Danbert Nobacon bills himself as a singer, songwriter, comedian and "freak music legend". He was a founding member of the British anarchist punk band "Chumbawamba", whose most famous hit was "Tubthumping" ("I get knocked down, but I get up again..."). This 2010 book bills itself as "a fairy tale for adults of all ages" and that quite fills the bill. The tone is humorous and satirical but thankfully not pedantic. There is an underlying seriousness to this 192-page novel, which owes less to the tales of modern politically correct children's fare and more to Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and Anthony Burgess "Clockwork Orange" (not in violence but in made-up wordplay in the latter case.)
The story centers on a post apocalyptic kingdom called Morainia--which in geography matches the Pacific Northwest state of Washington where Nobacon currently resides, only this is centuries in the future. The heroine is a thirteen year-old girl, Princes Stormy. She finds herself with an absentee father-King Walterbald and a step-mother, Queen Gwynmerelda. As soon as her dad takes off on a secret mission, the nasty step-mom tries to marry Stormy off to a "toadying prancer" Prince Mercurio from the "Southern Kingdoms".
The story centers around Stormy coming into womanhood, avoiding the clutches of various lustful, dense and power-hungry princes (there is a hint in the title as to what becomes of them all) and, along with her intrepid fellow traveller, The Fool, finding her King-father, Walterbald, and rescuing him in the lands beyond the Great Ice Wall. Then comes the climatic Battle of Bald River Falls, a finish as memorable as C.S. Lewis classic and more conventional "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".
Along the way, she has encounters with invading armies--those darn Southern Kingdoms--giant cats, mermangels, giggle monkeys, a large black bird called the Gricklegrack that makes himself very useful in a pinch and the usual compliment of flying lizards no good work of serious literature should ever be without.
Nobacon surely has a way with words and the book comes with an interesting afterword about the need for "mutual aid" and its role in humanity's long evolution. Alex Cox, a film director of such films as "Sid and Nancy" (1983), "Repo Man" (1984) did the illustrations and they are wonderfully imaginative in the vein of books like Maurice Stendack's "Where the Wild Things Are" .
I have to thank Multiply's own Merlin of the Shire, Aaran Aardvark, for introducing me to more of Chumbawamba's music than I had been given a chance to appreciate before.
This is in fact a good book for anybody thirteen or over and can be enjoyed on several levels.
Critical bias warning: I got a chance to chat a bit with both Mr. Cox and Mr. Nobacon separately at this year Ashland Book and Author Festival last month. Both men were amiable to all who came by and said hello, and asked about their work. Mr. Nobacon, despite having once dumped an ice bucket on a deputy Prime Minister at the British Music Awards show in 1998, showed no signs of any aggressive behavior or intent to those who just stopped by without buying his book or his most recent CD releases. He was quite friendly to the freeloaders among us, which is more than would have been said of a ready ice-bucket flinger like myself.
Here he is at a signing appearence a couple years back.
"Leni Riefenstahl symbolizes a German artist’s fate in the 20th Century both in her revolutionary artistic vision and in her political blindness and infatuation. No one would deny that with her talent she developed cinematic methods that have since become part of an aesthetic canon. Her career also shows that one cannot lead an honest life in service of the false, and that art is never apolitical."--Stephen Bach (page 297)
"Shortly after he came to power Hitler called me to see him and explained that he wanted a film about a Party Congress, and wanted me to make it. My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organization of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody - even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it:."— Leni Riefenstahl, her own memoirs. (1992)
Stephen Bach (1938-1909) was an American film executive who wrote this extensive biography of one of the most talented and controversial film actor/director/documentarians of the 20th Century, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003).
I remember seeing both "Triumph of the Will" (1935) and "Olympia" (1938) in the 1980's, the latter film--a documentary on the first great Nuremberg Rally of Hitler and his mass forces of "race and blood". One senses the real ominous terror of those times and how aesthetics like this added so much to the Nazi mystique. It is a chilling two hours to witness, especially on a big screen as I did in a college auditorium. The film "Olympia" is over three hours long--depending on what print of the film you see--is not quite as ominous (at least in the English language versions) but still blends together Riefenstahl's ability to blend art in the motion of bodies and the adulation of mass crowds.
Here's a famous scene from "Olympia" (1938): the diving competition:
It is these two films (and a feature film see did in 1941 called "Tiefland") which were her most famous and notorious works on screen. Gypsy extras used in the latter film were later taken to a death camp to be murdered. I haven't that one in complete but I would recommend anyone intersted in this subject should see a documentary called "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl", (1993) a film which she participated in and tried to obfuscate (as she does in the quote above) her role in making The Third Reich look all polished and perfect on screen. The film-makers did not thankfully give Leni the final cut or the final say in the film so it's worth seeing.
Bach's book explores how Leni went from being a provincial girl interested in art to great fame. It was summarized well by Simon Callow in his review of the book for The Guardian:
"Her background was perfectly ordinary. She was born in 1902 in a working-class suburb of Berlin (a city which Bach evokes, as he does everything else in the book, with vivid economy) to a severe father and a stage-struck mother. She and her mum were a team, secretly visiting cinemas and gate-crashing fancy-dress balls. By sheer willpower and the generosity of a lover who longed to marry her, she became a successful solo dancer in the avant-garde style of Mary Wigman, but, said a critic, "She lacks the highest, most important quality: soul." Her life found its focus when she saw Arnold Fanck's location-shot film The Mountain of Destiny. "I have to meet that man," she told her still adoring, still matrimonially hopeful lover. It was, he said, the refrain of her life. She uttered it for the last time when Hitler appeared on her horizon, with momentous consequences for them both.
"Struck by her vitality and beauty, Fanck wrote Holy Mountain for her, shooting it in Alpine locations over a gruelling two years. In what would become a familiar pattern, she took her co-star, Luis Trenker, into her bed, and then worked her way round the crew and cast, unleashing erotic mayhem in the isolated location. All her life, she changed men regularly, like the paintings on the wall. Many, if not most of them, were mountaineers, athletes and cameramen; quite a number were all three. Her essentially masculine sexual behaviour is almost exhilarating. When, for once, one left her - rather than her dismissing him - she slashed her arms, legs, hips.
"She became a director by default. After failing to secure the Marlene Dietrich role in The Blue Angel, she determined to direct a vehicle for herself: The Blue Light. The experienced scenarist Béla Balázs wrote and co-directed with her; one of her former lovers shot it. Unschooled in film technique, she invented and experimented, eagerly accepting suggestions from her partners. This was her Citizen Kane: she empowered her colleagues, who rose to greater heights for her than they had ever previously managed. Her rough cut, none the less, was a catastrophe; Fanck rapidly re-edited it, saving the movie, which was highly successful, despite poor reviews in the largely leftwing Berlin press. For these Riefenstahl blamed the Jews, even though her two chief collaborators were Jewish."
Later when Hitler was coming to power she read "Mein Kampf" and said "I have to meet this man." How far she and he got together is a source of speculation, but it's clear that Riefenstahl is lying when she says she was coy about making "Triumph of the Will" or, later, that she didn't know about the atrocities committed by the Third Reich. She knew about them sooner than most Germans in fact since she covered Hitler's victory parade in Warsaw in October of 1939 and photographic evidence shows her present at the slaughter of Jews in a near-by town.
