Sorry for the delay, but I was a little preoccupied in the early part of the month. Wonder why.
Anyhow, here's what I read last month, including the second Stieg Larsson book, Ken Kesey, Robert Bloch, William Styron, Nikos Kazantsakis, A.S. Byatt, Margery Kempe and a wonderful autobiography of a union man. Enjoy.
One Flew Over the Old Coot’s Nest: Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey :
"So anyhow, if we say that the righteous are like trees, an’ say people do like to see trees felled, then it comes to people are hot to see the righteous felled!" He paused a moment to let the power of this logic sink in. "It follows to a T. Think about it: somebody always tryin’ to do a good man some dirt. Some whore of Babylon is always hustling the man of God, ain’t that so?" As he warmed to his sermon his little blackened hands began jumping about in front of him and his eyes brightened. "Oh yeah. Oh man YEAH! Wait till I pass this on to Brother Walker. It works right to the hair. Remember Rita Hayworth in that Sadie Thompson show? She was for falling that preacher’s cedar tree even she had to gnaw down like a beaver. Same thing in Samson and Delilah. Sure. And even Brother Walker: remember three-four years back when that baloney was passing around about what does he do with those women who come to his house private to receive the Spirit? Shoot, he had to discontinue those prayer meetings, remember? The talk got so bad...not that Brother Walker wasn’t maybe guilty of what was said—what the dickens, Spirit’s Spirit, I always say, for whatever it takes to get it into you—but the point is, them WOMEN weren’t complainin’, were they? No. Just the people, the people trying to fall the Tree of Righteousness. Oh yeah, oh yeah!" He hammered his thigh with a sooty fist, so pleased and enthusiastic about his remarkable analogy. "Don’t you agree there’s a lot to it? People likin’ to watch the trees come down? That they is a natural hell-driven desire to see the righteous fallen?"
I'm almost embarrassed to have taken so long to finally get to Ken Kesey's other great novel, after having loved the adventures of RP McMurphy so much. Now I remember why it took so long--I started and stopped twice before, because the book is slow going and doesn't really get exciting until about 2/3 of the way in.
I actually met and talked to Kesey in Eugene, Oregon a few times, and pal around with big hairy people who call themselves Bigfoot Dave, Tripper John, Churchmouse and Frog. I'm pretty sure I've met some of the people the characters were modeled after. Their ideas, idioms, dialects, vocabularies and speech patterns are a stew of mountain man, country boy, IWW and hippie that erases the line between illiteracy and scholarship, left and right. Their symbol is a tie-dyed American flag with the Don't Tread On Me snake superimposed on it.
That's why it was shocking and disappointing to pick it up and find that Kesey's main character is a scab who spends the book breaking a loggers' strike without much of a motive other than just 'cause he's an ornery old cuss who won't let anyone tell him what to do. I have Wobbly ancestors and was brought up to believe that crossing a picket line was one of the three worst things an American could do. And so right off the bat, the Stamper family were not going to be friends of mine. Further, with the exception of Joe Ben, they had a lot of trouble distinguishing between being a free spirit that soars with the eagles and being an asshole. Again, I know people like this, and even get along with them mostly, but it was sad to see the feet of clay on display along with the brilliant merry prankster colors.
A lot of the first half of the book is flashbacks and setups among the various Stampers and the people in the town, talking like Elvis, Kerouac and Bob Dylan in a poetry slam contest. The first person narrative keeps changing confusedly from character to character without warning. But there's no denying that the climax is epic and that the characters, good, bad and ugly, will stay with you for a long time afterwards. This is a book I wanted to rave about and give thumbs-up with my toes. Instead, all I can say is that it's a good part of the American canon contributed by my corner of the country.
Zorba of Nazareth: The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis :
Sunrise found Jesus and John the Baptist sitting above the Jordan in the hollow of a precipitous rock. All night long the two of them had held the world in their hands, deliberating what to do with it. Sometimes one took it, sometimes the other. The one’s face was severe and decisive: his arms went up and down as though he were actually holding an ax and striking. The other’s face was tame and irresolute, his eyes full of compassion.
