to tell the narrator he has 30 minutes to run before the hunt begins, or for the appearance of a beautiful woman who changes into a panther during sex, but no. It’s pretty much “the horror of making animal-people” all the way. And yes, Wells just has to bring up headdesk-inspiring comparisons with those wacky, primitive dark-skinned folks from Africa as the attempts to tame and civilize them fail and they slowly revert to their jungle nature.
It’s part of the classic original S-F canon, and doesn’t take long to read, so everyone ought to read it once. After that, go back to Buffy Season 4.
Diary of Franz Kafka :
As a boy, I was as innocent of and uninterested in sexual matters (and would have long remained so, if they had not been forcibly thrust on me) as I am today in, say, the theory of relativity. Only trifling things (yet even those only after they were politely called to my attention) struck me, for example that it was just those women on the street who seemed to me most beautiful and best dressed who were supposed to be bad.
One of the very few books I could not bring myself to finish. Very short, choppy passages intermixed with rough drafts of passages from his novels and stories. A few jeweled bon mots; mostly the drafts are much rougher than the stories and the anecdotes and thoughts from life are so painful as to be like chewing on tinfoil. That Kafka had boxes in his closets that I just didn’t want to sort through. Even his friend and editor, Max Brod, feels the need to remind us by way of apology that peoples’ private journals tend to get entries when the journalist is not feeling so great. When all is well, they’re out enjoying life, not writing about it. Which is something we might want to remember when it seems like all our LiveJournal and FaceBook pals seem so bitter and upset all the time.
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov :
The porter had now stopped shouting, and through the crowd of excited customers could be seen the approach of two police helmets. But the cunning Behemoth poured paraffin from the Primus onto the counter and it burst spontaneously into flames. It flared up and ran along the counter, devouring the beautiful paper ribbons decorating the baskets of fruit. The salesgirls leaped over the counter and ran away screaming as the flames caught the blinds on the windows and more paraffin caught alight on the floor.
With a shriek of horror the customers shuffled out of the confectionery, sweeping aside the helpless Pavel Yosifovich, while the fish salesmen gallopped away towards the staff door, still clutching their razor sharp knives.
Heaving himself out of the barrel, the fawn man, covered in salt herring juice, staggered past the salmon counter and followed the crowd. There was a tinkling and crashing of glass at the doorway as the public fought to get out, whilst the two villains, Koroviev and the gluttonous Behemoth, disappeared, no one knew where. Later, witnesses described having seen them float up to the ceiling and then burst like a couple of balloons. This story sounds too dubious for belief and we shall probably never know what really happened.
For all the supernatural magic realism of this wonderful, wonderful book, it remains the most realistic Russian literature I’ve read so far. All of the older stuff—the Tolstoy, the Turgenev, the Checkhov, the literary washroom attendant Dustyouoffski—they all suffer from having been poorly translated by Constance Garnett into caricatures of long-bearded, overly excitable peasants who are forever shaking their fists at one another and shouting, and gloomy, vodka-guzzling genius-hermits who stop brooding long enough to shout “Don’t hit me with the babka!” at imaginary demons. This one, translated by Michael Glenny, is a lot less linguistically stiff and presents a much more cosmopolitan Moscow than the one a century older described by Tolstoi. Most of the characters are artists, writers and theater staff, as opposed to the endless pompous officials of Gogol and Checkhov. In fact, the officials of literary Russia of the past were so over the top pompous that some of the criticism of the literati in Bulgakov falls flat. While certain critics and theater managers were getting allegedly “well-deserved commeuppances” for their folly, I had to go back and reread a few passages to confirm that their previous behavior had, in fact, been folly.
The story tells of a practicioner of black magic, who might be The Devil, showing up in town with some supernatural friends and playing a series of pranks, amusing, deadly, or both, on people to whom he decides deserves torment, beginning with theater staff and continuing to the discomfiture of a theater full of people. The magician and his associates apparently have the “omnipotence” skill; literally anything can happen, and Faustian revelry and tragedy abound.
