What I read last month. Still delving into the 15th and 16th Centuries...
Modern:
Parasite, by Mira Grant
The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence
Hard Magic and Spellbound, by Larry Correia
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner
Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham
Autobiographies, by William Butler Yeats
Breakfast of Champions (or, Goodbye Blue Monday), by Kurt Vonnegut
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
Utopia, by Sir Thomas More
The Book of the Courtier, by Baldasaar Castiglione
Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais, translated by Jacques leClercq
And the usual smattering of period mystery novels. Enjoy!
Walk Without Rhythm: Parasite, by Mira Grant
The early success of the symbogen intestinal bodyguard(TM) line of products can be partially ascribed to canny advertising. Their marketing department hired an actress best known for her work in a series of horror movies featuring a monster modeled off a species of parasitic wasp. Her first infomercial began with her in her original costume smiling her A-list smile and saying, "I know a bad parasite when I see one. Now it's time for you to learn about a good parasite--one that wants to help you, not hurt you."
While SymboGen would quickly move away from use of the word "parasite" in advertising material, the early groundwork had been laid, and people were beginning to trust the concept behind the Intestinal Bodyguard(TM). After that, all that remained was to sell the idea to the world.
Mira Grant is a pen name of Seanan McGuire, under which she wrote what I consider the best zombie story I've seen to date, the Newsflesh trilogy. This new book being a horror novel about tapeworms, and McGuire being an expert in describing parasitology in squicky detail, I might have skipped it but for its Hugo nomination, gross parasite stories not being my thing. But, yes I'm glad I read it.
Turns out, it's more or less another kind of zombie story. In the world of Parasite, most of the world's population have voluntarily had themselves implanted with "benevolent" genetically modified tapeworms that boost the immune system, secrete prescription drugs and make steak taste better. Except that, now, wouldn't you know it, the side effects are manifesting to a degree that even the big powerful SymboGen corporation can't quite sweep under the rug. People are randomly assuming vacant stares, shambling, and attacking others. Enter Sally Mitchell, a revived coma patient with no memory of anything before the car crash, who just happens to have friends and relations with convenient backgrounds in government, SymboGen and parasitology, and who can't figure out why the infected have a tendency to call to her by name.
I liked the general environment of the book. Even when scientists are speaking in technical jargon, there was a sense that these people were "my people". The parasitology is more interesting than gross (to me, anyhow; your mileage may vary), and I deduced from the cover that this is number one of a planned six volume series. I expect I'll be reading the others, Hugo nominated or not. It's an excellent book, but not quite as thrilling as Newsflesh so far, or as surprising. I'd pretty much assumed the facts of the "big reveal" less than 50 pages into a 500 page book. Highly recommended.
All The Things: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
HOW TO PASS JUDGMENT ON A PAINTER'S WORK: First you should consider the figures whether they have the relief which their position requires, and the light that illuminates them, so that the shadows may not be the same at the extremities of the composition as in the centre, because it is one thing for a figure to be surrounded by shadows only on one side. Those figures are surrounded by shadows which are towards the centre of the composition, because they are shaded by the dark figures interposed between them and the light; and those are shaded on one side only which are interposed between the light and the main group, for where they do not face the light they face the group, and there they reproduce the darkness cast by this group, and where they do not face the group they face the brightness of the light, and there they reproduce its radiance. Secondly, you should consider whether the distribution or arrangement of the figures is devised in agreement with the conditions you desire the action to represent. Thirdly, whether the figures are actively engaged on their purpose.
Da Vinci was maybe the ultimate "Rennaisance Man" who did everything, as famous for painting the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper as for his myriad inventions and science experiments. One thing he was not, however, was a writer. His notebooks, which I've been grazing over for the past five months, are most interesting as an insight into the mind of a disorganized creative genius, and for some individual nuggets that have been borne out by subsequent science. Taken as a whole or as a "great work", they're a bit of a mess, even after centuries of editors have compiled them into the best possible order.
The notebooks bring to mind a great thinker who spent his life jotting down every thought he wished to remember, including many that came to him in the night and were scribbled while half-asleep in bed. While similar Great Journals full of disjointed thoughts exist (Marcus Aurelius, Pascal), they tend to be philosophical thoughts, often with a common theme. Da Vinci wrote about everything under the sun, and he wrote them as margin notes to drawings and sketches, and he frequently didn't finish his train of thought.
There are some philosophical maxims, and volumes on hydraulics, on flight, on flying machines, on war machines, on medicine and botany, on physics, motion and force, on painting--faces, landscapes, perspective--on scuplture, on prophecies, on weather. Editors have arranged the writings by subject, but the notes themselves could be years apart, and the effect is disjointed, especially as so many of the notes refer to illustrative drawings and sketches, which are included in my edition only as separate sections of glossy pages, not next to the entries themselves, and not many of them. You can see in some of the drawings, the original notes in the margins. They were meant for Da Vinci's own use in his work, not for publication.
