Jargoneer's Clashmaclavers

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Jargoneer's Clashmaclavers

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1Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Dez. 7, 2011, 12:01 pm

Currently reading -



Read....

72. Robert Coover - Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?
71. Rebecca West - The Return of the Soldier
70. Tanith Lee - Personal Darkness
69. Tanith Lee - Dark Dance
68. Anne Rice - Interview with the Vampire
67. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
66. Harry Pearson - Achtung Schweinehund: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat
65. Michael Moorcock - Modem Plus 2.0
64. Bram Stoker - Dracula
63. Charles L. Grant - The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
62. Dodie Smith - I Capture the Castle
61. John Burnside - The Hunt in the Forest
60. Ken MacLeod - The Night Sessions
59. John Crowley - Novelties & Souvenirs
58. John Crowley - Antiquities
57. Elizabeth Smart - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
56. Ernest Hemingway - For Whom the Bell Tolls
55. Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Fables and Reflections
54. Javier Cercas - The Tenant and The Motive
53. Robert Coover - Noir
52. Richard Wright - Native Son
51. Goscinny & Uderzo - Asterix in Switzerland
50. John Wagner & Alan Grant - Judge Dredd: The Complete Apocalypse War
49. Christopher Priest - Fugue for a Darkening Island
48. David Orr - Beautiful and Pointless - A Guide to Modern Poetry
47. Keiji Nakazawa - Barefoot Gen 1: A Cartoon History of Hiroshima
46. Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Season of Mists
45. Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
44. Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier
43. Jorge Luis Borges - Doctor Brodie's Report
42. William Wharton - A Midnight Clear
41. George Low (ed) - Commando: The Dirty Dozen
40. Roberto Bolano - The Romantic Dogs
39. Matt Wagner - Green Hornet: Year One vol.1
38. Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Dream Country
37. Norman Lewis - The Day of the Fox
36. John Crowley - Novelty
35. Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question
34. Bryan Talbot - Grandville Mon Amour
33. Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: The Doll's House
32. Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
31. George Eliot - Silas Marner
30. Pat Barker - The Ghost Road
29. Neil Gaiman - The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes
28. Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade
27. Charles Addams - The World of Charles Addams
26. Franz Kafka - The Castle
25. Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night
24. George Rosie - Flight of the Titan
23. Michael Chabon - The Final Solution
22. Metaphrog - Louis - Night Salad
21. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
20. Bryan Talbot - Grandville
19. Roger Zelazny - Jack of Shadows
18. Herta Mueller - The Passport
17. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Remaining Sunlight
16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Dust Waltz
15. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Origin
14. Lucius Sheperd - The Jaguar Hunter
13. Ronald Frame - A Long Weekend With Marcel Proust
12. Ron Butlin - Night Visits
11. Milan Kundera - The Art of the Novel
11. Kobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes
09. John Sutherland - How to Read a Novel
08. Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca
07. Arnaldur Indridason - Jar City
06. Thomas Transtromer - The Deleted World
05. Audrey Niffenegger - The Night Bookmobile
04. Joyce Carol Oates - The Museum of Dr Moses
03. Bertholt Brecht - Life of Galileo
02. Ursula K Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
01. Angus Finney - The Egos Have Landed

2Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Feb. 2, 2011, 9:07 am



This was a gift from my partner (who was struggling to find any Xmas presents; at least that's her excuse) so I had to read it. (that's my excuse).

Essentially this the same story as all the other would-be kings of cinema (Goldcrest, Miramax, etc) - start small, have a few early successes, become over-confident, over-stretch, and then collapse, with millions owed.
to be finished

3theaelizabet
Feb. 2, 2011, 9:57 am

Hi jargoneer. I'm reading Brecht's poetry right now. I look forward to your thoughts on his other writings. I read Life of Galileo years ago.

4janemarieprice
Feb. 2, 2011, 10:29 am

Welcome. Looking forward to your thoughts on the Brecht as well.

5avaland
Feb. 2, 2011, 7:49 pm

Oh, glad to see you here! You always read interesting stuff! Were you reading the Le Guin the first time or was it a reread? And if a reread, how did it hold up as a contemporary read?

6Jargoneer
Feb. 3, 2011, 5:53 am

>5 avaland: - it was a re-read, I read it years ago and thought I remembered it well. The book I read was not necessarily the one I remembered though - my memory was one of the ice journey and the dilemma of kemmer thereon. It was a surprise to find out how small that section was and how much of the rest of book was about political systems, spirituality, etc.

The reason I re-read was down to a bookgroup - we had never read SF before despite my attempts to suggest various writers and/or novels. Eventually they agreed but the criteria had to living and female (in order not to read too many classics or popular titles or too many men the books read are monitored). I suggested a few titles but the one that was accepted was Le Guin based on my memory about the sexual politics.
The group had decidedly mixed responses - a few thought it too didactic; that there was too much politics (greatly influenced by the Cold War); too little on kemmer; there was even a few who admitted they struggled with it due to the 'ridiculous' names. However the main debate focused on Le Guin's decision to use masculine language and how that tied in with her topic of a gender neutral society - why didn't she use she? can gender neutral language exist in English? if you don't use 'he' or 'she' are you reduced to using 'it' or a made-up word, both of which probably have a distancing effect?
On the positive side virtually everyone agreed that Le Guin was a good writer of prose, that the ideas made them think, and the flight across the ice was first class. So I may have managed to change a few minds about SF.

7avaland
Feb. 3, 2011, 7:16 am

>6 Jargoneer: Sounds like you have a very thoughtful book group! They make some interesting points.

8Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Feb. 4, 2011, 9:18 am



Collection of stories by the (very) prolific American author.

The subtitle, Tales of Mystery and Suspense, with it's homage to Poe, tells us all we need to about the nine stories contained in this collection - we are entering a dark world of murder and madness.

The first story, Hi! Howya Doin!, about a jogger who likes to jolt fellow runners out of themselves by saying 'Hi, Howya Doin!', is as much a technical exercise as anything, as Oates writes the piece in one long sentence, punctuated only by commas, in an attempt to re-produce the movement and breathlessness of running. It ends with a twist and is the first sign that we are in O. Henry territory as much as we are in Poe's.

In Suicide Watch, a successful businessman, visits his drug addict son in jail to find out what has happened to his to grandson. It is essentially a two-hander between the father and son, which could form the basis of an excellent short radio play. The ending is shocking, not just because of the reveal but because Oates makes it ambiguous.

The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza, is the longest story in the collection, about an Irish-American boxer in the 1940s/50s who coulda been a contender but ended up dead. In many ways this was the most troubling piece in the book because it highlighted some of the flaws that run throw all the stories - an over-reliance on cliches, a lack of care in the structure, and prose that occasionally lapses into journalese. It was hard to tell at times if I was reading a new story or a re-worked article about another Rocky-style fighter blah blah blah. Oates is a big boxing and her descriptions of the fight and preparations are spot on but this doesn't add anything new; perhaps it is difficult to add anything new, that we have all heard the ones about hard-living fighters whose lifestyle undermined their ability, the corruption inside and outside of the ring, the hero worship, etc.

The problem with Valentine, July Heat Wave is that the ending is too easy to guess, and takes too long to get to. The brillant professor obsessed with the beautiful but not-so-bright wife is yet another cliched scenario that Oates fails to bring much to.

Bad Habits is another stronger story, focusing on the family of the a serial killer known as 'Bad Habits' (which is possibly the worst nickname ever for a serial killer - wouldn't the tabloids have called him something like 'The Disciplinarian'). Fortunately Oates doesn't focus on the killer but the bad habits developed by the children as they struggle to cope with their world having been shattered. Oates does occasionally lapse into newspaper speak in this piece as well but having the freedom not to end on a reveal allows her to produce a more nuanced and interesting story.

Feral is the old story odd, being not about death and/or murder but about the changes in a young child after he dies momentarily in a swimming pool. Creepy and satisfying.

Could this man, an ex-con who loves woman deeply and views himself as a The Hunter, be something more? A killer, perhaps? The answer is obvious, the journey to the answer is so-so, the last line is embarrassing.

The Twins: A Mystery is just weak - the story about twins and their psychiatrist father who wants them to compete just doesn't engage and the ending is a complete cop-out (one a beginner writer would be ashamed to resort to).

Stripping is another technical exercise, this time about a killer washing away his 'sins'. It's OK but nothing more.

The title story is a variation on the Bluebeard tale, with the mother and daughter roles reversed and the locale changed to Eden County, the fictionalised area of rural New York that Oates uses in a number of stories. The daughter is invited to meet her estranged mother's new husband, an old-retired doctor who has opened a medical museum; whereupon she finds that he does DIY surgery and his collection contains more than just old instruments. It is effective transposition, creepy in the old-fashioned skin-crawling way and the most 'suspenseful' of any of the tales.

Overall, a mixed bag. It is interesting that many of the weakest stories are the ones that rely on a 'shock' reveal at the end, it is as if Oates found herself hamstrung by the formula. More worrying was Oates falling back on cliches and a certain sloppiness in the writing, highlighted by the easy journalese that occasionally raises its ugly head. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that some of these tales needed some more editing/re-working but Oates couldn't be bothered (she was disinterested in spending more time on these formulaic tales) or that she just didn't have the time to spend on them as she had moved onto the next project on a frightening prolific conveyor belt of work.

9Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Feb. 7, 2011, 8:40 am

Watched Faulks on Fiction, the start of BBC's book themed programmes leading up to World Book Night, over the weekend and was disappointed. Starting with Robinson Crusoe Faulks attempted to trace the decline of the hero within literary tradition, ending with John Self (from Martin Amis' Money') and the statement that the hero no longer exists in serious literature but only in the genres. (Using his own book was a bit much).

The fundamental problem with the programme was that is covered the same titles (others included Tom Jones and 1984) as before - every book programme the BBC now makes seems to focus on the 'well-known' classic or modern novel. Do the BBC decide to do another series on books, choose the same old titles, and then tell the presenter to draw up a thesis to loosely string them together?

Why can't we get a decent book show on the BBC? One in which academics and authors just discuss writers, writing and books. It would be cheap to do - just stick them in a studio and say talk. It wouldn't appear to the masses but why should the masses get the very expensive Eastenders week-in week-out when the curious literate minority get nothing.

Having ranted against the BBC I would like to say that I am looking forward to some of the upcoming dramas based on books (list available here.

10dchaikin
Feb. 7, 2011, 9:19 am

jargoneer - going back to post #8 "the easy journalese that occasionally raises its ugly head"

This is a very interesting criticism to me, as I haven't heard it before, or at least not worded this. I'm curious what is it that makes the "journalese" less than the "prose"...or less than the other kinds of prose here.

I enjoyed your review quite a bit, by the way (although I'm not planning on reading this)

11Jargoneer
Feb. 7, 2011, 11:37 am

Journalese is prose distinguished by clichés, sensationalism, and triteness of thought. Personally I'll accept that in journalism because the second-hand nature of it is now a form of short-hand between writer and reader. I'll even accept it in fiction for the same reason but too much of it in a story or a novel is just lazy. In the Roland Starza story it felt like Oates was recycling an old article full of boxing cliches - almost if Oates couldn't be bothered to make the effort to create something new.

I generally like Oates but the last two efforts I've read, this and Rape: A Love Story, are deeply flawed. (Rape read like the outline of a Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson revenge film). I can't help thinking that both of them required more re-working but she is starting to resemble a manic driver, hurtling forward faster and faster, forgetting that sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.

12dchaikin
Feb. 7, 2011, 12:04 pm

Oh...I misunderstood the term "journalese." I was thinking "journalese" was something like the writing styles found in non-fiction books on current events written by newspaper/magazine journalists. Thanks for the answer. I haven't read JCO before.

13janemarieprice
Feb. 7, 2011, 10:02 pm

9 - Well I don't think we have ANY shows about books in the States. :)

14lyzard
Feb. 7, 2011, 10:51 pm

>>6 Jargoneer: The author of a non-fiction book I read recently used "she" instead of "he" as her neutral term. It was surprisingly jarring, a good indication of how we get conditioned. The first few times I re-read the sentence thinking I'd missed something, before I realised what she was doing.

15Jargoneer
Feb. 8, 2011, 7:25 am

>14 lyzard: - I remember reading somewhere that UKLG regretted making the protagonists of some of her earlier novels male, that it sent the wrong message (especially the Earthsea novels, which is why she returned to write the sequels).

16avaland
Feb. 9, 2011, 6:10 am

>13 janemarieprice: We do have book TV on C-Span. It's nonfiction, though. http://www.booktv.org/

>15 Jargoneer: Interesting. I don't remember hearing that.

