Orion Reads

The Origins of Totalitarianism

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:22:00 +0000

I spent the last several months slowly reading The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, this is a very complex work which is difficult to reduce to a handful of sentences. But i'll try anyhow. The Origins is a study of not one but two totalitarian governments in the middle of the 20th century. .. And even already i've put my foot in my mouth, because Hannah goes to great lengths to show that the things we're speaking of when we say 'Stalinist Russia' and especially 'Nazi Germany' were not in fact governments; that they were anti-governments; that their leaders specifically endorsed chaos in order to keep power in their movement rather than in their governments. But that aside.

To illustrate how we came to find ourselves with Nazi Germany, Hannah provides a pretty good history of Europe from about 1500 through 1956 or so, with special attention given to tracing the roots and forms of antisemitism. Along the way she covers colonialism, imperialism, the birth of the nation-state, etc.

I've long wondered what happened between the biblical diaspora and the rampant anti-semitism of europe in the thirties (and russia seemingly forever), and The Origins certainly gives some insights into the history there.

With limited space however, i'm going to skip over the origins of modern anitisemitism and just mention a few of the salient characteristics of totalitarian 'governments', as Hannah sees them.

First, she distinguishes explicitly between totalitarianism and 'mere' tyranny. As i interpret it, the distinction is primarily that the scope of a tyranny is limited to a single nation or possibly a region, but the aim of a totalitarianism is nothing less than total control of the entire world. Expressed best and possibly most openly in the words of Cecil Rhodes: "I'd annex the planets if i could". With this worldview, the "homeland" is in fact merely the first population to be subjugated: hence the horrifying treatment of Germans and Russians by Hitler and Stalin. (Hitler as we all know had plans to gas the old and infirm, once all the Jews, homos, and Gypsies were gone. Extermination was not a means to an end; it was a never-to-be concluded process. The same was true of the Soviet Union: Stalin used starvation as a weapon against huge portions of the population, and new segments of society were constantly being selected more or less at random to step up as good communists and confess to crimes they hadn't committed but which the party 'needed' them to).

The second aspect of totalitarianism which was surprising to me is that its exercise of terror is superfluous to the comprehensible goal of achieving and retaining power. ie, it was not used as a tool for gaining ascendency, but rather as a means of shaping the daily reality of the subjugated homeland. Specifically, in both Russia and Germany, domestic terror actually increased and was at its height only after all vestiges of resistance to the regime had been utterly crushed. There was in fact no resistance at all, but the terror was stepped-up. In my opinion this was to break not only the wills but also the minds of the population by removing the existence of cause and effect: terror stuck at random, and no movement by a person could make one safe.

If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination. (p. 464)

.. terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so that it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of terror .. but the last impediment to its full fury. (p. 393)

A third thing i had not appreciated fully before was the concept of statelessness, and how it was employed by Nazi Germany. I hadn't known that the Germans first stripped their Jews of property and then evicted them from the country, creating a class of stateless refugees burdening the rest of Europe. When Germany then gathered these people up again to be murdered, the neighboring states were glad to be rid of them, and were thus made complicit in the proceedings. Hanna's chapter on the plight of the stateless is excellent. The stateless are also the right-less; there is nobody who has an interest or obligation in protecting their rights, and as such no law protects them. This is certainly what we are seeing today right before us with Guantanamo and the removal of political prisoners from American soil. The following quote illustrates Hanna's point that a person is better off within the legal system, even as a criminal, than in the lawlessness outside of it.

The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit* by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. (p. 286 * - meaning that his legal status would improve)

I'll leave things with one last quote concerning the time-honored practice of secret police of instigating ersatz opposition in order that it may be crushed. To hear this particular story again, once can also read the history of the CIA-led coup in Iran. An excellent source is All The Shah's Men, by Steven Kinzer.

The superfluousness of secret services is nothing new; they have always been haunted by the need to prove their usefulness and keep their jobs after the original task had been completed. The methods used for this purpose have made the study of of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself. Provocation, in other words, helped as much to maintain the continuity of tradition as it did to disrupt time and again the organization of the revolution. (p. 423)

If you find this book interesting, you might also enjoy Martin Amis's book about Stalinist Russia, Koba the Dread (Laughter and the Twenty Million).

LeGuinn, Grimm, Snicket, O'Brien

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:14:00 +0000

this is a quick list-style entry before the next, which will be more in-depth.

Am currently reading The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien given to me by Thom Moyles. I'm only a few pages in so don't have a lot to say, but so far it's promising.

Most recently finished Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe Of Heaven. I'm a huge fan of LeGuin. This is one of her earlier works, and i'll admit is a bit more like ordinary science fiction than most of her stuff. It's about a man who's dreams modify reality, and his fear of that. It tries to be a love story as well, but honestly succeeds about as well as Tolkien does. .. Which is surprising, as Le Guin's later works are exemplars of understanding and portraying human relationships. (For example, her 2008 novel, Lavinia.) All in all, i'd suggest leaving this one on the bookstore shelf unless you're particularly into science fiction.

Speaking of Lavinia, i read it recently and it's fantastic. In Virgil's Aenid, the main character is Aenaes, who leads the Trojans home from the war and who's sons eventually found Rome. On the way, he lands on the coast and marries the daughter of a local king who becomes the mother of those sons. Little is said of her, and in fact Virgil gives her no speaking parts. Lavinia is that woman's story, told from her perspective. It's very good. LeGuin deals much with the brutality of war and life during those pre-roman days, as well as with a large variety of interpersonal relationships.

I also recently read the sixth book in the Series of Unfortunate Events, The Ersatz Elevator, by Lemony Snickett.

Am also currently reading Grimm's Fairytales, the 'complete' translation, given to me by Mom. they're pretty interesting. i think the translation is terrible, but it sort of makes the reading more interesting. They're extremely brutal.

