This month’s reading list, with some exceptions, turned out to be, overall, the biggest crop of downers I’ve come across in a long time. From Walter Miller’s post apocolyptic America to Frantz Fanon’s call for third world bloodbath to the rape endured by Alice Sebold to the horrific, pornographic worlds of William S. Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade, I found death, depression, and awful views on life at most turns. Nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned from downers, as either prevention, or the inspiration to move on in the face of hardship, or the realization that what troubles you have in your own life are nowhere near as bad as it could get. Read on and learn.
Lisbeth Forever! The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, by Stieg Larsson :
Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian’s computer.
She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a Hotmail address who sent encrypted email. Since she had access to Teleborian’s PGP key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.
Yes, we can prove there is a conspiracy.
But what really interested Salander were the forty seven folders containing close to 9,000 photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.
She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with each other.
Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.
She remembered the nights when, as a twelve year old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St. Stefan’s. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the night light.
She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.
She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.
After a while, she pinged Blomkvist on ICQ.
The mildest downer of the month was having to say goodbye to Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson having passed away not long after he delivered the manuscript of the third and best of the three Salander-Blomkvist books. I dread the movies that will inevitably be made by Hollywood. They’ll cast Jennifer Garner or Angelina Jolie in a tight-fitting ninja suit as Lisbeth (you just know it), and completely wreck the magic of the character, which is based on the deceptive presumption of helplessness she evokes.
Actually, in this round, Lisbeth really does spend most of the book in a passive position, shut up in a hospital and later, in a prison cell, while it is Blomkvist’s turn to take center stage as the action hero fighting to save Salander from a clandestine snakepit of Machiavellian post Cold-War intrigue within the Swedish government.
It needs editing. The subplots and cast of characters expand until it’s hard to keep track of who is on which side, and the supposed masterminds within the government cabal make such ridiculous tactical blunders that they manage to erase the lines separating George Smiley from Maxwell Smart. In fact, after the first hundred pages or so, the tale does more to describe the inexorable tightening of the net around the bad guys than it does about any danger they manage to create for the good guys. It doesn’t matter. The story moves so briskly and grippingly that the flaws don’t hurt the story much. Dr. Teleborian, for instance, is the creepiest Evil Psychiatrist since Hannibal Lecter, and so who cares if his fate sticks out like an unnamed crew member on the Enterprise? Just watching him get there is fun enough.
Even with Lisbeth on the sidelines, there is female power everywhere, from Figuerola’s muscles to Berger’s business acumen and rank, to Linder’s and Modig’s superior security and police competence. As always, Larsson’s male characters are split between those who are comfortable sharing power with the heroines and who benefit from extremely capable partnerships, and those who completely freak out or crumple, and who thereby lose even their own power and respect. I’d like to think most guys have come past that kind of thing, but...well, I guess they haven’t. It does feel good to be in the first of the two categories, though.
Luck, Pluck and F*ck: The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow :
These earliest jobs, though, that she chose for us, they weren’t generally of the callousing kind. If hard, they were temporary and supposed to lead to something better. She didn’t intend us to be common laborers. No, we were going to wear suits, not overalls, and she was going to set us on the way to becoming gentlemen despite our being born to have no natural hope of it, unlike her own sons with the German governesses and tutors and gymnasium uniforms they had had. It was not her fault that they couldn’t do better than to become small-town businessmen, for they had been brought up to give the world a harder shake. Not that she ever complained of them, and they behaved with decent respect toward her, two sizeable broad men in belted overcoats and spats, Stiva driving a Studebaker and Alexandria a Stanley Steamer. Both were inclined to be silent and bored. Addressed in Russian, they answered in English, and apparently they weren’t so enormously grateful for all she had done. Perhaps she worked so hard over Simon and me to show them what she could do even with such handicaps as ours; and maybe she sermonized us both about love because of her sons. Although she had a quick way of capturing their heads when they bent down to give her the kiss of duty.
When I read Herzog (Bookpost, September 2010), I indicated that I was maybe too young to fully grok it. With Augie March, I’m maybe a little old for it, but at least I can remember what it is to be young and directionless and trying to find my first niche. In that spirit, Bellow’s protagonist is like a mid-20th Century Huckleberry Finn, observing and participating in a series of stupidities, comedies and tragedies that have more twists and turns than the Mississippi river.