>8 Jargoneer: I do really want to respond to your comments here but I find I just don't have the mental energy to do so (between combing through decads of publisher catalogs and excruciating over the decisions regarding a kitchen renovation—the demolition of which is scheduled for Monday—I'm seem to be perpetually on the edge of mental exhaustion). I did read this collection when it first came out, but remember little about it - which may be telling in itself. The only collection of suspense (hers) that has really stuck with me, is The Female of the Species, in which the women in the stories are not content to be victims (an over-simplification). I suppose I prefer her general collections.

17Jargoneer
Feb. 9, 2011, 6:53 am

I remember where I read UKLG saying that but I found an interview with about TLHOD when I was reading the novel - it is interesting about gender and language -

Have you ever considered revising The Left Hand of Darkness?" I asked her.

"I think that this would be almost impertinent. You have to let the whole work stand. You made a mistake, it's your mistake, then you go on and do better. I've had two opportunities to work on that. One is the short story directly related to The Left Hand of Darkness. I wrote it first then revised it for later publication."

The story she is talking about is "Winter's King," written about a year before The Left Hand of Darkness, and it concentrates on King Argavan of Karhide on Planet Gethen. In her first version of the story there is no mention of the ambisexual society. This idea came later and was incorporated in The Left Hand of Darkness. However, in response to the strong criticism of the use of male pronoun in the book, LeGuin revised "Winter's King," using the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians, while keeping the masculine titles such as King and Lord, to remind the reader of the ambiguity.

"The second opportunity I had was in the writing of the screenplay for The Left Hand of Darkness," she explained. "I've made up a pronoun. I referred to Gethenians not pregnant or in kemmer by the invented pronoun 'a' (pronounced "uh") in the nominative case, 'a's' in the possessive case. I thought, 'Since it was to be used only for dialogues, you can do it without driving people mad.' You see, this is the main trouble with made-up pronouns, to read a whole novel with something in place of he or she is just not possible. Actually, they used to be the English genderless pronoun until the 17th or 18th century, when the grammarians declared the he was the generic, but it's quite arbitrary. In colloquial English we all still say, 'Anybody missing a notebook, will they stand up?' We say it all the time. But I couldn't refer to Estraven throughout the book as they. I did try to put in a made-up pronoun, but it leapt out of every sentence."

"Still, there are many times in the book that you wrote man or son, when you could easily have said people or children."

"Yes, over and over. There are many places I'd like to revise in that sense. I masculinized the book most unnecessarily. I agree with you. It gives me considerable pain now to see how easily I could have degendered it. But I feel a moral compunction about revising an old book."


I find this statement she said very interesting about the gender in SF - Le Guin admits that in her earlier works she "wrote like an honorary man." It ties in with the other significant female SF writer of the early 70s, James Tiptree, Jr, who wrote "as a man" and whose fiction was praised for its tough masculinity.

18avaland
Feb. 9, 2011, 7:38 am

>17 Jargoneer: Very interesting. I'm sure I must have read that essay at some point; I enjoy her essays as much as her books.

19Jargoneer
Feb. 9, 2011, 9:53 am



I read this to fill in 15 minutes at work as the whole book (all 33 pages) is available on the Guardian website. My reaction to The Time Traveller's Wife should have warned me to stay away but I just couldn't help myself.

This story is relatively simple - a young girl wandering through the streets at night comes across an old winnebago driven by a distinguished old man, she accepts his invitation and inside finds a library comprising of everything that she has ever read. The rest of story follows her attempts, over years, to find the night bookmobile again and become a librarian therein.

Crucially Niffenegger misses the point of libraries: the night bookmobile contains all the books that an individual has read but surely a magical library would contain all the books an individual wants to read and books they could not obtain elsewhere, i.e., more novels by Austen or Dickens. That would be a library worth being obsessed about; a library of everything you have ever read could just be your bookshelves.

Likewise Niffenegger says that the book is "a cautionary tale of the seductions of the written word" but it goes further than that - it could be subtitled "why you shouldn't waste your time with books". Loving books will make you obsessed, lonely, and capable of only living vicariously. Also, the young woman, is only seen reading in order to fill more shelves in the bookmobile; we never see the joy and wonder of reading another great book.

As in The Time Traveller's Wife Niffenegger has created a concept-based work but failed to think through the ramifications of the original idea - it is ironic that Niffenegger is seen as being a clever writer when the final books are so dumb. While her artwork is perfectly acceptable her prose is as mediocre as before. If the night bookmobile ever tracks me down I will be throwing Niffenegger's books out when the librarian isn't looking.

20C4RO
Feb. 9, 2011, 10:35 am

I do like your reviews of Niffenegger's books. My sister and mum practically forced me to read the time travellers wife on the promise that it was excellent high-brow fiction, in line with my liking for sci-fi fantasy, but much better writing/ story/ characters/ everything than I would be used to!

I only got about 1/3 of the way in and then realised I had absolutely no interest in what happened to her or her weirdo husband-to-have-been and stopped reading at that point. It felt like a single idea strung out across some over-extensive minutia, dull character portraits and an emotional roller-coaster that I just didn't get attached to at any point. If that's high-literature, you can keep it.

From your review of this one, I think she could have made it a far more fascinating book if the mobile library had had the books she *would* have needed to read to make the most of her future life... That'd kill me to know there was somewhere a set of books which if I read them in the right order at the right times, the messages within would lead me to wonderful insights and greatness. The way you descibe it would only appeal to someone with a specific form of OCD that wanted to know what their list was, not how it fitted together with their life.

Anyway, enough rambling, thanks for your views and reviews!

21tomcatMurr
Feb. 9, 2011, 7:55 pm

hahah, I love your caustic reviews.

Jargoneer, you mentioned the OU in passing in the op. I am an OU graduate myself. Which OU course are you doing? How are you finding it?

and have the BBC scrapped the Late Show? Used to be quite a bit of book talk on that, I recall.

22Jargoneer
Feb. 11, 2011, 10:08 am

>21 tomcatMurr: - Currently I'm in the middle of 20th century literature: texts and debates, hence the Brecht play. It's a strange course - the first half is big names like Chekhov, Woolf, Eliot (TS); the second half is a real mixture with Du Maurier, Ginsburg, (PK) Dick, and Puig among others.
Studying with the OU is a little odd - the courses are well put together and you do end thinking about your subject a lot (my general reading has really declined recently) but whenever I go to one of the tutorials I remember what I miss about a physical uni - the ability to discuss book and ideas interactively. (Not sure the OU forums are that good at that).

Re the BBC - there is still The Late Review which is on every Friday but you are lucky if get one book a week while you get film virtually every week, tv and art most weeks. Having said that, the BBC have decided once a month will now be a book show. There is also The Culture Show but they barely notice books exist while covering everything else. My argument is that with 4 tv channels and 7 major radio channels (not including the WS) they should be able to manage one decent intelligent book show a week - Radio National in Australia can manage a daily one.

23Jargoneer
Feb. 14, 2011, 5:57 am

I feel as if I should write something about the Life of Galileo but I have spent so much time deconstructing it I'm struggling to think about the work as a whole.

Perhaps I'll write something about Brecht and Epic theatre when my head clears a little.

24Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Feb. 14, 2011, 6:47 am

ead some short stories -

John Crowley - The Nightingale Sings at Night (from Novelty)
Well-written but not sure I really thought much of the story - a combination of a new age Adam & Eve (God replaced by a Mother Earth figure, the serpent by the moon) and a Kipling Just So-type tale.

Carol Emshwiller - Grandma (available online at Belletrista)
Neat little fabulist tale that I didn't enjoy as much as I should have. I listened to some Donald Barthelme recently and I found myself getting irritated a little. Perhaps I'm just in a social realist/modernist mindset still.

Andrew Stancek (who LTs under the name polutropos - The Magician (available online at The Magician)

Listened to Don Delillo's Baader Meinhof from The New Yorker Fiction Podcast (the text version is available from The Guardian)
From early 90s when Delillo was mixing art and terrorism: oblique, thoughtful, first class.

25avaland
Feb. 14, 2011, 3:55 pm

Perhaps I'm just in a social realist/modernist mindset...

Not everyone can say that, me thinks! I am glad you are posting about your random story reading.

26amandameale
Feb. 17, 2011, 7:33 am

Enjoying your thread. Have deleted Faulks on Fiction from my Must Watch list.

And we don't have decent book show in Australia either.

27Jargoneer
Feb. 21, 2011, 11:32 am

Still reading Rebecca and supplementary material I have on it (which does make me appreciate it more) - on the other hand, I keep thinking why is this book over 400 pages.

Read another couple of John Crowley stories: -
Exogamy - a neat, if predictable, story (except the odd ending) about a harpy rescuing a drowning adventurer and then helping him find the castle where his "love" resides. Slight, OK.
Missolonghi 1824 - Byron, on the eve of his death tells a local boy (and lover) a story of his first trip to Greece when he encountered with a satyr. Enjoyed this one - compared to some of the others I've read this felt more solid in its construction, a genuine story rather than a writing exercise.
There are a number of interesting asides to his story: (1)how often Crowley utilises the framed narrator technique; (2) how English Crowley's writing often comes across; (3) as a companion piece to Crowley's novel Lord Byron's Novel.

28Jargoneer
Feb. 21, 2011, 11:54 am

Also read a strange essay The History of Henry's Bicycle, which discusses whether Henry James has an accident when he was 18 that (effectively) castrated him. Essentially the story is that James was impaled on a fence while helping to fight a fire - but then again the accident could have something to do with a bicycle.
In trying to get to the root of the story Woods also manages to discuss whether Scott Fitzgerald was gay (Nick, in The Great Gatsby his gay surrogate?, whether he had a relationship with Hemingway (who used a version of the James story in The Sun Also Rises, albeit in censored form), and whether James had a crush on H.G. Wells.
Fundamentally it's a game of literary Chinese Whispers involving writers, biographers, and James himself. Is it important? Does it tell us anything about James? It could be, it could explain James' peculiarily sublimated sexuality or it could tell us nothing, that it's all a red herring. Or perhaps it tells us more about biographers and writers attitudes to their subject matter and each other.

29detailmuse
Feb. 22, 2011, 8:33 am

Great thread. Your criticism of The Night Bookmobile rings so true that I must go take a look.

>10 dchaikin:-12 re journalese
It's the triteness that's my peeve, when a writer hunkers down and just gets through the material. At least in journalism you get the most important material early in the piece and can then drop out; a book usually builds in the opposite direction.

>20 C4RO:
...a set of books which if I read them in the right order at the right times, the messages within would lead me to wonderful insights and greatness
haha I’m surprised how often that does happen; I put a book aside and when I return I realize I’ve done or read things that prepared me for the next part of the book.

30avaland
Feb. 22, 2011, 11:29 am

>27 Jargoneer: re Rebecca: Have you seen comparisons to Jane Eyre? It is said that it is a modern retelling, though I'd have to reread it again to really mull on the idea. I just read Hill's Mrs De Winter which I thought good, not great. I expected much more than I got, I think.

31tomcatMurr
Feb. 22, 2011, 11:32 am

>28 Jargoneer: I'm fascinated by the Henry James story. In addition to the things you raised, might one not also appreciate it as fabulous gossip? Old Henry would have approved of it at least on that level, I'm sure.

32Jargoneer
Feb. 25, 2011, 6:48 am

>27 Jargoneer: - I have to write an essay on the mixture of high and low culture in Rebecca, i.e., the appropriation of Jane Eyre and fairy tales alongside the demands of the genre novel.

I've just finished reading and still formulating my thoughts on it.

>31 tomcatMurr: - James, of course, partook of this gossip. In his Notes on a Son and Brother he manages to go on about this 'hurt' for a few pages without actually revealing any details about the injury (sort of The Turn of the Fence - where the reader is left wondering what really happened).

33Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Feb. 25, 2011, 10:43 am



Brecht's take on the persecution of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church.

Before we look the play it is important to point out that this play goes way beyond historical inaccuracy into the realms of fantasy. Brecht gives the impression of historical accuracy by quoting specific dates but it is all wrong - the real people that appear as characters were sometimes dead, often the wrong age, etc. Galileo did not prevent either of his daughters from marrying but rather schemed to get them accepted in a convent while children despite the Catholic Church attempting to stamp out this practice. (Galileo called in favours from priests well up in the church hierachy after the local representatives refused him. The reason he did this was because they were illegitimate and therefore would struggle to get a decent marriage). More fundamentally, Galileo did not get into trouble with the RCC because he was teaching Copernican theory but for making the church look foolish in one of his Dialogues. Brecht undoubtably knew all this so his radical changes to Galileo's life were aimed at creating a more 'dramatic' text reflecting his political/social views.