"Isn’t love enough?" he asked.
"No," answered the Baptist angrily. "The tree is rotten. God called to me and gave me the ax, which I then placed at the roots of the tree. I did my duty. Now do yours: take the ax and strike!"
"If I were fire, I would burn. If I were a woodcutter, I would strike. But I am a heart, and I love."
"I am a heart also, that’s why I cannot endure injustice, shamelessness or infamy. How can you love the unjust, the infamous and the shameless? Strike! One of man’s greatest obligations is anger."
"Anger?" said Jesus, his heart objecting. "Aren’t we all brothers?"
"Brothers?" the Baptist replied sarcastically. "Do you think love is the way of God—love? Look here..." He stretched forth his bony, hairy hand and pointed to the Dead Sea, which stank like a rotting carcass. "Have you ever bent over to see those two whores, Sodom and Gomorrah, at her bottom? God became angry, hurled fire, stamped on the earth: dry land turned to sea and swallowed up Sodom and Gomorrah. That’s God’s way—follow it. What do the prophecies say? On the day of The Lord blood will flow from wood, the stones of the houses will come to life, will rise up and kill the house-owners! The day of The Lord has set out and is coming. I was the first to discern it. I uttered a cry, took God’s ax, placed it at the root of the world. I called, called for you to come. You came, and now I shall depart."
Definitely a different and earthy interpretation of the Gospels. At the beginning, Jesus the young carpenter has been commissioned by the Romans to build a cross for the crucifixion of an unnamed zealot, the latest pretender to the Messiah's throne. The neighborhood curses him up and down the street and the zealot's mother calls out that, as he has crucified her son, may he one day be crucified as well! Judas, a militant in the Jewish resistance, is sent to kill Jesus, and renounces his mission after talking with Christ for a night. And then it gets strange.
There is no nativity--in fact, we see an angel appear to Matthew and order him to just make shit up---and so Jesus grows up with Mary, neither of them having any grounds to suspect that something is not normal; Jesus just has a feeling, and prays for guidance, and then one day the miracles start happening. Barrabas is a nasty lout who is present and bothering people throughout the story. Lazarus's resurrection has more in common with the scene in Christopher Moore's Lamb than with the New Testament (Moore definitely read his Kazantzakis as well as Matthew, Mark, etc.), and Jesus actually makes use of Magdalene's services as a prostitute. He is half man, half God, after all, and in order for the decision to renounce the flesh to be meaningful, he has to live as flesh and enjoy what mortality has to offer, to be tempted by it.
In fact, the "last temptation" of the title happens on the cross, as Jesus is invited to renounce instead his status as the savior of man, and to live a peaceful, pleasant life as a mortal. You know what His decision will be, but it's worth reading anyhow.
Could it be...SATAN???? The Book of Margery Kempe :
I would often try to persuade my husband to be chaste, telling him how I knew only too well that our excessive lovemaking was displeasing to God. I argued considering all the very great pleasure we had in giving our bodies to each other, ought we not now, by mutual consent, desire to chastise and punish our bodies by refusing to give way to such lust any more? My husband would agree in principle that this was a good idea; but that he would only do so when it was God’s will. And so we went on as before, he using me, for he could never desist. But all the while I prayed God that I might live in chastity. And three or four years after matters had come to a head, only when it pleased our Lord, my husband at last agreed that we take a vow of chastity. But I shall, by Jesus’ leave, write about this later.
It was also as a consequence of hearing this heavenly music that I began to do severe penance to my body. Sometimes I would confess two or three times in a day, especially of that one sin which I had hidden and kept secret for so long, the one I told about at the start of my book. I also began to make frequent fasts as well as vigils. For instance, I would rise at two or three in the morning and go to church; and I might still be praying there at noon or even stay the whole afternoon. On account of this strict way of life, many people slandered and criticized me. I also got myself a rough cloth (the kind that is used to dry malt in a kiln) and this I wore discreetly under my skirt, as secretly as I could manage lest my husband should spot it. And he never did know in all that time, though we lay side by side in bed each night, and I continued to wear it throughout the day. I even bore him children during this time.