Interspersed with The Devil and his victims is a creative, philosophical retelling of the myth of Pontius Pilate, and the story of the two title characters (“Margarita” is a love interest, not a beverage, unfortunately) who, while they don’t get enough book-time to qualify as “protagonists”, exactly, do tie the whole thing together and are seen as islands of innocence in a corrupt land. Interestingly, while the book was both written in and set in the post-revolutionary Russia of Stalin, there’s barely a mention of communism or politics to be found. It may have been dangerous at the time to say anything at all.
The very last chapter is one of those cosmic passages that causes me to put books down and sigh while I contemplate life, the Universe, and everything. Very highly recommended.
Unlucky in Law, by Peri O’Shaughnessy :
”Do we admit the grave robbery?” Sean asked. He didn’t ask whether the client had confessed to Klaus. That would be bad form, since they were closing in on a trial at which they would claim the client was innocent no matter what he had told his lawyer in the cloister of their confidential relationship.
“Yes. There is a complication, however. Mr. Wyatt found a medal in the grave and put it in his pocket. The value of the medal makes the charge grand theft, a felony.”
“Sounds pretty minor, in the context of the murder charge.
“Ah, but it is not minor. The young man has a record. Two previous felony convictions. Violent felonies, and he did time for both. The first was for throwing a brick at a police officer at a demonstration. He was convicted of assault and served four months in the county jail. He had just turned eighteen.”
“That was bad luck,” Bear Said. “The birthday, I mean. If he’d been seventeen...”
Klaus went on. “While still on probation, at the age of nineteen, he struck another young man with his fist at a neighborhood party. Both men had been drinking. Unfortunately, the boy he struck fell against the curb and suffered a skull fracture. Mr. Wyatt pled guilty to assault again and was sent back to jail, for eight months this time.”
“This is one bad-luck kid”, Sean said.
“His victims were the ones with the bad luck,” Alan said. “Let’s not forget them. Sounds like you’ve got a client who deserves to go down.”
Klaus found the comment unworthy of a reply. “Mr. Wyatt was released after five years’ probation and has kept himself employed and clean,” he concluded. Nina made a note to herself to go into those priors in more detail with Stefan.
“Which makes a conviction for the medal a third strike conviction, even if he’s acquitted of the murder,” Bear said. “Mandatory twenty five years to life under California law.”
Speaking of post-revolutionary Russia segues nicely into a completely unrelated legal potboiler involving descendants of Russian immigrants who fled the revolution and ended up in Monterrey. The defendant says he was hired by one of them to dig up the bones of the Beloved Ancestor...except that someone else’s fresh corpse was in the grave and he’s charged with murdering her. Will O’Shaughnessy’s heroine Nina Reilly uncover improbable truths and prove him innocent? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?
My biggest problem with the Nina Reilly novels is that Reilly’s stature, speech patterns and mannerisms remind me very much of an actual attorney I know, who has the appearance and disposition of a pit bull, and so I visualize that attorney all through the Reilly books. This works great during scenes of gripping investigation and courtroom theatrics, where intelligence and nerve are called for, but I completely lose it during the extraneous side plots where multiple handsome love interests compete for her attention. And love-making scenes are just...ew. That’s maybe my unique problem, but it also highlights a disconnect between her professional and personal personalities. On the job, she’s the tough fighter you want on your side against the government. Off the job, she whines, mopes and agonizes about her life. And because clues to the actual crime could come up anywhere, you can’t just skip those chapters. “Peri O’Shaughnessy” is the pen name of two sisters who team up to write this series, and it may be that one of them writes the crime investigation and trial while the other writes the annoying romance. It’s the first part that I keep coming back for more of.
Detectives should note the pattern in these mysteries; they’re the kind where a seasoned armchair detective can usually puzzle out almost the whole story of what really happened and why from fair clues...and then there’s one final, almost unnecessary back twist at the very end that complicates it further and tests suspension of belief. You’ve been warned.
Obamanos! The Birth of a new political era, by Hendrik Hertzberg :
The past few months of sharply rising fuel costs have done more to cut our oil profligacy than all the preceding years of high minded exhortations. Unfortunately, all that extra cost is simply a transfer of wealth to the coffers of oil “producers” like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, with a few tens of billions skimmed off the top by ExxonMobil and the like.