It's clear that Leni was more than a little attracted to power and a career and, despite her post-war obfuscation and attempts to soft-pedal herself as a naive camera operator, she was in the inner recesses of Hitler's enclave up to her collarbone.
After the war ended, Riefenstahl was detained first by the Americans and then by the French. Upon release she was found not culpable for any sentencing due in part to her ability to put on a good act--according to the book--and the fact that she never joined the Nazi Party. (A hedging of bets?) Most of the rest of her life she spent in her apartment in Munich--restored to her in 1953--where she managed to make several journeys to Africa to film and photograph a tribe of people called the Nuba, a group of people who prided themselves in aesthetic glorification of the human body. In a way, Leni was right at home!
She was still making films at age 99 in the Sudan region, and was also scuba diving into her 90's.
The most interesting parts of the book for me were reading about how Leni went to Hollywood intending to make a film. She had garnered some interest by Universal Studios in her pre-Nazi days but her German "Alpine" films (one of which was shot in Greenland) generated less interest due to her limitations as an actress. Petitions by anti-Nazi artists and business-people in Hollywood (some of whom were refugees of Hitler and almost all know friends who were) gave her cause to return to her fatherland.
She later visited America again as a guest of Andy Warhol, and was reportedly involved in a photo shoot of Mick and Bianca Jagger--a meeting of art and commerce that I would rather not have read about. Bach's book is very interesting in refuting a lot of lies this woman told and is extensively researched with hundreds of interviews and citations.
A clip from a 1926 film featuring Leni as a actress: "The Holy Mountain".
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 10” ― Erich Maria Remarque
"All Quiet on the Western Front" was a major best -selling novel by German author Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), focusing on the young (and older) men who are wounded or killed literally due to mechanized warfare. Many were also wounded in the psyche from experiences that seared into them for the rest of their lives. In many ways it is timeless--all the realities of modern "post-traumatic stress" for the returning veterans, for instance, seems totally honest and believable both in the book and the film.
Published in the late 20's it was first set to be made into a silent film by Universal Studios in Hollywood. The popularity of sound films changed that strategy and it was reset for sound. Seeing the film again, one is struck by how raw it all seems--the sound is not smooth as it is in today;s films, and the scenes of battle are not computer-generated but look more real for being depicted by real men in conditions that, while staged, look as one could only imagine they MUST have felt at times to those on the actual front.
Many people who saw this film when it first was released must have wondered how, in less than ten years, Europe would be drawn into another disaster involving even worse death tolls.
The film centers on a young German named Paul who goes to the front in 1916 after getting a patriotic pep-talk to his class by a professor. Germany needs "Iron Men", the teacher tells the class with a bravado that is all ballyhoo and no reality. Many then rush to the recruiting office even before they are to be conscripted.
Some months pass at The front. The optimism of a quick war that had been believed by many on both sides is long over. The front lines are an endless horror. Gas attacks. Futile charges against machine guns. The life among the dead and the shell-shocked and the blinded and suffering. Only with his fellow soldiers in short lulls in the war--where they talk of putting all the leaders of the nations in a ring and letting them fight the war they are stuck in--provide some brief respite for the young man.
On leave, Paul realizes he cannot talk about war to his family or friends in his home town. They have no concept. In the book by Remarque, Paul returns home to his room and the books he read and was inspired by as a young man. They have lost their significance in a world that is torn apart by the reality of war.
In one of the best scenes in the film, Paul later returns on leave to the class with the same teacher and tells the students what war is really like. The film has many great scenes like this, and, thanks to the lax censorship of the times there is a maturity to the film about matters such as sexuality in wartime which are not graphic but refreshingly without prudery.
In a world where leaders on all sides talk rather easily of preparing for conflicts, this material (as a book or a film) is both a relevant and poignant testimony of a human folly that cannot seem to stop.
Jeffrey Sachs, a macro-economist from Columbia University, has written a book that makes a compelling case that one of the things that ails the United States is a loss of civic policy, the notion that there is a role for the national government in a democratic society for creating a better life for Americans. This loss of confidence in government--which grew out of the stalemate of the Vietnam War in the 1960's and the cultural "youth quake" and civil rights movements--gradually moved by 1980 into a pincher strategy for Reagan Republicans and conservative Democrats, an opportunity to reignite a one-sided attack on the "mixed economy" were tax rates on the rich were historically high and the gaps between the rich and the middle class were, to them, far too narrow.
After thirty years of intense corporate lobbying, we have seen the country go in a direction that has seen more jobs outsourced off-shore, a greater tax burden placed on the poor and the middle class and a dramatic shift in power away from the American worker/consumer and toward what Sachs calls a "Corporatocracy".
External forces like the rise of former third world nations (China, India) have also played their part, but America itself has seen a greater gap between rich and poor in health care access, the quality of public education and the capturing of our elected officials by special interest groups, particularly financial and military-industrial groups, that has left the public sphere looking more and more like Central and South America and less like our peer nations in northern Europe (especially Germany and the Scandinavian nations) and Japan.
There are a lot of distressing graphs in this book showing just how far we have slipped in terms of income inequality and life expectancy and plain happiness-in-life ratings as compared to a a lot of the developed world.
Sachs' case boils down to this: given that no level of government is perfect (nor any corporate entity, either, as the Crash of 2008 on Wall Street and the Housing Bubble bear mute testimony) are we as a nation willing to invest in America again and restore the public-private "mixed economy" that made us one of the most prosperous nations in the world?
We need to invest again in public spheres, Sachs argues, especially in higher education but also in reformed health care system, put limits on money in political campaigns, and an end to ex-Congressmen coming right back to work for the very industries they once oversaw.
Or are we content to be the world's biggest three-tier banana republic? (With a small but powerful elite, a shrinking middle-class, and more people falling through the cracks into a tattered net of diminished social programs.
The fact is our very political system--with its two-year election cycles for most federal government offices--puts all of our lower House of Congress in perpetual state of running for re-election and seeking short-term fixes to long term problems like budgeting and investment. We have far more elections on a national level than any other developed democracy and, paradoxically, it is making us less a nation of public power and more a nation where office holders are in hock to those who can bundle money for television ads to perpetuate their incumbency. And, with another election always just around the corner, no-one is doing anything long-term on our econoic and budget messes that might make them unpopular by reaching across the aisle to the other party leaders.
Sachs make clear both Republicans and Democrats party hacks and elected officials are complicit in this, but only we as citizens can get us out of it.
Some of Sachs findings are all too familiar:
"The United States" now has the most income disparities of any advanced developed nation."
"Three million U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between 1998 and 2004."
"Google uses a tax dodge called the “Double Irish” to avoid taxes on billions of dollars of revenue." (By declaring themselves an Irish company and putting their profits in Bahamian banks, saving themselves billions in taxes on profits earned in the USA.)
"Since 1980, the average compensation of the top 100 U.S. CEOs increased from 50 times the average worker’s salary to more than 700 times."
"These financial institutions are committed to divesting our money of value and replacing it with promises of value. For when they control the promise of value, they control all wealth itself,"--Playwright and scholar Elias Gordon to his friend, "detective" Benjamin Weaver.
"A Conspiracy of Paper" is a riveting murder and crime-in-high-places mystery. It won the Edgar Award in 2001 as the Best American Mystery of the Year and also won awards for best first novel of the year. At least two other "Benjamin Weaver" books have been published.
