Here's what I read last month. Featuring Sarah Vowell as the comic muse and Mira Grant as the tragic muse, with comparisons of Ulysses as seen by Homer and Joyce, Christians and pagans as seen by Robin Lane Fox, a couple of decent mysteries, some Philip K. Dick and Jim Butcher, and the usual eclectic mix you've come to expect from me over the course of three generations...
The Can-D Man Can’t: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick
Barney, dutifully, said, “You insert one of the Great Books, for instance, Moby Dick, into the reservoid. Then you set the controls for Long or short. Then for Funny version or Same-As-Book or Sad version. Then you set the style indicator as to which classic Great artist you want the book animated like. Dali, Bacon, Picasso...the medium priced Great Books animator is set up to render in cartoon form the styles of a dozen system-famous artists; you specify which ones you want when you originally buy the thing. And there are options you can add later that can provide even more.”
“Terrific”, Norm Schein said, radiating enthusiasm. “So what you get is a whole evening’s entertainment, say, Sad version in the style of Jack Wright of like for instance Vanity Fair. Wow!”
Sighing, Fran said dreamily, “How it must have resounded in your soul, Barney, to have lived so recently on Terra. You seem to carry the vibrations with you still.”
“Heck, we get it all,” Norm said, “when we’re translated.” Impatiently he reaced for the undersize supply of Can-D. “Let’s start.” Taking his own slice, he chewed with vigor. “The Great Book I’m going to turn into a full length Funny cartoon version in the style of De Chirico will be—“ He pondered. “Um, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.”
“Very witty,” Helen Morris said, cuttingly. “I was going to suggest Augustine’s Confessions in the style of Lichtenstein—Funny, of course.
This is one of those books where, if you squint one way, it looks profound, and if you squint the other way, it looks like navel gazing. My first year philosophy class spent a lot of time on the question, what if drugs or machines gave you perfect pleasure all your life, where you could experience a virtual reality anything, and your body aged and died over the decades in a room, doing nothing at all in the real world. I chose to call the book profound and actually enjoy it on the author’s terms.
Because it’s Philip K. Dick, you know that we’re dangerously close to the end of the world, and that those people still alive are either miserable, or evil, or both. Global warming has made Earth uninhabitable without expensive body modifications or special cooling packs, and many people have gone to colonize Mars and other areas under barely tolerable conditions, taking escapist drugs to hide form the agony of existence. Meanwhile, Palmer Eldritch, a businessman who left the known solar system a long time ago, has come back changed somehow, and peddling a “new and better” drug that supposedly lets you make the world of your choosing and live forever in it.
Once people start taking the drug, the book gets surreal. People take it, have experiences, and it wears off and they come to, only they’re still under the influence of it, and weird things continue to happen, and Eldritch, not the user, seems to be controlling things. And so then it really wears off and they come to reality—but wait, it’s still going on...and then they come out of that, and it’s years in the future, and people are saying to the user, “OMG, you’re the one who [did that spoiler thing] all those years ago! Are you a ghost?”. Eventually, I found myself waiting for one of the characters to say, “I get it now—we’re in a book!”
There’s more to it, under the surrealism. There are themes about playing God, and chances to undo past mistakes, and precognition, and the whole concept of escaping into virtual reality to get away from an intolerable life. It packs almost too much, but not quite, into a small space, and the book ended at just about the point where my head was going to start swimming and make me lose the thread of it all. Definitely recommended, but you have to be in the right mood for it.
Use The Force, Shaun: Deadline, by Mira Grant
Deer can grow to more than forty pounds and meet the standards necessary for Kellis-Amberlee amplification. We can’t wipe them out wholesale—ecological concerns aside, they’re herbivores, which means their food supply hasn’t been compromised, and they breed like the world’s biggest rabbits. Periodically, somebody introduces legislation to firebomb the forests and take care of the deer problem once and for all, and promptly gets shouted down by everyone from the naturalists to the lumber industry. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. I just find it interesting that kids apparently used to cry when Bambi’s mother died. George and I held out breaths, and then cheered when she didn’t reanimate and try to eat her son.
I knew ahead of time that the second volume in Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy (see Feed, Bookpost, July 2010, and Countdown from last month) would have me impatiently longing for the final volume, which won’t be available until Spring of 2012, and I thought about waiting to read it for a year. The problem is, so many of my friends online and off are fans of the series that I was pretty sure I’d get spoiled if I didn’t read it quickly for myself.
And so, here we are, in a world in which bloggers and George Romero movie geeks have saved civilization from the zombie uprising and become the world’s trusted sources of news and information. The gang from Feed is in the middle of it, working on a story with the potential to change everything as thoroughly as “The Rising” did, all those years ago.