A High Wind in Jamaica

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Well it's been nearly a year since the last post. Apologies. I'll try to keep the noise down.
Sarah handed me A High Wind in Jamaica and said "you should read this," and i did, and now i'm posting about it here and saying You should read it too. This book is nearly the perfect short novel. It was written around 1928 by Richard Hughes, and follows the mis/adventures of a group of young children ages four to eleven. The story is told usually from the children's perspective, even when using the adult narrator's voice, which i think is masterful. The brand of "children's perspective" here is basically animalistic. Hughes manages to take what might be a light romp and reveal the bestial nature of childhood reality. The book is simultaneously morbid and hilarious, the writing is graceful, and it's only 277 pages. Thanks, Sarah !

McCullers, Twain, Pratchett, Wodehouse, and not quite Toole and Pamuk

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:24:00 +0000

Just a quick jotting.

I re-read two of my favorites by Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding, a story about a young girl in the deep south at the awkward age between childhood and teenagedom, who's dissatisfied with everything in life except the thought of running away with her older brother when he comes back from the war and gets married, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (and other stories). Can someone explain to me what it is i don't like about Wunderkind ? It meets all the criteria for a great McCullers story, but something about it gives me hackles. Perhaps i just don't like the main character. Anyhow, all the other stories in the Cafe are just superb. If you haven't read it you probably should immediately. It's very short, like a Salinger book. I also tried to re-read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but found that the characters were still too fresh in my head, so i had to put it down. Which says something about the power of those characters, since i haven't read it for something like ten years.

I picked up Number Fourty Four, the Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. It was published posthumously but i believe relatively as-intended, and have to admit i was a bit disappointed. It feels like a series of vignettes somewhat crudely stitched together. It runs from absurdist physical comedy to Moralizing In All Capitals without much consistency. Sadly it reminded me a bit of The Further Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which has to be a commercial piece.

Vivianna knows i love A Confederacy of Dunces (you either love it or hate it and i love it) and so loaned me a copy of The Neon Bible, also written by John Toole, but i just haven't been able to get into it. I may give it another go.

Sharon loaned me My Name Is Red, by Orhun Pamuk, which, as far as i can tell, is an exploration of historical Turkey, through a variety of shifting and sometimes abstract narrative voices. For example the color red. .. Which sounds exactly up my alley, but i read a chapter or so and some pages at random and again wasn't grabbed. Perhaps i'm just in a light-fare mood.

So meanwhile, thank god for Terry Pratchett. His discworld books are so incredibly formulaic but really satisfying. Like a can of Pringles. This installment was Going Postal, which at first blush seems to be about the post office, but in fact is more about the internet. Just once i would like to see Lord Veterinari play the role of villain.

Currently reading some PG Wodehouse, whom i love. I'm careful to never go on a Wodehouse binge, because thus far there's always been more Wodehouse to read, and i dread the thought of that well running dry. The collection at hand is Blandings Castle, and delicious.

more angela carter

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:59:00 +0000

Angela Carter is fantastic. I went on to read a collection of three novels, The Magic Toyshop, The infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and Wise Children.

The Magic Toyshop was written early, and is more or less a coming-of-age story about a young girl mixed with puppetry and strange magic, not always good. It explores sexual politics & power, and is quite good.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was written in 1972, and is a a psychedelic masterpiece. I feel that TIDMODH is the novel which The Crying of Lot 49 was trying so hard to discover: a rambling heteromorphic journey through psychological landscapes, but where (imo) Lot 49 is one of the world's most annoying and tedious reads, TIDMODH is totally pleasurable. I have to admit i was free with skipping over parts that began to bore me, but the plot os so non-linear and non-representational that it seemed okay.

Finally, Wise Children is the real crowning jewel in this collection. Written very late in her life (1991), when Carter was about 50, it's the story of identical twin sisters reflecting back on their life as burlesque and movie starlets from the vantage point of sixty or seventy. The title refers to the saying (which i hadn't fully grappled with previously) "It's a wise child that knows it's own father", so you can imagine that there's a fair amount of paternity hijinks, and possibly even maternity too. As always, Carter is frank and charming on the topics of sex, and manages to weave an integrated tale of sexuality from childhood through septagenarianhood. The word "menarchy" appears, you may be sure. I can't recommend this story enough, it's fantastic.

Ligotti - My Work Is Not Yet Done

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:31:00 +0000

Imagine my thrill, my capering joy, to learn that the Ligotti volume My Work Is Not Yet Done was not in fact due out in something like 2010, but was in fact written in 2002 and published in paperback in 2009! For those who may not know, Ligotti is my current favorite author, especially the collection of short stories, Teatro Grottesco. His writing is what i can only describe as "Existential Horror", managing to capture a sense of supernatural revulsion at the very nature of existence itself, at even the possibility of existence. Ligotti's general thesis (which i love) is pretty well summarized by this quote, from the work at hand:

People do not know, and cannot face, the things that go on in this world, the secret nightmares that are suffered by millions every day ... and the excruciating paradox, the nightmarish obscenity of being something that does not know what it is and yet believes that it does know, something that in fact is nothing but a tiny particle that forms the body of The Great Black Swine Which Wallows in a Great River of Blackness that to us looks like sunrises and skyscrapers, like all the knotted events of the past the unraveling of those knots in the future, like birthdays and funerals, like satellites and cell phones and rockets launched into space, like nations and peoples, like the laws of nature and the laws of humanity, like families and friends, like everything, including these words that I write.

My Work Is Not Yet Done is a novella and two short stories which deal with the existential horror of the contemporary corporate workplace which so many of us have become familiar with. The first is eponymous, and deals with the supernatural unhinging of a mid-level manager at a large corporation, which itself of course is revealed to have sinister supernatural underpinnings of its own. The second is titled "I Have a Special Plan for This World", (Ligotti wrote the words to the Current 93 album of the same name) and presents again, an oppressive corporation with supernatural roots. The third is very brief and takes the form of camera directions for a movie.