More than anything, Augie March seems to be a satire on the Horatio Alger myth, in which the good-hearted, hardworking kid goes from beggar to millionaire through hard work and being favored by God because he works hard. March is good-hearted and hard working, and he gets fired from his first job for refusing to short-change the customers. With the lesson he learns from that, he gets fired from his second job for stealing. He gets a third job, this time working for an eccentric employer who he admires for his business sense, begins to rise in the company...and then the employer turns out to have feet of clay underneath the heroic Ayn Rand businessman exterior, goes bankrupt and loses everything, and it’s back to square one. When the wealthy couple from central casting wants to adopt him and make him their heir, he turns them down because the situation would be that of a kept man, and he goes back to being poor, only now he’s reviled by his family for having turned away wealth. The women he gets involved with turn out not to be golden-hearted princesses, but snoots and crazy ladies and douchebaguettes. And so on.
As Twain depicts life along the 19th Century Mississippi, Bellow gives a representative slice of many facets of the urban, suburban and rural midwest in the mid 20th Century, with detours into Mexico and a lifeboat in the ocean with the lunatic half-brother of Horatio Alger’s stock can-do inventor. March’s adventures are a lot closer to what the typical American, who goes from job to job, experiences, and even at the end you’re not sure whether he’s gotten any closer to the American Dream in love or career, but he certainly learns a lot along the way. Highly recommended.
Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life: The Autobiography of Goethe :
I should certainly have passed a tedious evening if an unexpected apparition had not revived me. On our arrival we found the table already neatly down and orderly set, and sufficient wine served on it: we sat down and remained alone, without requiring further service. As there was, however, a scarcity of wine at last, one of them called for the maid; but, instead of the maid, there came in a girl of uncommon, and when one saw her with all around her, of incredible beauty. "What do you desire?", she asked after cordially having wished us a good evening. "The maid is ill in bed. Can I serve you?" "The wine is out", said one. "If you would fetch us a few bottles, it would be very kind." "Do it, Gretchen", said another: it is but a cat’s leap from here." "Why not?", she answered; and taking a few empty bottles from the table, she hastened out. Her form, as seen from behind, was almost more elegant. The little cap sat so neatly upon her little head, which a slender throat united very gracefully to her neck and shoulders. Every thing about her seemed choice; and one could survey her whole form the more at ease, as one’s attention was no more exclusively attracted and fettered by the quiet, honest eyes and lovely mouth. I reproved my comrades for sending the girl out alone at night, but they only laughed at me; and I was soon consoled by her return, as the publican lived only just across the way. "Sit down with us, in return", said one. She did so; but, alas! She did not come near me. She drank a glass to our health, and speedily departed, advising us not to stay very long together, and not to be so noisy, as her mother was just going to bed. It was not, however, her own mother, but the mother of our hosts.
...and thus the female lead in Faust was conceived.
I like writers’ autobiographies when they share the moments they got the idea for something that ended up rocking the world, like the candy Roald Dahl bought that inspired Willy Wonka, or Mark Twain’s adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot that hold a funhouse mirror to Huck and Jim’s raft.
Goethe is a long-winded guy whose work, like Glen Beck’s speeches, probably sound much better in the original German, but he has his moments of charm, and his life encompassed a lot more than writing heavy philosophical novels and plays (his youth, however, was nowhere near as dramatic as that of Wilhelm or Werther; in his own account, he was always young Faust, forever thirsting after knowledge and directed action). I had no idea he had delved so deeply into science and politics, for example—a lot of these 18th-to-19th Century Renaissance men did a bit of everything. But where Byron and Shelley had fun, or at least high drama, in the process, Goethe remained earnest and serious throughout. As a result, his autobiography, especially in translation, is very, very dry, if good for you. Recommended with caution, and best read in a dark attic by the light of a whale-oil lamp.