Except that it’s much more than that. I had goose pimples reading it, and not just because it was scary. I felt like I was experiencing literary history being made; it’s that good. Where books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Bookpost, December 2009) are camp disguised as literature, Deadline is awesome literature disguised as camp.
It spoke to me on at least four levels: as a zombie action-adventure tale, with breakneck chases and narrow escapes from the monsters trying to surround and eat Shaun and his team; as a political thriller in which the zombies and the virus that creates them are a clever stand-in for the terror weapons at the center of a shadowy power-grabbing plot; as a friendship novel exploring one of the deepest, most moving bonds between two people I’ve encountered in writing in a long time; and best of all; as an inspirational story emphasizing how fortunate we who live today on Earth are, and the joys we take for granted. When Shaun and George, who have never known any existence other than the security state of post-Rising America and the endless, endless blood tests at gunpoint, speculate about how wonderful it must have been back when people were able to just take a walk outside if they wanted to, I cried almost as much as I did when...when the spoilers happened. Which I won’t spoil here. Except to mention that I read a lot of this book while on the epilleptical at the gym (because, pre-rising, people are so fortunate that we can go exercise in public if we want to, without worrying that some overzealous person acting against doctors’ orders might keel over, get up again and eat us), and right about page 209 I let out an agonized moan loud enough to scare people in the gym who thought I might have hurt myself. And they were right.
In fact, there are only about four action-packed zombie sequences. The real meat of the book is what happens in between. Very highest recommendations.
Please Tell Me What I Am: The Bio-Logical Tracts, by Aristotle
Serpents, by the by, have an insatiable appetite for wine; consequently, at times men hunt for snakes by pouring wine into saucers and putting them into the interstices of walls, and the creatures are caught when inebriated. Serpents are carnivorous, and whenever they catch an animal they extract the juices and eject the creature whole. And, by the way, this is done with all other creatures of similar habits, as for instance the spider; only that he, the spider, sucks out the juices of its prey outside, and the serpent does so in its belly. The serpent takes any food presented to him, eats birds and animals, and swallows eggs entire. But after taking his prey he stretches himself until he stands straight out to the very tip, and then he contracts and squeezes himself into little compass, so that the swallowed mass may pass down his outstretched body; and this action on his part is due to the tenuity and length of his gullet. Spiders and snakes can both go without food for a long time; and this remark may be verified by observation and specimens kept alive in the shops of the apothecaries.
This set of centuries-dated biological tracts (On the History, Parts, Motion, Gait and Generation of Animals) is even longer than the Logical tracts/Organon (see last month’s Bookpost), and less relevant today. Aristotle went about as far as he could go observing animal parts with the naked eye, filtered through the prejudices of the day. His guesses, which range from educated to wild, on such things as blood and semen, viewed by people like us, who learned about red and white blood cells and sperm in our fourth grade classes, are merely amusing.
“History” and “Parts” are attempts to classify the Animal Kingdom and various tissues and organs into an ordered whole. “Motion” is a strange digression on Aristotle’s concept of the “unmoved mover” and the ultimate source of animal motion, and “Gait” is about actual movement. Most recommended is “Generation”, which is about reproduction and provides the most insight into Aristotle’s reasoning without the use of the scientific method as we know it, and also contains his most hilarious mistakes and his most offensive whoppers (e.g., his assumptions that the male is naturally the superior gender and the sole cause of life).
Only Pumpkin Pies Were Burning: Pagans and Christians, by Robin Lane Fox
In the second and third centuries the pagan cities enjoyed all the forms of supernatural advice which historians of early modern Europe collect and analyze in later Christian contexts. There was only one exception: witchcraft. Pagan society knew no "Devil" with whom individuals could make a pact, and thus no torture and persecutions of "false" prophets and prophetesses. These features were a consequence of Christianity.
This one isn’t for everybody. It has nearly 700 pages of dry document sifting about the reasons why Christianity spread like a plague across the Roman Empire in the century or so before Constantine. The short version is that the dominant Pagan religion had become aristocratic, and was enriching itself at the expense of peasants while displaying a level of indolence and corruption that did not inspire public confidence. A millennium later, the dominant Catholic religion would bring on the Protestant Reformation the same way, while in modern times, the dominant evangelical Protestants doing the same thing inspire...more fervent worship by their congregations. What is wrong with the world today?