There are two ways to look at the Life of Galileo - the Brecht way or as a general spectator.

For the ordinary theatre-goer the Life of Galileo is essentially a drama about Galileo's desire for truth under extreme circumstances. We see Galileo preaching the heliocentric system, and his message start to change society, only for the RCC to bring him to task, placing him into a form of internal exile. Galileo, however, emerges victorious with his final book creating a new physics being smuggled out from under his captor's noses. The audience leaves the theatre feeling gratified.

Brecht would argue though that this audience has missed the point and they should read his theories on theatre and on Galileo specifically. What they would then discover is that Brecht has created an 'Epic Theater' built on ideas of alienation, designed to remove the audience from any emotional connection to the characters in order that they think about the issues raised. According to Brecht, traditional drama built along the lines of Aristotle's ideas makes the spectator little more than a zombie as they get lost in the emotional context of the drama, while his version of drama extorts action from the audience, they are completely engaged with the ideological aspects of the work and leave the theatre demanding social change.
Reading Brecht would also reveal that Galileo is not about truth and one man's fight for it but about doubt - through doubt we question the world around us and end up deciding that we need social change - and that rather than a hero Galileo betrayed the whole of science by accepting the decision of the Church when he could have created a 'science for the world' by standing up to them.

The main problem with Brecht's way is that most people are not going to sit down and read his theoretical writings on the theatre and/or Galileo and instead will take from the play what they want to. This is why the majority of readers will see this play as an allegory of life under a totalitarian state, i.e., East Germany, which would have shocked Brecht since he supported the communist state.
For this reason, the Life of Galileo can be seen as an archetypal text in a debate about whether or not the author's intent is really that important when reading a work: does the reader accept the death of the author and interpret the work as they want, or do they say that in order to fully understand the work they should read what the author has to say about it. (Fortunately the reader has that luxury since recent texts of Galileo come with lots of supplementary material).

Personally I think Galileo has a lot to recommend it (Brecht despite all this theory sometimes just produced great classical drama) but like most plays it is probably better seen performed. (Plays are designed to live on the stage more than on the page). There is a film version available - it was made in 1974 by the director Joseph Losey who directed the original 1947 US theatrical version - it is OK but Topol in the lead role is a little disappointing, we can only mourn the fact that the original Galileo, Charles Laughton, was not captured on film.

34amandameale
Feb. 25, 2011, 7:23 am

#28 Interesting to hear about James et al. My verdict: a) Further research required. b)We may never know the truth.

#32 Your essay: What are you studying? For career or for fun??

35baswood
Feb. 25, 2011, 10:33 am

Hi Jargoneer,

I am enjoying reading your thread. You usually raise some interesting points in your reviews and The life of Galileo is no exception. You raise the issue about the authors intention asking:

whether the Authors intent is really that important when reading the work

Well this gives rise to a host of questions: How much knowledge does the reader bring to the text? Should the text stand in isolation and speak for itself? Is it the authors intent that's important or is the readers interpretation more important? has the author managed to reflect his intentions or does the reader see things in the text that the author does not? I think about these issues when reading poetry, and I am of the opinion that the more you know about an author, his life and times, his literary style etc then the more you are going to get out of a text when reading. That is not to say that I would always seek background information because I agree that there can be tremendous pleasure and stimulation when reading a text with no foreknowledge. It can be a very different experience.

Drama is a different medium to poetry and you rightly point out a play is meant to be performed in front of a live audience. No matter how good a text it is, if it doesn't work in performance then it has no value as drama. I agree that many theatre goers will not have prior knowledge of the authors intention, but if they enjoy the play and are entertained at the theatre then this is sufficient. I have recently read a play Translations, by Brian Friel which I loved and I think it would be great to see a performance of it, but I won't know if it works as drama until I do.

36janemarieprice
Feb. 26, 2011, 6:24 pm

Interesting thoughts on The Life of Galileo. I've read a few Brecht plays and seen a performance of Mother Courage and enjoyed them a great deal. I'll have to seek this one out.

37Jargoneer
Mrz. 1, 2011, 3:28 pm

>34 amandameale: - my study is for fun: 20th Century Literature from the Open University. It's not bad but it has affected my general reading so perhaps it has actually reduced my fun.

>35 baswood: - the concept of authorial intent is really to the fore with Brecht. I can't think of any other writer that wrote so much on his/her own work - how it should be read (performed), what it means, etc. That's what makes him so interesting in this regard. He keeps making pronouncements along the lines of 'this means this' and 'that means that' but never seems to acknowledge that the spectators may interpret his work in a different manned. (Interestingly, Galileo was the one play that was performed regularly in East Germany following his death - because it could be interpretated as dealing with life under a totalitarian govt.)

38Jargoneer
Mrz. 1, 2011, 3:43 pm

Finished Rebecca and How to Read a Novel - still thinking about them.

Read a couple of short stories:-
James Tiptree Jr - And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side.
John Crowley - Exogamy

Listened to Anne Enright reading John Cheever's The Swimmer on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast - not quite sure about her slightly hammy reading in the beginning but got used to it - great short story. (The conversations about the chosen stories in this series are excellent as well).

Read some chapters from John Gardner's On Writing and Writers - not a man frightened about giving his opinions. He regularly dismisses most of the other major (male) US writers (a case of literary one-upmanship?); in a review of Daniel Martin claims that John Fowles is the only English writer of his generation who become a 'classic' writer; refers to female writers as Miss and often dismisses their work as 'ladies novels'. On the other hand he leads the cheerleading for Italo Calvino, gives a glowing review to Joyce Carol Oates Bellefleur.

39Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 2, 2011, 12:06 pm



The title of this book is misleading, a more appropriate title would be The Novel for Dummies, for the one thing Sutherland doesn't tell you is how to read a novel. This is disappointing as in the first chapter Sutherland says -
Two more humble assumptions are constant: 1) novels are things to be enjoyed; 2) the better we read them, the more enjoyment we will derive from them. A clever engagement with a novel is, in my opinion, one of the more noble functions of human intelligence. Reading novels is not a spectator sport but a participatory activity. Done well, a good reading is as creditable as a 10-scoring high dive. It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to writeone well. Which is greater, Henry James the critic or Henry James the novelist? Few of us can aspire to read as well as the Master - but then, even fewer can write fiction as well. No one, arguably.

Instead what we get is a book that usually skirts round the text of the novel, giving us chapters on the its history, hardbacks v paperbacks, publicity photos, dustjackets, the use of reviews, can you trust prizes, etc.
Sutherland uses this quote by Virginia Woolf to open chapter two (partially as a springboard to explain why he can't tell you how to read a novel) -
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading, is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
'How One Should Read a Book'

This is, of course, rather like getting Jack the Ripper to give a talk on female safety - Woolf produced numerous essays not only telling people what they should read but also telling writers what they should write.
There is a paradox at the heart of this issue - if you admit that you can be educated to read novels better (as Sutherland agrees) then aren't you producing readers for a certain type of novel? Do popular novels written as entertainments just lose all their interest because they can't stand up to serious analysis? When you educate a reader to 'read' better do you also have to educate them in the dynamics of genre? Can a great SF or crime novel just be a great novel? Sutherland has this to say -
The late nineteenth century saw the development of the stratifications which still operate in our literary culture: high, middle and low brow; quality fiction and pulp. Genre, or 'category', fiction also emerged (crime, science fiction,romance, porn, westerns, horror, etc.). At its simplest, 'genre' is merely a useful term for where certain known and recognisable varieties of fiction are conventionally shelved in bookshops. At its most complex, genre fiction stakes out new exploratory territories, frequently attracting the most creative minds and most educated (genre-educated, that is) readers. There is still, however, a taint of cultural inferiority. No straight science fiction novel, for example, has ever won a National Booksellers Association award, a Man Booker prize or a Nobel. Was Raymond Chandler a more prizeworthy novelist than John Steinbeck? In my view, yes. Did he win the Nobel? Of course not.

That Sutherland is not precious professor protecting the classics makes it even disappointing that he hasn't produced a book that really explores the ideas involved in reading a novel. I know I would prefer to read Sutherland's analysis about the relative merits of Chandler and Steinbeck more than whether I should buy a hardback or paperback.
It's not all as pointless as hardback v paperback . Sutherland does use regularly look the content through the book when he discusses aspects of the novel but none of this is particularly deep (each chapter is less than 10 pages), which is frustrating as the issues raised are often interesting, i.e., from the chapter Fiction - where the unspeakable can be spoken where he mentions Andrea Levy's Small Island -
Literary quality aside, fiction like Levy's, alas, is the only place nowadays where you are likely to find any grown-up discussion of race.

This is worth a substantial essay on its own - can the novel really tackle issues that the press can't? can they do in a more balanced, less knee-jerk reaction? don't the awards given to a simplistic novel about race like Small Island show that what is really acceptable are novels that pander to stereotypes? is it possible to criticise a novel about the Holocaust? and so on. Unfortunately what Sutherland gives us is a hit-and-run analysis rather than any real depth.
This lack of real depth however could be seen as the book's strength, as it doesn't get bogged down in semantics and debates but just wafts along in a nice breezy manner. It can be dipped into without any trouble to the reader, chapters being more-or-less standalone.
In most chapters there will be something of interest, if not great depth - the chapter on copyright ends up discussing censorship more, partially focusing on Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, where it reveals this gem -
The plot inspired one of the crispest dismissals in literary history, from The Field and Stream Magazine: 'In this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R.Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.'

or this (Sutherland is a Professor who specialises in the 19th century novel) -
In the literary period I know best, the nineteenth century, I have always believed that readers divide into two great taste sectors: Thackerayans, who like fiction which talks, conversationally, to them; and Dickensians, who
like their fiction to be theatrical: a spectacle at which they are spectators.

On the other hand in a number of chapters it seems like Sutherland is justifying his decision, as chairman of the judges, to award the Booker Prize to John Banville's The Sea. In another one he continues an argument with Banville about Ian MacEwan's Saturday on the basis that Banville's savage review of the book is nonsense because he misread the novel and couldn't place it in its correct milieu. Sutherland also has a tendency make statements with nothing to back them up, i.e., most crime fiction is read by men. Really? Where did you see that then?
There is something slapdash, rushed about this book as if the publisher, spotting a trend, phoned up Sutherland and said, "We need a book about novels but don't make it too high-brow or too detailed or too long. Oh, and can we have it in six weeks".
In the end it's hard to see exactly who this book is aimed at: while enjoyable it doesn't greatly inform the general reader about how to read a novel beyond what they already know. It could be useful to school children as an straight-forward overview of the novel, history and content, but is probably scuppered as that by including discussion of anal rape (see Lawrence above). Perhaps this is the ideal bathroom or bedside book, one to read when you can't be bothered concentrating too much.

40baswood
Mrz. 2, 2011, 7:18 pm

#39
Could your review be - How to read how to read a novel, which doesn't tell you how to read a novel. Great review by the way and I won't be getting this for my bathroom.

41deebee1
Mrz. 3, 2011, 4:44 am

Great review and more interestingly written, it seems, than the book itself.

42dukedom_enough
Mrz. 3, 2011, 7:27 am

jargoneer@38,

Have you read much other Tiptree? "Cold Hill's Side" isn't one of her best, I recall.

43dukedom_enough
Mrz. 3, 2011, 7:32 am

@39,

I read Robert Alter's The Pleasures of Reading In an Ideological Age maybe 15-20 years ago. I remember a fair amount of discussion about the various points of view a novelist might use, so maybe it could serve as a How to Read book. It's for the general reader, written at a reasonable elementary level.

44avaland
Mrz. 3, 2011, 7:46 am

>39 Jargoneer: I agree with deebee, fabulous review and perhaps more interesting than the book itself. There are so many points of discussion in your review, it gives me goosebumps. I would love to pull any one of them out and get a conversation going on it; however, my brain is barely my own these days (I may come back to this in a few weeks though).

45deebee1
Mrz. 3, 2011, 8:35 am

I look forward to when you have your brain back, Lois and ready to get a conversation along these points going :-) Plenty of great discussion stuff here. thanks, jargoneer, for showing us "How to Write a Review"!