I have to confess that i was somewhat disappointed by the first two stories. I felt they resorted to simple gore and terror where what i love about Ligotti is his ability to express horror without actually getting down to sort of literary wet-work. My conception of the ultimate Ligotti piece would be a story where in fact nothing scary happens, yet it terrifies the pants and socks off you. I think The Town Manager in Teatro Grottesco manages somewhat more effectively to communicate the cannibalistic nature of corporate existence. The last story in MWINYD contains a vignette where an enormous crowd of slaves waits before a ritualistic platform, upon which are five slaves who are to be ritualistically tortured and murdered. However, when the executioner climbs the platform, he unexpectedly freezes, like a motionless statue. One slave leaps from the crowd and onto the platform. He makes eye contact with the five on stage, but doesn't rescue them. Instead he performs a quick repair on the executioner-automaton and then returns to the crowd. - This, i think, captures much of the modern world quite nicely.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:59:00 +0000

I've been meaning to re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for some time, and it's great. The last time i read it was probably in elementary school, and needless to say i got more out of it this time around. - Not the least of which is an appreciation of the illustrations, by John Tenniel. The edition i read (the "centenary edition" by Penguin, $4 like new at the Friends-Of-The-Library bookstore at Fort Mason) includes many footnotes, usually concerning how this or that particular scene or line is a reference to some actual event between Carroll and the Liddell family, especially of course, Alice Liddell. (that's her on the cover, at left) This edition also has Carroll's original version of the story, Alice's Adventures under Ground, essentially a compressed (or unexpanded) early version of AAiW. All in all, well worth [re]reading!

The Hunger Season

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:36:00 +0000

I was once in the process of trying to get a date from a cute bartender i know, and things were going pretty well until she suddenly asked me if i like poetry, which, by and large, i don't. Fortunately however, she turned out to be referring specifically to a man who happens to be both a friend and by far my favorite poet, William Taylor Jr. Bill's second "proper" book of poems just came out, and it's hopeless, hopeful, painful, and beautiful as heck. The Hunger Season is mostly poems about the secret subsocietal world of San Francisco's Tenderloin district, a literary topic i admittedly find enormously compelling. The Hunger Season is also mostly poems about love, relationships, and beauty. I hope Bill won't mind if i quote two of the ones which affect me most powerfully.

Poem

Somewhere
along the way

we forget
to be beautiful

and this is where
all other deaths
begin.

Her Face, the Sometimes Gentleness

Let's not speak of hope;
whatever it is that gets you
through the day will
have to do for now.

Embrace the hours as best you can;
your failures

and the evil you've done drift out
with the eventual tide

and the void forgives all in time.

Think of her face,
the sometimes gentleness of things;

make the feeling concrete in your mind:
hold it in your fist
tight against your breast

and if you want, you can
call it love.

and i apologize for so much quoting,
but just one more which for me captures so much of what i love about Bill's writing as well as William Vollmann's.

When She Lights a Cigarette and Asks

God is yourself
walking out into yet
another day never knowing
exactly why.

God is the yellow sun
shining down
so uselessly upon everything

because that's all it knows how to do.

God is the laughter
of the girl on the bus
beautiful enough to remind you
why you ever bothered
to exist at all.

God is a story you can't guess
the ending to,

enough change in your pocket
for another drink,

the bright red polish
on the barefoot toe
of the skinny prostitute on Larkin Street.

God is the voice of the old bartender
at the Gold Dust Saloon
as he laughs and tells me he's looking forward
to the beautiful nap.

God is a half-bottle of wine
found in the cupboard at 3 a.m.,

the man
with a handful of pennies
who asks
what I can spare,

and the laundry quarters
I give him simply
because I am too ashamed
to do otherwise.

God is every splinter of light
in between all the darkness

and god is the darkness.

And when she lights a cigarette
and asks why i never
go to church

I can only wonder where it is
she thinks we are.

Angela Carter

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:39:00 +0000

I was at Borderlands in SF, asking if they had any Ligotti, and the guy asked if i'd read any Angela Carter, and i could tell by his shocked expression when i answered "No" that this was someone i should probably check out. So i got Burning Your Boats, the collected short stories. Bear with me: most of the stories in the book are re-tellings (or re-imaginings) of classic fairy-tales, with hyper-sexual and strong feminist themes added in addition to ordinary adulting-it-up. But here's the nutty part! They're really good! I think Janina put it best as "don't think of them as feminist re-imagined fairy tales, just think of them as stories", and it's true. I have to admit that i skipped one or two of the stories because they were too floaty or abstract for me. Also i don't quite understand the fascination Lizzie Borden holds over some writers. I think my favorite story is probably The Bloody Chamber, in which a young poor girl is married to an enormously wealthy marquis and goes to live with him in his remote castle on the French coastline. It develops that he has killed his previous three wives in grotesque manners, and that the ruby choker he insists our heroine wear presages her decapitation. However, a young blind piano-tuner becomes her lover and delays the fatal incident by just enough time for our heroine's mother to literally gallop to the scene and shoot the marquis dead using her dead husband's old service revolver. The girl and the piano tuner marry, give all the wealth to charity, and with the mother turn the castle into a school for the blind. - What i like about this story is the partnering of extremely adult writing (murder, sex, etc) with an outrageously saccharine plot.