The novel, by the American author David Liss, is set in the colorful and treacherous world of early Hanoverian London, with all its coffee houses, gin mills, theaters, gambling dens, and the emerging "new finance" capitalist engines such as the South Sea Company. It's 1719 and the South Sea Company is on the verge of losing 98 percent of its stock value, creating the first stock-driven financial panic in English history. But the public is unaware that the South Sea Company, set up to do business in South America, is about to go bust. The rivalry between "stock-jobbers" (brokers) and their over-extended clients forms the background of the story. The "new finance" groups like South Sea are also getting their hooks into the heights of the British political elite, creating rivalry with the more staid financial powers like gold traders and The Bank of England.
The narrator is a former professional boxer, Benjamin Weaver, who has become the 18th Century equivalent of a private eye. He is known in the lingo of the time as a "thief-taker", a man who makes a living recovering stolen goods for well-off victims of crime gangs, and occasionally catching the crooks and turning them into the law courts and the nascent legal system for a reward.
Weaver is a first -generation British Jew who changed his last name from Licenzo to a more Anglicized name when he becomes a professional boxer. (He is partially based, according to the author, by the memoirs of a then-famous real-life British-Jewish boxer of the time, Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza is considered the father of modern boxing. His innovations like "boxing rings" and the science of movement and punching are still part of the sport. )
Liss' main character is hired by an rich gentile anti-semite named William Balfour to look into the death of Balfour's father. Balfour informs him that the death of Weaver's own estranged father--run down by a drunken coachman--is linked to his own father's death.
Weaver is a much sought-after "thief-taker" because he is essentially an honest man, and he is tough enough to go anywhere in the dens of London vice to ferret out criminals. (There are no police in London at this time, and only an ineffectual constabulary and a lot of crooked judges stand for anything like a system of law enforcement in the 18th Century.) Weaver's main rival is a crime lord named Jonathan Wild, who has a syndicate dedicated to promoting thievs (who then turn their goods over to Wild so he can sell them back to their original owners.) Wild, a real-life figure who was the subject of a book by Daniel DeFoe, also employs goons to cart some thieves off to Newgate Prison and face either the hangman, deportation or a stretch of the hell on earth jail could be for those without money or influence.
Weaver's tracking down of this and other important cases he takes on simultaneously weaves him into a hard-core Darwinian world of both the heigths and the depths of London. It's a city with opulent theaters and gentleman's clubs and a vibrant society, but it is also a society made nervous by the "new finance" and the stock-jobbers of Exchange Alley and this new mania for owing stock that may (or may not) make them rich--or break them.
Weaver also gets back in touch with his Jewish roots through his uncle's family. The novel is not sparing in detail and it captures very well the precarious existence of Jews (who had been banned from England from the time of Edward I in 1300 for three and a half-centuries) and how they did business and kept themselves generally both a part of the British economy and also culturally aloof due to gentile bigotry and also pressure from their elders to carry on the culture and the faith. Every good private eye novel has a pretty lady and this novel has Miriam, a widowed cousin of Weaver who both catches his eye and also leads him unwittingly into greater danger.
Given the financial dis-settlement of the last five years, "A Conspiracy of Paper" seems like familiar territory today for those who read about the financial chicanery of today. It's a fast-moving and instructive historical novel and its also a hard-boiled suspense story.
Professor Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) , a prolific author, Harvard Professor, leading proponent of evolution and the importance of natural selection and fossil records and the like, wrote a compelling book in 1999 that tried to help toward a truce in the rather (for me) tiresome debate between science and religion, one that has plagued many parts of the world since the dawn of the modern scientific age.
Here is an introduction I found to how he dealt with the arguments back and forth and how they led to his conclusion: (As you can tell, Gould is both a lively and engaging prose stylist.)
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"In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.
"At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"
"A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief."
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Starting mainly with the controversy following the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species in 1859, and the acceptance and heated debate that ensued, Gould in this book reviews the old arguments and points out that there is in fact a third way to look at the controversy of God and faith versus scientific inquiry. It begins with the concept of separating these two important aspects of human thought into two distinct spheres. The non-interfering spheres are part of the Non-Overlapping Magisterium Arena, or NOMA. He also reminds us that many of Darwin's early followers were men and women of faith, the most prominent being Asa Grey, the leading American botanist of his day, friend of Darwin, and a Christian
Gould states to paraphrase that science is powerless to furnish ethical rules or proofs of God, but it's not capable of ruling out the possibility of a deity or the existence of moral imperatives based on a common human nature.
This is all the more important because, Gould states, Darwin's theories were based on the unethical "free market" doctrines of his time and also gave rise later to a "social Darwinist" movement that effectively reduces people to economic wigits for the use of the "better advanced" plutocrats at the top of the industrial food chain.
Hence the need for either a strong but un-dogmatic religious community in a nation, or at least ethical philosophers to keep the economics of greed and the feral "state of nature" advocates from taking over and disrupting a moral-based society.
Darwin did not use evolution to promote atheism--although he had severe doubts in God caused by the death of a young daughter. He famously discouraged hope in a God from seeing the struggle for existence in nature in all of its dire effects. But he remained an agnostic, as did his leading champion Thomas H. Huxley.
He also points out that Pope Pius in the 1950s and John Paul II in the 1990's declared themselves unopposed to evolution or scientific research. Indeed, the whole notion of "creation science" seems a peculiar fundementalist Protestant American affliction.
Gould maintained that no concept of God could ever be squared with the structure of nature. But he also counters that the magisterium of science cannot resolve nor even specify the existence or a God. The ultimate meanings of life--such as why we exist in the first place and what we are to do with said existence---are the proper foundations of morality, and that falls into the different magisterium of religion.
I found this book very engaging. I also realize that many on both sides of the question will not be satisfied by the late professor's conclusions. Gould in subsequent lectures certainly was suspect of anyone trying to find faith in scientific theory, but he also avoids the frankly dogma-style cant of a militant atheist like Richard Dawkins. I had the opportunity the other day to ask Professor Dawkins about Gould's book and his theory of NOMA. (Via a Southern Oregon Public Radio call-in program.) Dr. Dawkins dismissed it flat-out as "rank propaganda" and implied that Gould was making some sort of craven political accommodation with the faith community.
I would have loved to hear the late professor's response to Doc Dawkins in 2011. He might have said somethibng like this, as he already did in his NOMA writings from 1999.
"NOMA permits—indeed enjoins—the prospect of respectful discourse, of constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom. If human beings are anything special, we are the creatures that must ponder and talk. Pope John Paul II would surely point out to me that his magisterium has always recognized this distinction, for "in principio, erat verbum"—"In the beginning was the Word." '
A recent trip to a Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Medford--just one of 700 of these megastores in North America--- confirmed for me that times were changing faster than I thought.
On one hand, the place still looked Iike a Barnes and Noble, the biggest chain of brick-and-mortar book stores in the USA. I hadn't been in my local B&N in a while, preferring the cozier and admittedly cheaper air of a used book store or one that has fairly recent titles in a more human-sized form. Barnes and Noble offers row upon row of books of course and most of them are still very overpriced in my view. The "fiction and literature" section of the store featured new reissues of older novels going for fifteen dollars--in paperback!
Some hard cover compendiums of works by certain writers like Douglas Adams, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Maya Angelou were available. These often came with little other than the text of the books themselves. No forwards or biographical background on the author, no criticism from top-flight authors or afterwords by the writers themselves.