46Jargoneer
Mrz. 4, 2011, 6:34 am

>42 dukedom_enough: - I've read quite a lot of Tiptree but not for a number of years (I know I've read Up the Walls of the World but I can't remember a thing about it, I remember the stories better). There was no particular reason for reading And I Awoke... other than it is the first story in 10,000 Light Years from Home (which I have also read before) and I wanted something short to read. Was this story was not her breakthrough story? Not her first but the one that marked her as someone to watch.
I thought it was OK, fairly well written, although perhaps the (good) idea that the human race was in danger because they were more sexually attracted to aliens was a little battered on your head (although still not enough for the reporter in the story). The Harry Harrison introduction, which I glanced at, was interesting, talking about the 'masculinity' of Tiptree. Wasn't it Gardner Dozois who published a critical work on Tiptree which also discussed this aspect of the writing, shortly before he was revealed as a she? The fact is, that even now knowing he is she, there is a masculine hew to the writing (Hemingway-esque?). (There is one point in the story that made me stop, when the engineer orders an margarita - I couldn't help thinking that a male engineer would not order a drink like that but a straight-forward beer).
I am tempted to re-read Houston, Houston, Do You Read? now.

47Jargoneer
Mrz. 4, 2011, 6:36 am

Although I couldn't recommend How to Read a Novel much I would recommend John Sutherland's Literary Dectective books where he writes pithy little essays about incongruities in classic fiction.

48dukedom_enough
Mrz. 4, 2011, 8:16 am

jargoneeer@46,

Hmm, on second thought "Hill's Side" is better than I suggested.

I don't know what her breakthrough story was. Maybe "Parimutuel Planet" from 1969? If I can believe ISFDB, 1972 produced "Hill's Side" and a number of other stories that were clearly better than anything previously published: "All the Kinds of Yes," "The Milk of Paradise" in Again, Dangerous Visions, and "On the Last Afternoon." Amazing how many of what I remember as essential Tiptree appeared in the brief span 1972-1980.

Don't recognize the Dozois reference.

Her two novels were clearly inferior to the short stories - maybe she'd be better known otherwise. The current SF&F market does not treat kindly those writers who specialize in short fiction.

49dchaikin
Mrz. 10, 2011, 11:13 pm

Jargoneer - Catching up...and learning. Your analysis of Life of Galileo so interesting, so much info - very rewarding to read.

Also you have me thinking about this comment in your Sutherland review: There is a paradox at the heart of this issue - if you admit that you can be educated to read novels better (as Sutherland agrees) then aren't you producing readers for a certain type of novel?

50amandameale
Mrz. 12, 2011, 7:24 am

#39 Great review!

51Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 14, 2011, 8:38 am



I had read some of Du Maurier's short stories before but this is the first novel of hers I'd tackled. My opinion of her remains unchanged - she is a bad good writer.

The good writer characteristics can be seen in the care taken towards construction - the (partial) mirroring of Jane Eyre (some have said the novel is nothing but a base re-write), the use of fairy tale/supernatural imagery, and the technique of using an unnamed narrator. The bad is that she simply doesn't have the skill to match her ambition - the actual writing is often clunky and/or overblown.

It would be easy to dismiss Rebecca as a "romance novel" but this would be too simplistic. (Why should romance novels not be treated seriously anyway?). Rebecca does not match the criteria of Harlequin or Mills & Boon, the romantic aspect of it being peculiarly chilling - the narrator and Max end up emotionally damaged (in the original draft the damage was also physical, both being severely scarred by fire)and exiled. (Technically this is how they begin the novel as it is told in flashback).

What makes Rebecca interesting is that it is so open to interpretation. For example, we have the Freudian approach (Max is twice the age of the narrator), class conflict (this one seems quite weak to me as it obvious that Du Maurier is conservative in this area of her life), and especially gender studies (such as reading it as a lesbian text – Du Maurier had a number of lesbian affairs). The one that is most fascinating, to me at least, is reading it as a quest for female self identity.
In this reading, the narrator is nameless because she cannot claim her own identity – her husband and home (pillars of a woman's life in the 1930s) belong to Rebecca hence her obsession with her predecessor. She cannot break Rebecca's hold Manderley and Max and so in order to claim these she becomes Rebecca in the key scene of the costume ball (having been tricked by Mrs Danvers into duplicating Rebecca's costume). She only starts to become herself after Max has confessed to Rebecca's murder but even then she only claims the name Mrs De Winter and not her own.
What intrigues about this question of self is that it raises two important questions. Firstly, why isn't the narrator finally named? Is Du Maurier saying that she will never attain any of concept of herself as long as she is Mrs De Winter? Are Rebecca and Beatrice (Max's sister) named because they break conventions and therefore attain a state of individuality? If this is the case, is Rebecca not the heroine and not the narrator?
Secondly, if self is at the heart of novel is it not truer to say that only concept of self that is explored in the text is the narrator's? Rather than having no identity it is only the narrator that has any true identity as we see everything through her eyes. She is, to use E. M. Forster's phrase, the only character that can remotely be seen as round, the rest are completely flat. For example, we never see another side to Rebecca – she remains demonic throughout the novel, even in death she remains a force for evil. Is not the power of Rebecca and Mrs Danvers as characters that transcend the novel because they are so flat, that they are constructed as much in the mind of the reader as in the mind of the narrator.

The one thing that these approaches have in common though is that they don't answer, or even ask, if the book is any good. They don't point put that in keeping the narrator nameless Du Maurier turns cartwheels, stumbles and falls; neither do they highlight the major structural problem with the novel – that the following Max's confession we lose the triangle (the narrator, Rebecca and Mrs Danvers) that gives the novel its power, replacing it with a banal stand-by-your-man court case which determines how Rebecca died and whether Max is guilty of murder (which we know the answer thanks to the beginning of the novel).

Rebecca's murder is an aspect of the novel that now seems questionable. Max shoots Rebecca because she reveals she is bearing the child of another man and that he will have to bear the situation to avoid a scandal. The final third of the novel revolves around the discovery of Rebecca's body and whether this will reveal she was murdered, with the result that Max will be found guilty. At no point in this section is it suggested that Max may actually have done something wrong, instead we are left with the message that Rebecca deserved to die because of her transgressions. Does a person really deserve to die for having an affair? For being a despicable person? .

Rebecca is not a great novel (although it does have a great, and justly famous, opening line), possibly not even a good one but it is an interesting one. Reading it as a simple romance is doing it a disservice, proclaiming it as a masterpiece is overstating its case. It is worth reading.

52Jargoneer
Mrz. 14, 2011, 8:42 am

Also read (reviews to catch up) -

Arnaldur Indriðason - Jar City
Tomas Tranströmer - The Deleted World
Milan Kundera - The Art of the Novel
Kobo Abe - The Woman in the Dunes

53Jargoneer
Mrz. 14, 2011, 10:08 am

Stories read -
James Tiptree Jr - The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone
Harlan Ellison - The Whimper of Whipped Dogs
Lucius Shepard - The Jaguar Hunter

Stories listened to -
Donald Barthelme - Indian Uprising (New Yorker)
Jorge Luis Borges - The Shape of the Sword (NPR Selected Shorts)
Javier Marias - On the Honeymoon (NPR Selected Shorts)

54avaland
Mrz. 14, 2011, 1:57 pm

>51 Jargoneer: Glad you found Rebecca intriguing. I think your hypothesis regarding female self identity has merit. I thought it interesting that in Susan Hill's Mrs. De Winter, she continues with the character only having the name of Mrs. DeWinter. It also, to some extent, continues the identity crisis (which was becoming tiresome in this sequel). She struggles to develop any confidence and real sense of self beyond her all-encompassing concern for Max. It's been maybe 10 years since I read Rebecca, but I think I'd call it a homage to Jane Eyre.

55Jargoneer
Mrz. 14, 2011, 2:22 pm

>54 avaland: - Angela Carter thought Du Maurier shamelessly duplicated the plot of Jane Eyre. (One of the other readings of the text is that of a Bluebeard variation - young wife returns with older husband to ancestral home where she finds out he is a killer).

56avaland
Mrz. 14, 2011, 4:20 pm

>55 Jargoneer: Bluebeard seems a stretch ( Bluebeard is one of my favorite fairy tales:-). hmmm, I wonder if Angela is where I first heard about the similarities between R & JE... This book looks intriguing...

57janemarieprice
Mrz. 16, 2011, 1:00 pm

39 & 51 - Just catching up here. Great reivews both.

58dchaikin
Mrz. 16, 2011, 2:56 pm

#51 - Very interesting, I really enjoyed reading this.

59Cait86
Mrz. 20, 2011, 1:44 pm

#51 - I just bought Rebecca, and plan on reading it later this year, so I've saved your post to come back to once I am familiar with the book.

60amandameale
Mrz. 31, 2011, 8:22 am

#51 Very, very interesting.

61Jargoneer
Apr. 5, 2011, 5:35 am



The reason I brought up the example of sand was because in the final analysis I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand.

Until recently, The Woman in the Dunes was probably the best-known Japanese novel in the West but as Hisaaki Yamaouchi has pointed out, Abé “is probably the first Japanese writer whose works, having no distinctly Japanese qualities, are of interest to the Western audience because of their universal relevance.”
This very fact asks an interesting question – what makes a novel Japanese or English or Croatian? For some a Japanese novel should have Japanese signifiers in the same way that a genre novel has signifiers relating to its genre, ie, SF=spaceship, lasers, etc. But doesn't that make us guilty of a form of literary tourism, not unlike ethno-tourists who demand that cultures eschew progress, dress in traditional manner and dance for their supper.

Niki Jumpei (which translates as ordinary) is a clerk who collects insects. On the basis of a mysterious postcard he calculates that he may find a new variety of beetle in a sandy environment. (This helpful homage to Kafka gives the reader an idea of what expect next). Once at his destination he misses the last bus home and some local villagers convince him to stay. At their insistence he descends a rope ladder into a hole at the bottom of which is a small house occupied by an unnamed woman in her 30s. The following day he finds that the rope ladder has been withdrawn and he is now the trapped insect.
He is informed by the woman that they have to dig the sand everyday to stop his collapsing on them and creating a knock-on effect that will destroy the village. The man ignores the woman and instead spends his time thinking about escape. He threatens the villagers with action from the authorities, he cajoles them, tries to bribe them, all to no avail. He tries to dig his way out but ends up buried and is rescued by the woman; eventually he devises a plan that gets him out of the hole but pursued by the villagers he stumbles into quicksand and is returned to the woman. At this point the villagers say they will let him out for some periods if they can watch him having sex with the woman, when she says no he attempts to rape her but is overpowered and beaten to the delight of the onlookers. Defeated he decides to help the woman more and make their situation more bearable: he digs the sand and develops a more efficient method of capturing water. When the woman has to taken to a hospital the villagers accidentally leave the rope ladder down – Jumpei climbs up, looks around and decides to stay.

All this is presented in an analytical and methodical prose style that presents everything, the everyday, the protagonist's thoughts and the ridiculous with equal consideration. This allows Abe to present the most fantastical events, such as changing the properties of sand (it rots rather than preserves, for example) in a manner that the reader just accepts them. Sand is everywhere in the novel – the characters cover their face with a wet towel to protect them from the sand that accumulates on them while they sleep; they wash with it in lieu of water; it permeates all their areas of their lives. If you go to the beach and pathologically hate that sand in your sandwich this is not the novel for you.

Equally, we accept Jumpei's thoughts which usually take the form of an internal philosophising -
As if all of human life could be expressed in those two things alone. Radios and mirrors do have a point in common: both can connect one person with another. Maybe they reflect cravings that touch the core of our existence.

or
What was the use of individuality when one was on the point of death? He wanted to go on living under any circumstances, even if his life had no more individuality than a pea in a pod.

In a realist novel this would just come off as arch and precious but because of the internal consistency of the novel it is completely believable. This is very much the novel as a whole entity; the novel as an argument that leads to a philosophical truth.

The Woman in the Dunes is a classic existential novel: the protagonist eventually finding more fulfilment in his new life with its restrictions and endless work than he ever experienced in his previous 'free' life. (The scenario echoes Camus' version of the myth of Sisyphus but crucially the man and woman in the sand need to work to prevent disaster unlike Sisyphus whose rolling the stone up the hill is pointless). Some will undoubtedly find this novel bleak, some may find it pointless or the conclusion incomprehensible but those who accept its absurdities will be rewarded by an excellent novel.

62Jargoneer
Apr. 5, 2011, 5:50 am

Went to the Brunton Theatre (Musselburgh)* to see Chekhov's Shorts, a portmanteau of five short plays (The Evils of Tobacco, The Dimwit, The Bear, Swan Song, & The Proposal). Very enjoyable, very funny, not your typical Chekhov.

Pick of the bunch were The Bear, effectively a romantic comedy about a widow in mourning and a brusque landowner who has come to collect a debt, and Swan Song about an drunk old actor left in the theatre after celebrating his last performance - it perfectly switches between knockabout humour and pathos.

*just plugging one of the local theatres.

63baswood
Apr. 5, 2011, 6:15 am

Really enjoyed your review of The woman in the Dunes, which I haven't read but want to now.