Omnivore's Dilemma, the

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:47:00 +0000

Mykle and i were traveling in China. I'd brought Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, and The Rainbow Stories by Bill Vollmann. Mykle had The Omnivore's Dilemma, and one other rather thick book that is seventh and final in a very well-known series. By the end of the trip we'd both cleared our list, and Mykle went to the shop to get something for the ride home, and i snagged Omnivore's Dilemma.
I'm not going to summarize OD, because i think everyone knows that it's a justified diatribe against the monoculture of Corn in industrial agriculture and the concomitant non-sustainability & general crappiness of that industry.
I am, however going to join what is probably a pretty large camp and criticize Michael Pollan for a certain glaring blind-spot in his criticism of the non-sustainability of industrial agriculture. And this is that his entire exploration has an unstated focus: How do we achieve sustainable farming methods for the production of meat ? ie, it's specifically farming which results in steak on the table that he's interested in, and clearly illustrates how many problems that generates, yet never broaches the topic of perhaps eating way, way less meat. He even has an entire chapter titled "the ethics of eating animals", which presents and discusses several 'ethical' issues around human carnivorism, but never once raises what in my mind is the primary ethical issue here: environmental responsibility.
I am also going to rage against his rhetorical and prose styles. They are god-awful. Here are a few sentences which each begin not merely paragraphs, but entire sub-chapters: "To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm .." "Part of me did not want to go." Or here, the first sentence in chapter 20, "The Perfect Meal": "Perfect?! A dangerous boast, you must be thinking." These of course are stylistic quibbles, but i read for prose style at least as much as content. Pollan's rhetoric is similarly sloppy. One technique he uses frequently is to introduce us to a slogan of some sort and then repeat that slogan over and over, until a chapter and a half later it's been transformed from slogan to actual fact. A particular case of this is the phrase "you can't change just one thing [in a farming ecosystem]", meaning that if you raise chickens and cows, you can't just add more chickens and expect there to be no effect on the cows. This is certainly good advice, and very likely true. It's not the truth or utility of this particular slogan which i'm against, but rather the fact that it's introduced as a slogan and leaves as a rhetorical argument. I was also pretty disappointed by Pollan's presentation (if not his understanding) of natural selection. The book is rife with personification of nature and even specifically of natural selection, constantly using phrases such as ".. helped them to displace the native plants and animals allied with the Indian" - huh ? plants allied with Indians ? Or: ".. in fact it makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as a brilliant (if unconscious) evolutionary strategy on the part of the plants and animals involved to get us to advance their interests." - there's so much wrong with that sentence from a scientific point of view that it's difficult to know where to begin.

Anyhow. So, in summary, i think it's a good book which certainly presents a lot of interesting information (except in the chapters about hunting and mushroom gathering - that's interesting, but not very) but it's horribly written and has some serious rhetorical blind-spots.

Vollmann - The Rainbow Stories

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 01:55:00 +0000

The thematic breadth of William Vollmann is simply stunning. I first read The Royal Family (about which i wrote far too little. the exegesis on the corruption and screwed-up-ness of the penal bail system alone is fantastic), which is a novel set in SF relating the downfall of a private investigator in love with a rich and suicidal Korean woman while at the same time falling in love and chattledom with a nearly-mythical prostitute/pimp in the streets of the Tenderloin. Then there's his most recent work, Europe Central, an incredibly erudite work about various aspects of the USSR and Germany during the years anteceding and following WWII. It manages to portray large portions of the war through the lens of classical music! (the main character is Dmitri Shostakovich) The entire thing is meticulously researched, with footnotes and sources for each historical reference. It's also about a zillion pages.
So, my experience has been that Vollmann is often a bit difficult to approach, but has always been rewarding, and so i had confidence when i picked up one of his earlier works, The Rainbow Stories out at the Friends of the Library Shop at Fort Mason. Written in the late 1980s, The Rainbow Stories is a collection of short writings mostly about various marginal groups or scenes in San Francisco during the 80s.
The story which asks the most of the reader is "The White Knights", where Vollmann actually became (or simply was?) friends with a gang of white-supremacist skinheads named "The SF Nazi Skinz". I believe this is them on the cover of the book, sig-heiling away, skateboards in tow. Vollmann basically hung out with them and asked about their various life stories, and did an admirable job of writing them down without too much editorializing or judgement. He follows a few of them in particular, getting the story of how they became a skinhead, some stories of their life now, and the seemingly inevitable dissolution to jail or death. Clearly these people lived sad, horribly fucked-up lives of misery and viciousness. But Vollmann's take seems to be something like "we all choose our fucked-up-ness in this world. the skinheads have chosen violence and squalor, while the commuters on the bus have chosen to live without souls and work for the man". - or something.
The skinhead story becomes truly amazing when held against the next one, in which Vollmann during this same period was also becoming a friend (and client) of the SF prostitutes, most of whom are distinctly not white. He describes what it's like to smell the hair of one particular black girl, whom he knows the skinheads personally hate and often talk about beating up. He asks the girl, "what do you think of those skinheads?" and she replies "i don't like 'em. no, i don't." In a later story, Vollmann has a korean girlfriend, and the girlfriend is throwing him a birthday party, and it's mostly her middle-class korean friends over, and Vollmann also invites two bootwomen from the Skinz (apparently female skinheads are "bootwomen") to the party, and then the girlfriend's wallet goes missing.
Along the way, there is a rather overly long and bookish dramatization of the bible story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, a story about a leader of Thugs on Thuggee and his supernatural servant (the devil), an interview with a man who blew up an occupied department store in ireland, a typically personal and human exploration of the homeless of golden gate park and a fictional-but-possible story of a murderer preying on them (based on real events), and finally a portrait of our much-beloved Survival Research Labs. (makers of large destructive robots which fight each other in imitation of human sexuality, and pretty much the genesis of the much tamer robot-wars industry we have today)

Basically, he wears a lot of hats, most of which are hats i would have a lot of difficult wearing, and many of which are hats i wouldn't even want to be in the same room with, and it's well-written and amazing.

