What I read last month.
Includes sociopaths, Discworld, black belt zen guitars, stories about actual haunted places, Henry Fielding, Plato, Marco Polo, the stunning conclusion to The Once and Future King, and much much more.
The Rocky Road to London: Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding
The hostess, who was a better wife than so surly a husband deserved, seeing her husband all bloody and stretched along, hastened presently to his assistance, or rather to revenge the blow which to all appearances was the last he would ever receive: when, lo! a pan full of hog's blood, which unluckily stood on the dresser, presented itself first to her hands. She seized it in her fury, and without any reflection discharged it into the parson's face, and with so good an aim, that much the greater part first saluted his countenance, and trickled thence in so large a current down his beard, and over his garments, that a more horrible spectacle was hardly to be seen or even imagined. All which was perceived by Mrs. Slipslop, who entered the kitchen at that instant. This good gentlewoman, not being of a temper so extremely cool and patient as was perhaps required to ask many questions on this occasion, flew with great impetuosity at the hostess's cap, which, together with some of her hair, she plucked from her head in a moment, giving her at the same time several hearty cuffs in the face, which by frequent practice on the inferior servants, she had learned an excellent knack of delivering with a good grace. Poor Joseph could hardly rise from his chair; the parson was employed in wiping the blood from his eyes, which had entirely blinded him, and the landlord was just beginning to stir, whilst Mrs. Slipslop holding down the landlady's face with her left hand, made so dextrous a use of her right, that the poor woman began to roar in a key, which alarmed all the company at the inn.
Fielding's Tom Jones is one of my favorite novels ever, the original Delightful Romp of a story that I'm always trying to find another of. Joseph Andrews, Fielding's earlier effort, doesn't quite achieve Delightful Romp status, but it does get a wee bit merry and frolicsome.
Joseph Andrews is presented as a satire on Samuel Richardson's Pamela (see Bookpost, January 2011; I read Pamela the better to understand the parody, and you don't have to), a preachy epistolary tale in which the snow-pure heroine tames and civilizes the country gentleman who wants to ravish her and ends up reforming and marrying her instead and they live happily ever after. In fact, Fielding's "satire" goes off in an entirely different direction, which is just as well, since the whole gender reversal of "Oh goodness, a MAN who deeply values his own virginity and must fend off the rich lady's attention--how ridiculous!" gets old pretty fast.
Andrews, presented as Pamela Andrews's equally sappy and virtuous brother, is a footman in the home of Lady Booby, aunt to the unnamed "Squire B." who is smitten with Pamela in Richardson's novel. Having rejected the advances of both Lady Booby and the housekeeper, Joseph is thankfully turned out of doors by chapter six, meets up with the slow-witted but goodhearted Parson Adams and his real true love Fanny, and the three of them must make their way along the English road through a series of country inns, despite never having any money to pay their way. Comic mayhem ensues, complete with a succession of slamming doors, recalcitrant horses, wrong bedrooms, brawls, thieves, crooked justices, roguish "gentlemen", honest yeomen, improbable coincidences and educational fireside tales, culminating in an appearance by the original Pamela and Squire Booby, and a deus ex machina to get all the crises squared away.
Dagnabbit, I wish Pamela had made her way through a succession of country inns; it would have improved her story considerably.
It’s a good tale, but I think maybe the magnificence of Tom Jones spoiled me for it. Joseph Andrews is almost a rough draft for Fielding to practice on in preparation for his masterpiece. All the things that make Tom Jones famous and delightful are there—the digressions by the author; the humanizing of the protagonists compared to the too-virtuous-to-be-real characters in his contemporaries’ works; the red-faced rustic squires and deceptive, corrupted city people; the attention to plot structure—but you can see the chalk outlines where they miss their mark. The baggage that comes with having to accept the given circumstance of a society in which everyone treats birth as an indication of personal merit and one landowner gets to pretty much rule an entire village is harder to put up with every year that passes. And the author has a distasteful prejudice that learning science and philosophy, without religion, automatically makes someone a bad person, and that schools in particular make people into useless city dandies while rural life without asking questions is all wholesome and decent. We get enough uneducated rural people in modern times thinking they know better than anyone and feeling entitled to force their agendas on “elitists” who have actually studied a particular problem. It may be that a world with nothing but elite professors and fabulous urbanites would miss out on a lot of the essentials, but it seems to me a world composed of the supporting cast of Deliverance would come up short as well.