Interesting idea about literary tourism. All I would say is at least it is not as harmful as ethno-tourism can be. I do take your point that one of the reasons we read books by foreign authors is so that we can glimpse a culture that is different to ours. There would appear to be no harm in this as long as we do not insist that all their books should provide us with this keyhole into their world. I tag my books by either their country of origin or the country where the novel takes place and so I suppose I am expecting those signifiers to be there.

64Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Apr. 12, 2011, 4:38 am



Collection of essays and interviews about Kundera's, and other, novels.

These seven pieces (itself a nod to Kundera's repeated use of seven sections in his novels) consist of two interviews, an address on winning an award, three essays, and a dictionary, with meanings, of 63 words (which came about due to Kundera spending more time supervising translations of his novels rather than writing).

The first essay, The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, is an impassioned defence of the Western novel from Cervantes on. ("Indeed, for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes." - "The novel is Europe's creation; its discoveries, though made in various languages, belong to the whole of Europe.". All writers in essence defend the novel (or poetry) that they himself write - hence Kundera's idea of the European novel is derived form Sterne, Kafka, Hasek, et al.
The time was past when man had only the monster of his own soul to grapple with, the peaceful time of Joyce and Proust. In the novels of Kafka, Hasek, Musil, Broch, the monster comes from outside and is called History; it no longer has anything to do with the train the adventurers used to ride; it is impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible—and it is inescapable.

He believes that it took a wrong turn and rejected many of its possibilities when it got tied down in the 19th century to realism and then psychology. The pivot of this change is Flaubert, this is an idea also developed by the critic James Wood, although Wood hasn't pinned it down so insightfully -
The lost infinity of the outside world is replaced by the infinity of the soul. The great illusion of the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual—one of Europe's finest illusions—blossoms forth.

The novel then found its true modern form in the writers listed above (plus a few others like Gombrowicz); writers from Central Europe that found a new ways to approach it.
As is inevitable, this essay also becomes about the death of the novel, especially in the light of totalitarianism -
Thus the death of the novel is not just a fanciful idea. It has already happened. And we now know how the novel dies: it's not that it disappears; it falls away from its history. Its death occurs quietly, unnoticed, and no one is outraged.

For Kundera there are four main appeals to the continuation of the novel -
1. Play (Sterne)
2. Dream (Kafka)
3. Thought (Broch or Musil)
4. Time ("Europe looking back on its own past, weighing up its history like an old man seeing his whole life in a single moment")

What is immediately apparent about this list is how much it resembles a breakdown of Kundera's approach to the novel - his novels are not one of description (his characters are rarely described) or psychology (his characters are rarely given any backstory) but ones that play with form, essays ('thought') mix with fiction, etc.
In the end Kundera is worried that the novel is against the flow of the modern world -
I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on "progressing" as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

In essence all the themes of the book are raised in this first essay, the subsequent sections returning to the same ideas, exploring them from different angles and persepectives (the one weakness of the book, especially if read continuously is this repetition - paradoxically, this also gives the book the strength of a single continuous argument). The one place it temporarily breaks from this argument is when Kundera discusses, very interestingly, the influence of music on his novels (he is musically trained and before turning to words wrote 'classical' music).
It is still full of thought-provoking stuff , from Dialogue on the Art of the Novel:
Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust's "lost time": the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.

or
A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being. And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive? Understand me, I don't mean to scorn the reader and his desire, as naive as it is legitimate, to be carried away by the novel's imaginary world and to confuse it occasionally with reality. But I don't see that the technique of psychological realism is indispensable for that.

From Somewhere Behind
In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. Indeed, both the Land-Surveyor K. and the Prague engineer are but the shadows of their file cards; and they are even much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right to exist as shadows.

From Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe (and suitably the last words in the book)
if European culture seems under threat today, if the threat from within and without hangs over what is most precious about it—its respect for the individual, for his original thought, and for his right to an inviolable private life—then, I believe, that precious essence of the European spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel. It is that wisdom of the novel I wanted to honor in this speech of thanks. But it is time for me to stop. I was forgetting that God laughs when he sees me thinking.


This is one of the best books I have read about the novel but I also realise that could be down to the fact I like the type of novels that Kundera is championing. It is therefore possible another reader could find Kundera completely wrong-headed, missing the point, the strengths, of the traditional novel. I doubt any reader, unless it is one who doesn't want to 'think' while reading, is going to be disappointed by this book. It will make you think about the novel anew.

65Jargoneer
Apr. 5, 2011, 9:10 am

I thought I would post this separately. Kundera on being translated -

In 1968 and 1969, The Joke was translated into all the Western languages. But what surprises! In France, the translator rewrote the novel by ornamenting my style. In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. Another country: I meet my translator, a man who knows not a word of Czech. "Then how did you translate it?" "With my heart." And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I almost believed it was actually possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart. Of course, it turned out to be much simpler: he had worked from the French rewrite, as had the translator in Argentina. Another country: the translation was done from the Czech. I open the book and happen on Helena's monologue. The long sentences that in my original go on for a whole paragraph at a time are broken up into a multitude of short ones. . . . The shock of The Joke's translations left a permanent scar on me. Fortunately, I later came upon some faithful translators. But, alas, some less faithful, too. . . . And yet for me, because practically speaking I no longer have the Czech audience, translations are everything. I therefore decided, a few years ago, to put some order into the foreign editions of my books. This involved a certain amount of conflict and fatigue: reading, checking, correcting my novels, old and new, in the three or four foreign languages I can read, completely took over a whole period of my life. . . .
The writer who determines to supervise the translations of his books finds himself chasing after hordes of words like a shepherd after a flock of wild sheep—a sorry figure to himself, a laughable one to others.

66baswood
Apr. 5, 2011, 2:13 pm

fascinating stuff jargoneer, your thread gets better and better. I love that bit about Kundera being translated.

67janemarieprice
Apr. 5, 2011, 10:23 pm

61 & 64 - Both great reviews and sound like interesting books. Love this part:

"Joyce analyzes something still more ungraspable than Proust's "lost time": the present moment. There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact."

68amandameale
Apr. 6, 2011, 9:31 am

Gosh, this thread is educational and stimulating.

#61 This month I will be reading The Makioki Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki so will re-read your comments when I've finished.

69kidzdoc
Apr. 7, 2011, 10:55 am

Wow. Fabulous reviews of The Woman in the Dunes (one of my favorite books) and The Art of the Novel, which I've just ordered. Thanks!

70zenomax
Apr. 7, 2011, 4:04 pm

The Kundera book looks fascinating.

I have had The Preparation of the Novel by Barthes on my list for sometime, but I guess this book needs to go on as well.

71Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Apr. 12, 2011, 5:45 am



Short collection from highly regarded Swedish poet.

Before Vargas Llosa was announced as the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature the favourite was the Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer. This is important to bear in mind as I came to this collection with high expectations. It turns out this is not a bona fide collection but a selection of Tranströmer's poetry from throughout his career chosen and translated by the Scottish poet, Robin Robertson. There is an obvious sympathetic link between the two - an austere natural world, light, life struggling on, etc.
So why didn't I enjoy this collection more? With a couple of exceptions I just never connected with the poems; I could admire them but they just didn't speak to me on any level, too many times I finished reading thinking, 'Mmmmm'. This may not be the failure of the poems though, it may be mine, unable to empathise with the material, unwilling to spend more time digging deeper. However, at the end of the book were two poems I did 'get'.:

From March 1979(p37)

Sick of those who come with words words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages
stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,
language without words.

Black Postcards (p39)

I
The calendar is full but the future is blank.
The wires hum the folk-tune of some forgotten land.
Snow-fall on the lead-still sea. Shadows
scrabble on the pier.

II
In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

Will I read more Tranströmer? Possibly, if I like two poems there may be fifty more I will like. Do I think he deserves the Nobel Prize? Not on this showing , not when there poets like Paul Muldoon or Saadi Youssef still writing.

72Jargoneer
Apr. 12, 2011, 6:20 am

Went to the Lyceum to see Educating Agnes, an adaptation of Moliere's School for Wives by Liz Lochhead, the current Scottish Makar (think Poet Laureate). Since this is written in Scots its unlikely that this adaptation will travel outside Scotland, probably some of the dialect and much of the humour can't. This was an oddity: it managed to be both funny and tedious. One moment I would be laughing, the next I would be thinking 'get a move on'. This could have something to do with the form (Moliere's original was in Alexandrine couplets) and Lochhead's decision to keep the play in rhyme (which does lead to some good laughs).
The cast was perfectly acceptable with Peter Forbes in the lead superb.

73Jargoneer
Apr. 13, 2011, 11:33 am



Short fantasy by leading SF/Fantasy writer.

In another time and place I used to be quite a fan of Zelazny's but never got round to reading this novel (despite liking the short graphic adventure based on the same character in The Illustrated Roger Zelazny). Years later and probably too late I finally got round to Jack of Shadows.

The action takes place on a planet of two halves, one light and one dark. On the light side humans and technology are the order of the day, on the dark side dark lords with magical power oversee everything. Jack of Shadows is one such dark lord but is unique in that is able to move about, his power not being linked to a specific place but to shadows, without them he is powerless.
The novel opens with Jack being executed for being a potential threat at the Hellgames, i.e., he may steal the jewel that is the Hellflame (which is his aim for with it he will the hand of Evine, the Colonel Who Never Died's daughter). Death is not the end for darksiders though, an unspecified time later they will be reborn in the Pits of Glyve and so Jack lives again. Most of the first section of this novel deals with Jack being resurrected and having to journey through his enemies' lands without being caught. Initially he successfully, being helped by Rosie, a human he loved years ago but who is now an old witch, but eventually the Baron of Bats traps him and he is imprisoned in an amulet in the hope he will go mad. Jack tricks the Baron by using a spell to change the Book of Eils, which lists the seven dark lords that monitor the shield wall that protects the darkside from destruction. By this simple act Jack is made persona non-grata in the darkside.
Travelling to the light Jack visits Morningstar, a creature of immeasurable age trapped in stone. Like most oracles Morningstar is vague about revealing the future, that there are possibilities he cannot foresee but informs Jack he should be wary of travelling the road he is set upon.
At this point the novel changes abruptly. Jack of Shadows is now Jack Shade, a university professor in Darkside Customs, living in a recognisably modern world (and judging by the amount people consume tobacco desperately needing a smoking ban). Jack has adopted this persona to get access to a computer (this is in the era when people had to book computer time) in order to search for the secret darkside weapon, Kolwynia. He has to go on the run again as he has been tracked down by his foes and so heads back to his natural domain.
The novel then jumps again. The Baron of Bats is being attacked by a mountain and none of powers can save him. At the heart of the mountain is Jack, he has found the secret weapon and is bent on using it to destroy all he believes betrayed him and gaining control over all of the darkside. Jack proves to be a particularly heartless ruler; makes a mess of things and ends up having to journey to the centre of the earth to fix everything, although this is a fix with major consequences.

Written in 1969, as a homage to Jack Vance, all this takes place in 200 pages; now Zelazny would be expected to produce a trilogy or an ongoing series and the page count would be in the thousands. This means that the book zips along at pace but the characterisation is close to zero – only Jack exists beyond one dimension, and that is primarily down to the introduction of an external soul (darksiders are supposedly soul-less), which conveniently also provides the hope of redemption, not to mention authorial cop-opt.
Zelazny is an interesting case; he was associated with the American new wave writers of the 1960s and big things were expected of him but as his career developed it was increasingly obvious that he lacked the ambition and technical skill to match his contemporaries (Delany, Disch, Le Guin, for example). He was content to write competent genre novels and stories for most of the time and Jack of Shadows is one of the first of this change of direction. The novel is not bad, the brisk professional style sees to that, but it never threatens to be good, that would require effect than the Zelazny seems willing to put in. In fact it reads like Zelazny put all his effort into the first section of novel and then just dashed the other two off; the middle section set in the 'real world' is especially perfunctory and serves no function other than providing a way (computers) for the author to miss out almost obligatory quest (perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies). Having said that, it's a masterpiece compared to most of the dreck that passes as fantasy nowadays; better written, more inventive and out-of-print. Why? Like Thomas Burnett Swann, one of the best fantasists of the 1960/70s, and much of Fritz Leiber, this novel just doesn't meet the almost completely rigid criteria that publishers have adopted with regards to fantasy. It is ironic that a genre that prides itself on the imagination shows so little imagination when it comes to publishing.