evelyn waugh binge

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:28:00 +0000

i've been reading nothing but Evelyn Waugh lately, and yesterday i finished my fifth-in-a-row by him. I have Gabriel and Yelly to thank for the introduction. especially gabriel, who gave me not one but two hand-drawn reminders in my little notebook:

so, to date, i've read Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, The Loved One, and Officers and Gentlemen. Of these, Brideshead is the clear winner - who knew there were not only raging homos at Oxford in the 30s, but stories about raging homos in the 40s ? It's also, classically, about the tribulations of being in the leisure class, involves the main character taking a trip to the jungle, and issues with the catholic church. It's quite good.
Scoop and The Loved One are comedies, and are pretty good. Yelly described him as sort of PG Wodehouse but more grown-up, which is pretty accurate. A Handful of Dust is a very depressing book, although i felt it was trying a little too hard. Officers and gentlemen in the second in the Sword of Honor trilogy, a series of novels following one nice guy through World War II.

sorry for the rather thin and dry reviews, but i'm packing up to move and couldn't quite bear to put five books by the same author into a box without a quick comment.

also being read lately:
On the lower Frequencies (or, "A Secret History of the City") which Kaitlin gave me, is a collection of 'zine articles written by Erick Lyle in the mid-90s to early-aughts, and is a sort of history of punk and homeless life in San Francisco during those times. Lyle's voice is aggressively "street" and he is unapologetically biased in favour of the homeless. It's a history of squatting, scamming the system, illegal concerts, activism, as well as a great portrait of community in a major urban city. I love it.

quick update

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:56:00 +0000

currently reading Awakenings, a history of "The Sleeping Sickness", which is a form of Parkinson's wherein the victim more or less loses all will. Sometimes mental will, sometimes physical will (ie, you want to pick up the book, but you're body refuses). The author, Oliver Sacks (who also wrote uncle tungsten), reports on his experiments using the drug L-DOPA to 'awaken' such sleepers. I usually don't go for medical books, but this has some pretty bizarre stories in it, and Sacks is actually a pretty decent author. And the words i don't know are pretty bad-ass.

also reading On The Lower Frequencies, a history San Francisco during the last ten years or so told from an unapologetically biased punk-rock & homeless perspective. i love the dude's voice and perspective, and there's some pretty good historical material as well.

have given up reading The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing. It's just too slow.

OH ! the thing i'm REALLY reading is Thomas Ligotti's Teattro Grotesco. This book is awesome. It's existential horror, but i can't say anything more about it now because it needs much much more than a short synopsis. I am also trying to make a short puppet-film out of one of these stories, am illustrating one of them, and am writing a piece of short fiction hopefully in the prose-style of them.

Europe Central, Doris Lessing binge, William Taylor Hookin' Me Up (almost)

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:20:00 +0000

I finished the considerable thickness that is Europe Central a month or so ago. I have to say that this was one of the most difficult books for me to get any traction with that i've ever read, and i very nearly put it down. It was literally just a day or two after a threatening love-letter to EC that we finally found some common ground where we could have an exchange of ideas. But that common ground turned out to be a verdant valley indeed, and the price of getting there was worth it. I will criticize the unapproachable parts: they weren't rewarding. With some difficult books, the difficult parts themselves are rewarding: you have an "aha!" or "ooh!" at the end of the struggle. I felt that the difficult portions of EC were more punative or hazing: you have to endure this unpleasant thing in order to get to the good parts. And the unpleasant things were unpleasant indeed: abstract-yet-first-person narrators, reams of thickly-veiled allusions to historical events which this reader didn't have the education to begin to know wtf he was talking about, entire chapters of pith narrated only as reflections of specific passages of classical music. Seriously. Ordinarily i have a pretty low tolerance for literature: there are so many good books out there, that i don't feel any compunction to continue reading a book just because i've started it: i need to be enjoying it. But i've read another work by Vollmann, The Royal Family, and have a very high regard for his prose.

Europe Central is historical fiction taking place in Germany and the Soviet Union spanning about 1928 to 1960, with most of the attention during WWII. It picks out a handful of real historical figures and does a fantastic job of portraying them as real people set in a real war. The passage which has stuck with me most vividly is that of an upper-middle-class german woman who's upper-middle-class, respectable husband is home on a brief leave from the polish front, and as just a part of a marital argument she confronts him with raping polish women: "everyone knows what you men are doing out there". This brought home to me the extreme warping nature of war: middle class men like myself or perhaps yourself become (or became, if it helps make it real) literal rapists.

.. which makes an unexpected segue to Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (as narrated by the chroniclers of Zone Three), in which Lessing presents one of the most mature and credible portrayals of an adult relationship i've ever read, in which a forced marriage between the queen of an enlightened territory (imagine a Waldorf school the size of northern california) and the king of a brutal one (qv "sparta") opens with his immediately raping her and closes with a portrait of real intimacy between the two, and an entirely convincing evolution from one point to the other. Technically Science-Fiction, the book is really about men and women, their relationships, and the realtionships of couples to the rest of society. despite having the world's dullest, most reader-unfriendly title ever, it's quite good. I'm stoked to have discovered another good author to read. What made me decide that D.L. might be a good writer was her famous reaction to learning she'd won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature: "oh, christ." If you haven't seen it, it's worth looking up.

Mykle was surprised to learn that i started my Lessing-reading with The Marriages and told me that some of her other works were much more approachable, especially Winter In July. Fortunately i'd bought up every used Lessing they had in Dog-Eared Books in SF, and that included Winter In July, so i picked that eagerly up next, and Mykle was right. Winter In July is a masterpiece of human portraiture, short stories set in South Africa in the years before and after WWII. It has the tension and insight into social stratification of Flannery O'Connor but while O'Connor's humour is greater, Lessing's characters have more complex relationships to each other. Absolutely read this book if you haven't.