Many of the "classic" works were available but were published by Barnes and Noble's printing house. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but I found it sad that they often went with a very old English translation of a book like "The IIi-ad" or "The Three Musketeers" by Dumas that was obviously in public domain. And the font for some of their other classic books appeared to be not been reset in the last fifty years! Only the covers were new.
If you go into one of these places you can't miss right up front its big display for hand-held electronic gadgets for reading novels and such without buying an individual product. It's called a Nook. The Nook is the new big thing, the little gadget you carry around to order books and read them on an electronic slate with a viewer.
Has anybody out there ever read a whole book on a computer? I have no interest in that way of long-term reading. It's one thing to read an article or an essay, but a 300 page book? Some journalists see this as a generational thing, but part of the fun of books is that you have them at home or office to refer to when you like. They are part of the decor as well, part of what makes a home a home or a business office personal. Does one really need to lose "the Nook" and with it the better portion of your library?
And yet while independent and well-stocked bookstores are increasingly hard to find outside the major cities and university towns, it appears that even the chain-leviathans of high cost books are losing their stores. Borders Books is no longer in business, as is Walden Books and a few others I could name.
Most of us have seen products like Nook on television and the malls and such. . Now while I don't fancy myself a Luddite it does also concern me that the consumer is being stampeded toward a way of reading that may be cheaper per unit for the publisher, and even the reader, but will also discourage new book-length works of fiction and non-fiction. An article in the London-based "Guardian" outlined that the cost of publishing would become more like the cost of everything else in media like music downloads and such--much cheaper. This might be all right, as the author, Lloyd Shepherd suggests, or maybe Mr. Shepherd is a Pollyanna.
This would spell the end of major advances for news or "mid-list" authors, those who aren't household names but have a niche with readers who are loyal to a certain writer who might be talented but hasn't a mega-following of a Stephen King or a James Patterson. The prospects for more literary authors might be even more dire.
Advances by publishers that may be reduced by up to two-thirds soon. So this sounds to me like the number of book titles will go down. Is this good for a literate society? Will all serious writing be down to a few proven authors who cut their opinions to match the ever-bigger corporate entities that publish these fewer books?
How does an off-beat financial or sociological writer get published in an environment where no "small presses" exist to get the word out? And how does that effect the "marketplace of ideas" that Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes spoke about in 1917 in his Supreme Court defense of first-amendment guarantees. How can an new paradigm of economic or scientific or theological importance be nurtured if you make the "gatekeepers" of our book selection ever more mindful of fulfilling a giant corporate agenda, an agenda that says in effect--"we will allow one or two ways of looking at a political problem or a historical time or a figure of controversy like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Sanger or Jesus Christ or Fidel Castro or whomever.
Great writers of the past whom we revere today were sometimes mid-list writers for most of their careers. F. Scott Fitzgerald published little successful work in the last fifteen years of his life. Jane Austen was not a huge seller in her time, and now her work is globally recognized. Graham Greene and Steinbeck struggled for years in the 1930s as newspaper writers until their fiction work began to capture public imagination. More recently Don DeLillo, author of the acclaimed American novel "Underworld" was a midlist writer.
And will great novels or non-fiction essays by new and dynamic non-English language writers even bother to be translated, or would that hurt the bottom line?
Will the lack of even a mega-bookstore like Barnes and Noble as a bricks and mortar place in a town change the way we see books we might not have seen otherwise. Some see this is already happening as online book sellers like Amazon take away market share from the regular book stores, as well as evading paying the state taxes that regular commercial businesses have to charge. Oh yes, Amazon will 'recommend' books FOR you. But what about old school browsing yourself in a shop and finding your own "recommendations"?
It seems the new way to publish books that is upon us is fraught with consequences people should think long and hard about before we all start relying on a few e-book spots for our book purchases.
"Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of of any service to them" ---from "The One Thing Needful", Chapter One, "Hard Times"
Reading this book for the first time, I found Charles Dickens 1853 novel "Hard Times" about a fictional northern English city of Coketown and its and its sterile and dark atmosphere an excellent read. It starts with a indictment of factory-based, facts-oriernted "model schools" for children. Then we meet the "Hands" workers with little life beyond work, and beauty and social amusement seen as a frivious luxury (Charity or justice is also frivilous to this doctrine of top-down industrial feudalism. ) And then we see the effect the doctrine has on the very people who promoted it. It is not a cheerful picture.
Dickens' indictment of misapplied utilitarianism,the factory-school system that existed to root out the hearts of the young and the hypocrisy that some of upper class and wealth, especially the loathsome "self-made man" Josiah Bounderby, try to foist on their factory "hands". The book succeeds as an entertainment with all the plot twists and come'upance you'd want from such a book. But also as a political novel in the same vein as John Steinbeck's humanistic "Grapes of Wrath" or his earlier novel about struggling workers in Depression-era California, "In Dubious Battle".
Mainly this is because it is not a political novel in the sense of a polemic, but one that serves as a dramatized plea for the better senses of human beings to be restored and put above base coinage, banks, and economic productivity. It does this by giving us characters and humor and changed minds of peole we can care about, not just straw characters and statistics.
And it speaks to our time as well, a plea to save human beings from the maw of simply being industrial (or, in our day) technological or retail/service industry cogs and tools to any of the masters of our community. There's a little Coketown wherever you go.
Humans need circuses in some form, time for drama and poetry and beauty and time to appreciate it all. We all have a divine spark that should be cherished. Those sparks shouldn't be starved of energy.
Below is an animated adaptation of the first part of the novel, from a graphic novel by Nick Ellis.
"If you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove." -- USA Today
The above blurb is misleading. "Lonesome Dove" is a terrific novel that happens to be about a section of the history of the American West than some kind of genre work. It reminds me of the joke Woody Allen once wrote about having just finished reading "War and Peace" and "It appears to be about Russia."
No one novel could possibly sum up the Western/Manifest Destiny experience, not even this 850-page Victorian door-stopper of a novel.
A couple other McMurtry novels--the more recent and more comic "Telegraph Days" and some of his non-fiction works convinced me the time invested in a book like this would be worth it, and it was.
The book centers around the relationship between two retired ex-Texas Ranger lawmen around 1877-1880. Captain W.F. Call is a natural leader of men who is the driving force behind the Hat Creek Ranch along the Rio Grande in Texas. He sells horses to folks wandering in the small settlement that boasts little more than a few houses, a blacksmith shop, a saloon and a "sporting woman" named Lorena who provides special services for the cowboys, several of the younger ones being secretly in love with her.
Call's partner, Augustus "Gus" McCall, is a more book-read, talkative person but just as tough when the chips are down. Each man has faced long odds in dealing in their past career with desperate outlaws, angry Comanches, and Mexican cattle rustlers in their time as Rangers. One day an old comrade from the Rangers named Jake Spoon rides into the little dusty hovel and starts talking up the virtues of pulling off a 1,500 mile cattle drive up to Montana. The territory there is wide-open and cattle much needed, if only some could steal enough cattle from the Mexican cattle barons (without being shot of hanged) and get them up there.
Spoon himself is more interested in gambling and womanizing than he is serious about going to Montana but Captain Call and Gus decide they want to round up some horses and cows and their small band of Hat Creek cowpunchers (with names like Deets, Dish, and Pea Eye) go forth on the grueling frontier Odyssey. Gus wants to see Montana "before the bankers and the lawyers get ahold of it."