It is the Church era, after all, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the first autobiography in English turns out to be by the Fourteenth Century equivalent of this woman:
http://www.youtube.com/...
She hears voices in her head and sees visions, and thinks she's favored of Jesus, and she celebrates by declaring war on pleasure for herself and her family, by practicing mortification of the flesh, and by wasting her life in pilgrimages to places like Sacred Site where Saint Brutor Slayed the Wicked Jews. And she never enters such a holy site without shrieking to Jesus for the benefit of the third gallery, to the extent that priests declare her volume and stamina to be supernatural confirmation that Christ has chosen her as the vessel through which to demonstrate His power. And no, we're not talking about joyful noises unto The Lord; Kempe looks at cross fragments and feels herself undergoing the pains of Christ's crucifixion and the sorrow of Mary watching him die.
Aside from value to the true historical scholars (I'm told in the forward that one English Medievalist is forever having to decline the advances of students who want to do dissertations on some aspect of Margey Kempe), this one is most useful as a warning of how wretched society is when run by organized religion. Not only does Kempe voluntarily make herself miserable for the sake of some imagined better life after death in which earthly misery is rewarded, but her reward on earth is to be slandered and reviled more often than not by the high social castes of the day, especially by clergy. It may be that the clergy feel threatened by Kempe's superior connection with God and exposure of their own heresies, or it may be that they're just sick and tired of her screaming and wailing all the time.
A Boy’s Best Friend is his Mother: Psycho, by Robert Bloch :
The water was hot, and she had to add a mixture from the COLD faucet. Finally she turned both faucets on full force and let the warmth gush over her.
The roar was deafening, and the room was beginning to steam up.
That’s why she didn’t hear the door open, or note the sound of footsteps. And at first, when the shower curtains parted, the steam obscured the face.
Then she did see it there—just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanely, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman.
Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
And her head.
You can just hear the violins screeching, can’t you?
Like most, I learned the story of Norman Bates and his mother from the Hitchcock movie. I had never read the book, though, and though the plot is substantially the same, the focus is quite different.
Norman is definitely not Anthony Perkins—he’s a pudgy, glasses-wearing, almost simpering little nobody who comes across as more pathetic than interestingly intense. About half the book is told from his point of view, complete with several conversations with his cruel, browbeating, overprotective mother, and with inner monologues fraught with oedipal double-meanings. The other characters are there as supporting cast to the Bates family. Mary Crane (about a third of the movie) appears in just two chapters and is dead by the end of chapter three. Arbogast in another two chapters. Sam and Lila are barely developed as characters. Psycho is definitely a tale of psychology, and of one mother-son relationship in particular.
Robert Bloch is one of the great grandmasters of horror, and the nasty murders in his books fascinated and scared me when I was a kid (I particularly remember American Gothic. Today, he’s like reading old science fiction. The genre has passed him by, and his twists are the kind you can see coming a mile away, even when they haven’t already been disclosed by classic movies. Worth reading anyway.
Muddled Curmudgeonly Meanderings of the Hairy Pothead: Trout Fishing in America, by Richard Brautigan :
A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the outhouse was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, "The old guy who built me crapped here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I'm a monument now to a good ass gone under. There's no mystery here. That's why the door's open. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer.
"Fuck you", I said to the outhouse. "All I want is a ride down the river."
This one calls itself a novel, but it's really a series of vignettes that have a passing acquaintance with each other. It ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but with the word "mayonnaise", just because Brautigan always wanted to end a book with that word. It's that kind of book.