Tom Friedman pointed out the other day that the Danes are paying ten dollars a gallon for gasoline. It’s not a problem for them. That’s because most of what they pay goes for taxes that have financed an energy policy so effective that Denmark now gets twenty percent of its electricity from wind (we get one percent) and zero percent of its fuel from the Middle East (down from ninety nie percent twenty five years ago). Now the Danes are getting ready to jack up gasoline taxes even more and use the proceeds to cut personal income taxes. They have this crazy idea that they should tax things they want to discourage, like gas guzzling, and ease up on taxing things they want to encourage, like people working.
But what do they know. They’re just a bunch of foreigners. European socialists too, probably.
Every time I wake up and hear an excerpt from a speech our President just made, or see his photo online, I can’t help but feel warm and fuzzy at the reminder that America now has a leader with a fully functional brain. It’s a good time to be an American. Even so, the “Obama Derangement Syndrome” on both the right and left occasionally gets to me. My leftward friends call him a tool of the establishment and complain that, less than halfway into his first term, he has not yet solved every single problem in the political and economic Chernobyl his predecessor left for him to clean up; and my rightward friends continue to chant that he’s Lucifer, Prince of Lies. The media continues to talk about Democrats in Congress losing seats to bombastic soapbox crackpots and crazy PTA ladies whose ideas for improving America consist of bringing chickens to your doctor and removing ethnic studies and science from schools.
Obamanos! is a feel-good antidote to Obama Derangement Syndrome, consisting of commentary Hertzberg wrote for the New Yorker in 2007 and 2008. It’s written from a definite liberal perspective, but is more than fair to all sides—Hertzberg accompanied Obama, Clinton and McCain during various stages of their campaigns, and seems to find all three personally likable—and provides a rare demonstration of the persuasive power from consistent intellectual honesty. This is not a book of juicy, behind-the-scenes gossip—I’m still waiting for John Heilemann’s Game Change to be available at the library for that perspective (the only actual fact mentioned that I didn’t know earlier was that the Dobsonists urged their followers to pray for rain the evening of Obama’s stadium convention speech—and the weather that night turned out to be perfect, which may say something about God’s attitude toward Dobson’s agenda). It’s commentary on the same moments people saw on television. And it ought to remind liberals—and reassure conservatives—that we’re living through perhaps the greatest United States Presidency since John Kennedy. Highly recommended.
The Sunday Woman, by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini :
”You know, it shocks me,” he said, as a reward, throwing a bone, “to think that he is dead? I’ll mourn him, really. He was useful to us, poor man.”
“Garrone? I thought you said you barely knew him.”
True, true. But the inspector would have to be patient just another moment, overlook the apparent contradictions. Any fairly thorough discussion of Garrone involved an infinite amount of correction, adjustment, gauging, calibration.
“A complex man, was he? An interesting man?”
No, no, quite the opposite. The fact was that Garrone had never existed, not really; they had invented him, the two of them, Massimo Campi and Anna Carla Dosio, extracting him from the murk of a vague, anonymous, colorless—but at the same time unique—Turin subculture. He had been a half figure in a half provincial city, one of the many semisomebodies, pseudopersonalities, quasicharacters who moved about, indoors, God knows where, and in the open, between dress rehearsals by invitation at the Teatro Stabile...and sooner or later you inevitably came up against them, just as you came upon those statues of vague Savoy dukes and princes scattered about the city.
The point of the passage quoted above is that two of the main characters like to people-watch and make up stories for each other about people they see, extrapolating entire personalities and life histories from a glance in the street. One such person they’ve observed has been murdered, and the detective is being told that a letter he thought was an important clue is really a bit of private fiction. This would ordinarily be a breathtaking moment; instead, the twin barriers of the translation from Italian and the fog-enshrouded meanderings of the allegedly clultivated, intellectual minds of the protagonists made my eyes glaze over, and I had to go back and re-read it before what was happening sank in. And that happened over and over again.
Heavy duty “spinach books” (not fun, but good for you) can get away with that. Thrillers that you read for pleasure should not. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s better in the original Italian. However, in the form I read, the characters were not memorable, the crime not interesting, and the philospohical overtones distracting and dull. After a while, I stopped trying to solve it, on the theory that the relevant clue had probably sailed right by me in the fog, and it was too much trouble to go back and look. I bulled through to the ending and got a big “so what” out of something that, written a little differently, should have been a clever twist on a genre that has been mostly beaten to death.