What follows after this set-up is a grueling and near-sleepless trek across a landscape of human lawlessness (horse thieves, gangs of killers, settlers none too happy to see cattlemen ruin their crops, Native American fighters who haven't forgotten this is their land, etc.).
For natural "diversions" there are fatal diseases like cholera, dangerous swollen rivers that must be crossed, vast plains that are little more than deserts, outbreaks of brutal heat and cold and incessant assaults by everything from swarms of grasshoppers to the bitter snow that greets the survivors as they cross the Yellowstone River to Montana, etc.
And if that weren't enough, Army officers and their cavalry units are liable to come by and try to appropriate the horses of the cattlemen for use in fighting the latest band of "Indian hostiles".
It's been estimated that the cattle drives of the 1860-1880's from Texas up to wide-open towns like Dodge City and Abilene, Kansas, were so tough on men already tough that little more than a third who survived the trek ever made a second journey.
Most of the cowboys were lowly-paid and many were ex-Confederate soldiers who met up with ex-Union soldiers turned lawmen and business-owners. The results often led to gun-play when present animosity among the groups reignited old and bloody grudges. Neither side had forgotten.
The novel itself has scenes that resonate--Augustus meeting his old flame (and ex-prostitute) Clara after she has married and is running a farm and horse ranch practically by herself; Newt (the youngest of the cowboys) coming of age in a hostile environment; Jake Spoon falling in with a group of horse thieves after he leaves his lover Lorena--who wants him and her to start a new life in San Francisco--and paying the price for keeping bad company, etc. The savage half-Comanche Blue Duck, a natural-born killer who seems to personify the unforgiving nature of this trek into a hell on earth, is particularly memorable.
McMurtry himself calls this work "a poor man's {Dante's} 'Inferno'' and admits in a later edition of the book to being surprised that, although he thought he delivered an story "filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal" readers (and viewers of the popular 1989 six hour mini-series) saw the work as "a kind of 'Gone With the Wind' of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long,long time".
I personally found little of what modern readers would call romance in the story. It's more Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" to me than anything to get all wistful and nostalgic about, as some people do when they get a glimpse of the 'taming of the West." This is a book of hard truths leavened with some humor. Without the character and wry observation of Gus Mc Rae I doubt many people would finish the book that have. But it is a testament to what a writer who knows his business can do with a setting like this--breathe life into a genre like the Old West, "the phantom leg of the American psyche" and not get either sentimental nor post-modern judgemental about the place that once (and somehow still is) the United States.
"To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind."--the author
This 1967 book comprises a record of the British Parliament from the viewpoint of a cabinet officer and later backbencher Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) during the time he was a witness to many of the backstage workings of the British National Coalition Government until 1941 and later as a witness to secret sessions in the chambers of power and other important meetings.
When the writer/politician was removed from his place as an assistant cabinet (to make way for a Labour party minister) he spent the rest of the war as a backbencher, while still writing histories, doing weekly newspaper columns and giving pro-Allied speeches in neutral nations like Sweden and parts of North Africa recently liberated by the Allies in order to boost the war effort. HIs 1939 book, "Why England is at War" was also a major success. After Nicolson was asked to leave by Churchill he still was on good terms with the likes of the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, Harold MacMillan and others who steered the country as well as visiting Americans like influential newsmen Edward R Murrow and William Shirer.
The refreshing thing about reading the diary of an insider to major events is not how often Nicolson got things right--sometimes he didn't as when he predicted that Stalin would keep his promises at the Yalta Conference or when he seemed assured The USA would enter the war after Roosevelt's reelection in 1940. But it is his intelligence and descriptive powers that are on display here.
Nicholson also was a best-selling novelist and biographer, journalist, diplomat (on hand with Lloyd George at the Versailles Conference in 1919), Governor of the BBC and the husband of one of Britain leading poet/novelists Vita Sackville-West. Their "open marriage" and lovers of the same sex is an issue covered by their son, the writer Nigel Nicholson (1918-2004) in his own biography of his parents lives' "Portrait of A Marriage" (1973)
This diary focuses on the Nicolson's public career, his affectionate letters to his wife and his two sons (Nigel and Ben) who are both fighting in Europe and North Africa. There is also his personal doubts about the war effort and flights of enthusiasm he had even in the darkest times about Britain emerging victorious. That he held this spirit despite the long odds that events in 1940-41 (the Fall of France, the evacuation of Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain, et al) held for the Allies and later served as a champion to the cause of the Free French government in exile speaks well to his character. (Although he had misgivings about General DeGaulle, who was a difficult man to handle to put it mildly and gave fits to many a greater contemporary.)
Nicolson has a lot of humor in his writing, at one point describing the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, as a singularly unimpressive speaker, rather "like a snipe pretending to be an eagle" and somehow making the news of a British victory in North Africa sound almost as a defeat. His praise of Churchill is higher, although he steers clear of being a hero-worshipper and takes hm to task for being too boastful at times and, later, not supporting the Free French cause with enough vigor. The descriptions of Churchill in the House bring the man and the moment to life. This is as close as we shall get to having a camera view of this era and how its ministers and members behaved in a multi-party government during times of great stress.
There are also Nicolson's concerns that their renovated, partially- Elizabethan home in Kent (Sissinghurst) he shared with his wife will make it through the war and all those involved in the grounds will of course survive.
There's something rather British in the way Nicolson and his wife concern themselves with the garden in a time when one bomb could have taken either one of them out separately or together. Indeed in the darkest time of the war (1940) both husband and wife were prepared to commit suicide by poison rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo.
The strangest part to me is that, as a governor of the BBC, he argued that he's rather lose a son in battle than lose a great work of architecture like the Monte Cassino monastery in Italy. Other than that I find nothing in Nicolson's diaries presented here that doesn't either inform or delight.
His son Nigel gives an overview of the progress and red-letter events of the war at the beginning of each year to better frame his father's records.
Besides "Democracy", a novel published anonymously in 1880 which was a best-seller and a controversial book in its day, Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) is best remembered for his remarkable memoir "The Education of Henry Adams" which was first published privately in 1907. He was an influential historian of the early American republic in his own right and also the grandson of a President and the great-grandson of John Adams, who was both President and Founding Father.
"Education" concerned itself with modern education itself and political theory but also had elements of autobiography. That book is classic because it offers insight into how far political power differs from the way most people in a democracy might care to view it. Adams, like his comp-temporaries William James and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a pragmatist at heart and one who had serious misgivings about the role of power politics in a democratic society. Especially one where business interests and party patronage were so strong.
This led him to write--anonymously--"Democracy", a story of two powerful men vying for the love of one society socialite, the widowed Mrs. Lightfoot Lee. Also in the mix is her younger unmarried sister, Sibyl Ross, a woman who desperately struggles to keep her from from marrying the corrupt and ambitious, charismatic and amoral Senator Silas Ratcliffe of Illinois.
The novel takes its course as Mrs. Lee--a philanthropist and social activist with a sterling reputation for both--decamps from New York City after the death of her son, looking for a way to understand how power functions in Washington. She has no intention at first of getting remarried and one feels she must be searching for some sort of distraction to deal with such grievous personal losses.