Booga-Booga, Kiddies: New Maps of Hell, a Science Fiction Survey by Kingsley Amis :
Passing over "Monsters that Once Were Men" and "Birth of a Monster", I draw attention to "The Horror in the Attic"—"it was a hideous, horrible THING on a gruesome errand". The errand consists of frightening to death the lover of a fifteen year old girl and then of eating the girl alive:
"The creature held her tightly. With one massive paw it ripped away her clothing, tossing the tattered garments to the floor, exposing her firm white breasts, her soft woman’s body. Close up, she could see the creature’s teeth—hideous yellow fangs [etc. etc.]"
Before giving way to panic at such a cultural manifestation, one would do well to remember that vampires, werewolves and such were behaving exactly like that over a hundred years ago, fulfilling the same function of putting into acceptable form interests that realistic fiction could not accommodate: Sheridan Le Fanu’s "Carmilla" with its blatantly lesbian theme, is the most famous example.
It is what it says: a survey of early science fiction, beginning with Aristophanes, Dante, Swift and any other classic authors with a theme of speculation or supernatural elements, continuing through Verne and Wells, and coming around to the magazines and novels of the early to mid 20th Century. Walter Miller (see below) is mentioned prominently, along with Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, A.E. Van Vogt, and several well-regarded general writers with one or more forays into speculative fiction (Orwell, Huxley).
Amis treats the genre with equal parts snark and affection, and seems to be writing for literary academics who ordinarily wouldn’t stoop to reading S-F; his basic message is that it really does have something to offer, especially in the exploration of Utopias, dystopias and Jungian psychology. Most of my friends reading this don’t need that message; still, if critical essays discussing some of your favorite non-academic books interests you, this is a fun read.
Pour on some dressing already: Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs :
Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: "My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!" He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse, kissing and jacking off in the face of the black mirror, glides obliquely down with cryptic condoms and mosaic of a thousand newspapers through a drowned city of red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded flat and meaningless to avoid short-arm inspection of prurient ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.
I forced myself to slog through the first hundred pages of this 200 page book, and then couldn’t continue. And if you follow my posts, you know I stick it through with some very heavy duty stuff.
I didn’t know what it was about. Naked Lunch was presented as some sort of avant-garde, cool book for hipsters, pushing the limits of what literature can be. I’ll give it this much: it’s the rotting edge of surreal, nightmare stream-of-consciousness. It’s Hunter S. Thompson without all the calm, sober dignity.
Every so often, during flailing Zumba-type exercise classes or sex or endorphin-producing activity like that, I get the giggles, because it just hits me how silly the human body can be. I have visions of weightlifters inflating their muscles with bicycle pumps and twisting them into balloon animals and squeezing them with squeak-toy noises. Now imagine the kind of surreal imagery designed to produce, not giggles, but uncontrollable vomiting and despair, and you have the vision of Naked Lunch. Nominally a partially autobiographical account of the paranoid hallucinations of an utterly, utterly degraded junkie, it rambles between half-poetic, half graphic descriptions of torture at the hands of the ultimate police state, gross bodily sexual, excretory and decomposing bodily functions, man-rape, woman-rape, child-rape, incest, sex with animals, eating yucky things, sticking needles in body parts and letting the sores fester, blasphemous treatment of revered holy and political objects, gross racial stereotypes...if it pushes someone’s offensensitivity buttons, Burroughs rubs the reader’s nose in it.
The whole point of the "naked lunch" is that it’s supposed to be the naked TRUTH about what’s really on the end of everyone’s fork, and that if you see what it really is, you’ll be enlightened, or gag and stop eating, or something. Except that, what I’m actually eating is definitely NOT shit, or maggots, or poison, or drugs to turn ME into those things. If this book defines what is hip and cool, I ain’t cool. I’m just hot. ::snap::
Slouching Toward Texarkana: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. :
So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make Earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds "bloodthirsty simpletons".
Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: Simpletons! Yes, yes! I’m a simpleton! Are YOU a simpleton? We’ll build a town and we’ll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they’ll be dead! Simpletons! Let’s go! This ought to show ‘em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!