In search of some kind of unifying theme, he inserts the phrase "Trout fishing in America" into most of the vignettes. In the Humpty-Dumpty sense, it means pretty much whatever Brautigan intends for it to mean. It's a random force of nature that comments as a pisces ex machina at the end of some vignettes, corresponds with Brautigan in others, gets written in chalk on the backs of a bunch of first graders another time, and is the middle name of a San Francisco stewbum. Among other things. And then there are the dozens of anecdotes and observations that don't mean anything, but which are hilarious for sheer randomness, like the notation that the NO TRESPASSING sign is 4/17 of a haiku.
Don't read this one in an easy chair. Take it to a poetry slam night and read it out loud.
Lisbeth Salamander: The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson :
"There is one more thing," the giant said.
"What’s that?"
"We’d like to put a special job your way."
"Let’s hear it."
He pulled an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and gave it to Lundin, who opened it and took out a passport photograph and a sheet of A4 containing personal data. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Her name is Lisbeth Salander and she lives in Stockholm, on Lundagaten in Sodermalm."
"Right."
"She’s probably out of the country at present, but she’ll turn up sooner or later."
"OK."
"My employer would like to have a quiet talk with her. She has to be delivered alive. We suggest the warehouse near Yngern. And we need someone to clean up afterwards. She has to disappear without a trace."
"We should be able to handle that. How will we know when she’s home?."
"I’ll tell you."
"And the price?"
"What do you say to ten thousand for the whole job? It’s pretty straightforward. Drive to Stockholm, pick her up, deliver her to me."
They shook hands again.
Oh, I pity those bad guys, almost. They have no idea what they’re getting into...
In detective fiction, you have the Sherlock Holmes prototype, the brilliant sleuth, cards held firmly to chest until the end, who observes and remembers everything and comes up with the perfect solution. Then you have the Dr. Watson prototype, the capable assistant who maybe mirrors the reader and comes up with intelligent but ultimately wrong theories about the mystery. Finally you have the Lestrade, the silly police foil who leaps at the easiest answer or first bit of misleading evidence planted by the culprit, and who usually scoffs a little at the "Holmes" even after being shown up many times before. The police, prosecutors and psychologists of The Girl Who Played With Fire are the next level down after Lestrade.
I’m still on Team Love It; in fact, this one is better than Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It made it more clear to me why I (and others) have an affinity for Lisbeth Salander. At a time when bullying and ineffective government are headliners, Salander is the soulmate of every kid who was bullied and lived, or was victimized by the state and lived, or who was ever told that certain childhood incidents would go on their "permanent record."
By the time I got to high school, no one gave a ripe turd about my awful experiences in elementary school, or my even more horrific experiences in junior high, and I was able to achieve some measure of acceptance and status in my niche, even a circle of friends in my peer group. College admissions cared about only my high school interests, grades and test scores.
Salander is what happens when a "record" really is permanent and wrong. A succession of stupid, incompetent, sadistic bullies, teachers, caseworkers and psychologists, and finally the "guardian" we met in book one, successively pile unearned black marks one on top of another to create a person on paper who bears no resemblance to the person they’re studying; a person who understandably loses faith in the system real fast and therefore does little to correct the misdiagnoses and outright fabrications that go into the official version of who she is. A soul with less steel and sense of self than Salander could easily succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and become the failure that everyone around her tells her she is. There was a time when I might have done the same...and then there’s that mysterious missing period from her record, the time when "all the evil" happened...
Which leads us to the crimes, years later, in which the bumbling investigators pick up this early record and, when facts and testimony contradict every part of that record, choose to believe the record instead of everything before them, and set out to ruin her. Jail her, hopefully kill her, in the name of justice.
It’s lopsided. They never have a chance against her, although she does need a little help from Blomqvist, the "Watson" in Larsson’s narrative.
Although Larsson’s strongest theme is the prevalence and injustice of individual and institutional misogyny, there are some scenes of intense villainy that will be disturbing to survivors who are easily triggered. The most intense one is the few pages of prologue right in the beginning. If scenes like that are not for you, you can skip the prologue completely and lose nothing in the plot of the book—it has no relation to anything in the first three sections of the book, and the final section can be understood without it...although you will miss a damning, Swiftian bit of social criticism that only becomes apparent later on.