If you love Tom Jones, you’ll like Joseph Andrews a little. If you haven’t read either, read this one first, as an appetizer. You’ll enjoy it more that way.
Fie on Goodness: Candle in the Wind, by TH White
Lastly there were under the window the people themselves—the coruscating mixture of oddities who reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most surprising ways. In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was notorious for having invented the pendulum clock. A fabled King of France called Robert, who had suffered the misfortune to be excommunicated, ran into dreadful troubles about his domestic arrangements, because the only two servants who could be persuaded to cook for him insisted on burning the saucepans after meals. An archbishop of Canterbury, having excommunicated all the prebendaries of St. Paul’s in a pet, rushed into the priory of St. Bartholomew and knocked out the sub-prior in the middle of the chapel—which created such an uproar that his own vestments were torn off, revealing a suit of armor underneath, and he had to flee to Lambeth in a boat. The Countess of Anjou always used to vanish out the window at the secreta of the mass. Madame Trote de Salerno used her ears as a handkerchief and let her eyebrows hang down behind her shoulders like silver chains. A bishop of Bath, under the imaginary Edward the First, was considered after due reflection to be an unsuitable man for the Archbishopric, because he had too many illegitimate children—not some, but too many. And the bishop himself could hardly hold a candle to the Countess of Henneberge, who suddenly gave birth to 365 children at one confinement.
The final installment of The Once and Future King takes us through the treason of Mordred, the breaking up of the Round Table and the end of Camelot.
At the center is the final betrayal of the Arthur-Guenever-Lancelot triangle, a situation in which all three participants are traditionally depicted as nearly criminally stupid, but in which White manages to portray all three as heroes. They act out their parts in the epic tragedy almost like a holy trinity, dying for our sins because all of this was predestined to happen, as was the whole Round Table and its failure.
Everything I said about the first three books is still true. The entire Once and Future King is a story about the efforts to make human society perfect, a reaching for the best in ourselves, evocative of an Avalon greater than our ability to make Paradise on Earth. Highest recommendations.
Turkish Delight: The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay
Of course, from one point of view my mother was right about the church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped.
This is an odd book, presented as a novel, but apparently autobiographical and defying classification. It’s about a British missionary lady who reminds me of one of Bertie Wooster’s more iron-whim aunts. Although Aunt Dot seems like she’d be more at home shooting elephants in India, she instead travels to post-WWII Turkey to spread the news of Jesus to all those heathen Turks and tell them what’s what. What follows would be a comic novel but for the fact that these head-desk moments really happened: the “ugly tourist” moments and the smiling, subservient, passive-aggressive native servants and officials, who use the culture barrier to smilingly, politely have their own way. Aunt Dot makes me cringe for white people abroad, and for their victims.
With Aunt Dot are her friend the perpetually astonished priest, and the niece/narrator “Laurie”, who stands in for Macaulay herself. “Laurie” takes an air of detached bemusement to the conflicts and spectacles around her, which give the story an absurd air. And then, halfway through the book, Dot and the priest reach the Armenian border and promptly disappear behind the Iron Curtain, leaving “Laurie” by herself, in Turkey. At which point, it is no longer a comic novel. In fact, it becomes very serious, both situationally and in terms of the characters’ philosophical and theological musings. And when she gets back to England, the culture shock is no less severe than in Turkey.
The Towers of Trebizond is one of those works that cannot be completely classified, because it makes its own rules. And it works.