To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to any sanctuary that offered itself. When the Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks’ robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived and could be reoccupied, for the religious were less despised by the mob except when they openly defied it and accepted martyrdom. Sometimes such sanctuary was effective, but more often it was not. Monasteries were invaded, records and sacred books were burned, refugees were seized and summarily hanged or burned. The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can only occur when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were not merely to forget, but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.
These mobs, in fairness, had endured the destruction of world civilization by nuclear holocaust. What excuse do Beck, Palin and the Teahad offer today? Miller’s message is never so chilling as it is right now, as mobs seek to install government of, by and for the stupid across the board.... But I digress.
A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place in the post-apocolyptic American Southwest, the USA and its component states having devolved to cluster cities around Texarkana, Laredo, Denver, etc., the surrounding deserts populated by savage, genetically mutated robbers and (shudder) simpletons. In the midst of the desert is the Abbey of St. Leibowitz, dedicated to the deification of a 20th Century person—pilot?—electrician?—believed to have been instrumental in saving part of the rubble. Monks laboriously preserve the saint’s grocery lists as scripture and copy electronic circuitry diagrams onto illuminated scrolls, with no idea what they mean. And then Brother Francis, perhaps with the divine aid of St. Leibowitz himself, discovers the remains of an underground shelter, and theological mayhem ensues as the monks debate whether the holy relics within should be studied or forever hidden from profane human view. And that’s just for beginners...
I was overwhelmed at a beautiful and terrible tale unlike anything else I’ve read, that manages to be fair to the forces of both religion and science while remaining optimistic in the face of a population that will probably never learn from its mistakes, though they be repeated again and again. Highest recommendations.
The Jedi Training of Arthur: The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White :
"Please", said the Wart, "Dear Merlyn, turn me into a hawk. If you don’t do that I shall do something, I know not what."
Merlyn put down his knitting and looked at his pupil over the top of his spectacles. "My boy", he said, "you shall be everything in the world, animal, vegetable, or mineral for all I care, before I’ve done with you, but you really will have to trust to y superior foresight—or is it backsight? The time is not ripe for you to be a hawk—for one thing, Hob is still in the mews feeding them—and you may just as well sit down for a moment and learn to be a human being."
"Very well," said the Wart, "if that’s a go." And he sat down.
After several minutes he said, "Is one allowed to speak as a human being, or does the thing about being seen and not heard have to apply.?"
"Everybody can speak."
"That’s good, because I wanted to mention that you have been knitting your beard into that night-cap for three rows now."
"Well, I’ll be fiddled."
"I should think the best thing would be to cut off the end of your beard. Shall I fetch some scissors?"
"Why didn’t you tell me before?"
"I wanted to see what would happen."
"You run a grave risk, my boy", said Merlyn coldly, "of being turned into a piece of bread, and toasted." With this he slowly began to unpick his beard, muttering to himself meanwhile and taking the greatest precautions not to drop a stitch.
White's The Once and Future King is my favorite of all the tellings of the King Arthur legend, and this is the first part, covering Arthur's childhood as "Wart", the adopted page in Sir Ector's castle and ending when he pulls Excalibur from the stone and learns of his destiny. Most of that childhood is spent in the company of Kay, who unlike Wart, will grow up to be a knight, and who doesn't let Wart forget it, and with Merlyn, the best tutor a boy could ever have.
With Merlyn, Wart is transformed into snakes, fishes, birds and badgers, and hears the song of the trees and the stones, learning what each animal, vegetable and mineral has to teach him. He encounters a witch in the forest, a giant in a dungeon, goes on a mission with Robin 'ood (with a silent W, not an H), and hunts a wild boar in the winter. For those in the SCA, the first lessons of archery, hawking, tilting and court protocol are covered along the way, as well as they can be in a story book, anyhow.
The best parts are the inside jokes that adults will understand and that children will get to in future readings. This was a welcome dose of warmth among the downers.
Feckless Old World: Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley :
"Living modernly's living quickly," she went on. "You can't cart a wagon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by airplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it's too ponderous nowadays. There's no room for it in the airplane.
"Not even for a heart?" asked Walter. "I don't so much care about the soul." He had cared a great deal about the soul once. But now that his life no more consisted in reading the philosophers, he was somehow less interested in it. "But the heart," he added, "the heart..."