Somewhere, right now, there’s a predator who, having read Larsson, sees a skinny, vulnerable looking punkish girl minding her own business on a dark street, and who gulps to himself and decides it would be wise to keep his distance and go after an easier target, like maybe Chuck Norris or Hulk Hogan. Larsson’s final volume is called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. My condolences to any hornets that don’t get away fast enough.
Deep in the Underground: Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne :
It was indeed a human skull, perfectly recognisable. Had a soil of very peculiar nature, like that of the cemetery of St. Michel at Bordeaux, preserved it during countless ages? This was the question I asked myself, but which I was wholly unable to answer. But this head with stretched and parchmenty skin, with the teeth whole, the hair abundant, was before our eyes as in life!
I stood mute, almost paralysed with wonder and awe before this dread apparition of another age. My uncle, who on almost every occasion was a great talker, remained for a time completely dumbfounded. He was too full of emotion for speech to be possible. After a while, however, we raised up the body to which the skull belonged. We stood it on end. It seemed, to our excited imaginations, to look at us with its terrible hollow eyes.
This one managed to be both tedious and silly, but it was short enough to read in an afternoon and I was done before I got tired of waiting for a payoff. Three stock 19th century science fiction characters--the omniscient professor, the stolid guide and the romantic emo everyman narrator discover an ancient rune revealing the location of a tunnel that leads to the center of the earth, and promptly go spelunking in standard hiking clothes, scientific instruments, a couple of unwieldly pre-incandescent bulb lighting devices, and enough food to fill their backpacks. The professor assures them they'll find plenty of water as they go along. Because it's a story, the professor is right, and they find water, and don't burn themselves to death or suffocate, and their lights don't die before they reach vast underground caves with some other light source, and when it gets boring to have only geology to discuss, they get to an underground sea with sea monsters.
The narrator's reasonable concerns about living to get out are pooh-poohed by the professor, after which the narrator mopes and frets about how very dark it is, and how many strata of rock lie between him and his true love back home, and how likely they are to all die, until you're ready for a quick, painless falling rock to put him out of his misery.
How to Break an American Girl: Lie Down in Darkness, by William Styron :
As a matter of fact, there had been a ghastly moment when in the midst of noon hour traffic the hearse did stop, completely. It had happened just as the two vehicles had blundered into a long line of cars drawn up behind a stoplight at Thirty-fourth street and Virginia Avenue. There had been no reason for this, actually, because Mr. Casper had told Barclay, not once but three times, to take the less crowded route through Niggertown. But here they were, utterly stalled. Barclay ground away on the starter, but the hearse didn't move, and from all sides came the noise of car horns, irreverent and frantic in the noonday heat. At that moment an audible sound of despair had come from the limousine. It was as if the heat and the grief and the tension had all found a voice in the ferocious blatting of horns around them; and each person in the car also made a little noise. There was nothing maudlin about these sounds; they were too spontaneous, and they came from the very heart of pain: Dolly wept anew, Loftis gasped and covered his eyes with his hand, and Ella made a low sob or sigh, hard to define, which began low in her chest and built up on a soft, high, drawn out note of grief ending on the word, "Jesus"
William Stryon picked up the torch from Faulkner. Lie Down in Darkness won the Decaying Southern Family Feel-Bad Book Award of 1951.
They tell the reader early on that Peyton Loftis, golden girl of the Tidewater, has killed herself, and you see not too long after that that something is very wrong with the surviving parents, and the rest of the book intersperses the progress of the funeral with flashbacks to Peyton's birth, life and death as seen by the family and their friends. If there's a Hell, dad and especially mom will spend eternity reliving all of it. Fortunately, you only need to do it once, and only when you're in the mood to suffer on a Greek Tragedy scale.
Peyton's mother is a horrible, righteous bitch of a woman, who hates her and never passes up a chance to favor her crippled little sister. Her father is a weak, retiring man who crawls into a bottle of whisky and pulls the cork in after him whenever trouble comes, and who loves Peyton a little too much. This not being Faulkner, Dad does not actually commit incest, not even when drunk, and Mom doesn't take an axe and kill her daughter. The bad things happen much slower than that. Very well done, but depressing beyond belief.