Republicans at home: The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout
Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The amusements he pursued, even the girls, even fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so. The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet—he was still a child. No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations were a very good time. That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissors, for want of another method. He had discovered that he could take a net from the fishing shed and capture the frogs easily from the mud banks of the lake. He would hold them down on their backs, stab their bulging stomachs, and turn them back over to watch their stupid jelly eyes go dead as they bled out. Then he would hurl the corpses as far out into the lake as he could, yelling at the dead frogs as they flew, “Too bad for you, you little fuck-face froggy!”...But by the end of that first summer, Skip had decided that he could do better. Next summer, Skip would have not scissors but fireworks!
I first learned about Sociopathy at an impressionable young age, became terrified that I might be one of them, and spent several months crippled with guilt at the thought that I might not have a conscience. Stop that! (sob) It wasn’t funny!
The point is, sociopaths, of course, don’t feel guilt, and so it’s very hard for the rest of us even to imagine their state of mind. Martha Stout’s brief book does a pretty good job explaining what the conscienceless predators among us, the ones who see you as a resource, really are thinking, how to recognize and avoid them, and (surprisingly), a good deal of attention is paid to proving that the power to do all sorts of things without remorse is not a Darwinistic advantage over us wusses who hold back when it’s the right thing to do, but a disadvantage and a curse.
According to Stout, 4% of the population are sociopaths, meaning there are roughly 12 million of them in the United States of America. And they all vote. By Stout’s criteria, Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich come closest among American politicians to fitting the type; maybe John Edwards among the Democrats. Fandom, in spite of the infamous numbers of the fog-enshrouded, the clue-impaired, and the socially delayed among us, apparently does not have that many of this type of monster drawn to it, thank goodness. Fascinating, especially the case histories.
Not Christine O’Donnell: Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills.
The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked, “When shall we three meet again?”
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones, “Well, I can do next Tuesday.”
By now, it’s a little difficult for me to write about a Discworld book, having gone through and commented on five or six of them by now, and found them all uniformly delightful for the same reasons. Terry Pratchett has a wonderful knack for turning cliches inside out and presenting the silly side of tropes in a way that parodies and celebrates them at the same time. I would expect a big budget Discworld movie to take after The Princess Bride and Stardust.
The plot is just details. This one happens to feature the wonderful Granny Weatherwax and a couple of her witch friends, who decide to get together as a coven because, well, because it would be a hoot. They alternate between banishing demons with a curt “All right, run along then” and resorting to great Shakespearean invocations for show. Pretty soon, the servant of the murdered king of Lancre shows up and presents them with the Crown of Lancre and the infant heir to the throne, and dies, leaving the witches to protect the young king from the Wicked Usurper. The comic mayhem that ensues involves frustrated ghosts, earnest fools, playwriting dwarfs, terrified villagers and unusual familiars, and is a joy to read. Highly recommended, as usual with Terry Pratchett.
An embassy with every civilization: The Travels of Marco Polo
In this island of Japan and the others in its vicinity, their idols are fashioned in a variety of shapes, some of them having the heads of oxen, some of swine, of dogs, goats, and many other animals. Some exhibit the appearance of a single head, with two faces; others of three heads, one of them in its proper place, and one upon each shoulder. Some have four arms, others ten, and some an hundred, those which have the greatest number being regarded as the most powerful, and therefore entitled to the most particular worship.
When they are asked by Christians wherefore they give to their deities these diversified forms, they answer that their fathers did so before them. “Those who preceded us,” they say, “left them such, and such shall we transmit them to our posterity.”
The various ceremonies practiced before these idols are so wicked and diabolical that it would be nothing less than an abomination to give an account of them in this book. The reader should, however, be informed that the idolatrous inhabitants of these islands, when they seize the person of an enemy who has not the means of effecting his ransom for money, invite to their house all their relations and friends. Putting their prisoner to death they cook and eat the body, in a convivial manner, asserting that human flesh surpasses every other in the excellence of its flavour.