74dukedom_enough
Apr. 16, 2011, 12:39 pm

It was all downhill for Zelazny from the early or mid 70s, wasn't it? Sad. Looking at ISFDB, his short story rate dropped about then. That's roughly when the field shifted away from short fiction toward novels, yes (in the US, anyway)? His 60s novellas and the resulting fixups, including Lord of Light, are his best. Maybe if the magazines had stayed central to SF, he'd have produced more of his better work.

75wandering_star
Mai 3, 2011, 6:55 am

#72 - Ranjit Bolt has translated a number of Molière and Molière-period (eg Pierre Corneille) plays into English, keeping the rhyming couplets, and managed to make them very watchable. I saw several in the mid-1990s... not much recently though.

76dchaikin
Mai 3, 2011, 2:33 pm

Jargoneer, catching up. I'm just now reading those wonderful posts on Kundera's The Art of the Novel. Very thought-provoking comments and excerpts.

77Jargoneer
Mai 4, 2011, 5:49 am

>75 wandering_star: - Thinking on it a little more I think the problem with farce usually has more to do with the pacing. It needs to performed briskly, if not manically even if it means the audience sometimes struggles to hear the words. Slower and it all becomes a little laboured.

I will attempt to put some more updates on this thread soon.

78Jargoneer
Aug. 25, 2011, 7:30 am

In order to kickstart this thread again I thought I would mention some things I have seen at the Edinburgh festival -



Tuesday at Tescos
It's Simon Callow. It's Simon Callow in drag. That sounds like fun. Unfortunately it wasn't. The only enjoyable bits were when Callow danced (in the loosest possible sense) around the stage. In-between this jiggling was a monologue of little interest, sparkle or originality. The story of a man who has decided to live as a woman going back to his home town every Tuesday to help her elderly father (who has difficulty his accepting his daughter) should have produced some decent laughs, a few poignant moments but the writing got lost in a cul-de-sac of triviality. The tacked on 'tragic' ending was even worse - the type of ending that seems wonderful to you when you are 14 but is just tacky, mediocre.

79Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Aug. 25, 2011, 7:33 am



Ali McGregor
McGregor is an Australian operatically trained singer who has moved 'downmarket' into jazz and pop, here accompanied only by a jazz pianist. She started with a few standards like The Man I Love, which while competent were nothing special (the problem with these songs is that they have done so well before by more stylish performers) although Summertime which she did as a medley in three different styles was interesting. The performance, and audience, came alive when McGregor delivered her re-interpretations of other great American songs such as Tainted Love, La Isla Bonita and, her words, the sexy-ist song ever, I Was Made For Loving You. The highlight of the show however was a cover of Salt'n'Pepa's Push It - it shouldn't work with just a singer and pianist but it did brilliantly.

80Jargoneer
Aug. 25, 2011, 7:34 am



Bette and Joan: The Final Curtain
Not a version of the play currently showing in the West End but another two hander about the screen legends. It is 1989 and Bette Davis is on her death bed. In order to help her negociate her way into the afterlife the gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons send down Joan Crawford to help her. It was fast and funny with a few frights and little mawkishness. The actresses may not have looked like their real-life counterparts and some of the sound in the video may have garbled a little (it was performed in a basic lecture theatre) but this was as enjoyable experience I've had in the theatre for ages. It may not have been a 'great play' but it was great fun. I don't know if they will tour this piece afterwards - if they do and it comes to a theatre near you I recommend you rush to the book office asap.

81Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Aug. 25, 2011, 7:44 am

And a book review - this one is so long it's really just for me.



First collection of stories by highly regarded SF/Fantasy author.

Although Shepard is usually cited as a SF writer the truth is that much of his work is fantastical in nature with even the SF stories often containing elements of magical realism.

The big story in the collection is R&R, a Nebula winning novella that was later incorporated into his second novel, Life During Wartime. The US has become embroiled in a conflict in Central America. Mingolla, Gilbey and Baylor are based at the Ant Farm in Free Occupied Guatemala. They are tied together by the belief that as long as they are together they will see out their tour of duty but in this tour everything will unravel. Baylor, wasted on drugs, fights a jaguar in a pit, and loses his mind. Gilbey escapes to Panama unable to take any more. A young women he meets reveals to Mingolla that he has latent psychic powers and encourages him to also escape to Panama before he too loses his mind. But Mingolla realises there is no place to run - 'The war was his new home, his newly rightful place.'
What makes this story so compelling is Shepard's blending of science fiction and magic realism. The war is fought by soldiers with high-tech equipment aided by drugs to make them more effective but who have also embraced superstitution and magic in order to survive and make sense of their survival, their surroundings, their existence. The helicopter pilots refuse to take off their helmets, even when sun-bathing, claiming that they have been hard-wired to their optic nerves disfiguring them, claiming they can now see 'ghosts' and 'souls'.
Salvador feels like a companion piece to R&R. Dantzler's patrol, lead by the psychotic DT, go in recon into sacred Indian territory. Strung out on drugs used to give them the edge in fighting they have lost their moral compass, being more responsible for any atrocities than the guerillas that are supposedly the enemy. Drugs and mysticism combine to create a self-inflicted massacre and only Dantzler walks out of the jungle. He is sent back to the US but the seed of war is still inside him.
In the title story, Onofrio Esteves, a farmer, is lured back into jaguar hunting by the indiscretion of his wife running up debt and the greed of Esteban Caax, an appliance dealer who exploits the local Indian population. Caax has bigger dreams, he wants to develop the old abandoned fruit factory into a tourist enclave but the jungle which has reclaimed the land is haunted by jaguar, one that has killed all previous hunters. Esteves however has a method that never fails, one involving herbs that induce a death-like trance. Once he has reached the jaguar's domain Esteves meets a beautiful young woman whom, even the most callow reader instantly knows, turns out to be the jaguar. They become lovers and she reveals she is one of the old 'gods' and this part of the jungle contains a doorway between two worlds. Evitably Caax turns up wondering why Esteves hasn't returned with the dead jaguar, there is a confrontation and Esteves kills Caxx son. The authorities will now seek him and he has to choose the two worlds.
Taken together, Salvador and The Jaguar Hunter emphasise a two major elements of Shepard's work. Firstly, he is not a particularly original writer in terms of plot, both stories have a dynamic that is almost entirely predictable. We know the woman will turn out to be the jaguar just as we know that the patrol will be destroyed by the magical forces in the jungle. We know that Esteves will side with the woman just as we know Dantzler will go back to US psychically damaged and dangerous. Secondly, the knowledge of these destinations doesn't diminish the stories, the strength of them is in the vigour and commitment of the writing.

Two stories are set on the fictional island of Guanoja Menor, located off the coast of Honduras: Black Corral & A Traveler's Tale. Both of these tales are two of the more science fictional tales, dealing with alien lifeforms. In the former, arguably the weakest story in the collection, smoking the eponymous substance allows for a form of symbiosis. It is in essence the story of a powerful drug trip that ends with the loss of self, in this case due to alien takeover rather than madness.
In the second story, a young American, Ray Milliken, believes that aliens have landed on the island in the past, based on hearing a local legend, and attempts to form a colony on swampland to encourage them to visit again. The colony fails as it turns out Ray was wrong about the aliens visiting but right about them having visited. Again the stranded alien is not a new story but Shepard manages to link it to exploitation, both human and economic.
It could just be coincidence but these are two of the weaker stories in the collection; the former feels a little like a writing exercise with its descriptions of the drug trip, and while the latter has more substance it just doesn't add up to much.

The final two Latin American stories are The End of Life As We Know It and Mengele. The latter story is the shortest story in the collection. A pilot crash lands in the jungle and is taken to an estate to recovers where he finds he is the guest of Josef Mengele. It is your typical mad scientist story (think Dr Moreau) but being more modern it omits the happy ending. Mengele is still out experimenting, spreading his madness.
In the former story, Richard and Lisa are a young couple on holiday in Mexico in an attempt to patch up their failing marriage. On a trip to village at the base of a dormant volcano they meet another America, a young man who claims to have been given a gift by an old magician who lives in the volcano. They agree to meet the old man who informs them there is a great struggle coming and they are part of it but not together. He then gives them a gift each. The portrait of the disintegrating marriage is surprisingly well-done, we do get the sense of a couple in that nether region between togetherness and separation with both of them desiring different directions. And the gifts received are not the gifts of adolescent fantasy where people suddenly have amazing powers, these gifts are so subtle that the new owners aren't even sure they have been given a gift. It is this subtlety, and the way Shepard mixes the mysticism with real violent politics, that stops this being a simple throwaway piece.

For one of the stories, Shepard doesn't travel very far (culturally at least) – Spain. The narrator who shares some of the author's biography and his name, has hooked up with a small bunch of ex-patriots, artists and petty drug dealers. Into this environment come a couple, Tom and Alice, who because of their manners and strange appearance are seen as threatening to the existing group, especially the leader, Shockley, who is trying to arrange a big drug deal. In order to help them fit in Tom and Alice ask Shepard to pretend to be Alice's boyfriend, which he accepts as much to antagonise Shockley. Shepard finds Tom's notebooks, decorated with swastikas, inside reveals a fantastical world in which the Third Reich have created an Empire based on magic and technology (the descriptions of which are fantastic). Tom & Alice confess to being products (literally) of this world and that they escaped by creating a tunnel between the two worlds, unfortunately something may have followed them into the tunnel and they now have to re-open it in order to destroy it. Cue big finale on the beach. What makes this story particularly interesting is that Shepard purposely lays out the moral in the last couple of pages. While we are used to, say, Victorian writers telling us the moral of the story it is unusual for a modern writer to even admit to having a moral never mind revealing it. It also reveals something fundamental to Shepard's writing, that underpinning much of it is a moral indignation, especially towards US foreign policy at the time - Shepard's heroes may be American but they are Americans who have fled America – but it is also runs deeper, to the level of individual. If you don't stand up and take responsibility then what are you doing?

Of the other stories, How the Wind Spoke at Madaket is Shepard in Stephen King territory. A wind containing an elemental force descends on the small remote Alaskan town of Madaket, drawn by the latent psychic powers of Peter Rainey, a writer trying to recover from the breakdown of a relationship. It has the standard cast of characters: the damaged hero, the young woman who can heal him, an old woman who also has the gift, and a bunch of decent but disbelieving members of the community. There is nothing particularly original here, the wind/force may be particularly brutal in pursuit of its goal, but is not difficult to guess how everything will end. Still, for what it is, this is a enjoyable story.
The Night of White Bhairab is back in an exotic setting, this time Nepal. Elliot Blackford, has dropped out and is. in Katmandu attempting to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Twice yearly, Mr Chatterji leaves Blackford in charge of his home, a period Blackford uses for a blow-out. This year he has company, a beautiful young American who is engaged to Chatterji, and there is a new item being delivered for Chatterji's collection, the fireplace from Cousineau mansion which was at the centre of The Carversville Terror. This could jokingly be called the Amityville Horror goes East. We have the usual possession, creature of pure evil, etc, but we also have the Khaa, Nepalese house spirits.(I can't help visualising them in terms of a Miyazaki creature). We are all set for a showdown between Eastern and Western magic. It's all good fun and we even have the little twist at the end, when khaa gives you something it also takes something in return.

The remaining story, The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule, is the only one not set in a recognisably 'real' world. An unnamed country is under the spell of a six-thousand feet long dragon but the dragon, Griaule, is not terrorising them, it is just lying there unable to die due to a miscast spells years before. It is believed that everything in the country is down to the dragon's gloomy presence and have posted a reward for killing it. Meric Cattanay has a plan to do, paint the dragon and slowly the paint will poison him. In desperation his plan is accepted and all available resources are placed at his disposal. Cattanay's life becomes so bound up in his project that he misses everything else; his project is a success but his life is a failure. And without the dragon what is Cattanay? This is one of the best stories in the collection, the idea of using art as a weapon is an excellent one, the more beautiful the dragon becomes the closer to death. But we know that neither Griaule nor Cattanay will die, even as the flesh rots the art will remain, the painted scales of Griaule will be there to remind everyone of the artist who killed the dragon with beauty. (Shepard obviously felt some affinity with this world as he has returned to it since, most notably in the excellent novella, The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter).

This is highly recommended. Shepard is not always the most original plotter but he blends his influences (Ballard, Dick, magic realism, etc) into a unique voice and one that repays re-reading. This is the kind of book that I would give to readers who disparage or dislike SF – if this doesn't change their opinion then I doubt anything will.