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, by Alan Garner :
When the circle was complete the creatures began to advance across the swamp, moving easily over the mire on their splayed feet. Ever closer they came, till the rock was surrounded.
From all sides at once the ropes came snaking through the air, as soft as silk, as strong as iron, and clung to the children as though coated with glue; so that in no time at all Colin and Susan fell helpless beneath the sticky coils, and over them swarmed the mob, pinching and poking, and binding and trussing, until the children lay with only their heads exposed, like two cocoons upon the rock.
But as they were being hoisted onto bony shoulders it seemed as though a miracle happened. There was a flash, and the whole rock was lapped about by a lake of blue fire. The children could feel no heat, but their captors fell, hissing and spitting, into the swamp, and the ropes charred and crumbled into ash, while pandemonium broke loose through all the assembly.
This book raises the question: Can an infinite number of Orc-Gollum halfbreeds pose a credible threat to two unarmed children seeking to find the Magic Doodad of MacGuffinia that is all that stands between the Earth and the Ultimate Evil, as prophesied centuries ago? Even when the white haired old guy with the SCA garb and the Omnipotence Powers disappears after chapter two? The answer, of course, is: Not even close.
Even if you haven't read this story yet, you've read it, or seen the movie, in some form. Garner uses Wales instead of Middle Earth, and Welsh battle dwarves instead of Reepicheep, and Old Magic instead of The Force, but you know what you're in for. It's almost comical the number of witches and morlocks and slithery monsters and stone She-Hulks and tunnel chases and forest chases are crammed into just 250 paperback pages, but it counts as a fairly good popcorn fantasy-action adventure.
Justine, by the Marquis de Sade :
”Ah!” said Severino, “I’ve never enjoyed a finer spectacle: behold, good friends, see the state it puts me in; it really is unbelievable, what feminine anguish obtains from me.”
“Let’s go back to work,” quoth Clement, “and in order to teach her to bellow at fate, let the bitch be more sharply handled in this second assault.”
The project is no sooner conceived than put into execution; up steps Severino, but his speeches notwithstanding, his desires require a further degree of irritation and it is only after having used Clement’s cruel measures that he succeeds in marshaling the forces necessary to accomplish his newest crime. Great God! What excesses of ferocity! Could it be that those monsters would carry it to the point of selecting the instant of a crisis of moral agony as violent as that I was undergoing, in order to subject me to so barbarous a physical one! “’Twould be an injustice to this novice,” said Clement, “were we not to employ in its major form what served us so well in its merely episodic dimension,” and thereupon he began to act, adding: “My word upon it, I will treat her no better than did you.” “One instant,” said Antonin to the superior whom he saw about to lay hands on me again; “while your zeal is exhaled into this pretty maiden’s posterior parts, I might, it seems to me, make an offering to the contrary God; we will have her between us two.”
First, there was Job, who was rewarded by his piety by being stripped by God of all he owned and covered with itchy, sore pustules all over his body, surrounded by “comforters” who told him he must have done something to deserve it, and then sneeringly told by God, in effect, “Why? Because I’m bigger than you.” And this is supposed to be some sort of inspiring parable proving that GOD is the good guy here.
Then there was Chaucer’s Canterbury tale of “the faithful Constance”, whose monstrous husband takes away her children at birth, telling her he has murdered them because she’s a bad wife; who abandons the marriage bed, telling her he’s out sleeping with whores, who are more worthy of his affection than she; and who finally tells her he’s executing her because she’s a bitch and a slut and a whore...all to test her fidelity. After she meekly submits to everything, the husband says, “Ha-Ha, just kidding”, produces the children, showers her with luxury, and they all grow closer together. And this, too, is supposed to be considered a wonderful moral tale, an allegory of how all of us should faithfully submit to God (and of course, by extension, to the pedophilic priests and ministers who claim to speak for Him on earth).
And then there was Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (see Book Post June 2008), beaten and starved by her family in order to force her to marry Lord Ugly; raped by her lover (that rascal!) and left to spend 500 pages dying of moral anguish. What a great moral lesson about virtue!