MIss Ross' comrade in this affair is the spurned suitor John Carrington, a Virginia lawyer and former Confederate officer who lost his family fortune during the Civil War. He is hopelessly in love with Mrs. Lee herself, but she is much more taken by the Senator. Ratcliffe is well aware of his rival and at one point lobbies the new President to offer Carrington a economic representitive post in Mexico City to get him away from her for the few months he feels he will need to bend her to his will.
"Democracy" is set in a Washington of power-hungry Senators seeking the Presidency (and in one case a beautiful and intelligent wife for a First Lady) , lobbyists bearing graft in exchange for votes, office-seekers haunting the capital as a new President is about to be sworn in, an army of lawyers, numerous scandals, cynical Old World diplomats who see Americana view of themselves as a incorruptible republic as delusional.
Much of the novel is set in the drawings rooms and splendid houses of Washington's social elite. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee becomes a star in this mobile salon of intelligent and well-placed people. She is first an idealistic than a cynical witness to all the pomp of foreign dignitaries, White House receptions, and speech-making from the galleries of Capitol Hill. There is a fine chapter on her side-trip down the Potomac Rival with friends to se the Georgian spendour of Mount Vernon, home of George Washington.
Here Adams gets to reflect on the times of the Founding Fathers in comparison to the great disillusionment of a century later when the country was saved from slavery after a bloody struggle but still struggling on how to be a true republic.
As historian Arthur Schlesinger put it in an article on Adams in the New York Review of Books in 2003:
"Like other young reformers in 1868, Adams was thrilled by the election of Ulysses S. Grant as president. People saw hopeful parallels between Grant and George Washington. Both were generals; both commanded national confidence; both had the capacity to raise the character of government. Then came the announcement of Grant’s cabinet. When Adams heard that McCulloch, a man he admired, was to be replaced in the Treasury by George W. Boutwell, a man he detested, he saw this as “a somewhat lugubrious joke” signifying “total extinction for anyone resembling Henry Adams.” “To the end of his life,” he recalled, toward the end of his life, “he wondered at the suddenness of the revolution which actually, within five minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed of it.” Disenchantment accelerated as fraud and scandal spread through the Grant administration. “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” "
Adams himself later saw that the dream of a better society he hoped for in the post-war years was dashed by corruption from the imperfectibility of human beings and the "robber baron" bankers and industralists and railroad executives who wielded power and were virtual kingmakers when it came time to choose Presidential and Senatorial candidates.
Some reforms have come along since 1880, but the course of controlling power and governing by consent of all those citizens who participate is still an ideal far from conception.
'Democracy" is an interesting and witty novel and a strong tonic to those who think our own times are somehow uniquely troubled by a death of ethics in high places. What makes it memorable is how the story ---the wooing of Mrs. Lee by two men from different regions and temperaments--is symbolic of the struggle between ethical and Machiavellian forces in the body politic.
And Adams knew how to keep a secret. No one other than his wife knew he was the author of this novel it seems until after his death 38 years later.
Julius Caesar restored her to the throne after she showed up unannounced in her Roman-occupied palace in Alexandria, dressed in a sack. The two may or may not have voyaged down the Nile but they definitely had a son --Caesarion--whose very existence threatened the whole Roman Empire.
Marc Anthony needed her to finance his war against the Armenians and the Parthia-ns and later dressed himself up as Dionysus to her Isis in a grand display in Alexandria; Marcus Cicero hated her for upstaging him when she was Caesar's guest in Rome; she crashed Roman society and started a craze for all things Egyptian in fashion among Romans of both sexes. King Herod (the Great) wanted to assassinate her when she passed through Jerusalem after seeing Marc Anthony off on one of his eastern conquests, and, finally, the ruthless and back-stabbing Octavian wanted to take her captive back to Rome to celebrate his victory at Actium in 31 BCE and later invasion of her kingdom. (She had other plans, although not death by the bite of an asp you get in Shakespeare's play.)
She ruled over a kingdom of eight million people, and was the richest person in the ancient world by far. She was a hands-on monarch, meeting with delegations of her people and serving justice to those who had been wronged by her vast bureaucratic layer of inspectors and officials. She had a bit of a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, Arsinoe IV, which got resolved when she had her agents drag the younger daughter of her beloved father outside a temple of refuge in Greece and put to death. (She could be nasty, yes, but this was not unusual in those days when brothers and sisters competed to rule kingdoms.)
And nineteen centuries later, the Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille enticed a star actress, Claudette Colbert, with the offer of playing the Egyptian queen in his epic movie by asking her, "How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?"
Much of Stacy Schiff's memorable and for me fascinating book recalls a lot of these well-known situations this great Queen faced. (She was the last of the Ptolemaic monarchs in Egypt, a dynasty that lasted nearly three centuries.) Her main theme is to show that Cleopatra was an amazing woman in her own right, who mastered several languages and was as witty and able a rhetorician than any leader in Rome or elsewhere. A great deal of her biographies from ancient times have been written by Roman historians like Plutarch, Dio Cassius and the Romanized Jewish general Josephus. They tended to portray her as a temptress and a practitioner of magic, taking over men like Marc Anthony and making them slaves to oriental decadence.
The truth, as always, is much more nuanced. Yes, she needed Roman assistance at times but her rule of Egypt and popularity as a living embodiment of Isis made her more of an ally than a lover. And her Nile-fed land was rich in grain for hungry Italians, and precious metals for all who had the disposable income to covet them.
She was no "martyr to love" as Chaucer called her, or a "silly little girl" as Bernard Shaw described her. Rather she was in Schiff's judgement closer to the 7th Century Coptic bishop who termed her "The most illustrious and wise of women, greater than the kings that preceded her."
I highly recommend this book. Below, Ms. Schiff reads from the book on "The PBS News Hour". Her description of ancient Alexandria in Cleopatra VII's time shows why it was THE great metropolis of the age.
"The time travel motif also has an ideological function because it literally provides the necessary distancing effect that science fiction needs to be able to metaphorically address the most pressing issues and themes that concern people in the present. If the modern world is one where the individuals feel alienated and powerless in the face of bureaucratic structures and corporate monopolies, then time travel suggests that Everyman and Everybody is important to shaping history, to making a real and quantifiable difference to the way the world turns out."
—Sean Redmond, Liquid Metal: the science fiction film reader (2004)
(to right: the cover of prolific science-fiction author Fred Saberhagen's "After the Fact", one of two "Pilgrim" novels concerning time travel. In this one the "Flying Dutchman of Time"--Jerry Flint-- has to try and save Abraham Lincoln from assassination at the climax of the Civil War. Other good good time travel novels I recommend include "The Book of Kells" by R A McAvoy (a story of Viking marauders versus the early Celtic Christian civilization in medieval Ireland, and the modern young man and woman who find themselves in a time portal to the midst of the trouble) and "Time Frame" by Michael Creighton (concerning a American billionaire who creates a way to travel back in time and how difficult it is for a group of young people to get out of the forests, castles and battlegrounds of 14th Century France alive) These books are entertaining because they are also good history.
Sean Redmond's comment on the "motif" of time travel does go a long way I think to explaining its hold on many millions of people. No matter what we believe about how and why we are existing at this time on this planet, we all strive at some points in our lives to matter, hopefully to matter in a way to make our family/friends/society better for our being here.