Additionally, in those days there were supposedly miracles like the spontaneous healing of the sick and creation of food. Nowadays we get crazy PTS ladies claiming to see Jesus’ face on pieces of toast. But mostly, it comes down to the sudden conversion of Constantine. According to Fox, the Pagans were still doing great and existed in far greater numbers right up unto Constantine’s conversion; after that, we sank into the Dark Ages, as Christianity went from “We have no control and therefore ask for tolerance—demand, really, as it’s simple fairness, after all” to “Now we are in charge and will kill all of you as heretics who refuse to submit to our Kingdom”. The moral is: separation of church and state is a very, very good idea.
Recommended to people very interested in the subject matter. I much preferred Gibbon’s explanations, both for readability and for making sense.
A Daydream Believer...: Ulysses, by James Joyce
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a good sized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.
I started Ulysses at least three times and stopped, failing to understand what was going on. I eventually resorted to a reader’s guide (more like a hint manual: Hide your fake ID in your hat. Take the potato but leave the latchkey behind. Buy the lemon soap and the racy novel, and make sure you keep transferring the soap until it’s been through all your pockets...), I think it was called “The Bloomsday Book”. That got me through all the way on the fourth try, and now I pick it up every few years and find it fascinating in a high-functioning autistic sort of way.
There are 18 separate episodes, each with its own themes and structure, and all of them about a day in the life of two ordinary guys who wander Dublin, crossing paths now and then, and eventually find one another. That part is just details; the real adventure is the wordplay and other games. In addition to the long stream-of-consciousness monologues, there’s the chapter interspersed with newspaper headlines and rhetorical devices, the chapter composed entirely of questions and answers, the chapter written as a play, the chapter of vignettes about various characters where Joyce cuts and pastes sentences from some characters’ sections into others; the episode about sounds, the one that begins in medieval writing style and evolves into modern English, and (my favorite, from which the quote above comes) the pub where everyday drinking and arguing is portrayed as a larger-than-life epic. Different chapters have themes based on various parts of the body and various scholarly disciplines. And of course, there are the parallels with Homer’s Odyssey (really, those are only about as close to the original as the ones in O Brother Where Art Thou; as far as I’m concerned, if you know just a little about Ulysses without having read it, the part you know about isn’t the important part).
Ulysses is a very weird book, and very hard to get into, but the rewards are worth the trouble. It’s been on many banned lists, and was the subject of a famous Supreme Court case over attempts to censor it, as somewhere in it is a reference to just about every bodily function that polite people aren’t supposed to talk about. And yet, it’s too literary to be vulgar. I recommend it highly.
...and a Homecoming King: The Odyssey, by Homer
And came he back from pasture, late in the day,
herding his flocks home, and lugging a huge load
of good dry logs to fuel his fire at supper.
He flung them down in the cave--a jolting crash--
We scuttled in panic into the deepest dark recess.
And next, he drove his sleek flocks into the open vault
All he'd milk at least, but he left the males outside,
Rams and billy goats out in the high-walled yard.
Then, to close his door he hoisted overhead
A tremendous, massive slab--
No twenty two wagons, rugged and four-wheeled,
Could budge that boulder off the ground, I tell you,
Such an immense stone the monster wedged to block his cave!
The above, the first appearance of the Cyclops, is what Joyce directly paralleled in his description of The Citizen from Ulysses. Which do you find the most compelling? Yeah, me too.
Since I've been re-reading a lot of the ancient Greek classics, as well as Ulysses in honor of Bloomsday, it made sense to pull out the Odyssey, one of the first existing pieces of western literature and far superior to the Iliad. I first encountered it in Freshman humanities class, where I wrote a paper on it having blown off reading anything but the table of contents (it was fortunately one of those expanded contents that said, e.g., "BOOK XI--In which Odysseus goes to Hades and meets the shades of his mother, and blind prophet Tiresias, who warns him of the perils that lie ahead..."). Not only did I get an A on the paper, but the prof read bits of it out loud to the class as an example to others. I never got that kind of praise when I actually did the work. There's a lesson in there someplace...
This time around, I read the Robert Fagles translation, which is very lively and compelling read, and which makes the characters seem human. I'd always had a problem with Odysseus, in that he is continually described as the trickster archetype, the little guy who succeeds by his wits instead of brute force, but then is portrayed sometimes as a great hulking man-god who impresses everyone with his rippling physique, even when disguised as a beggar, and whose bow no mortal is strong enough to pull. No matter how much suffering he endures, it's been hard for me to feel much sympathy for him because he's so fucking perfect. His estate is so vast that an army of suitors wastes it for three years without apparently making a dent in it, and his swineherd lives in a more spacious house than most middle class people own in America today. Somehow in the Fagles translation, none of that really matters. Neither does the fact that the whole part everyone thinks of when they think of "The Odyssey"--the journey from Troy to Calypso's island, with the lotus eaters, Lestrygonians, cyclops, Circe, the journey to Hades, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens and Apollo's cattle--are compressed into just four chapters of a 24-chapter epic, with about half the book devoted to wailing and gnashing of teeth over repeated descriptions of the suitors gorging themselves on Ithaca Manor. This may have been the first time I really paid attention to that dead space, Fagles having actually made it seem not to be repetitive.