Lucy shook her head. "Perhaps it's a pity," she admitted. "But you can't get something for nothing. If you like speed, if you want to cover the ground, you can't have luggage. The thing is to know what you want and to be ready to pay for it.I know exactly what I want; so I sacrifice the luggage. If you choose to travel in a furniture van, you may. But don't expect me to come along with you, sweet Walter. And don't expect me to take your grand piano in my two-seater monoplane."
There was a long silence. Walter shut his eyes. He wished he were dead. The touch of Lucy's hand on his face made him start. He felt her taking his lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. She pinched it gently.
"You have the most delicious mouth," she said.
Huxley has written a novel of ideas...bad ones, and so many of them that they’re overwhelming. The overall impression is that of an explanation of how the British Empire came to die as its best and brightest were overcome with navel-gazing, aimlessness, indolence and paralyzing self-contradiction.
There are many characters, none of which are particularly likable, which is always strike one in a story. They argue and sulk and have extramarital affairs out of boredom and neglect their children and fritter away their lives on useless things and occasionally commit murder without really knowing why. Their problems range from mere foibles to serious character flaws. Huxley tries to do too much with them, making every character a symbol of a different kind of decay of the soul, and apparently basing them on real-life celebrities of the day, several of whom I’ve never heard of and none of whom I really care about. There may have been a scandal about it when it was first published, as none of the portraits are flattering; if so, the scandal has long since faded away.
Additionally, one of the two characters Huxley bases on himself is—yes! A writer, and—yes! He writes all sorts of helpful notes about the other people in the book, for use in the novel he’s thinking about writing, which will be a lot like Point Counter Point. The notes give Huxley an opportunity to really spell out what all of the characters symbolize, just in case you haven’t figured it out for yourself. I could just see Huxley doing the Snoopy Happy Dance during these parts as he patted himself on the back for being so very clever. Philistine that I am, I merely shrugged at all his brilliance and said, "Meh."
Kill Them All: The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon :
The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settlers’ feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settlers’ town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settlers’ town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.
These are the lean and hungry barbarians who are destined to overthrow the Colonialist Europeans last seen decaying in Point Counter Point
I’m told there was a group of self-styled "Fanonists" at my old, Bohemian east coast college. I wasn’t even aware they existed at the time, and I’m grateful. The thought of these earnest, privileged white kids setting up mock shantytowns on the quad and having pizza delivered to them before they go to sleep in their goose down sleeping bags and dream of taking up arms against their oppressors makes me cringe.
If you live in America, or even Canada or Britain, Fanon is not talking to you. The Wretched of the Earth do not live in those places. They don’t even live in Appalachia, or Harlem, or on a reservation. Those poor, oppressed people of my own country that I’ve been studying are to the downtrodden of Africa and Latin America (and particularly in the Algeria studied by Fanon during the last desperate efforts of French occupation after WWII) what the Monty Python Yorkshire guy who lived in a corridor was to his friend who lived in a paper bag in the middle of the road. Fanon’s book is about and for the third world peasants of third world countries who don’t worry about being able to afford shoes, because they don’t have any feet.
Odds are, if you’re reading my bookpost online, you aren’t there. If you’re part of the ruling elite, Fanon wants you dead. If you’re part of the middle class bourgeoisie, he considers you useless, and you’re probably going to be among the first to get killed if he has his way and the third world masses actually rise up and start slitting throats, while the rich assholes who actually profited from their exploitation get in their gold helicopters or fortified bunkers and leave the mess to you. Either way, the point is not to have fun starting a revolution you can’t finish. The point is to learn something from this book and attempt to defend yourself from the consequences of a nasty situation you didn’t cause. A smart middle-class liberal wants to see the peasants fed and content; he does not want to see them armed.