In spite of the inherent flaws, the passion and thirst for knowledge that come out are compelling, as are the scientific insights that were not to be verified for centuries. Not really worth reading to the end, at least not all at once, but definitely worth a look, and worth grazing over a period of months or years.
"Become who you are: The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence
"You know how some have the gift of the second sight? Well, it's the gift of the garbage-telling which I have myself, now. Watch this...Now, you see these bones here, and you know what they mean? They mean simon Pearl the lawyer's got the money for steak. yep, not so often, maybe, but one day a week. So although he's letting on he's as hard up as the next--he ain't, no he ain't, though it's troubling him too. By their Christly bloody garbage shall ye know them in their glory, is what I'm saying to you, every mother's son. And these chicken bones right here now, they'll be birds which have been given to Doc MacLeod for services he's rendered to some farmer who couldn't pay a bill if his life depended on it so he takes it out in poultry, well it's better than baloney which is what a jesus lot of us gets served up on the table. And the huge amount of apple peels from the Reverend George McKee, now, means he gets a crate of apples from his Okanagan sister so they eat a lot of applesauce each summer at the manse, there, but they don't put in a garden or they'd use the peels for compost, so the preacher really means it when he says the Lord provides.
You'd think I'd go straight for this kind of book, that incorporates Celtic and Native American myths and folk songs into a modern novel of self-discovery. Well....kind of.
The Diviners is the story of Morag, a woman of Scots ancestry living in rural Manitoba (as opposed to, I guess, urban Manitoba), from her orphaned, tomboyish, alienated childhood to her pregnancy by a Metis man, her development as a writer more respected in far-away places than in her small town, and her relationship with her daughter and the way history repeats itself or not. Time and again the protagonist and the people in her life turn to old ballads for spiritual sustenance and meaning.
I found the subject matter wonderful and the writing style hard to follow. The book begins in "the present" with the adult Morag thinking back on life, and so the story jumps back and forth in time, and eventually ends without much in the way of climax or resolution. Still intriguing, though.
Potboiler calling the kettle black: Hard Magic and Spellbound, by Larry Correia
So he wasn't going to give these Okies shit. They weren't even Catholic. They should have to work like he did. He watched the Okie father talking to his son as his son patiently explained for the hundredth time that there wasn't any work, and that they needed to head toward Los Banos or maybe Chowchilla, not that they were going to work anyway when they could just break into his milk barn and steal his tools to sell for rotgut moonshine again. His grandkids were poking their heads around the house, checking out the Model T, but he'd warned them enough times about the dangers of outsiders, and they stayed safely away. He wasn't about to have his family corrupted from their good Catholic work ethic by being exposed to bums.
Larry Correia strikes me as the kind of guy who would deliberately eat a large helping of beans and cabbage a few hours before going to services at a church he didn't approve of, for the pleasure of farting up the place for a captive audience. Hard Magic and Spellbound are the first two books in a trilogy, the third volume of which is up for a Hugo Award this year because Correia decided to market himself as the Conservative candidate for the award and told a bunch of right-wing folks that the Hugos were a bastion of politically correct thought police and it would be fun to piss them off by voting up his book. Having achieved ballot status on the basis of politics, he now is pointing the Middle Finger of Scorn at other people who want to downvote his book on the basis of his politics.
Seems to me, you can't have it both ways. I'm willing to overlook Woody Allen's, um, personal scandals when enjoying his movies, because some of them are still good whatever you think of the person. Ditto for Orson Scott Card and the Alvin Maker books. However, if Woody Allen went around campaigning for some film award on the basis of his scandals--"Vote for me to show your support for rape and give the finger to those stodgy old anti-rape people!", it would be kinda hard to show support for that, no matter how awesome Annie Hall might be.
Nevertheless, I resolved to be fair and find out for myself whether the books are, indeed, awesome. Unfortunately, the quoted part above is on page two of book one, and is from the perspective of someone who's supposed to be a good guy. Correia opens the trilogy by taking a long piss on the Joad family because he can, which would have lost me had I known nothing about him before I started the book. And there are digs like that all the way through. Anarchist activists are framed for an act of terrorism, but everyone knows they wouldn't have had the brains to pull off successful terrorism. The first volume's Big Bad is a Japanese heavy who is called "The Chairman" so that he can be both Communist and the correct WWII villain. FDR is wrong about everything, because liberalism. And so on.
That said, Correia is not a hack, and it is possible for people in a different frame of mind from mine to enjoy his books without being political partisans, or perhaps in spite of it. He's not a hack because he writes B-grade style on purpose, Mickey Spillane to Jim Butcher's Robert B. Parker and Seanan McGuire's Sue Grafton. (Who is Chandler in that analogy? Maybe Charles DeLint?). The Grimnoire books are to be read when you're in the mood for entertaining mental junk food full of karate fights, gun porn, explosions, and characters played by Arnold Schwarzenegger types who do things like stab bad guys with icicles while saying "Ice to meet you."