Contrary to popular presentation, this is not a travel journal so much as a fairly stiff book of anthropology and geography, without maps. Other than a brief preface, Marco Polo says almost nothing about his actual 12th century journey across Asia and back via the Indian Ocean, involving several years at the court of Kublai Kahn in China. Instead, we get chapter after chapter of “The people of such-and-such country or principality have these unusual customs, and the land produces these goods.” China and India have more semi-independent provinces and self-contained mini kingdoms than pre-Bismarck Germany, to say nothing of the various lands between China and Europe that have been absorbed into Russia and Kazakhstan over the centuries, and after a time, they tend to blur with one another. The lack of a map adds to the confusion, and Marco polo’s cataloguing lacks continuity; he goes from one part of India to Madagascar to another part of India, for example.
As with the travels of Ibn Battutah (Bookpost March 2008), I blame the translation, but the language is duller than sawdust without butter, and the author’s bias invokes suspicion as to his accuracy. Any people with beliefs other than Christianity are described as “idolators”, and it hurts to see Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others all painted with one brush. Polo’s religiosity does not prevent him from praising “The Great Kahn” every chance he gets; however, he does go out of his way to assure us that Kahn admires the Pope very much, and would surely convert to Christianity were he not on the other side of two continents from the Vatican. I found myself shaking my head in consternation frequently, and invite any Marco Polo fans to comment with a clue as to why this work remains so popular centuries after the fact.
Holden Caulfield on Steroids: Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there's a war. When other people start thinking about you, it's to figure out how to torture you, that and nothing else. The bastards want to see you bleeding, otherwise they're not interested! Princhard was dead right. In the shadow of the slaughterhouse, you don't speculate very much about your future, you think about loving in the days you have left, because there's no other way of forgetting your body that's about to be skinned alive.
Actually, the narrator of Journey to the End of the Night isn’t really Holden Caulfield. If he was, he’d probably let Phoebe run off with him, and then after a year or so of bumbling around in the west, he’d sell her to a brothel because, meh, why bother, people are all phonies anyway.
They say that biographical works can be divided into examples and warnings, and Celine’s book is definitely in the “warning” category, especially for people like me who have sarcastic, cynical pessimism virtually running through their blood. That road, followed as far as it can go, leads to a personality like the narrator Bardamu, who hates everything, loves and trusts nothing, and kicks away opportunity knowing he’s doing so. In fairness, the world around him sucks so harshly it borders on the absurd. On the other hand, after a while, you begin to wonder if it has to do with his perception. Journey to the End of the Night has come closer than any other book to getting me to take “the secret”, “the law of attraction”, etc., seriously.
Bardamu’s journey takes him from the trenches of WWI (admittedly a major bummer to go through by any standard, but even here the random cruelty of the officers and the self-serving cowardice of the ground soldiers is exaggerated) to Conradesque experiences in the Congo to the repetitive labor of Ford’s auto factory to life as a provincial doctor who doesn’t much care about his patients, or about being paid. He’s like a person without life, and he prefers it that way.
This is not a pleasant book, for all the dry wit. I normally like dark humor, and this was a bit much even for me. On the other hand, it did pave the way for much more dexterous authors like Vonnegut and Heller, who learned from the example to lighten it up a bit.
Booga-Booga, Kiddies! Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas
”Are you joshin’ an old man? Is this a Halloween prank?”
“No, sir. Two of my friends are dead. This thing killed them. It’s real.”
“What the hell is it then?”
As if in answer, there was the sound like a huge can opener going to work, and then the long, thin arm of the folding man poked through the fence and there was more ripping as the arm slid upward, tearing at the metal. A big chunk of the fence was torn away, revealing the thing, bathed in moonlight, still holding what was left of William’s ragged body by the ankle.
Jim and Gordon both stood locked in amazement.
“Sonofabitch”, Gordon said.
Chomps growled, ran toward it.