CalvinCamp: Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome :
"It's a good thing you hadn't got the ship's baby aboard when you were wrecked," she said at last.
Able-seaman Titty was playing with the ship's baby. She looked up at once.
"I expect she was on board. It wouldn't be fair if she wasn't. You were, weren't you, Bridgie? And when the ship went down she was put on a raft, and the raft floated away in a current like the Gulf Stream, and we should have never seen her again if you hadn't happened to be coming along in your canoe and found the ship's baby sailing away on a raft by herself.
"That must have been it," said the best of all natives. "She was sailing away on the raft and had nothing with her to eat but one doughnut, and even that she was sharing with a gull who had perched on her raft and looked hungry."
"Well, I'm glad you found her," said the able-seaman.
This is the second book in the Swallows and Amazons series. I like everything about it. I like the Calvinish flights of imagination when they play at pirates or natives. I like that the kids have a male and a female leader, each of whom respect the others’ competence. I like the discoveries of real nautical and camping tools. I like the invocation of my own (almost) carefree Summers by the lake. Arthur Ransome and his books are what it is to be simple and wholesome and natural.
In this tale, the Swallow is sunk and grounded early on, and so the Swallows must make do with their tents on land in a nice valley with a cave, ultimately experimenting with voodoo dolls on Nancy’s annoying great aunt and going on a hike through the mountains. And that’s all there is to it...except that it’s just plain captivating. Read it with your kids, if you have some, or just read it on the porch or in a boat on the lake, for yourself.
People of Letters: Possession, by A.S. Byatt :
Had the correspondence continued? If it had, where was it, what jewels of information about Ash’s "ignored, arcane, deviously perspicuous meanings" might not be revealed by it? Scholarship might have to reassess all sorts of certainties. On the other hand, had the correspondence ever in fact started? Or had Ash finally floundered in his inability to express his sense of urgency? It was this urgency above all that moved and shocked Roland. He thought he knew Ash fairly well, as well as anyone might know a man whose life seemed to be all in his mind, who lived a quiet and exemplary married life for forty years, whos correspondence was voluminous indeed but guarded, courteous and not of the most lively. Roland liked that in Randolph Henry Ash. He was excited by the ferocious vitality and darting breadth of reference of the work, and secretly, personally, he was rather pleased that all this had been achieved out of so peaceable, so unruffled a private existence.
He read the letters again. Had a final draft been posted? Or had the impulse died or been rebuffed? Roland was seized by a strange and uncharacteristic impulse of his own. It was suddenly quite impossible to put these living words back into page 300 of Vico and return them to Safe 5. He looked about him; no one was looking; he slipped the letters between the leaves of his own copy of the Oxford Selected Ash, which he was never without...
I was put off by the earnest, earnest outpouring of very serious praise on the jacket for A.S. Byatt’s literary genius, for her ability "to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being", her "profound blend of technique and range that seems to paint rather than describe". I felt like I was being told to eat my vegetables which were good for me.
I needn’t have worried. Possessionis layered, significant literature, but it is also a decent page-turning tale that simultaneously satirizes and glorifies its subject world, like Barry Hughart does with ancient China or Rabelais or Cervantes do with everything in the medieval world and earlier. And unlike Hughart’s China, Byatt’s world of 19th Century English writers and the 20th Century academics who critiqued them is familiar enough for me to get the inside jokes, and to know when I’m missing something.
The short version: Randolph Ash is a very male Dead White Guy poet with a solid place in the Western canon. Christabel LaMotte is a very female lesser poet who has recently been elevated to importance as a lesbian feminist icon among womens’ studies departments. Two contemporary scholars, Roland and Maud, discover a hitherto unsuspected romantic connection between the two that threatens to upset established scholarship on both poets and give new meanings to their most famous works.