82Jargoneer
Aug. 25, 2011, 7:47 am



Ed Reardon:A Writer's Burden
I'm not a big fan of Radio 4 comedy but when it's good it can be very good and Ed Reardon's Week comes into that category. Reardon is a writer who wrote a novel, Who Would Fardels Bear? which was made into a Hollywood movie minus every item in the book. Subsequently he has made his (very low-level)living (ghost)writing books like Pet Peeves and Nigel Mansell's Love Poetry. This doesn't stop him pontificating on all aspects of writing and there were some very clever jokes about writers like Barnes, McEwan and Amis. While I enjoyed this I couldn't help thinking that I had heard much of it before, that this was part new show, part greatest hits. You should be able to judge for yourselves soon as it almost certainly will be on Radio 4 sometime in the future.

83baswood
Aug. 25, 2011, 10:47 am

Nice to see your thread reactivated.

You will be back to normality soon with the festival coming to an end.

Lucius Shepard is a new author to me. The stories sound interesting. Other people on LT rate this selection very highly as well. I will dip in.

84Jargoneer
Aug. 25, 2011, 11:26 am

>83 baswood: - his profile seems to come and go as he often produces work in batches meaning it's either feast or famine. His short story collections are probably the best introduction as he excels at novella length.

85Jargoneer
Aug. 25, 2011, 11:30 am



Bryan Talbot - Grandville

Steam-punk graphic adventure by acclaimed writer-artist.

In this world France won the Napoleonic Wars creating a European wide empire that included Britain. After a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings Britain won its independence but the unrest remains. The Eiffel tower has been destroyed by terrorists (in a heavy-handed reference to the Twin Towers), allegedly British in origin but is this the case? Could malcontents within France be the true perpetrators?

Investigating the supposed suicide of a diplomat DI Lebrock, with the help of his assistant Detective Ratzi, finds himself in a conspiracy at extends to the heart of the empire. There is nothing new here – a secret government department with requisite death squad, a lover who is sacrificed in the pursuit of justice, the country is moribund and we must rebuild its greatness, etc – but it's all done quickly and smoothly.

With conspiracies an author has (usually) two ways to end it – the downbeat one where the hero defeats the conspiracy but remains essentially powerless to stop the people behind it, or the upbeat one (normally with some downbeat tones) where the hero rampages through the villains. I'm not going to say which one Talbot chooses other than to say there is fair amount of violence in the book.

Talbot takes his title from the French artist, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, who worked under the name J. J. Grandville. Grandville became famous for Les Métamorphoses du jour where the heads of animals are grafted onto human bodies (with great skill)for comic effect And that is what Talbot does – there are a few humans ('dough-faces') in the book but on the whole all the characters have the heads of animals. i.e., LeBrock is a badger, Ratzi is a rat, the French emperor is a lion, etc. It doesn't make much sense but then does it need to? Talbot obviously wanted to pay homage to an artist he respects while setting himself a challenge.

This is a beautiful book to look at. Top quality paper makes the colours shimmer and shine. (It is unlikely that blood splatter has ever been so beautifully produced before). Talbot is a first class draftsman – his bodies resemble real bodies, not the pneumatic caricatures that are seen in so many modern comics; the faces of the animals are lovely created; and, for those who like to linger over the art, there are jokes and homages throughout. If you were to criticise Talbot's approach at all, it could be that the art is so clean and perfect that it can come across as a little cold.

Just the right length (European 96 page volume) and great fun this is recommended.

86Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Aug. 25, 2011, 11:45 am



Metaphrog - Louis: Night Salad

The fifth adventure for the cult character, Louis.

Metaphrog are Sandra Marrs (artist) and John Chalmers (writer). The art is Louis is simplistic: the characters are chubby, four-fingered, with basic faces (three circles and a line); the backgrounds bold and colourful. It's all rather charming, lovingly hard-painted, and I imagine that children would love it.

The story is almost as simplistic but with a strain that may not play to younger children. Louis is a gardener who has been supplied with new (dangerous) chemicals to help grow his fruit and vegetables. He has an accident that puts his pet bird (FC: Formulaic Companion) into a coma. Distraught, Louis writes a letter to his aunt asking for advice. This letter is intercepted by his neighbours who, for some unknown reason, hate Louis. They decide to play a trick on him by responding as his aunt, informing him that only the fruit of the raining tree can save his pet. At the same time Louis is also starting to feel the effects of the chemicals, also collapsing into a coma. We then travel into Louis unconscious as he dreams of travelling underground in search of the raining tree. These adventures include the usual messages aimed at children - Louis and his new companion have to visit the library to gain knowledge, the value of friendship, etc, but at the same time there is a darker underside - huge caterpillars that suck people's brains among other creatures, and Louis' underworld companion is turned into dust.

Of course, everything works out in the end, both Louis and FC regain consciousness, the chemicals are disposed of safely, and the neighbours are punished by becoming ill.

Glenn Lees, in The Comics Journal says that
Metaphrog manage to bridge the gap between innocence and experience with real insight, making Night Salad something that can stand alongside Kafka's short stories, deceptively simple tales that manage to pierce directly to the heart of the human condition.

This is just tosh, highlighting the lack of perspective that too often accrues around cult fiction/comics. Night Salad is enjoyable, probably a class above most children's books but it is not on the level of Kafka, nor any well-written serious novel. But then it doesn't have to be, that's not the market it is in, so why make outrageous claims for it?

I recommend this graphic novel to adults and children alike but just take some of the reviews about it with a pinch of salt: you won't find a major piece of literature but a nicely plotted, beautifully painted work that is entirely satisfying its own right.

87Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 9:10 am



Qing Cheng
It seems that every item you buy today is produced in China so the Edinburgh festival thought it was time to show art produced in China. (The cynical have also noted that in a time of dwindling subsidies choosing to host events by a country with money and constantly wanting to positively promote themselves in the West made a lot of financial sense as well). While every manufacturing plant may be under pressure from China, based on this production the Opera companies have little to fear.
Based on around Qing Cheng (Green Mountain), one of the ancient homes of Taoist, the plot of this opera is a standard girl (in this case, a Princess) meets unsuitable boy (commoner). They are on the mountain for different reasons - the girl because it is paradise away from the court; the boy to meet the spirit of the mountain who can teach him martial arts in order to revenge himself on those who killed his family (and I think it is obvious who is responsible for that). The princess is bitten by a snake, the boy sucks the poison out but then he is dying until the spirit of the mountain saves him although refuses to teach him martial arts because he is spiritually lacking. After that it's the old story of boy and girl failing in love, the father appearing and disapproving, the boy jumping off the mountain and ending up in 'heaven' where he learns the truth of the Tao. Then he is allowed to return to Earth only to find that it is a 1000 years later but fortunately that schoolgirl looks a lot like the princess and they have an immediate bond.
The good - that was the spirit of the mountain who looked like the cool old man in all Chinese/Hong Kong films and who spoke in strange aphorisms (his song based on the teachings of the Tao was particulary full of this - stuff like 'in order to feel the fullness of the universe you must first become empty'); the staging using video backdrops; and some of the set-pieces. The bad - the endless duets which made up more than 60% of the opera, after the third one I was on the side of the emperor - 'Kill him! Kill him!.

88Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 9:10 am



T. C. Boyle
Boyle started by announcing that he wasn't going to talk about his most recent novel When the Killing's Done because he couldn't really remember it - since its publication he had written another novel and 8 short stories.
Instead he read a short story, The Lie, about a young man who decides not to go into work one day because he doesn't feel like it. At which point he needs an excuse so he informs his boss that his child is ill. Having enjoyed his day off so much he decides to take another and then another, at which point he announces to his boss that the child has died. Consequently his life starts to to unravel. It was an enjoyable tale of an ordinary person who does something stupid and rather than admit the truth compounds his initial action with more stupidity. A good one to read at a festival (only his second one, after the previous week's one in Kilkenny).
Afterwards he took some questions which revealed him to be a consumate performer - he was witty and clever fielding the questions with ease although since he was asked three times about Water Music (probably because it is partially set in Scotland) which was written 30 years ago he was also honest enough to admit that he couldn't remember what made him write x, y and z.
At the book signing he talked to everyone, answering their questions and trying to understand their accents for the dedications. Me - I talked to him about going out in Kilkenny, having been there earlier in the year for a music festival. If you get the chance I would recommend making an effort to see him.

89Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 10:26 am



Robert Coover

This was billed as a Masterclass but there were no details beyond that on the festival website. Still, I think everyone who attended, and the festival organiser and presenter, probably thought that Coover would talk about his approach to fiction, about his use of the popular (sports, genre, etc) in creating complex meta-fictions. What everyone got was something radically different.
Coover based his talk on 'cave writing', an immersive form of electronic writing. The 'reader' is placed inside a box in which text is displayed on the walls or floor - this text can move about, can hide other text behind, be reconfigured to create something else, be manipulated by the reader who has a device to click with. It sounds wonderful and probably is if you are in the 'cave'; outside the 'cave' it has little validity. The examples Coover showed of 'cave writing' looked just like bad video games and had no value as literature.
I may look back on this in a few years and hail Coover as a visionary but this was dire - there were people walking out and I don't think I've seen anyone walk out of Book Festival event before. It was pointless - even Coover admitted that it had no influence on his fiction - a technology that no-one could access or wants to. A book is a book and an immersive textual-video experience is something completely different. Very very disappointing.
Afterwards at the book signing Coover was more interesting in a few minutes than he had been for the previous hour.

90Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 10:26 am

Jason Webley & Thomas Truax

This was a benefit gig for a local arts centre but unfortunately a few days earlier they had been told by the administrators (they were part of an organisation that went bankrupt leaving them high and dry) that the lease wouldn't be extended regardless of whether they could pay it or not. The administrators would rather leave the building empty.


Thomas Truax was up first. I've seen Traux before and I'm a fan (so much so I have pledged money to help him finish recording his next album). His one-man shows with home-made instruments (i.e., as seen above - a drum machine called Mother Superiour made from what looks like pram wheels and extendable aerials; an old gramophone speaker fitted with electronics that alter voice, etc) are always worth seeing. He puts so much effort and thinking into the presentation that occasionally the songs get a little lost for the audience member who is engorssed in the theatrics. This is a pity as Truax has a decent catalogue of quirky off-beat songs at his disposal. This was just a short set with a few of his 'better' known numbers and an odd choice of cover - the 1970s Johnny Cash hit, One Piece at a Time. (A song, I should note, I have always disliked). A good introduction for the uninitiated but too short to be really involving. Hoping he will come back soon to play a full set.
For a taste of his music go to his bandcamp page here.


Jason Webley is an accordion, and occasional guitar, player who is best known for his work with Amanda Palmer in Evelyn Evelyn. From what I had heard of him before he sounded like Tom Waits-lite but live he was something else. Although he is nominally listed as an alt country act much of the music he played derived from folk like tangos and polkas (perhaps the accordion lends itself to these idioms) with Webley stomping out the beat like a man possessed. At the end of the night he seemed near to collapse, totally drenched in sweat - it was a very warm venue with no air-conditioning and he kept stomping and jumping away. By then the audience were on their feet cheering. There was no sophistication to this performance, it ran on pure energy and audience participation - the audience functioning as backing singers, extra percussion and an occasional orchestra. What about the songs? He played a some of his own like the impressive Dance While the Sky Crashes Down and his hilarious Bacteria song written for the Ignobel prize ceremony; then he did originals and covers on request (name an 80s song) including memorable versions of Billie Jean & White Wedding. I have seen artists that have moved me, that have been more accomplished, that are more talented songwriters, but I can't remember seeing a performance that I have just enjoyed more. If this man comes within 50 miles of where you live go!
For a taste of his music go to Myspace here.

91baswood
Bearbeitet: Aug. 26, 2011, 10:28 am

trying to understand their accents for the dedications I bet that was a problem for him. T C Boyle sounds like a nice man and an interesting character.

92Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 10:40 am



Ben Okri

To be honest I'm really sure what Ben Okri is any more - is he still a serious writer who utilises magic realism as a method to discuss the situation in Africa or is he now closer to a new age guide? It is a pertinent question but it is difficult to answer. I still can't after this performance. All I can say is that while I enjoyed it I felt no inclination to buy any of his recent books but I'm not writing him off yet.