“Chomps will fix him”, Gordon said.
The folding man dropped William’s ankle and bent forward, and just as the dog leaped, caught it and twisted it and ran its long arm down the snapping dog’s throat, and began to pull its insides out. It flung dog’s parts in all directions, like someone pulling confetti from a sack. Then it turned the dog inside out.
This is an unusual menu. It’s as if several writers were given a homework assignment in creative writing class, to research an actual place that is said to be haunted, and write a story about it. The results include many haunted corners of America, with a smattering of demon stories from all over the world.
In fact, you might get similar results if you gave that assignment to a class of fair-to-extremely gifted college students. Most of the stories are well-crafted but forgettable variants of “This lost girl” (or whoever) “asked me to give her a ride home, and I followed the directions she gave me, only they took me to this empty field, and she thanked me and got out, and she just faded away, and then later I found out that there was a girl murdered in that field several years ago, and they say her spirit still haunts the field. Creepy, huh?” Or they give it another little twist like, “They also say that only people who are going to die soon can see the girl’s ghost, and now I don’t feel so good”, or “Oh wait, I just remembered that I’ve been dead all along and I must have really scared that real girl who made me feel creepy!”, and it’s all scholarly and literary but not really what I’d call horror.
Stick with it, though, or start in the middle. The stories get more creative and more horrific as they go along. The last few are very very good, and the very last one in the collection, Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Folding Man”, is a masterpiece of Crypt-Keeper Kitsch that did to me what creepy tales are supposed to do.
Prelude to Fabio: Chaereas and Callirhoe, by Chariton
First, a young man from Italy, the prince of Rhegium, stood up and spoke as follows: “If any one of us had married her, I should not have been angry, for just as in the athletic games, one man only among the contestants must be the victor; but since he has surpassed us without working to win his bride, I cannot bear the insult. As for us, we have wasted away, keeping sleepless nights before the door of her house, flattering nurses and maids, and sending gifts to her attendants. How long have we been slaves! And what is worst of all, we have come to hate each other as rivals. But this dirty rascal, poverty-stricken and the lowest of the low, in a contest with kings has borne off the crown for himself without a struggle. Let us see to it that he does not enjoy his prize, and let us turn the wedding into death for the groom.”
They all applauded, and only the ruler of Agrigentum objected. “It is not,” he said, “through any good will toward Chaereas that I am holding up your plans against him, but through considerations of greater safety. Remember that Hermocrates is not a man lightly to be despised, so that it is impossible for us to attack him openly. A crafty approach is better, for it is by unscrupulous deceit rather than brute force that we obtain power. Elect me general of this campaign against Chaereas and I promise you I will dissolve the marriage. I shall arm Jealousy against him, and she, with Love as her ally, can accomplish serious damage. Callirhoe may be even-tempered and incapable of low-minded suspicions, but Chaereas, trained as he is in the gymnasia and not inexperienced in youthful follies, can easily be made suspicious and thus fall into youthful jealousy. Also, it is easier to approach him and speak with him.”
Western civilization’s first sappy romance. I’d never heard of it before, but it’s not hard to see why nobody groups it with Homer or Sophocles. I suspect Shakespeare read it and decided to edit out about ¾ of Teh Dramaz, to make Romeo and Juliet a tragedy you could take seriously.
The protagonists marry and settle down to live happily ever after early on, but then their enemies persuade Chaereas that Callirhoe is unfaithful; he tries to kill her; she dies but then comes back to life in the tomb; tomb raiding pirates break in and steal her away; blah-blah shipwrecks, blah-blah abducted by barbarians, blah-blah forced to marry King One, blah-blah forced to marry King Two, blah-blah crucifiction trial before the ruler of Babylon wailing and gnashing of teeth etc., etc.