There is always the question of "what if?" Whole religions like Buddhism are focused on resolving that which is flawed within us and getting us off the wheel of existence. But many simply would prefer some more time with a lost loved one or a chance to rectify an old problem and redress it now that we as individuals have the wisdom to do so.
To travel back in time to fix a bad situation or cure a longing for something the modern world doesn't provide can be seen in two of the most memorable time travel movies I recall. The first is a crime story within the time-travel motif called "Frequency" (2000). The story is explained by the movie trailer below. There is no time travel in the film per se, but there is communication between father and son in 1969 up and back to 1999. Thanks to a flare-up of sun spots and an old ham radio link-up, a serial killer might be stopped and a family life altered for the better. This film is a good suspense yarn also.
One of the best things about the movie to me is how the character of the Son in 1999 gets his father to realize this is not a hoax is by giving him the details of the New York Mets improbable "cinderella" victory in the 1969 World Series over the juggernaut Amercian League favorites, the Baltimore Orioles: a shared passion for some great moments in sports unite a family for a larger purpose!
Twenty years before "Frequency" came "Somewhere In Time" (1980) starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer. Based on a Richard Matheson short story, the film followed a young man who meets an older lady at a theatre party and longs to discover how she ever knew him. This film became a true "cult film" in the best sense of the word, and even today generates a fan base that makes a pilgrimage to the grand resort hotel in Marinac, Michigan, where the film was shot. Whereas most time travel stories concerned crime or spectacle, this one has a story which penetrates the heart, a unique film that even I, not exactly an arch-romantic, nevertheless find this little film somehow more moving each time I've viewed it. John Barry's marvelous score---featured on the clip--is just one of the many great compositions he has done in cinema.
My own version of a time travel novel was something I finished about ten years back and redacted it a bit in 2007. I flogged about the agencies and book conventions for awhile.It never got a publisher so I did it myself with a great measure of help from Shirley
It's something of what I liked best in all these novels and films and concerns a detective investigating his friends' murder, a task which takes into the world of modern theater and, later, to the time of Shakespeare's London. "Cursed Spite" is the name of the work and if you like stories of history and imagination, I'll be happy to send you a copy, gratis, since my wife would love to get more of these copies we printed out of our garage :-)
I also think personally it's a good tale. You can get "Cursed Spite" by contacting me and leaving a mailing address at my e-mail: dnoakes@charter.net
"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." --Joseph Conrad.
The Heart of Darkness is a story of a story. Conrad's narrator, Marlowe, recounts his experiences in Africa and briefly, in Belgium, and his feelings about the voyage to a group of other men while waiting for a rising tide along the River Thames. In the story the narrator is going down an African river for "The Eldorado Exploring Expedition" to bring back some of the valuable caches of elephant ivory. The journey takes him down the dark waters and deep and sometimes deadly jungles. The ultimate end of the journey is a personal fiefdom of terror run by a man called Kurtz.
Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella is familiar to many. Rereading it again I was struck by how much of the story delves into Marlowe's sense of assault upon not only the native peoples and his fellow men in the steamer, but his own psyche. Marlowe is as much a victim of war as the modern soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder might be.
But the wounds are totally psychological-- and not to be healed by being removed from the harrowing river journey. The mysterious, intelligent and ultimately enigmatic Mr. Kurtz, the leader of the ivory station--a highly civilized and capable man who is brilliant and at the same time savage and mad--has made him question the nature of humanity itself. Marlowe cannot see civilization in the same way again, and has contempt for those who might judge his reactions to such terrors "with a policeman at one corner and a butcher shop on the other".
Civilization to Marlowe is a mere veneer. Its Conrad himself trying to express that difficult sense of total isolation in his own skin---he knows that London itself was a savage place to the first Romans who came to Britain. All places were savage once and parts of them can be again, without warning.
But there is something dark and evil within all men as well, and what circumstances might bring this darkness, a darkness perhaps beyond the control of the keenest intellect.
"Heart of Darkness" is a multi-layered novella that is a triumph of fiction and an authentic statement of the animal nature of human avarice.
Some think the book has a racist slant. But I believe, even if he was a man of his own time, Conrad is after something more profound than a tale of terror or a political statement on race. In condemning Kurtz and his dark deeds, and those of others along the route of colonial exploitation, Marlowe also sees something within himself, a savageness as dire as the heads of men placed on poles to encourage more ivory extraction. Marlowe feels as alone as he was with his friends and listeners as he was back in Africa, at that ivory station hundreds or miles inland, standing over the body of the "great" Mr. Kurtz as he sums up the brutality within that heart of darkness:
"The Horror! The Horror!"
The book is based on the worst of colonies in the dire history of the great African land grab of the late 19th Century---King Leopold of Belgium's' Congo Free State of 1890. Conrad, a longtime seafarer with the French and later British Merchant services--served briefly as a fresh-water captain of a small steamship going upriver to meet up with an ivory outpost run along lines of brutality he later depicted in horrifying and psychologically subtle details.
James Knox Polk was a protege of the better-known American general and President Andrew Jackson. He was the eleventh president and, though despised and reviled by many of his rival Whig Party enemies (including a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln) , the United States had a territory 500,000 square miles larger than it had been four years earlier when Polk first took the Oath of Office on a rainy day in Washington City in March of 1845.
The better-known Jackson served two four-year terms (1828-1836) and ignited a new democratic spirit in the nation--a spirit that because of the times was confined to working white men and small farmers, and not include women, blacks, or Native-Americans.
Jackson, "Old Hickory" he was called, was a hard-bitten rawhide figure who managed to gain great success during the War of 1812 by defeating a British force at the Battle of New Orleans and later driving Native-American fighters like the Seminoles off their lands.
He was the first President from the then-frontier state of Tennessee, and the neo-Jeffersonian champion against the forces that wanted a National Bank. (Which he felt put too much power in the hands of New York speculators, among other things.) Jackson is immortalized still on the $20 bill and remained an immensely popular Chief Executive until the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
And yet, you could make the argument that James K. Polk, the man known as "Young Hickory" , did more in the four years he was President (1844-1848) than his mentor did in eight.
Polk was an accidental President in many ways. A former shining light in the Jacksonian Democratic Party, stalwart Polk (1798-1849) had gone from point-man for Jackson to Speaker of the House in Congress in the mid-1830's. He was from the same state as the shrewd and imperious Jackson and basically didn't go to the bathroom without consulting the older man.
A few years later, however, the rival Whig Party started to gain ground thanks to the leadership of Henry Clay, a Congressman who popularized an "American System" of internal improvements (canals, roads, port facilities) into the growing nation. The Whig Party was a national movement that favored high tariffs to develop the nation. This was seen as favoring the industrializing centers of New England and the Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest where slavery had been pushed out of existence. Low tariffs, favored generally by the Democrats, helped promote trade with Britain, France and Europe--especially agricultural crops like cotton, which were slave-labor dependant.
Polk was a defeated candidate for governor of Tennessee in 1843. The political career of this Tennessee plantation (and slave) holder seemed to have peaked and he went back to the town of Columbia, south of the state capital, Nashville, to lick his wounds.
But one year later Polk was back in the ascendancy. He had his name placed in nomination for the Vice-Presidency. With a new "two-thirds" approval rule in the Nomination Convention in Baltimore, Maryland, however, none of the favorite candidates could pull off a super-majority of the delegates. A compromise candidate was needed, someone who was from a border state (like Tennessee) who could draw both Northern and Southern support. And Polk--after multiple ballots--got a bigger prize than he had hoped for.