The Grimnoir world takes tropes from pulp detective stories, Heroes, the X-Men, and cheap martial arts movies. Characters have assorted superpowers which get their energy from some sort of Deus Ex Machina which is in turn hunted by a different, evil Deus Ex Machina that the protagonists will fight in the final volume. Those with the superpowers are, of course, misunderstood and feared by the public, harassed by the government, blamed for assassinations and other terrorist turmoil, and divided into criminals and good guys, with the bystanders forced to take sides, and the real protagonists being rogues who don't trust anybody or anything except their own moral compasses. Karate fights, gun porn, explosions and Schwarzenegger caricatures ensue. And tropes. I could go on and on about the hackneyed tropes, but again, they're done on purpose with a sense of irony, because Correia is drawing on the pulpy hard-boiled tales from which the cliches came from in the first place. You know what you're getting, and if you're in the mood for it, here it is.
Springtime for Vito: The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Hagen understood that the policeman believes in law and order in a curiously innocent way. He believed in it more than does the public he serves. Law and order is, after all, the magic from which he derives his power, individual power which he cherishes as nearly all men cherish individual power. And yet there is always the smoldering resentment against the public he serves. They are at the same time his ward and his prey. As wards they are ungrateful, abusive and demanding. As prey they are slippery and dangerous, full of guile. as soon as one is in the policeman's clutches the mechanism of the society the policeman defends marshals all its resources to cheat him of his prize. The fix is put in by politicians. Judges give lenient suspended sentences to the worst hoodlums. governors of the States and the President of the United States himself give full pardons, assuming that respected lawyers have not already won his acquittal. After a time the cop learns. Why should he not collect the fees these hoodlums are paying? He needs it more. His children, why should they not go to college? Why shouldn't he himself get the sun with a winter vacation in Florida? After all, he risks his life and that is no joke.
Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of The Godfather regularly gets high positions on lists of the greatest movies ever made, and rightly so. I respected Coppola's masterpiece the first time I saw it, and I respect it all the more now that I've seen the raw material he had to work with. Puzo's book sucks!
I can't help feeling a little sorry for Puzo. He's in the unique position of having his own original words come across as hackneyed cliches because the blockbuster media adaptation made better use of them, and inspired further use of them in a whole genre of derivative Organized Crime Family movies and TV shows. Puzo's primary purpose was to explain mafia culture and ethics as he understood them to a world that, in 1969, was unfamiliar with it but which now has largely accepted the stereotype as thoroughly as they've accepted the stock Hollywood sitcom family, police partnership and wartime army platoon. Puzo explains 'the code' in painstaking detail when we already know it.
Puzo can't do what Coppola and his all-star cast do. His antihero Don Vito Corleone jarringly wavers between being a larger-than-life force of nature who dominates all around him and being a feeble old man with multiple crippling physical and psychological wounds. His elder son is such an uncontrollable rage machine that it is astonishing that any capable family would trust him with real power, and the younger son's transformation from appalled distance from the family's business to ruthless head of the clan is without a satisfying rational basis. We're just supposed to accept that it happens because it's a Sicilian thing, it's what they do. Possibly the real central character is Tom Hagen, the family's "director of operations", who is most compelling because he plays his cards close, lets nothing show, and therefore succeeds as an enigma. Puzo might have done better to write the Corleones in the same style, instead of with the ham-fisted prose purporting to describe their states of mind. Coppola's most famous scenes--the horse head "offer he can't refuse", the tollbooth shooting, the massacre of the five families--are described with none of the vividness you'd expect, and Puzo's constant attempts to play with time--surprising the reader with the news of a major character's death, for example, and then going back and describing the events leading up to that death--are a technique that Coppola rightly discarded and that Quentin Tarantino studied much later as examples of what not to do.
Finally, Puzo invests a lot of energy (distracting from the action plot to do so) in arguing the thesis that Don Corleone is a good guy. He presents the stereotypical ironic politeness with which mafia hoods threaten their victims as if it were actual politeness and concern. Nothing to be afraid of; the Don just wants to make friends, and friends do one another favors. No hard feelings if you turn him down, oh no, no. He'll just send a few of the boys to persuade you of the true wisdom of his position, is all. The Don cares about you. He takes care of his own. He makes the trains run on time, and his use of force is ethically no different from what any government does. Of course. And if you don't see it that way, why you just don't understand Sicilians, which is just fine. Maybe a couple of big guys will be along to help you understand. I'm not sure whether Puzo really believed that philosophy, or if he represented it as such out of fear that he might faces some Sicilian displeasure if he represented otherwise. Either way, the digressions about Vito's avuncular kindness made my skin crawl.
See the movie; ignore the book.
The Renaissance Murders: Poison for the Prince, by Elizabeth Eyre; The Hunter's Tale, The Widow's Tale, The Sempter's Tale, by Margaret Frazer; The Merchant of Death, by C.L. Grace; The Holy Innocents, by Kate Sedley
"Just mind you don't go killing him. You'd be caught for it and hanged and he'd rejoice from the grave to know that he'd brought you down. You don't want to make him happy, do you?"
"Right. I can see myself with the noose around my neck and him sniggering up at me from Hell. damn. I'll have to let him live."