The biggest threat to the two lovers, that most prevents them from eventually finding one another once more is, of course, the lovers themselves. At least twice in every chapter, one of them is told that the other is dead, no really this time, and that lover promptly swoons, wastes away, beats hir breast, and has to be restrained by friends from suiciding, until it becomes not tragic but funny; Chapter 7: Chaereas tries to kill himself yet again. Short, cute, and worth reading once for the historical value.
Toga Party: Symposium and Phaedrus, by Plato
And now, my boys, I shall praise Socrates in a figure which will appear to him to be a caricature, and yet I speak, not to make fun of him, but only for the truth’s sake. I say, that he is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries’ shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths, and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them. I say also that he is like Marsyas the satyr. You yourself will not deny, Socrates, that your face is like that of a satyr. Aye, and there is resemblance in other points, too! For example, you are a bully, as I can prove by witnesses, if you will not confess. And are you not a flute player? That you are, and a performer far more wonderful than Marsyas. He indeed with instruments used to charm the souls of men by the power of his breath, and the players of his music do still: for the melodies of Olympus are derived from Marsyas who taught them, and these, whether they are played by a great master or a miserable flute girl, have a power which no others have; they alone possess the soul and reveal the wants of those who have need of gods and mysteries, because they are divine. But you produce the same effect with your words only, and do not require the flute: that is the difference between you and him. When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who comes within hearing of them.
Be warned, I may be revisiting several ancient classics including much of Plato and Aristotle this year. These two Platonic dialogues contain most of what Plato had to say about love.
The first thing to note is that , boy oh boy, were those Greek philosophers gay. The Symposium involves several of them getting drunk at a party and making speeches in praise of Aphrodite and Eros and, with the exception of Aristophanes the playwright (who postulates that there used to be one four-armed, four-legged gender that was sundered into Man and Woman, and that sex is the attempts of the two halves to find one another and become whole again), they all pretty much use the male pronoun to refer to both partners in a relationship. One of them goes so far as to equate sex with women as inferior, merely carnal lust, concluding that REAL love, the higher, holy, divine love, is between men. Fuddy-duddy scholars like to insist that they’re talking about the intellectual “love” of philosophy and valuing (male) intellectuals for their ideals. Yeah, right. If you believe that, you probably believe the Song of Solomon is about love of God, and not Bible porn.
Toward the end, the Greek general Alclibiades of the Mighty War Yodel (played by Orlando Bloom) shows up, roaring drunk, quaffs two quarts of wine (as Terry Pratchett tells us, quaffing is like slurping except that you spill a lot more), and launches into an epic oration in praise of Socrates, describing the old gadfly as part satyr, part kung fu master, until you envision him in battle, saying “So, a feeble old man you think I am? Well, my flying windmill kick taste, asshole!” Does that sound like what you think of when you think of Socrates? Me neither. Alclibiades was smitten.
On the other hand, the comparison, partly quoted above, comparing Socrates to the hollow satyr statue, ridiculous looking on the outside, full of magnificence on the inside, is what I consider to be one of the finest accolades I have seen in all literature, and one which I have always striven to earn for myself. Hence, in my writings, look for considerable silliness and considerable meat within, should you care to crack the bones for the succulent marrow within.
Phaedrus, turns out not to have so much to do with love, but has Socrates and Phaedrus analyzing some speeches about love more for their insights on rhetoric than on love. One such speech is an argument that people should choose to pair off with those who don’t love them rather than with those who do, because lovers are crazy, clingy, demanding, whatever. The sophist who wrote that is presented as one of the great orators of the day. No wonder Socrates and Plato had a thing for tearing down the sophists.
Bujold in the Original Ferengi: Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon
Quincy let out a stifled sound and buried her face in her hands.
“What?” Ky said. “It’s not that bad an idea..”
Quincy looked up; tears rolled down her face, and her shoulders shook. She was laughing, Ky realized, laughing so hard she couldn’t speak.
Gary, when she glanced at him, was grinning. “Ky, Ky, Ky. We wondered how long it would take.”
“How long what would take?”