And of course, the Bible, and Chaucer, and Richardson, are great, wonderful authors of great reputation. We’d have to be real heels to scold them for such uplifting moral messages, right? Really, The Marquis de Sade, whose very name has become synonymous with degenerate cruelty, didn’t do anything different from that.
He just did it a bit too much and with too much obvious relish.
First Kafka, then Fruttero, then this bit of cruel bondage porn. Once again, I found myself skimming over large sections trying to get to the main point. I can’t say I shouldn’t have known what I was getting into, but, this book is not for the squeamish, and not for people who respect women. Never before have I so desperately wanted to reach into the book and bestow super buttkicking powers on a main character. Justine spends pretty much the entire novel being beaten and raped by noblemen, priests, mad doctors and other human monsters with reputations as pillars of society. Usually, one such monster promises Justine freedom and riches if she will help him to commit a crime. Justine, being a paragon of virtue, always refuses and tries to turn the monster away from sin...and so he commits the crime anyway and frames Justine for it, causing her to be arrested and sentenced to death; she escapes by the skin of her teeth, and is immediately abducted by the next monster, and the whole cycle starts all over again, to be repeated four or five times until it’s become ridiculous, at which point we finally, finally get the last few pages of eventual rescue, restoration to luxury and comfort, and the turning of a couple of characters away from debauchery by her example.
Those few pages aren’t worth it. What is possibly worth it are the pages in which the villains, eager to justify their unjustifiable appetites for violent rape, professorially describe their “philosophies”, proving how right and sensible and good they are before chuckling in a “what jolly rogues are we” sort of way while committing more violent rapes. Their monologues are like taking Machiavelli, Nietzche and Ayn Rand to their absurd logical conclusions. I had to skim over most of the passages in which each successive monster indulges his unique sadistic fetish in great descriptive detail; it was too much, too often and too extreme.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck :
"Easy, Tom." Ma soothed him. "Easy, Tommy. You done good once. You can do it again."
"Yeah, an' after a while I won't have no decency left."
"Easy", she said. "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on."
"We take a beatin' all the time."
"I know," Ma chuckled. "Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don't you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'."
"How do you know?"
"I don't know how."
Dustbowl Oklahoma. Families migrating in trucks piled high with all of their worldly possessions. Hordes of starving Depression-era huddled masses herded together to labor for starvation wages, denounced as communists and shot when they try to organize. You can just about hear Woody Guthrie's guitar and Pete Seeger's banjo in the background on every page.
In these economic troubles, it's time for everybody to re-read Steinbeck's classic tale of economic inequality, actual assaults on family values, and how it doesn't have to be this way. 70+ years after the Depression, led by FOX "News", people who should know better are once again blaming poverty on the poor and calling for the elimination, not the expansion of the New Deal at the very time when it is most needed. Pundits, and some of your own neighbors, bitch about "bums on welfare who get a better lifestyle than laborers" while simultaneously bitching about minimum wages, the abolition of which would make the lifestyles of laborers worse than they are now. Said people should read and remind themselves of what it was like without those things, when the poor were considered "uppity" for wishing for hot water, when an entire family's wages for hard labor would not pay for the food and gasoline offered at inflated prices at the company store, when business "associations" set prices of both goods and labor to maximize profits for themselves and deliberately destroyed surplus food in front of starving families, to keep prices up, shooting and jailing people who desperately tried to steal what was being destroyed. Do you think those things don't happen today? Ask someone who works in retail what they are required to do to usable goods that aren't sold or are superficially damaged. Ask someone who works in the criminal justice system what is done to dumpster-divers who "steal" what other people have already thrown away.
The Grapes of Wrath is a piece of American history, a call to social and economic reform and a thrilling story all at once. The protagonist Joad family, reduced from 13 to 7 as the story progresses, probably couldn't have read the book. You can almost smell wood burning as Tom or Ma or Casy the preacher attempt to think through their visions of what might happen wealth was not concentrated so heavily in the hands of the few that waste and destroy it for the sake of acquiring more, at the expense of all the rest of us. You can also see that their spirit cannot be crushed, no matter how many bankers, scabs and Pinkertons are sent against them. Very highly recommended.