The Cunterbury Tales: The 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade :
"What's this!" said Durcet. "Do you then have principles, Duclos? I am very pleased to observe this in you; for, as you appear to realize, any relief given to misfortune, any gesture that lightens the load of the distressed, is a real crime against the natural order. The inequality she has created in our persons proves that this discordance pleases Nature, since 'twas she established it, and since she wishes that it exist in fortunes as well as in bodies. And as the weak may always redress matters by means of theft, the strong are equally allowed to restore inequality, or protect it, by refusing to give aid to the wretched. The Universe would cease on the spot to subsist were there to be an exact similarity among all beings; 'tis of this disparity there is born the order which preserves, contains, directs everything. One must therefore take good care not to disturb it; moreover, in believing it a good thing I do for this miserable class of men, I do much ill to another, for indigence is the nursery to which the wealthy and powerful repair in their quest of the objects their lust or cruelty needs. I deprive the rich man of that branch of pleasure when, raising up the downtrodden, I inhibit this class from yielding to him. And thus my charities have done nothing but put one part of humankind very modestly in my debt and done prodigious harm to the other. Hence, I regard charity not only as something evil in itself, but, what is more, I consider it a crime against Nature who, having first made differences apparent to our eyes, has certainly never intended ideas of eliminating them to occupy our heads. And so, far from giving alms to the poor, consoling the widow, succoring the orphan, if it is according to Nature's true intentions I wish to act, not only do I leave these wretches in the state Nature put them into, but I even lend Nature a strong right arm and aid her by prolonging this state and vigorously opposing any efforts they make to change it, and to this end I believe any means may be allowed.
And you thought Senator Rand Paul was a brand new horror. In fact, his way of life goes back centuries.
It says a lot about Naked Lunch that I was able to endure—barely—the Marquis de Sade, albeit by skimming through a lot of hideous, repetitive passages that brought out my gag reflex, and still couldn’t cope with Burroughs. I normally like naughty, racy books where you get credit for reading great literature as a bonus; The LeClercq translation of Rabelais is, to me, one of the greatest things ever written. The 120 Days of Sodom is downright repulsive, and I invite anyone’s help who has read it, in explaining why something so full of over-the-top rape, torture and sex acts involving bodily wastes should be considered great literature.
Thank God, there are really only 30 days, and an author outline about the other three months. What happens is that four evil nobles—an aristocrat, a non-aristocratic official, a bishop and a banker—kidnap a lot of beautiful, vulnerable teenage girls and boys, and have them locked up in their impregnable, inaccessible castle far away from nowhere, along with some hideous, ugly maidservants to chastise them, and some hulking brutes with monstrous, gleefully-described weapons of war for their male appendages, hired expressly to torture the victims when the nobles are too fatigued to do it themselves, or when they just want to watch. Each day, the four jolly rogues dine on luxurious banquets and discuss philosophy, listen to a pornographic bondage tale told by one of the servants, and then have merry fun doing unspeakable things, described in detail, to their victims, whose agony is also described in detail. And then it happens again, and again, to the point where incidents merge with each other and I lost all interest, except for an eager wish that they all receive a visit from Lisbeth Salander.
I paid more attention to the introduction by Simone de Beauvoir that tried to explain why de Sade was a genius worthy of serious consideration. It didn’t convince me. Okay, so it reveals that the high and mighty who preach repentance and thrift and family values to the poor are more disgusting cretins than you ever imagined. I already suspected that, and didn’t really want to know the details. The story of the manuscript, as opposed to the story written on it, is more interesting—de Sade wrote it on several yards of toilet paper while he was imprisoned in the Bastille, going mad, and later died believing it had been destroyed. Only in the 20th century did a German—no doubt just following orders—had the thing published, and scholars were delighted at the find.
And yes, I think the thing has a right to exist, and yes I’d fight against the censorship of it, and yes there were some few parts that were perversely fascinating. However, I’m glad as can be to have done with it, and I doubt I’ll ever pick it up again.
Calvin Treasure Island: Peter Duck, by Arthur Ransome :
"Well, they took this square bag and lowered it down into their hole, and they scraped the sand and earth in again with their knives and their hands and stamped it down and smoothed it over till they was satisfied, and with that they slapped each other on the back and went walking off again among the trees.