Finally i had an awesome personal event center around a book a couple weeks ago. I was in one of my favorite bars, which has a new bartendress whom i imagined i shared a certain affinity with, and one fine sunday afternoon had resolved to try to make a date with her. I know that hitting on bartenders is pretty much the tackiest thing under the sun, but .. well, i guess there's no but. I aimed to do it. So we were having a great chat as usual, and she knows i'm a reader (i read parts of all three of the above while chatting with her) and suddenly asks "hey! do you like poetry?" - which, with very, very few exceptions, i don't: poetry gives me a dull headache. John Donne and William Taylor jr are pretty much the only poets i read with gusto. So i was in a tough place: i wanted to have a shared interest with her, but i didn't want to have to read some awful poetry. So i philandered with "well.. i like some poetry", and she dashed off into the back and returned with a thickish book and passed it over to my cringing hands with "well check this out". .. And it turned out to be Bill Taylor's Words for Songs Never Written ! I have been meaning to get a copy since it came out, it's a book of compelling physical and poetic beauty, as Bill's work is absolutely top notch. He writes mostly about street life in SF's Tenderloin district, and portrays and evokes beauty in places where i can only sense a small rumor of it. Prostitutes, the lonely, and bartenders make frequent appearances, but so does non-ironic commentary on the loss of what i personally have loved the USA for. you'll have to read the poems to find out. Anyhow, so i said "hey! do you know Bill?" and she: "no, do you?" and thus i was able to wake-board a little bit on the power of Bill's charm and my coolness of knowing him. She read a couple poems out loud, i read half the book to myself, and as i was leaving i wrote my info on the receipt (dog-eared, again) which was still inside the book and gave it back to her with "my number's in the book if you ever want to hang out". The appropriateness here sort of demanded it. Naturally and sensibly, she of course demurred, citing just getting out of a long relationship, but she did seem excited to have a phone number in the book. So, thank you, Bill ! (as a post-script, the failed hitting-upon doesn't seem to have soured the bartender/client thing, and we're still jawing on sunday afternoons)

As another final status-update,
in bed i'm re-reading Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers, whom i love. The Diaries of Jane Somers, also by Lessing is being read from the throne at the rate of about two pages per day, and the book in the backpack, which is always the main book, is currently Teatro Grottesco, by the master of contemporary existential horror, Thomas Ligotti. - Which reminds me, i am also working very slowly on a short story of my own, a horror vignette in the Lovecraft mythos, set in sinister San Bernadino, California. I'm at the point where i can just barely see the entire plot arc, and should "soon" have the first draft done.

Europe Central

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:09:00 +0000

Dear Europe Central, i've been reading you for a couple weeks, and i think we need to talk about some things. Page ninety is just the beginning of what could potentially be an eight hundred-page relationship. The beginning of a relationship should be full of romance and heady excitement. Mystery, confusion, and a sense of greater things to come you've definitely given me, but i find i'm missing those other charms. And really i'm not sure who you think you are to be insulting my intelligence and education in such an offhand, non-flirtatious manner. Also i sometimes wake in the middle of the night and worry whether or not i can trust you. I play back certain scenes and small things you said earlier and feel a sort of hollow of dread open in my chest. For example, this first-person "I" you keep mentioning: i know you've been with your share of narrators in the past and i'm sure there will be more in the future, but i'm starting to suspect that you're using "I" to be the voice of the entire German People, or worse the Germans and the Soviets, and at some point i'll have to just say enough is enough.

So, i don't know what you've heard about me from other books, but i'm not the kind of person who feels they have to finish a relationship just because they've made it to page ninety or whatever, so i'm giving you fair warning: let's see a change in that attitude when next we spend time together, and it wouldn't hurt to put out with a sign of plot or even an tangible character or two.

Yrs, Elenzil

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:27:00 +0000

I'm nearly done with Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it's great.
I read Kavalier and Clay a while ago, and it was good, but i didn't think it was great. The Yiddish Policeman's Union is great. Where K & C seemed to go astray and lose itself in filling the requirements of a pulp comic book, the YPU is much more focused, tighter, and the characters and story-telling benefit from it. I still have some complaints - for example i don't think it was necessary to have the protagonists own personal story turn out unexpectedly to be intimately tied up in the story of the antagonists: doing so sort of dilutes the .. pedigree of the hero's motives, imo, and is unnecessary.

Here's the overview:

the year is 2008.
the place is Sitka, Alaska. The past is one in which we're not sure who won World War II, but we do know that the Jews were thoroughly rousted from Israel and were generally unwelcome the world over, including in the US, and in the late 40s Sitka was essentially turned into a giant Jewish ghetto. .. With the proviso that after 60 years, the chosen people would have to vacate Sitka and move on to places unnamed. So it's 2008, and the next rousting is due.
our hero is a hardboiled cop mourning his lost marriage and the upcoming eradication of a culture he both loves and derides. in good hardboiled cop tradition, he is now living in a flop house, and exploring mourning through the lens of cheap and strong booze. His partner is also his cousin, who is racially half Indian (American) and culturally 100% Jewish, and has a poor but flourishing family.
There's a murder, there's plots, there's backstabbing, there's surprises. There's lots and lots of Jewish words and Jewish this and Jewish that, which i love. I guess it's about one third [Jewish] political story, one third adventure story, and one third Jewish cultural portrait. It's a great mix, and Chabon's prose has only improved since K&C.

Other recent books:
The Crying of Lot 49 - reading this in half-page sprints while lounging on the can. That's the only way i can possibly swallow this stuff.

Words and Rules by Steven Pinker - this is a whole book about irregular verbs. i love irregular verbs, and so does Steven Pinker. but i'm not going to finish the book because he loves them exactly as far as they promote the pedagogical agenda of his theory of cognition.