“You. So prim, so proper, so very earnest—“ He chuckled, and shook his head. “I knew it wouldn’t last. It never does.”
Ky felt her neck going hot. They were treating her like a child, and—
“You’re so Vatta, is what he means,” Quincy said, through the laughter she was trying to control. “Trade and profit, right? If there’s an angle—and then it is your first ship.” She shook her head, still laughing.
“The thing is,” Gary said, “there was no way you were going to take this ship off to scrap if you could help it. I’ll bet you that you’d been wondering if you could possibly earn enough for a refit before you ever got aboard.”
“Not...exactly,” Ky said. They were both grinning now, not sarcastic grins, but genuine glee. “You knew,” she said. “You knew all along...did my father know?” Gaspard must have known, she realized. He must have assumed that any Vatta would find a way to save a ship from scrap.
“He knows you,” Quincy said. “I don’t suppose he knew about the Pavrati nondelivery, no, but he knew you.”
“I think Ted got it,” Gary said to Quincy.
“Depends on how we set the time,” Quincy said. “From the time she made the contract, or from telling us?”
“Now what are you talking about? Ted got what?” Ky asked.
“The ship’s pool,” Quincy said.
The scion of a powerful dynasty with many enemies, anxious to strike out and make a name independently of the family connections, longs for a military career but is thrown out of the academy in chapter one following a stupid mistake; goes home in disgrace; decides to start out anew with a clunky old commercial ship, impulsively makes a commitment to buy “farm equipment” at a place that turns out to be at war, and ends up impressing and making friends with the local mercenaries....Hmmmm, where ever might I have encountered a story like that before? What is my online name here, again?
Actually, Elizabeth Moon’s heroine Kylara Vatta bears more than a passing resemblance (in character development, not looks) to several of my favorite space opera protagonists, although she’s much more quiet and reserved than the manic Miles Vorkosigan, and more human and vulnerable than the merciless terminator Honor Harrington. Vatta is a born soldier, forced to settle for a commercial career in the family shipping business, and her tragic flaw is...trusting people she shouldn’t. She makes plans, takes risks, and when unforeseen problems blow up in her face, she does what has to be done and surprises herself more than anyone else by coming through. Who wouldn’t love and respect that?
Trading in Danger is the first in a five-book series. You can probably count on seeing the next four in these posts before too long. Highly recommended as a good story and as a role model for determined young women—determined young anyone, for that matter, starting out in a challenging career.
Skeptical Inquirers: Inside Job, by Connie Willis
Usually when Kildy calls, she’s bubbling over with details. “You’ve GOT to see this psychic cosmetic surgeon, Rob,” she’d crowed the last time. “His specialty is liposuction, and you can SEE the tube coming out of his sleeve. And that’s not all. The fat he’s supposed to be suctioning out of their thighs is that goop they use in McDonald’s milkshakes. You can smell the vanilla! It wouldn’t fool a five year old, so of course half the women in Hollywood are buying it hook, line and sinker. We’ve GOT to do a story on him, Rob!”
This hundred-page mini book is too short to be a Delightful Romp, but it’s definitely a pretty nice Romplet, if you like H.L. Mencken and his rants against the American “booboisie”. It takes a tongue in cheek look at the world of Hollywood trance channelers, the gullible SoCal idiots who fling their money at them, and the professional skeptics who match wits with them and try to expose them as frauds. Channelers are different from the mind readers, faith healers and miscellaneous snake oil vendors; there are no hidden wires or tricks. It’s a matter of performance art that can neither be verified nor refuted, unless someone claims to channel an actual historical figure with a known biography.
Enter two employees of The Jaundiced Eye, a debunking magazine. He’s an aloof intellectual and Mencken fan; she’s a Hollywood starlet; together they solve hoaxes. Until they go to one channeler’s seminar, and the “spirit” she’s channeling sounds a lot like Mencken and berates the crowd for falling for such a load of flim flam. Is it really Mencken? An act of sabotage? A double bluff by the channeler who has an unknown reason for harming her own spiel? Comic mayhem ensues as the debunkers try to make sense of it all. Delightful and highly recommended.