"Besidaes that, if you killed him, you'd go to Hell for it, and have to spend eternity with him."
"Then he's surely safe from me! I'm not about to risk that!"
"Unless he's left money in his will for masses enough to send him to Heaven!"
"Ha! There aren't enough priests in the world to say that many masses before Judgment Day."
"Of course, after you killed him, you could repent of it, and then if you were hanged, you'd save your own soul and be safe in Heaven, leaving him to Hell on his own."
"God forgive me if I'm ever that much of a hypocrite!"
--from The Hunter's Tale
"MICHELOTTO!" It was a war cry this time. Fracassa drew his sword in one splendid movement of force, the blade swinging in a great arc toward the shaven head. The man from France turned at the same moment as the blade lodged with a vibrating thud deep in the low beam of the gallery. He dropped on one knee and with an iron candlestick he had just acquired he scythed at Fracassa who, gripping the hilt of his sword, jerked up his legs in frantic recoil and hung like a spider over the hurly-burly below. The man from France moved on, to help Rosaria's guard to throw out an immense black-bearded brawler, one who had felled two men with a single blow of a fist that was a club in itself.
--from Poison for the Prince
Dame Claire was openly furious. "Her wrists. She's been tied with a rope and must have fought it. Her wrists are rubbed raw. They've even bled. There are new sores on top of some several days old and no one has done anything for any of them. It's a wonder they haven't festered. I think she was gagged, too. There are sores at the corners of her mouth. Didn't you see? She must have fought the gag, too. I'm going for water to clean them, and an ointment."
--from The Widow's Tale
"Last night, the Wicker Man, that spacious, comfortable place just past the castle near Worthingate, had all its rooms taken up by travelers trapped by the inclement weather. Amongst these was a royal tax collector, Sir Reginald Erpingham." Luberon sighed, picked up the cup, drained it and got to his feet. "To cut a long story short, Mistress, this morning Erpingham was found dead in his bed."
"And the cause?"
Luberon sagged into his cloak. "Dead as a nail, the mean hearted bastard." He smiled apologetically at Kathryn. "I am sorry, Mistress, but he was. Erpingham won't be missed, but the hundreds of pounds sterling in royal taxes he was carrying will be."
--from The Merchant of Death
I glanced at Thomas Cozin, standing at his brother's side, the two grey figures so alike that it was as though I had drunk too much ale and was seeing double. At present, their faces were expressionless, although there was, perhaps, just the tiniest flicker of worry in Thomas's eyes. He did not have a lawyer's ability to hide his emotions completely. Was I imagining things? After all, what had they offered me but a comfortable lodging for the night? It would be foolish to refuse, even though I did not believe for a second that the outlaws would risk coming into the town. Such an occurrence had reality only in the fevered imagination of the townspeople.
"Very well," I said. "I accept. And thank you."
--from The Holy Innocents
"Those marks," Brother Michael interrupted. "The Hebrew letters gashed into his flesh. Who else but a Jew would make them? Why else would they be made except for a Jew's purpose? This was no plain killing. This was done by Jews! It was one of their ritual murders!"
"Those marks," Father Tomas said, his voice small, as if he would smother the words as he said them, "are not Hebrew. They are meant to look so, but they are not."
"You'd know Hebrew to see it?" Brother Michael challenged with an edge of scorn.
Gripping the cross hanging on his breast with a trembling hand, Father Tomas met the friar's stare with his own straight look. "I would know."
Brother Michael's scorn went into something sharper. "How?"
Afraid though Father Tomas openly was, he lifted his head, bracing for an attack he knew would come, and said, "Because I saw my grandfather's Jewish books when I was young."
--from The Sempter's Tale
Elizabeth Eyre is still the only historical mystery writer I know of who writes about the Italian Renaissance, and so I keep reading them, even though they have confusing plots full of too many interchangeable characters and too many coincidences. They do provide lively supplemental enrichment about the era I'm studying, in a more readable format than, say, Guicciardini. Poison for the Prince has the adventurer Sigismondo assigned to protect a Prince with too many enemies, in a situation in which other people keep dying of poison seemingly intended for the Prince. In this genre, that's generally a good sign that the "miraculously surviving intended victim" is the real killer, but you never know...
The Hunter's Tale is maybe the best in the Sister Frevisse series so far, moving away from the distant machinations of the War of the Roses and focusing entirely on one dysfunctional family in a remote estate in a traditional mystery with a perversely uplifting ending. the family patriarch, who has managed to unite the whole family against him, is murdered during a hunting expedition, to the joy of family and tenants alike; leaves a will full of nasty, divisive conditions as a final act of cruelty, bitter quarrels and another death ensue, and Frevisse shows up to open the family closets looking for bones and finding them. I found it very satisfying. The Widow's Tale is good in a different way, not being much of a mystery but being an excellent adventure in which the nuns foil a wicked male cousin's plot to kidnap a widow and her two daughters and cheat them of their inheritance. In addition to a frightening reminder of the appalling status of women in earlier ages, the story shed light on the machinations of Somerset, Suffolk and York around Henry VI as the Hundred Years War--and England's aspirations for a permanent foothold in continental Europe--end, and the War of the Roses commences. The Sempter's Tale brings us to the events from Act 4 of Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 2 (Jack Cade's rebellion and the murder of the Duke of Suffolk) in a tale of period antisemitism, star-crossed lovers and the surreptitious exchange of gold.