The Night People by Jack FInney - this came up one day when Vivianna and Mike Plotz and i rode bikes over the golden gate bridge and down into Tiburon, a route which takes you through Strawberry, which is the sleepy little town from which the hijinx of The Night People radiate. It's a great story. It's in a collection titled 3 by Finney, and seems to be the clear best of the lot.

I read The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, by Diana Jones. This calls for a picture. .. Yeah. It was actually pretty fun, a temporary trip back to junior high.

DFW

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:52:00 +0000

re DFW.
it's ironic:
i was having a rough few days and had been feeling poopy for a while and was pondering ways to de-poopify my outlook on things, and i said to myself "maybe i should re-read IJ again. that always cheers me up." and it's true: without fail sitting down to read a page or twenty in IJ has never failed to make me feel like a slightly snazzier person. as if i were granted a temporary gift of some small part of DFW's wit and outlook. the additional irony here is that i was considering this rereading that very thursday just before his death. that evening i was out on the town and both myle and kevin texted me late in the night with the bad news.
one is reminded a bit of Richard Corey, of course. it's eerie and intimidating that someone as smart and definitively successful as DFW could eradicate his own map, as he might say. especially in view of the obvious wealth of knowledge DFW had around depression itself. (If you don't know, IJ deals with many many topics, among them is Depression with a capital D, and its treatment of it is highly informed and insightful) and of course one is also reminded of the constant theme in IJ about the danger and stress of achieving success, of making the cover of Tennis Annual or whatever, of creating one's opus. In many passages the entire raison of the enfield tennis academy is to prepare players to survive their own success in "the show". Haunting and intimidating.

Well, i have more to say but don't really feel like saying it here.

rest in peace, david.

here are the unknown words from that third reading.
many, many more than from the second, curiously.
my rules were: "words which i either don't know at all or i'm not confident enough with to deploy them in a sentence. excluding medical terms and other jargon."
i think this last time around i was more honest about the second part: it wasn't sufficient for a word to merely be familiar: if i would be scared to use it in conversation, then it went in the list. i think also i was more patient and dilligent about actually writing words down.

also there were six additional words i ran out of room to write in the back cover so they're in the front, unphotographed:
p. 952 tucking ("billow and pop like a tucking sail")
p. 952 seraglio
p. 953 kyphotic
p. 965 piaffer
p. 967 Carmelite
p. 969 practicum

GOD DAMN IT

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:34:00 +0000

motherfucking god damn it.
RIP DFW.

The Crossing

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:59:00 +0000

just finished Cormac McCarthy's second book in "the border trilogy", The Crossing. With this one i really have to weigh in and say that i now think Cormac McCarthy is full of shit but he doesn't have to be. Reading The Crossing is like reading some of the best bits of Hemingway with the worst of The Celestine Prophecy and The Adventures of Don Juan's illegitimate child. McCarthy can tell a fantastic story but it's as if he himself doesn't believe that either the reader or the author or both can appreciate anything transcendental without discoursing as if he were Foucault and explicitly defining terms for us.

But in between all the philosophical sophomorism, The Crossing is a great story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it follows a young cowboy through an epic arc of bereavement as he wanders through barren mexican and spiritual landscapes. If you can find someone who will take the time to just tear out the bad parts, the remainder is a great book by an author with an unmatched storytelling voice.

To his credit, McCarthy's latest, The Road, seemed to do a much better or at least more confident job of communicating interior journeys with way less resort to explicit soliloquy. I also plan on reading Cities of the Plain, the final book of "The Border Trilogy".

The Road, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Uncle Tungsten, and IJ

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:57:00 +0000

Just this hour finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Probably anybody reading this has already read it and felt the strange feelings one feels when reading that last passage about the past's trout in underwater glens, muscled and smelling of moss in the hand - so evocative! - but for those as haven't, a quick synopsis. The Road is published in 2006, and posits a nuclear apocalypse in say about 2006, followed by a nuclear winter in which the entire world has turned to ash and nothing grows and nothing lives save a very, very few humans* who for the most part are cannibal and entirely wretched. The action follows a father and his son about five years into the post-apocalypse.

Every scene in The Road is predicated on hopelessness. There is clearly, starkly, no future even conceivable. But the book's magic is that it communicates hope and love. I can't/won't really try to describe it further than that. It's good.

The only other McCarthy novel i've read is All The Pretty Horses, and my only complaint about both of them is that they're too damn short. I feel like McCarthy is still writing his Farewell To Arms, and i look forward greatly to his For Whom The Bell Tolls.

* why humans walk the earth when cockroaches and grasses don't is a bit unclear to me, but otherwise the technical points seem pretty solid.

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was loaned to me by Niki, and i'm super glad that it was. Thanks Niki! It's a good two or three inches of solid modern fairy tale telling and i enjoyes every millimeter of it. Set in Napoleonic Brittain (ie, early 1800s), Susanna Clarke's tale is that of a supremely pedantic and spiritually cramped man named Norrell who sets about resurrecting "English Magic", and gets more than he bargained for. (Sorry, i couldn't resist)
If you've ever enjoyed a Piers Anthony or Terry Pratchet novel, you'll likely enjoy this. It's sort of like Harry Potter for grown-ups. I do have to concurr with some folks that the ending is a bit unsupported, but otherwise a fine book.