Video Night in Kathmandu, by Pico Iyer :
After an unquiet sleep, I had woken up and walked around the three or four square blocks of the town. Most of the stores seemed to be trendy boutiques, across whose windows were splashed New Wave Japanese T-shirts and pretty sundresses in Miami Vice turquoise and pink. Surfaris. Tropical Climax. Cherry. Mariko. An American Werewolf In London was playing at the local cinema. The Narnia. Frenchy. Pancho's. The Pub. A few Men at Work songs were pouring out of cassette stores opened to the street, only to be drowned out by the roar of Suzukis erratically ridden by local boys in leopardskin shirts. Fatty. The Beer Garden. Depot Viva. The Duck Nuts. "Marijuana and hashish", whispered one man to me. "Hashish and cocaine", muttered his friend. Joe's. Lenny. Jerry. Elly's. Elice's. I walked back to my guesthouse. Van Morrison had now replaced Vivaldi on the system, and a couple of the boys there invited me to sit down over some guacamole and give them my opinion of Michael Landon and John McEnroe.
I was, of course, in Bali, the Elysian isle famous for its otherworldly exoticism, its cultural integrity, its natural grace.
This collection of essays from the mid 1980s explores the changes that globalization and tourism bring to the ancient cultures of the East. Tourists who discover Paradise and soil it. Americans who go on quests to behave like ascetic monks and natives who behave like sharp western capitalists. I found the descriptions of foreign cultures hundreds of years old easier to digest than the countless dated references to Walkmans, videocassettes, Rambo, Miami Vice and USA for Africa. Madonna, however, remains constant to this day.
Iyer has a wonderful writing style, making for easy reading. He writes about a dozen Asian countries, and tends to focus on one cultural aspect of each: brothels in Thailand; Bollywood movies in India; baseball in Japan; Marxist-Capitalist dissonance in China; the national going-out-of-business sale that was 80s Hong Kong.
Along the way are the usual anecdotes of Kafka-like travel regulations; malaprop menu items like "vegetable plow" and "bout of plain curd"; cutesy-wutesy menu items like "bacon your pardon" and "cheese my baby"; tourists ripping off natives; natives ripping off tourists; governments ripping off everybody; restaurants and stores that rival Monty Python's cheese shop at being out of anything you care to name; improbable anecdotes and even less probable coincidences and mystic experiences....and not just within the book. Right after a section on fortune telling and synchronicities, Iyer drops a reference, written in 1986, to someone he meets in India who asks him if it is true that Gary Coleman is dead. I read that chapter within two hours of learning that Gary Coleman had actually died in 2010.
The overall effect is neither one of mourning for the adulteration of simpler ways of life nor of celebrating progress, but of choosing to find pleasure in the foibles and indignities of both traditional and "modern" (1980s) ways of life; of laughing because the world is becoming bigger and funnier every day. Considering the alternatives; it's a good way of looking at the world....Iyer made me smile at what was going on in these countries; he did not in the slightest inspire me to want to visit any of them.
The Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons :
DOCTOR: Good. That's very GOOD. Okay, Walter. Now I want you to tell me what's on the card...tell me what you see.
(Rorschach blot on yellow background)
(silhouette, similar to the blot, of a couple intertwined, on yellow wallpaper)
VOICES: Ngh..Ngh..AAA! Oh God!
(Young Walter approaches)
VOICES: Oh, you're hurting me! OW, Oh, Ohhh...What?
MAN: HEY! What is this?
WOMAN: Oh God...
MAN: You didn't tell me you had no KIDS around here!
WOMAN: It...it's my son, look really, it doesn't matter! Let's...
MAN: Ahh, who needs it...kids creeping around everyplace. I get enough of this crap at home!
WOMAN: Oh, baby, please listen...he's kinda backwards. Please don't get mad...
MAN: I said FORGET it! Here's five bucks. It's more'n you're worth.
WOMAN: Five...? Five BUCKS? You BASTARD! You lousy BASTARD! Don't you dare walk out on me. Don't you DARE!
MAN: Outta my way, retard. (shoves young Walter, and leaves)
(Woman stares at Walter)
YOUNG WALTER: M-Mom? ...Mom, I'm sorry. I, I thought he was hurting you. I thought...
WOMAN: YOU LITTLE SHIT! (strikes Walter)
YOUNG WALTER: OOAH...
WOMAN: You know what you just COST me, you ugly little BASTARD? I shoulda listened to everybody ELSE! I shoulda had the ABORTION!