The Merchant of Death is the third in CL Grace's dr. Kathryn Swinbrooke series still set in Edward IV's reign. and still featuring a bunch of men at arms and other thickheaded men outraged that a 9gasp) female is allowed to practice medicine and ask a bunch of nosy questions about suspicious deaths (you'd think by book three they'd be used to it). Her sidekick Colum Murtagh is starting to remind me of George R. R. Martin's Sandor The Hound. This installment has another set of interlocking puzzles, this time involving the unlamented murder of a mean tax collector, and the slaying of three people with arrows, to which a master bowman and husband of one of the victims openly confesses to, on the grounds that he caught them at an adulterous threesome. Naturally, nothing is what it appears.
Sedley's next Roger the Chapman book is a model of character, atmosphere, and storytelling, as Roger once again comes to a new town and has the local closeted skeletons thrust into his face (Booga-Booga, Roger!). This time, the haunted damsel encountered in Chapter One is the former nurse to two much-loved children whose disappearance and murder not long ago resulted in a windfall for their widely despised stepfather, who had an unshakeable alibi for the time of disappearance and who was reluctantly let go for lack of any evidence against him, but whose name is mud nonetheless among everyone except his lawyers. Will Roger discover how the nasty man pulled it off? Or will the uncovered truth show that someone else was responsible after all, even though no one else appears to have disliked the children nor gained anything from their deaths? The answer is not much of a mystery, as the truth is just about revealed to the reader at the same time as it is to Roger, but the process of getting there is a wonderful tale.
A Land for All Seasons: Utopia, by Sir Thomas More
Now, ye have heard the reasons whereby I am persuaded that this punishment is unlawful. Furthermore I think there is nobody that knoweth not how unreasonable, yea, how pernicious a thing it is to the weal public, that a thief and an homicide or murderer, should suffer equal and like punishment. For the thief seeing that man, that is condemned for theft in no less jeopardy, nor judged to no less punishment, than him that is convict of manslaughter; through this cogitation only he is strongly and forcibly provoked, and in a manner constrained to kill him whom else he would have but robbed. For the murder once done, he is in less care, and in more hope that the deed shall not be bewrayed or known, seeing the party is now dead and rid out of the way, which only might have uttered and disclosed it. But if he chance to be taken and discrived, yet he is in no more danger and jeopardy, than if he had committed but single felony. Therefore whiles we go about with such cruelty to make thieves afraid, we provoke them to kill good men
Utopia is a blessedly short, dreary book most notable as the most famous work by a Great Man of the Reformation era. I'd say that it was also notable as among the first depictions of an author's conception of the ideal society, except that, really, it had been explored before by Plato, Augustine, Virgil, Dante, Erasmus, probably many others. Nonetheless, this book gave us the word Utopia, which has become synonymous with both the concept of a fictional ideal land, and the concept of a pipe-dream "ideal land", whose unworkability in real life is a defining characteristic.
The plot is as minimal as that of a Platonic dialogue. In part one, the featureless narrator meets some ambassadors who discuss several societal problems (crime, greed, laziness, etc.) with deadly philosophical earnestness. In Part two, one of the ambassadors describes how these problems are resolved in the far off land of Utopia. It is formulaic. People all do X the same way because custom and laws, developed through education (education being the great solution to all of society's problems, according to a host of social planners, some of whom have gone on to "educate" the people through forcible indoctrination).
More himself is best known as one of the prime Catholic foils to Henry VIII, played by Paul Scofield in an excellent movie) who resigned a chancellorship and accepted execution rather than take an oath contrary to his concept of Catholicism. The odd thing about Utopia is that many of the values held up as prime reasons why Utopia is great are themselves incompatible with More's Catholicism. There is female equality, including female clergy. There is divorce, euthanasia, economic socialism and an attitude of religious toleration in an era when Catholics were still extorting great sums from the poor to enable lavish lifestyles and burning people for heresy. And for all of the Scofield-More's softspoken gentle saintliness and King Henry's imperfections, More was something of a prig who was willing to stake all on a church that refused to accept no-fault divorce while letting the clergy fornicate all over the place.
More's style was copied by successors who created several more Utopian societies. Notable ones include Erewhon, Looking Backward Islandia, and Walden Two. None of these are particularly enjoyable or widely read today. Draw your own conclusions.
How to be a Renaissance Man: The Book of the Courtier, by Baldasaar Castiglione
Therefore will I have our courtier the best he can (beside his worthinesse) to helpe himselfe with wit and arte, and when ever he hath to goe where he is straunge and not knowne, let him procure that there goe first a good opinion of him, before he come in person, and so worke that they may understand there, how he is in other places with Lordes, Ladies and gentlemen in good estimation; because that fame, which seemeth to arise out of the judgements of many, engendreth a certaine assured confidence of a man's worthinesse, which afterwarde finding mens mindes so setled and prepared, is easily with deedes maintained and encreased, beside that a man is eased of the trouble that I feele, when I am asked the question Who I am, and what is my name.