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Jonathan inspired me to get us a couple kilogram-hunks of tungsten, which is one of the most dense materials available without straying into the truly exotic and radioactive. It's twice as heavy as lead and very satisfying to hold in the hand. Along the way i stumbld on a book Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. It's pretty much as titled, stories of growing up in pre- and post-world war II London, with a family rich in scientific and intellectual spirit. The sotries are great and also it has a bunch of interesting facts about various elements and science history.

the stack

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 04:26:00 +0000

this is the current stack on the table.
with like one exception they've all been read, but few blogged.
bottom-to-top (roughly chronological)

Martin Amis - House of Meetings
Hemingway - For Whom the Bell
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas (unblogged)
Annette Kobak - Isabelle [Eberhardt] (unblogged)
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (unblogged)
Robert Righter - The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
William Vollmann - The Royal Family (unblogged, incredibly)
Carter/Sokol - He's Scared, She's Scared (unread, unblogged)
Gray Brechin - Imperial San Francisco
Vonnegut Jr. - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (unblogged)
Salinger - Catcher in the Rye (unblogged)
Nevada Barr - Hard Truth
William Gibson - Spook Country
Anne Rice - Pandora (would like to say this is unread, but it's not. unblogged)
Rowling - Harry Potter the Last Book (unblogged)
Ann Coulter - Slander (unread, origin unknown, unblogged)
various - Cthulhu 2000 (very, very read, unblogged)
Jack Chalker - The Moreau Factor (unfinished, unblogged)
Gwynn/Blotner - Fiction of J. D. Salinger (unread, unblogged)

spook country

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:15:00 +0000

Spook Country is William Gibson's latest. For those who may not be aware, Gibson pretty much fathered the science fiction genre of Cyberpunk. Think mona lisa overdrive, johnny mnuemonic (sp?), and the matrix. What fewer folks know is that his previous book, Pattern Recognition definitively left cyberpunk and even science-fiction in general well behind (or in the nursery, if you want to be mean) and graduated Gibson into straight-up Literature. And it's an excellent book, you should read it, whomever you are. Spook Country is cut from the mold right next to Pattern Recognition: it's obsessed with contemporary life, especially with the presence and role of branding in our world, stars a down-to-earth, recognizable female protagonist, doesn't rely on jargon, nor (almost) on technological marvels, varies its senetence-structure and uses the occasional big word. In short, it's a great and well-written book, but not that far off from Pattern Recognition.

words: (several not english, i think)

p. 6	semiotics
p. 24	prelapsarian
p. 52	apport
p. 68	orishas
p. 69	Santero
p. 102	Tulpa
p. 117	Cuirass
p. 161	oxford*
p. 208	foxfire**
p. 315	Asanas

* ".. a three-eyelet black alligator oxford in his hand."
** "The late-afternoon sun dressed the passing woords with Maxfield Parish foxfire, and perhaps it was that elliptical flicker generated by the train's motion that called these beings forth."

also, great author photo.

Hard Truth

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 02:05:00 +0000

Pop gave me Hard Truth by Nevada Barr. It's a sort of niche-mystery, similar to those of John Dunning (ex-cop turned rare book collector), except this is park-ranger-cum-detective-cum-action-hero. Basically, it's a fine story with lots of nice characters and description of Rocky Mountain National Park, but towards the end it takes a turn for the shockingly graphically horrible, and altho i finished it i sort of wished i hadn't. If you're a silence of the lambs person, this might be for you.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:16:00 +0000

Like a dog to its vomit, me to Hemingway.
I afraid that i can't say enough good about For Whom The Bell Tolls. This is one of the finest books i've ever read.

From the back of the jacket: "Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century ... and was known for his tough, terse prose." - I take serious issue with
both these statements. Taking the second one first, he may be known for his tough, terse prose, but to say that his tough terse prose is a defining feature is like saying Yosemite is famous for the texture of the granite. Hemingway is all about characters. His people are absolutely believable, and here's what i love most about him: He loves and cherishes each of his characters. Certainly, terrible events befall them and many of them are assholes, but Hemingway always treats the characters with respect and grants them dignity. This may sound insignificant, but i think it's something few authors are able to do. I picture Hemingway cradling each of the people he wrote about in his hands. Which brings us to the first statement above, that he was an enourmous influence on writing last century. That may be, but not enourmous enough. If there are more writers who convey the simple honesty and gentleness of H. in their prose, please, please let me know.

Some specifics about For Whom The Bell Tolls.
The title comes from a John Donne poem, part of which H. quotes as introduction:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. (italics his)

.. picking up this post after it lay fallow for a few months ..

well, instead of just further lauding, let me just say this book is firmly in my Top Seven and move right on to the style of cursing i desperately want to adopt from it, what must surely be known as The Soiled Milk School of Epithets. eg, a Soiled Milk Schooler upon hearing that a compatriot of his is perhaps worried about tomorrow's raid on the bridge: "I obscenity in the milk of thy worry". In response to braggadocio: "I relieve myself in the milk of thy mother". And so on. Look for it by name!

Imperial San Francisco

noreply@blogger.com (good old o) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:32:00 +0000

I read this a while ago; Michelle got it for me.

Imperial San Francisco - Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, by Gray Brechin is a great history of the abuses of power in the early history of San Francisco. While i'm obviously all in favour of exposing the crimes which underly most american fortunes, i was sort of hoping for a bit more breadth of discussion.

The book primarily recounts the history of the DeYoung's, the Hearsts, the Scott's, and the University in Berkeley as uniformly rapacious and morally bankrupt; with references enough to be convincing, if you need to be convinced of that sort of thing.

All in all well worth the read.

On quick quote about our friend Hearst

In 1945 .. His attorney, John Francis Neylan, was instrumental in breaking strikes while Hearst kept in close touch with him from Europe. During the publisher's visit to Germany that summer, Adolf Hitler invited him to Berlin for a long, private interview.
.. Shortly after [an alleged deal w/ the Nazis], Hearst's Sunday newspapers began syndicating columns by General Hermann Goering and Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, giving 30 million Americans the Nazi point of view without space for rebuttal. Simultaneously, Hearst launched his crusade against treason in the classroom and for loyalty oaths.

One of the most charming aspects of the book is the collection of political cartoons from the old SF newspaper, The Wasp. These cartoons are amazingly biting when cast against the prevailing climate of the times.