YOUNG WALTER: Aaaaaah! MommEEEE...
(Yellow wall. Silhouette of Woman beating Walter.)
Aoh...Ahhhhh...AAAA!!!
(Rorschach blot)
DOCTOR: Well, Walter? What do you make of it?
ADULT WALTER: .....some nice flowers.
Very highest recommendations--this graphic novel (by the creator of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—unlike Black Dossier, above, this is the original work, not an add-on) is the most powerful, highest quality piece of writing and art I encountered this month. Maybe all year so far. It is everything that Justine is not, for all the similarity of the themes of virtue and suffering and cruelty. Sade is trash disguised as literature. The Watchmen is literature disguised as trash. Sade's descriptions of tortures I have not and will never experience disgusted me; Alan Moore's vivid depiction of a bullying victim punished severely by the grownups the first time he fights back against his tormentors brought up my personal abuse triggers more acutely than I'd previously experienced in my adult life, and yet I loved the story.
Somehow, I managed to read The Watchmen cold, for which I am very grateful. I vaguely remember people on various blogs and in conversations making casual references to it, and to a movie version that was either coming out or had come out...the only thing I registered was that it was some kind of comic book and that it involved superheroes. I filed it away in my mind as if it was a series like the X-Men or a dozen other comics that started up after I no longer read comics. And, since my first reading was such a pleasure for not knowing what was coming, that's about all I'm going to tell you about the story. Except that it kicks ass. And that many times I found myself going back and having another look at earlier panels, because what was happening in them took on more meaning the more I knew about the story. Nothing is exactly what it seems at first look. Nothing.
If you're reading this on a blog where you're on my friendlist, you've probably already read The Watchmen. So just close your eyes for a moment and imagine you're sitting across the table from me, and I point to the book, and we stare into each others' eyes a little, and then we both nod and softly say "Yeah" at the same time.
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury :
"Mr. Aaa, I'd like to tell you...we came sixty million miles."
Mr. Aaa regarded the captain for the first time. "Where did you say you were from?"
The captain flashed a white smile. Aside to his men, he whispered, "Now we're getting someplace!" To Mr. Aaa, he called, "We traveled sixty million miles. From EARTH!"
Mr. Aaa yawned. "That's only fifty million miles this time of year." He picked up a frightful looking weapon. "Well, I have to go now. Just take that silly note, though I don't know what good it'll do you, and go over that hill into the little town of Iopr and tell Mr. Iii all about it. He's the man you want to see. Not Mr. Ttt, he's an idiot. I'm going to kill him. Not me, because you're not in my line of work."
"Line of work, line of work", bleated the captain. "Do you have to be in a certain line of work to welcome Earth men?"
"Don't be silly, everyone knows that!" Mr. Aaa rushed downstairs. Goodbye." And down the causeway he raced, like a pair of wild calipers.
The four travellers stood shocked. Finally the captain said, "We'll find someone yet who will listen to us."
"Maybe we should go out and come in again.," said one of the men in a dreary voice. "Maybe we should take off and land again."
This book of stories, united around the common theme of Humanity's colonization of Mars, from several first contact attempts to...well, to the end, is not Bradbury's best, mostly because it attempts to jam several beautiful pieces from different jigsaw puzzles together and call it a coherent history. The Martian Chronicles is no such thing. Bradbury has good ideas for several first contact stories that have nothing to do with each other, and so he pretends that each of them happened in different missions, several months apart. He has good ideas involving different kinds of aliens with different cultures and abilities, so he writes that there are several kinds of Martians. Exactly one story has some characters that show up again later; the rest have stories that are complete in themselves.
And the stories themselves are wonderful, as Ray Bradbury tends to be. The first-contact Earth men who have to prove that they're not simply insane Martians. The Martian with the power to assume the guise of an Earth couple's long-dead child. The fully automated house that continues its programmed upkeep routine decades after the atom war has wiped out all life in the city. And, of course, an excellent variation on Bradbury's most frequent theme of what happens when serious, mundane government officials attempt to outlaw imaginative literature.
It's great classic science fiction. Seems to me it would be even better if presented as a regular collection of stories without the clumsy vignettes in between, trying to make it into one history.