As I've pointed out several times this year, the Italian Renaissance was long on visual art and short on great literature. this is one of the reasons Castiglione's awkward and sexist etiquette guide stands out as a worthy contribution, still read today.
Unfortunately for me, the handy-sized-for-reading-on-epillepticals edition I got out of the library turned out to be translated into Ye Olde Archayick Ynglyshhe that did not lend itself to the "philosophical dialogue among aristocrats at tea" format. I lost track of how many participants there were discoursing on What Makes A Gentleman Courtier, as none of them were developed as characters, and none of them qualified as courtiers under their own criteria, which include being an interesting speaker.
The other qualifications include being able to swordfight, play musical instruments, paint, hunt, hawk, indulge in clever wordplay and practical jests--there's a very long section devoted to anecdotes about good funny jests that aren't--wenching, drinking, poetry---pretty much the defenition of "Renaissance Man" appears to have originated with Castiglione, and is either an impossible ideal or an invitation (for the leisure class) to dabble in many leisurely pursuits.
Motorcycles and the Zen of Art: The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner
That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn't meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day's heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?
In the years before widespread internet use, flame wars were conducted with real fire.
The Flamethrowers, a finalist for several prestigious book awards, is about a motorcycle racer identified only by the nickname "Reno", who heads east in the late 1970s and becomes involved in pretentious art culture, American underground revolutionary culture, and Italian above-ground revolutionary culture---and spends the bulk of the book in a state of Hemingwayesque ironic detachment, dispassionately watching other people make idiots of themselves.
The overall effect is of a set of loosely connected vignettes with common themes (such as explosions--and she does it right; see, for example, Richard Ford's forest-fire-as-human-passion attemptWildlife, December 2012 Bookpost, for an example of doing it wrong), mostly tied together by the members of the Valera family that made Reno's prized motorcycle. There are young violent activists who demand a socialist utopia, and who make the women do the cleaning and cooking while they're out ineffectively rabble-rousing (the same people who, by today, have done an ideological about-face and are ruthlessly promoting movement conservatism). There are other activists who riot in the streets, shouting "Expropriate! Expropriate!" like a herd of daleks unclear on the concept. There are Italian police busting heads (the same ones who, today, are doing whatever it takes to keep Amanda Knox convicted of a crime she clearly did not commit). In one particularly devastating scene, an "artist", rather than dominate a conversation in person, subjects his guests to a lengthy, offensive recording of himself blathering on and on. Harder to interrupt that way. you know. Reno endures it all stonily, and then heads back to the open road, where she can be fully herself.
Kushner is a prized modern literary property, being aggressively promoted, but I liked the book on its merits anyway. If she were a visual artist, she would be praised for bold, vivid brush-strokes, because that's what she does with words, almost the opposite of Tom Robbins. Very high recommendations.
The Second Mrs. Driffield: Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham
I could not get over what Mary-Ann had told me about Mrs. Driffield. Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, i did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting, and i did not quite, quite believe it. After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I knew it was flat. Mrs. Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open and simple, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her "going with" sailors and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George. She was not at all the type of wicked woman I had read of in novels. Of course I knew she wasn't "good form", and she spoke with the Blackstable accent, she dropped an aitch now and then, and sometimes her grammar gave me a shock, but I couldn't help liking her. I came to the conclusion that what Mary Ann had told me was a pack of lies.
This one is much shorter than Maugham's better known Of Human bondage and The Razor's Edge, but it may well be the best thing I've read by him. It is a short, bitterly, wickedly satirical send-up of Edwardian era mores and manners.
I'm past the age of thinking it might be fun to have lived in an earlier time, but when I used to think that, I tended to fancy what passes for enlightened, cultured eras from English history--the late 18th Century, and the early 20th Century. Reading the likes of Fielding and Maugham cured me of such delusions.
Cakes and Ale centers around the recently deceased author Edward Driffield, whose prim and proper widow wants to commission a biography that glosses over all the sordid, seamy parts of his life (you know, anything remotely interesting), and most especially any mention of his first wife, who was ---gasp!---a Scandalous Woman!
Those Edwardians. They got scandalized over the damnedest things. In Maugham's world, it seems to be the national pastime: poking one's snoot into other people's business, getting the vapors and being shocked--shocked, I tell you!--about what one finds, and then gossiping all about it and ruining reputations over nothing. Rosie, the first Mrs. Driffield, of course, turns out to be a delightful, lively, imaginative person who is the muse for Mr. Driffield's best work, and who is made an outcast because of the open and guiltless way she lives her life (oh, all right, she also openly sexual and sleeps around a lot, but work with Maugham and me here). We know this because the narrator, a friend of the Driffields from youth, who was brought up with a snootful of traditional ideals about class and morality and is forbidden by his conservative uncle from associating with ThoseNastyDriffields, gets to un-learn his straitlaced upbringing, in large part due to Rosie's influence. Very high recommendations.