It was a hard-fought national campaign for the Presidency, however. Polk's opponent was the great Henry Clay himself. Clay has served in Congress longer than Polk and had a national reputation as "The Great Compromiser" who had staved off clashes between free and slave states in the young Republic. Along with Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, he was one of the three greatest political leaders of the Jackson Era and remained so until his death. Yet Polk beat him--narrowly, in part, the author states, because Clay underestimated how important the expansion of the nation was to many voters, particularly those who wanted to see the new republic of Texas (which had gained independence from Mexico in an Anglo-American inspired uprising a decade earlier) admitted to the Union.
Clay was lukewarm on the Texas issue, knowing that it would lead to problems with the balance of power between slave and free states. (Texas was a slave republic, which was one of the reasons white men fought to be free of this part of Mexico's northern frontier. Mexico has abolished slavery when she won independence from Spain.) "Young Hickory", however, was pro-Texas, and he also articulated in his letters to his followers--it was considered unseemly to openly campaign in those days--- that he wanted as much of the Oregon Territory as well, which was then jointly administered by the USA and the British through their Hudson Bay Company.
He was also not shy about being prepared to go to war with Mexico to secure Texas and also take New Mexico and California as well, either by purchasing them from the cash-strapped Mexican government or by conquest.
A "war of choice" you might say.
There is enough political intrigue in "A Country of Vast Designs" to keep any history nerd like me enthralled. Polk himself is not a very intriguing figure, but he was focused and stubborn and, whatever can be said for the immorality of the Mexican War--which cost 11,000 American lives and many more Mexican ones--he changed the map of America forever and made it a transoceanic power. The careful negotiations with Great Britain over Oregon, where Polk was at odds with his own more-cautious Secretary of State, James Buchanan, also make for interesting reading. If Britain and Mexico had formed an alliance against American western expansion, as Buchanan feared, it would have been a disaster. That was another thing about Polk, he was not a great leader, but he was damn lucky.
Well, except for the fact that he died four months after he left office from disease author Merry says says was brought about by stress and exhaustion battling with Congress and his own cabinet over the shape of the nation and its fiscal structure. It is likely his early death that prevented James K. Polk--The Napoleon of the Stump-- from getting his rightful share of both Machiavellian credit and moral blame for the "vast designs" of America in modern America. He personified the Age of Manifest Destiny.
Here's a song about the 11th President, courtesy of the off-beat 80's rock band They Might Be Giants
"Good God!" he cried, "can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, blood... with the axe... Good God, can it be?" - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Ch. 5
Dostoevsky second major novel (after "Notes from Underground") "Crime and Punishment" (1865) follows a poor St. Petersburg student , Rodin Romanovich Raskolnikov, and how he is at times elated and other times tormented in the aftermath of killing a woman pawnbroker and her sister in their apartment. Raskolnikov believes at times that the murders were justified, that the money he steals can be of benefit to many, he even gives some away to a struggling family of a drunken ex-civil servant.
At times he sees himself as a great man--another Napoleon, a proto embodiment of Frederic Nietzsche's "Ubermensch" -- believing his actions somehow are just because he is beyond good and evil and transcends morality by a twisted self-affirmation.
But at other times he is brought to despair and the impulse to confess his terrible crime. It is this duality in human nature that Dostoyevsky exploits so well---the currents of reason and irrational (or rational) fear that over takes us and makes either cowards or killers or fools or heroes if they are placed in a situation where they are driven beyond the borders of mundane life.
"But what can I tell you? I have known Rodion for a year and a half; he is moody, melancholy, proud, and haughty; recently (and perhaps for much longer than I know) he has been morbidly depressed and over-anxious aboud his health. He is kind and generous. He doesn't like to display his feelings, and would rather seem heartless than talk about them. Sometimes, however, he is not hypochondriacal at all, but simply inhumanly cold and unfeeling. Really, it is as if he had two separate personalities, each dominating him alternately."--Dimitri Prokofych Razumihin, on his friend Raskolnikov, Crime and Punishment Part 3, Chapter 2.
Rereading the book after many years I was struck by how the author drives home this dichotomy of his main character. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet, he is torn between conscience and cold-bloodedness; between flights of egotistical haughtiness and anti-social behavior to acts of crippling doubt and a desire for simple understanding and forgiveness.
Dostoevsky desire for spiritual redemption is also at the heart of the story, not only for Rosolnikov but also for Sonia, the prostitute who also represents an ultimate victory of sorts over the depravity of the modern urban world through the Image of Christ. It is to modern minds an idealistic drive indeed, an avoidance of the great waves of technology and political theories that were so popular in Western Europe and so wrong for Russia (or so the author thought.)
Still, the story is great not for what it says about Russia's political or spiritual world that the author occupied, but for the keen insights into human behavior through characters that occupy a fully dimensional and all-too recognizable landscape. It is no wonder that Dostoevsky writings continue to be studied and admired.
"I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring stupid, judgemental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgemental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell".--Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates"
Ms. Vowell's latest book is about the Puritan settlements of the 1630's in modern-day Massachusetts, USA. Back then the place was called the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their leader for nearly twenty years was Governor John Winthrop, a Cambridge educated theologian whose word was pretty much the law. They had left England, these couple hundred souls, mainly because they wanted to practice the Christian life their own way, and the squeeze was on back home. King Charles I had disbanded the Parliament in 1629 because the Puritans in the place were the main culprits preventing him from raising money for a ceaseless war with Spain and were ticked off that he was doing things--like arresting MPs--that were in contradiction to the tradition of the Magna Carta. Since a revolution seemed a long way off, around 20,000 people, who were not keen on Charles and the pomp and heavy-handedness of High Anglican officialdom, left England in the time before and during the English Civil War.
The book focuses on Wintrop's achievements--such as the founding of Harvard University--originally a theological institution, in 1635, and the grim things--such as leading the settlers against Native-Americans in lob-sided military affairs that come close to genocide.
This 2008 book is not a formal history, but is rather a tour de force of biting humor, measured with some respect for the better actions of men like Winthrop, who besides being an authoritarian in the Calvinist mode, was also an idealist who believed that God sent him to America to help build a "city on a hill" for the world to admire, a New Jerusalem for a new Chosen People no les. These small bands of English from East Anglia (mainly) helped shape modern American politics in ways we can still see nearly four centuries after they set up shop. In between dealing ruthlessly with political/religious dissidents, and killing Native-Americans who resented their intrusion into a place already heavily ravaged by European diseases like smallpox, Winthrop and his fellow colonials lay the groundwork for the dicey relationship between Church and State in America. Unlike many of today's modern lay Christian Protestants of the fundamentalist variety, they were well-read and believed that they could fail and God would not give them a break (or a tax cut) if they did fail. American Presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have used "the city on a hill" motif in their campaigns. Reagan called America "a shining city on a hill" over and over again, adding the word "shiny" to Winthrop's initial remarks (from a 1631 sermon called "A Model of Christian Charity") as a bit of razzmattazz worthy of a former General Electric pitchman. In Vowell's entertaining book, the early colonial past and the modern American colossus of McDonald's, Theme Parks, Native-American casinos and CIA prison camps for alleged terrorists are all woven in to the narrative in a way that might be a bit jarring but never seems too forced or off-the-subject.