Everyone should at least read it once, and the Fagles translation is the best version I've found to date.
Leader of the Pack: Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher
I have what might be considered a very out-of-date and chauvinist attitude about women. I like to treat women like ladies. I like to open doors for them, pay for the meal when I’m on a date, bring flowers, draw out their seat for them—all that sort of thing. I guess I could call it an attitude of chivalry, if I thought more of myself. Whatever you called it, Murphy was a lady in distress. And since I had put her there, it only seemed right that I should get her out of trouble, too.
That wasn’t the only reason I wanted to stop the killings. Seeing Spike torn up like that had scared the hell out of me. I was still shaking a little, a pure and primitive reaction to a very primal fear. I did not want to get eaten by an animal, chewed up by something with a lot of sharp teeth. The very thought of that made me curl up on my car’s seat and hug my knees to my chest, an awkward position considering my height and the comparatively cramped confines of the Beetle.
In the second installment in the “Dresden Files” series, Chicago’s almost-tough consulting wizard races with the moon cycle to stop one or more werewolves before more victims get slaughtered. He endures a string of spectacular fails, and manages to defeat the villain and avoid getting chomped, as before, with a lot of luck and assistance.
Dresden is brain candy, not great literature. I’m intrigued enough to stay with the series because I’m hoping the character grows over time. As I noticed with volume one, Storm Front, all of Dresden’s stats are in reckless courage and magic, and there are enough regulations and energy limits on the magic that he can’t just cast spells out of every situation; in fact, he’s tapped out for most of the book, and without the muscle, the intelligence, the wisdom or the charisma to find other ways out of his problems, the way other detectives do.
On one of my forums last month, I had a pie fight over Storm Front with people alleging that Butcher was (gasp) sexist! I suppose that, if you hate Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald and all the other lone male sleuths in detective fiction who spend a lot of their adventures philosophizing from a place of detached superiority while the female characters mostly need rescuing or are evil, you won't like this series. If you hate the kind of 40 year old Virgin type movies where some doofus is finally, finally helped to get a clue and all the women he's mistreated throughout the movie immediately jump for joy and want to marry him, you won't like this series. Because, at least here in the first couple of books, Dresden is that kind of doofus. He has lousy dating skills. He withholds information from women on the theory that they Can't Handle The Truth, with the result that they don't know what to do when danger arrives, and good people get hurt and killed.
And his code of honor is stupid. When the local chaotic-good mobster trope (i.e., the violent criminal with some semblance of a code of honor) wants to establish a diplomatic understanding with Dresden, the wizard not only turns him down but goes out of his way to be insulting. Compare this with Spenser, who opposes organized crime when his cases require it, but who knows enough not to rock the boat and cultivates a working relationship with just about every crime leader in Boston, running the full spectrum of Bad. Dresden will learn diplomacy over time, or the series will be a short one.
All of this is a far cry from the author sharing in the character's bad qualities. I see no implication that Dresden's doofus behavior is supposed to be praiseworthy; in fact, the consequences he suffers seem to indicate that Butcher knows Dresden is wrong, and (hopefully) plans to make the character grow over time. I'm still intrigued. Your mileage may vary.
As Seen on TV: Naked Heat, by “Richard Castle”
He may have been in the same place, because in some unspoken ballet of synchronization, the two leaned forward at the same instant, drawn to each other by a tender kiss. When they parted, they smiled again and just held each other, jaws resting on opposing shoulders, their chests slowly rising and falling as one.
“And so you know, Rook, I’m sorry too. About this afternoon in the car, being so rough on you.”
A full minute passed and he said, “And so you know? I’m good with rough.”
Nikki drew back from him and gave him a sly look. “Oh, are you?” She reached down and took him in her hand. “How rough?”
He cupped a palm behind her head, lacing his long fingers through her hair. “Wanna find out?”
She gave him a squeeze that made him gasp and said, “You’re on.”
And then she gasped as he gathered her up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom. Halfway down the hall, she bit his ear and whispered, “My safe word is “pineapples.”
Unless you’ve been watching the Castle TV series, this is an average-to-good police mystery. If you have been seeing it, it’s gorram hilarious. The show has some amazing writers and an excellent cast, and the chemistry between the main actors is wonderful to behold.