Slainte: Autobiographies, by William Butler Yeats
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find, but as yet we do not know truths that belong to us from opinions caught up in casual irritation or momentary fantasy. As life goes on we discover that certain thoughts sustain us in defeat, or give us victory, whether over ourselves or others, and that it is these thoughts, tested by passion, that we call convictions. Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate's antithesis; while what I have called "the Mask" is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.
Yeats was not only one of the greatest of all Irish poets, but one of the great poets of the 20th century, period. His Autobiographies cover the first part of his life, from childhood through the Parnell years, Madame Blavatsky and his occult influence, and the Rhymer's Club (the "tragic generation"). It does not cover the Abbey Theatre, the Nobel Prize, or his more mature work.
His prose is as vivid as his poetry. His love for Ireland--the mythology, the politics and the soul of the people--is everywhere. There are so many anecdotes and reflections on life, philosophy and mysticism that it is difficult to pick out just one quote.
There are occasional offensive sections, as when Yeats meets with the Oscar Wilde set and attends teas where everyone tries to make lots of witty comments: "Men are born bad, but women make themselves so." (What is that even supposed to mean?). They are also terribly, terribly witty about hating the Jews, wot-wot. Nevertheless, if you can get past those parts, it's one of the more readable and interesting memoirs I've ever read.
Our Lives as Robots: Breakfast of Champions (or, Goodbye Blue Monday), by Kurt Vonnegut
When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared: "Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.
There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl's underpants.
"I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief--any belief.
"So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants."
He paused, and then he recited with wry mournfulness the beginning of a poem he had learned to scream in Bermuda, when he was a little boy. The poem was all the more poignant, since it mentioned two nations which no longer existed as such. "I see England," he said. "I see France..."
I first read this book early in 1985, as part of a plan to read one Vonnegut a month for a year, that would culminate in Slaughterhouse Five (Bookpost, February 2014), his most famous book. I never got around to Slaughterhouse Five for almost 30 years. Re-reading Breakfast of Champions reminded me why. I had read nine Vonnegut books, and this one, coming on the heels of the much lesser-known Slapstick and Deadeye Dick induced me to just give up. It was too much nihilistic meaninglessness. So it goes.
Listen: This is the one with the pictures. Vonnegut apparently never graduated from college, but got an honorary degree much later on from a university that considered Cat's Cradle to be a significant work of anthropology. Breakfast of Champions works best as a work of anthropology, and perhaps semantics. It's stood the test of time. It attempts to emphasize the absurdity of the lifestyle of Americans in the mid 20th century, and, it seems to me, it failed back then when that lifestyle was the way people live, but it succeeds very much now. Vonnegut pretty much admits in a preface that this book is "a sidewalk strewn with junk", and the constant description of roadside Americana--mack trucks with corporate logos, used car dealerships, cheap motels, advertising billboards, lounge singers, and people reciting buzzphrases from TV shows and advertisements as a substitute for thinking (we can look back at tacky buzzphrases of the past with contempt, and then feel less smug when we think about the way we speak today without realizing it) bear it out.
The plot is minimal. Vonnegut's perennially appearing fictional author Kilgore Trout takes a road trip from New England to Indiana to participate in an arts festival, where he meets the dangerously unhinged car salesman Dwayne Hoover and gives him one of his, Trout's books, a book written in the second person which suggests that the reader is the only real person in the world, and that all other "persons" are machines put there to fuck with the reader's head. Hoover, who has been drifting into solipsism anyhow, goes around the bend on reading this book, and goes on a violent rampage. So it goes.
I finished this book right as the news of the day was telling us about a dangerously unhinged man named Elliot Rodgers, who went on a similar violent rampage because he wasn't getting any sex, and the chemicals in his head told him that it was OK to kill women to "punish" them for withholding sex. Such an incident would fit right in with Vonnegut's hum-de-dum-de-dum-dum plot. Vonnegut would point at it and shrug. While crying. That is what a Vonnegut book does.
It also fills out the book to 300 pages by going into many digressions. Vonnegut will stop the Trout/Hoover plot to write a couple of paragraphs about one of Trout's novels (like the one about two bits of yeast that discuss the purpose of life, not knowing that they're making champagne the whole time), or to tell you something about a secondary character who never shows up again. For example, at one point Trout is mugged and thrown into a gutter where he gets dog feces on his suit. Vonnegut then lets us know that the woman who owned the greyhound that left said excrement in the gutter is an assistant lighting designer for a musical about American history. So it goes.
The pictures add to the semantic/anthropological theme by illustrating the difference between what characters say and what they mean. One recurring picture looks like an asterisk, but Vonnegut tells us it is meant to represent an asshole. It probably means something that the pictures representing sexual or excretory bodily functions are more shocking than those that represent violent death. Vonnegut further writes himself into the novel as a deus ex machina, looking at other characters in a lounge from the table in the corner and overtly telling you he's playing God by writing that so-and-so gets a phone call at a particular moment, and that another so-and-so took a speed reading course so that the plot can have him read a book quickly without wasting your, the real reader's time.