"I was down out of my bedroom quick enough after that. You see, it come to me clear that pirates was humans, which crabs is not, and that them two had a ship somewheres, and that maybe I'd see Lowestoft again, which I'd given up all thought of. So I went legging it away through the trees after them two. And they went clean across the island, with me not so far from them among the trees, over the shoulder of the big hill there is there, and sure enough, looking down the other side, I see a smart brig lying to her anchor. So I hurried me on down on that side of the island, and there was a boat drawn up there by a stream I'd known nothing of, me not daring to go in among the trees before. And there was a fire burning, and half a dozen men singing and laughing round a keg they had there chocked up between a couple of stones. I had sense enough to slip away through the trees till I could come at the men from along the shore, and then I set up yelling and shouting till they see me."
"What happened then?", said Peggy.
"Shut up, you galoot," said Nancy. He's just going to tell you."
The third book in the Swallows and Amazons series is as delightful as the first two, but has a completely different flavor. While the first two have the Walker and Blackett kids having innocent real-life adventures in the safe Lake District of England, here they are sailing the Atlantic in a schooner, in search of treasure and pursued by pirates. With them are their friend Captain Flint from the first two tales, and a newcomer, the old sailor Peter Duck, who leads them to Crab Island to find whatever the pirates had buried so many years ago. In pursuit of them is a black ship straight out of "Pirate Jenny", bearing the sinister Black Jake and a mysterious red haired boy, who also seek the treasure of Crab Island.
As always, the main joy of the tale comes from the vivid imaginations of the children, and the actual instruction in seamanship they get along the way; however, it can be strange when there is actual danger. It's as if Calvin and his tiger actually went into space, still playing at being Spaceman Spiff, or if the Scooby gang ran into some criminals who didn't bother pretending to be ghosts, but went for the more traditional guns and clubs. Still, it's a decent merry adventure that captures the way children think and play, just like the earlier books. Not a downer.
It could have been even worse: Lucky, by Alice Sebold :
The struggle began.
He covered my mouth again. He kneed me in the back of my legs so that I would fall down. "You don't get it, bitch. I'll kill you. I've got a knife. I'll kill you." He released his grip on my mouth again and I fell, screaming, on the brick path. He straddled me and kicked me in the side. I made sounds, they were nothing, they were soft footfalls. They urged him on, they made him righteous. I scrambled on the path. I was wearing soft-soled moccasins with which I tried to land wild kicks. Everything missed or merely grazed him. I had never fought before, was chosen last in gym.
Somehow, I don't remember how, I made it back on my feet. I remember biting him, pushing him, I don't know what. Then I began to run. Like a giant who is all powerful, he reached out and grabbed the end of my long, brown hair. He yanked it hard and brought me down onto my knees in front of him. That was my first missed escape, the hair, the woman's long hair.
"You asked for it now," he said, and I began to beg.
The final downer of the month, the true story of Alice Sebold’s rape at Syracuse University and her struggles thereafter, is also potentially uplifting, both for survivors and as an etiquette/clue book for people like me who have no idea what it’s like to go through that kind of ordeal and who need to be told what to say and not say when it happens to someone they know.
Greg Madison, the assailant (I may start using "needs a visit from Lisbeth Salander" as a stock phrase for violent men), is just the start of the ordeal. There’s the passer-by who misinterprets what he sees and calls out, "Nail her, alright!" as he walks by. The police officer who refuses to believe she was a virgin. Her mother who tries to shelter her. Her father who can’t understand why she didn’t try to fight him off once he’d dropped the knife. Students who resent her for not leaving the university. Former friends who no longer want to be seen with her. Strangers who do want to be seen with her.. People who want her to symbolize their pet cause, or who are shocked by the sardonic humor she uses as a defense mechanism, or by her poem in which she fantasizes about killing Madison, or who think that strong women don’t get hurt. And then, the legal stuff. Through it all, Sebold tears, she bleeds, but she makes it. We know this because she wrote it down and told the world.
The edition I read had one of those reader’s guides with topics for book club discussion in the back. I’m glad; Lucky ought to be read and discussed by many people, including book clubs. It’s also (the reason I read it) on a suggested reading list at my daughter’s high school; on reflection, I consider that appropriate, too. I was very derisive toward Sebold’s other book, The Lovely Bones, when it came out. Knowing what I learned about Sebold here, I might give that one another look.