Girl Power: Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the battles of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine “gendercide” in anade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century.
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
It’s counterintuitive, reading a book like this in America. Over here, I see girls growing into powerful alpha women, earning most of the slots in the Universities and their Dean’s lists and coming out with plans for successful lives and the tools and the will to take them there, while their male counterparts are watching football and achieving high scores in World of Warcraft. I’m convinced that by the time I’m old and grey, American women will have taken over business, government, science and letters, and will be leading the country and the globe into probably a better place than the men took it over the past couple millennia.
It’s not that way everywhere. Kristoff and WuDunn put a spotlight on China, on India and Indochina, on the Middle East, on northern and sub Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Islands, to reveal more than half of the populated world as one big misogynistic hellhole. It isn’t easy to read. Story after story—all of them true—of girls and women raped, mutilated, murdered, sometimes by their own family members, or by local religious leaders who preach that unsubmissive, disobedient women, or sexually active women should be killed, that rape is a tool of war useful for shaming the other side in local feuds. Girls kidnapped and sold as slaves to child sex brothels, and beaten and returned there by police, politicians or middle class people should they escape and turn there for help. Girls and women denied access to education, to health care, to employment. Women made to work as slaves in factories, sometimes in factories in India and China that are owned by American corporations, or in the case of Micronesia, in slave factories that were actively supported by the Bush Administration. Women dying unnecessarily in childbirth, reduced to the status of household pets by religion. It’s horrifying to read and traumatic for any easily triggered survivors of abuse.
But the book is not a complete downer, as it also offers glimmers of hope and equally true stories of people who are making a difference. Survivors of the brothels who go on to achieve independence and who become with their success an inspiration to other girls and women in their communities. Women who become doctors and who own their own hospitals. Women who crack down on traffickers. Women who end up becoming leaders in their areas, instead of chattels, all over Africa and Asia.
Most of all, the book tells you what you can do to help, starting with sites like http://www.globalgiving.org and http://www.womensenews.org . Half the Sky is a book that will enrage you, make you think, and inspire you to do something for your sisters.
Licks on, Licks off: Zen Guitar, by Philip Toshio Sudo
I hear many students ask, "What exactly is this sound? A Gibson Les Paul through a stack of Marshall amps? A handcrafted classical played center stage at Carnegie Hall?
It is all of that and none of that. At bottom, it is the sound of the divine spark within us all. Like the cry of a child or the howl of a wolf, it transcends language and culture. It is the sound that drives the dance of life. Zen masters call it sekishu no onjo--the sound of one hand clapping.
Each of us has the potential to know this sound in our own way. Some people are driven to find it through bongos or bagpipes; others use kalimbas or keyboards. Some just open their throats and sing. Some hear the sound through dance or driving or acting or architecture--or just sitting in complete silence.
This was one of the shortest books I read this month, and it was the one that took the longest to read. It's a book of meditations on how to make good music, full of little profundities along the lines of "You must play the guitar, not with your hands, but with your soul", and "The seeds of genius must fall upon an open and fertile heart if they are to sprout." I spent the month, and part of January earlier, reading a couple of passages just before bed and considering them as I drifted off to sleep. Depending on my frame of mind on any given night, the Path of Zen Guitar struck me as either deeply meaningful or utter bullshit, rarely anything in between.
The book is organized into lessons that progress from "white belt" to "black belt", and then back to "white belt", to emphasize that learning is a lifelong process and that the master never forgets to attend to the basics. It contains almost no practical information about playing the guitar. Instead, the meditations ("Spirit", "Rhythm", "Discipline", "Yin-Yang", "Two Hands as One", "Holding on and Letting go", etc.) are the things necessary to mastery of any particular skill, and pretty much the same instructions used by zen teachers in archery and gardening.