I alternated between feeling really interested at how meta Breakfast of Champions (the title has nothing to do with Wheaties, but refers to a waitress who says "Breakfast of Champions" every time she serves a customer a martini. So it goes.) gets, and being stabby about how annoyingly meta it gets. Definitely worth reading once, and maybe twice, and not just for the pictures.
Flagons of Learning and Joy: Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais, translated by Jacques leClercq
Have you ever seen a dog fall on a marrow bone? (The dog is, I may add, as Plato says in Book II of The Republic, the most philosophic beast in the world). If you have seen my dog, you may recall how intently he scrutinizes his bone, how solicitously he guards it, how fervently he clutches it, how warily he bites his way into it, how passionately he breaks it, how diligently he sucks it. What force moves him to act so, what hope fosters such zealous pains, what recompense does he aspire to? Nothing but a little marrow. (To be sure, this little is more toothsome than large quantities of any other meat, for--as Galen testifies in Chapter III of his Concerning the Natural Faculties, and Chapter XI of Concerning the Uses of the Various Parts of the Human Body--marrow is the most perfect food elaborated by nature.)
Modeling yourself upon the dog, you should be wise to scent, to feel and to prize these fine, full-flavored volumes. You should be fleet in your pursuit of them, resolute in your attack. Then, by diligent reading and prolonged meditation, you should break the bone of my symbols to suck out the marrow of my meaning--for I make use of allegory as freely as Pythagoras did. As you read, you must confidently expect to become valiant and wise. For here you will find a novel savor, a most abstruse doctrine; here you will learn the deepest mysteries, the most agonizing problems of our religion, our body politic, our economic life....And now, my hearties, be gay, and gayly read the rest, with ease of body and in the best of kidney!
I'm often asked what my favorite book of all time is, and I have no consistent answer. Favorite books are like favorite foods; you're not always going to be in the mood for the same thing, and the goals of nutrition and pleasure are often at odds. The LeClercq translation of Rabelais, however, is a prominent contender for my personal Number One spot. I come back to it at least once a decade, and find something new and vital in it each time.
I often fail to appreciate translators, but Rabelais is an exception. You MUST read the LeClercq version to understand why I love Rabelais. The most common translation, the one used in the Great Books of the Western World and other collections, is the Urquhardt version, which is like reading Shakespearean comedy. Sure, it's great and scholarly, and even funny in parts, but few people roll on the floor guffawing at something with so many archaic words and such an unfamiliar style. Leclercq wrote in the 20th century, in modern English, making up silly yet recognizable words when the existing words wouldn't do, finding as many words for "sex" as the Inuit are inaccurately said to have for "snow", and using them with vital, reckless abandon.
And he satisfies cravings for both nutrition and pleasure in a way that few books do. Rabelais was maybe the most learned and effective satirist of his day, the 16th Century equivalent of the very best (as well as the most disgusting) offerings seen on The Simpsons and South Park. On one level, Gargantua and Pantagruel
is a silly tall tale full of juvenile flatulence jokes, about rowdy young giants who steal the bells of Notre Dame cathedral for a joke, flood the streets of Paris diuretically, and blow away armies of thousands by merrily farting at them. Look again, and Rabelais wickedly skewers all the local clergy, lords, lawyers, pedants, soldiers, wompsters, wastrels and shit-a-beds of the age as expertly and hilariously as a Jon Stewart. Look a third time, and you'll notice the passages you probably skimmed the first time, where Rabelais digresses and refers to pretty much every scholarly work that came before him, including every ancient and medieval book I've covered over the past three and a half years and many more besides. Being familiar with those books enhances the enjoyment of Rabelais, as some of the digressions look like nonsense otherwise. For example, Rabelais describes a naval operation by imitating those horrible passages from The Iliad that consist of page after page of listing the names of the Greek fleet's crew--only Rabelais gives us instead three pages of sing-song nonsense names--Piddleguts, Dishdiddle, Bumswabber, Peter The Nostril, The Noble Wantawench, Li'l Rot the Sphincter, etc.--that it's hard to get through without laughing out loud.
Finally, and above all, Rabelais sets out a philosophy of life based on laughter, large living and enjoyment of as many wild and crazy experiences as possible, that appears everywhere from Rabelais's bold and lusty writing style to the descriptions of Gargantua and Pantagruel's educations and adventures to the prologues of the five sections of the book told from Rabelais's perspective. The story opens with the newborn Gargantua roaring out of the womb with a lusty "Drink! Drink! Drink!", and concludes when a lengthy quest to visit the holy Oracle of the Bottle results in the one-word answer, "Drink." In the Rabelaisian sense, this refers to drinking frequently and deeply from the fountains of life and wisdom:
And you, donkey-pizzles, hark!--may a canker rot you!--remember to drink to me gallantly, and I will counter with a toast at once!
Very highest recommendations.
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