Roland and Maud have a surprisingly suspenseful adventure trying to track down the truth, on a trail that leads through decaying family homesteads, Yorkshire heaths, libraries, French villages and ultimately to grave robbery. Along the way, they pore over journals, letters, folktales, headstones, poems and critical essays, which are produced for the reader and which take up a major proportion of Possession. Byatt’s imitation of the many styles is incredible, and their juxtaposition is a kind of humor I don’t think I’ve encountered before, ever. At one point, for example, Roland reads a feminist essay glorifying a particular stretch of seashore as an homage to the feminine, with erotic contours and life-giving bodily fluids, while Maud simultaneously reads an account of a 19th Century naturalist exploring the same stretch of shore and aggressively poking around the tidepools for anemones. Each essay by itself is dry and eye-rollingly full of itself; taken together, they are hilarious.
Eventually, an unscrupulous, wealthy American collector, an acerbic traditionalist Ash professor and an overbearing feminist LaMotte professor get involved in the quest to unearth history, and tragicomic mayhem ensues. Highly recommended for any lover of books, and almost essential reading for anyone who has studied serious literature.
A Working Class Hero is Something to Be: Organize! (My Life as a Union Man), by Wyndham Mortimer :
Nature is bountiful, and the ingenuity of man is very great. The problem of how to produce in abundance for all has been solved. It has been solved for some time, but only that portion of our production is distributed which enables someone somewhere to get back more than he contributes. Profit is the sacred cow of our society. It is long past time for this bovine to be turned into steaks. Whatever its merits may have been in generations past, its continued existence is an anachronism. It stands athwart the highway of progress and bars the way to an economic paradise that is now within our grasp.
I said we must make common cause with labor everywhere throughout the world, but how is this to be done by a leadership that is wedded to things as they are? In their denial of the class struggle they disown the only reason for the existence of a labor union. For if the interests of the worker and the employer are mutual, then what possible reason can there be for the existence of the AFL-CIO?
The biggest comfort I got from this gripping biography, is the knowledge that there is no new evil these days. We've been here before, and the labor movement is no exception.
Wyndham Mortimer, founding leader of the UAW and the CIO, recounts his days in the 1930s. The AFL leadership is packed with handmaidens to industrialists, who sow discord among the union organizers by appealing to racism and red-baiting in the most transparent ways. And if that didn't work, they just fired anyone for union activity. The President of the United States, purportedly a liberal hero to the working class, is pulling strings to keep the status quo in place and to make those at the bottom of the heap content themselves with crumbs. Sound familiar? Some might walk away thinking that the fact that these things are happening again proves that nothing will ever change. I get the message that it's cyclical, and that things will swing back our way again, if we work to make it happen.
Meanwhile, read and remember what happens when the corporations are in complete control. It isn't pretty for the working class. Anyone who works for a paycheck, unionized or not, should read this book to remind themselves why no one who works for a paycheck should ever vote Republican.
The Friedrich Strasse Irregulars : Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kastner :
For a long time he just stood leaning against the door, not daring to move. Just over there that man Grundeis had slept and snored. And now he was gone. Of course, everything might be all right. It was absurd to be suspicious right away. Just because Emil was going to Friedrich Strasse Station in Berlin was no reason why everyone else had to go there too. And the money, of course, was safe in its proper place. First, it was in his pocket. Second, it was in the envelope. And third, it was fastened to the lining with a pin. And then he reached slowly into his right inside pocket.
The pocket was empty! The money was gone!
A very simple boys' adventure story that proves that style can make an ordinary story amazing. Nominally, it's about a boy whose money is stolen from him while he's on a train to Berlin by himself, and the help he gets from some friends in stalking the chief suspect. In fact, there's no much more too it than that, except that it's reminiscent of James Thurber in its playfulness. The kids go about their business as though they’re Scotland Yard on the trail of Moriarty, and they (and Kastner) clearly have the kind of fun that only children with vivid imaginations have, with an actual climax at a police station that manages to be surprising even though you’re expecting every bit of it. Highly recommended for any age.