The novel isn’t quite a written episode of Castle with the names changed to Jameson Rook and Nikki Heat, the characters in the book about Beckett that Castle writes in the series. It’s better than that...it’s a Castle episode as Rick Castle himself would have written it, where Rook and Heat are friggling like bunnies and there’s no mother and daughter in the apartment to walk in on intimate moments.
Also, Rook is a famous journalist, not a novelist, which gives the writers a chance to explore how it might affect the series if, instead of Nikki Heat novels, the Beckett character was written up in the press by her intermittently welcome ride-along. It gets interesting. The mystery part, not so much; it matches one of the frequently used formulaic plots from the series. I singled out as “most likely suspect” the actual killer the first time that character appeared, and though the plot shifts back and forth several times, I was pretty much able to predict most of the twists before they happened. Recommended anyway, for the fun of the chase.
Towards a Socialist America: The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons of marked individuality—crooked sticks, as some of us might be called—are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a faggot. But, so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near, without finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with, in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not greatly care—at least, I never did—for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced. My hope was, that between theory and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out, and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise.
I was assigned this one via an online book club that chooses books from a long list of "great fiction". If the list has a flaw, it is that it tends toward author worship, so that any author who wrote a masterpiece is represented on the list by every novel that author ever wrote. This book is a case in point. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and I Know What You Did Last Summer The Scarlet Letter are deservedly widely read. The Blithedale Romance is one few people these days have even heard of and, after reading it, I have a pretty good idea why not.
The socialist farming community of Blithedale is apparently a stand-in for Brook Farm, an actual experimental utopia formed in Massachusetts in the 19th Century. Among its inhabitants are Miles (the poetic narrator), Hollingsworth (the neurotic, overbearing one who everyone has to be nice to because he's funding it all), Zenobia (the charismatic reformer) and Priscilla (the waif), who take turns forming assorted alliances and hostilities. Long, long segments are devoted to Miles's psychological misgivings and descriptions of allegorical natural formations in the wilderness surrounding the community. Only three or four real plot developments happen, and when a Big Reveal came, I found myself wondering what all the fuss was about.
According to the introduction, Henry James really enjoyed this book, maybe so much so that he adopted the style of putting so much effort into telling the reader who people are that he runs out of space tohave them actually do anything. The Blithedale Romance is just 240 pages long, and by the time I started to find the characters interesting, the story was over. If you like most Henry James, this book might be for you. If you prefer The Scarlet Letter, not so much.
A Nice Hawaiian Punch: Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell
I’m hard pressed to find a more momentous season in the history of Hawaii than the autumn of 1819. Kealakekua Bay—the already significant Big Island cove where Captain Cook died and Henry Obookiah lit out for America—welcomed the first two New England whaling ships on September 29. Three weeks later, the first missionaries departed Boston on the Thaddeus. Two weeks after that the eating kapus came to an abrupt end.
Thus within five weeks during the presidency of James Monroe, Hawaii’s stormy course toward becoming the fiftieth state was charted. The Hawaiian people, with their ancient balance between spiritual beliefs and earthly pleasure, were suddenly freed of or in need of an official religion, depending on one’s point of view, and about to entertain swarms of haole gate-crashers representing opposing sides of America’s schizophrenic divide—Bible-thumping prudes and sailors on leave. Imagine if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted the Values Voter Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously...for forty years. As Hiram Bingham put it dryly, “It has been said that the interests of this mission, and the interests of commerce, were so diverse, or opposite, that they could not flourish together.”
I’m a major fan of Sarah Vowell. I read many historians who can educate, even entertain, but Vowell is the only one who makes the trip seem hip and cool. Oh all right, Vowell and I.F. Stone. I happily got on the library’s wait-list for Unfamiliar Fishes as soon as I learned it had been published, and picked it up eagerly, wanting Vowell’s comic muse to balance out the tragedy of Mira Grant.
That was a mistake. The delightful bon mots and pop culture references I’m used to were few and far between this time around (though there were still some to be found), and the story she has to tell is a bitter pill to swallow without a lot of sugar coating. Unfamiliar Fishes is pretty much the story of how white people from the United States came to the Island Paradise of Hawaii, which had been getting along just fine on the other side of the world from Western Syphillization, and—first with missionaries, then with capitalists and other fortune hunters, and finally with soldier with guns—took it all for their property. As usual.
Vowell may be too pissed off to make many jokes here: The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: This is not who we are. But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide’s eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are.
Even so, what happened to Hawaii in the 19th century is something all Americans should know about and ponder, and no source is going to make it more palatable than Vowell does. Highly recommended.