93Jargoneer
Aug. 26, 2011, 11:33 am

94Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Aug. 26, 2011, 11:33 am



The North Sea Scrolls

Collaboration between journalist Andrew Mueller and two of the best songwriters of the last 25 years, Cathal Coughlan and Luke Haines. (On stage there is a fourth member, Audrey Riley, who plays the cello). The premise of this show is simple - a document called the North Sea Scrolls has been found that reveals the true history of Britain. (To be honest it mainly concerns England as is Haines wont although Coughland does a couple of songs relating to Ireland). This is a tongue-in-cheek alernate history set to song so we have songs about how bit-part actor Tony Allen is responsible for the complete output of Francis Bacon; about Morris Men who operate as death squads; about the Australian IRA who have set up in tribute to the real IRA (a la Australian tribute bands); about the execution and matryrdom of Chris Evans; and the funeral of the devil, Jimmy Saville. Each song was set up by a short introduction by Mueller detailing another piece of alternate history that subsequently dovetails into the lyrical content of the next song. Highlights included the Morris Men and Australian IRA songs listed above and Mr Cynthia about Mosley's Minister of Culture, Sir Joe Meek, putting upstart young popstar, John Lennon, under house arrest. Typically this was excellent (Coughlan must have one the best voices in modern music) and I'll be buying the CD if they ever get round to releasing one. Equally typically it wasn't sold out. It's a disgrace that neither of these songwriters have ever managed much mainstream success. This won't bring them success but we can only hope that it encourages them to keep going.

95dchaikin
Aug. 27, 2011, 10:00 am

Turner, nothing of substance to post, just wanted to say This is all very entertaining. Enjoyed your bashing of the critic of Louis.

96auntmarge64
Aug. 27, 2011, 10:53 am

>81 Jargoneer:. I was reminded of The Jaguar Hunter not long ago and remembered how much I enjoyed it when it first came out, so I got a copy. I think this will encourage me to read it sooner rather than later.

97baswood
Aug. 27, 2011, 12:50 pm

#94 The same Luke Haines who was with the auteurs no doubt. I have a couple of their cd's and I found the songs interesting. The group had some success on the "indie" scene I think. Nice to know that a talented songwriter is still going strong.

98avaland
Sept. 1, 2011, 7:49 am

Glad to see you back and your thread reactivated (she says as she knows she has let hers mostly lapse into inactivity). Interesting posts, particularly the notes on the authors events, though the other events look interesting too. Must make sure dukedom knows you've reviewed The Jaguar Hunter, he'll enjoy reading your comments.

I thought the Coover talk sounded ...er... fringe. I've only read one Coover (Briar Rose) and that was ages ago (it seems).

btw, are you going to go back to Bellefleur? I'm nearly at the end of the 2nd section, so much keeps interrupting me. Have you read her other American Gothics?

99dukedom_enough
Sept. 2, 2011, 8:28 am

Glad to see you're a Lucius Shepard fan. I like Shepard a great deal, but he can be uneven. I think he was still on the way to becoming his mature self when he wrote the stories in The Jaguar Hunter.

Although he does most of his work at novella length, for a new reader I'd suggest the novel A Handbook of American Prayer. It has a somewhat lower than usual ratio of the fantastic to the ordinary, and ends less grimly than most of his stories. The short fiction might best be sampled from The Best of Lucius Shepard, including several of the stories you've reviewed.

I had the privilege of encountering him when he was Readercon guest of honor. He's a lovely person, rumpled and laid back most of the time, though the fiction, and his biography, would lead you to expect a lot of anger.

100Jargoneer
Sept. 14, 2011, 8:34 am

>97 baswood: - it is that Luke Haines. It's the typical story of artist not selling enough so getting dropped by major album but now releasing material through smaller labels.

>98 avaland: - I hope to get back to Bellefleur soon. I had finished the first two parts and then other things started to take priority. I was reading it in the same manner as you - a chapter or two a night. It is a book that almost demands you read it slowly.

>99 dukedom_enough: - perhaps he gets the anger out in the work. I haven't read that novel - I think it's one that isn't that easy to get over here. Actually most of his work seemed relatively difficult to get hold until recently when a bunch of Kindle editions were launched. (Of course, this is no use to me since I don't like the way Amazon are trying to tie you in completely with the Kindle).

101Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 14, 2011, 10:08 am



Classic Spanish Civil War novel by Nobel Prize winning author.

Hemingway's reputation now seems to be in almost terminal decline; partially a victim of style and partially the difficulty of seeing past the man to view the work clearly? When this novel was suggested as the next book group read it was surprising but less surprising than the unanimous yes vote. My previous experience with Hemingway had been mixed: I enjoyed the short stories and The Sun Also Rises, felt ambivalent about The Old Man and the Sea but hated To Have and Have Not (a prime example of the movie being better than the book) but I was looking forward to this book.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is the story of American Robert Jordan sent into the Spanish hills near Segovia to blow-up a bridge. In the hills Jordan meets up with a group of partizans who are to aid him in his task. Among them is a girl rescued and recovering from abuse by the fascists, Maria. Jordan and Maria fall in love instantly. Written in the third person the majority of the novel sticks closely to Jordan, only occasionally switching focus to a partizan to emphasise some aspect of the war, so the reader follows Jordan as he falls in love, attempts to come to terms with his past, present and possible lack of future.

Theoretically this should all be rather wonderful - an ordinary man captured between love and war, embracing life at the same time as coming to terms with death - but sadly it isn't.

The book is too long, which seems a strange thing to say about a master of the short story but Hemingway just can't be succinct when dealing with Jordan; he goes on and on when everything should be more focused. We don't need three pages about Jordan having doubts about the mission (and we get a lot more than three pages, Hemingway returning to the same issues again and again and again). Possibly this is due to the writer being too close to his character. We have Jordan discussing his grandfather and father: his grandfather is a real man, one who fought in the civil war and done well, whereas his father is a coward, a weakling who only uses a gun to kill himself. Who is talking here? Jordan or Hemingway? Hemingway's twisted view of masculinity also flaws the whole novel: he may give Jordan doubts but at no point does the reader doubt Jordan. The reader knows that Jordan is a real man, a good man who won't fail in his mission even if it means sacrificing himself and/or others, he won't let anyone down. An editor needed to step in and strip much of this fat back to the bones, make it lean and exciting.
However I doubt Hemingway would have accepted any editorial interference - this is his bash at the big book, the one that cover the BIG issues: love and war, political and personal ideology, how to be a 'good' man, etc. This is would be fine if Hemingway actually had much insight into either the political or the personal but he doesn't - he is poor on psychology and simplistic on the political. (This makes the notion that he was annoyed at the film adaptation for ignoring the politics a little laughable but then Hemingway never seemed to really grasp the concepts of what made a good film). We never really get a grasp on the war - we get the usual 'both sides are just ordinary people', the barbarity of war and we get Jordan who is dedicated to his duty and therefore by extension the idea of the Republic (Hemingway makes sure that although Jordan takes orders from Communists he not identified as one himself) but what we don't get is an idea of what the Republic stands for or why the war is happening.

Then there is Hemingway's use of language. The idea of using, for example, 'thee' and 'thou' to duplicate the formal aspects of Spanish was interesting but it also causes problems, creating an aura of artificiality when you want realism. There is something odd about a gang of partizans made up of the lower echelons of Spanish society talking in a chivalric manner. Since Jordan speaks perfect Spanish wouldn't the colloquial have been a more suitable choice. Even more irritating is Hemingway's coyness - rather than use an actual word Hemingway utilises 'obscenity', so we have bizarre lines like “I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness" while we also get the unexpurgated Spanish, “Me cago en la leche”. (This is doubly annoying when one of the Spanish partisans is described and portrayed as foul-mouthed). And when he doesn't use obscenity he uses an alliterative word, i.e, muck. It is possible that Hemingway did this due to the strictures of the time but if that is the case couldn't the language be changed to reflect a more modern sensibility - we are all adults here (with the possible exception of Hemingway himself).

The most damning aspect of the novel is the love story. Whenever Jordan and Maria are together it is cringe-worthy. This isn't Nobel Prize winning literature, it is Mills and Boon at its worst.
Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, “Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”
“Oh,” she said. “I die each time. Do you not die?”
“No. Almost. But did thee feel the earth move?”
“Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please.”
“No. I have thy hand. Thy hand is enough.”

Yes, it is true, the cliche about the earth moving started here. That's the level of writing around Maria and Jordan's passion. If there was a bad sex award in 1940 Hemingway certainly would have won and probably grabbed some runner-up places as well. Maria is barely a character, merely a lovely leading lady who is there to make the hero look more virile and human.

At the same time Hemingway can be a good writer when he keeps it simple, so we have excellent descriptions of the natural world and when he forgets the psychology and concentrates on the action the novel holds the interest more, gaining some much needed momentum. The milieu creates its own interest as well - you would have to be absolutely appalling writer not to generate some reader interest when the Spanish Civil War is the setting but as I stated above Hemingway doesn't make the most of it, avoiding complexity and embracing cliche.
And while the leads, Jordan and Maria, don't always hold up the supporting characters are much better drawn. Pilar is a much more believable character than Maria, interestingly she is also a relatively masculine woman. The story of her relationship with the doomed bullfighter Finito foreshadows Maria's with Jordan but is better drawn. (Hemingway utilises so much foreshadowing it almost closer to an eclipse and he can't resist writing about bulls whenever some reminisces). Anselmo, the old man who helps and in his personal dedication mirrors, Jordan most seems like the prototype for the old man of the sea. The other partisans such as Agustin, Fernando, Sordo, etc, are drawn quickly but effectively so that the reader follows their fates closely. And then there is the character of Pablo, arguably the most interesting in the novel: does he believe in the revolution or is he just an opportunist? Is he brave fighter or cold-blooded killer? Is he now a drunken coward or a pragmatist who truly understands the situation?

As Pablo turns out to be the real winner in the book is Hemingway's message that the those who benefit from the sacrifices of the idealists and the 'good' are the undeserving, the parasites? Is the fact that Jordan is willing to sacrifice himself for his own ideals worthwhile in itself? Is Jordan essentially a Christ-like figure who knowingly lays down his life to benefit the many?

I would like recommend this novel as it does possess a certain strength and asks some interesting questions but ultimately cannot - there is just too much hacking through dead wood to get to the final destination.

102Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 14, 2011, 11:43 am

One more book festival event.



A couple of minutes into this event Javier Cercas was asked to introduce his novel The Anatomy of a Moment. He first apologised for his English (which was excellent) and breathed again 15 minutes later. He was funny, informative and very loquacious. The chair had 18 questions to ask - she managed 2.
The oddity is that while his talk was very enjoyable I am stuck with The Anatomy of a Moment - it just isn't engaging me at present so I've decided to put it aside for a little while. Soldiers of Salamis is still a masterpiece though.

Note - the Edinburgh International Book Festival has made a number of their events available on audio - Re-Live the EIF

103Jargoneer
Sept. 14, 2011, 11:50 am

One last festival event.

Off the Ball

This is a light-hearted radio programme about football (the real kind). If there was a funnier show in the festival this year the audience must all be dead having died laughing.

Some Scottish jokes:

10 cows in a field. Which one is closest to Iraq?
Coo 8.

10 cows in a field. Which one is on holiday?
The wan with a wee calf.

What do you call a Spanish man with no legs?
Gracias.

And so on...........

104baswood
Sept. 16, 2011, 7:29 pm

Interesting review of For whom the Bell Tolls. I must have read this when I was still in school and remember enjoying it then. I never thought it was a literary novel. Last year I read Trinity by Leon Uris and his writing style and subject reminded me very much of Hemingway. Uris can definitely be described as pulp fiction and so we might say the same about Hemingway. I am not tempted to re-read him to find out (especially after your review)

105tomcatMurr
Sept. 16, 2011, 8:30 pm

great review of Hemingway. I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness. I am going to remember that one.

106avaland
Sept. 17, 2011, 4:14 pm

>98 avaland:, 100 Yes, agree about it demanding one to read it slowly, but only because I also feel one could drown in it. I'm somewhere beyond the second book - what a odd family (or are they?). It's pretty clear that the younger generation wants nothing to do with the Bellefleur "legacy".

>99 dukedom_enough:, 100. We have an extra copy, an ex-lib of Handbook of American Prayer (we rescued it from a library sale), if you would like it. You'd have to send me your address again. btw, I came across that literary theory book I was reading eons ago when we had that discussion on post-modernism. I'm tempted to read it again as much literary water has gone under the bridge since that discussion.

107dukedom_enough
Sept. 18, 2011, 10:18 am

Hemingway was the cat's (terse) meow when I was in high school, but I think his reputation has declined in recent years?

108Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 21, 2011, 7:38 am



There is an almost irresistible urge to dismiss this book as 'beautiful and pointless' (complete with drum roll). However it wouldn't be fair although there would be a little truth in it.

In his introduction Orr mentions being at a party and a fellow guest being horrified when he told her he reviews poetry for a living. For this fellow guest and others the idea of reviewing poetry is akin to reviewing the writer's soul; poetry, in popular parlance, being deeper, more intimate than any other art form. The remainder of the introduction essentially states that poetry can be very intimate but on the other hand it may not be remotely personal at all. This leads into the first chapter on 'The Political' which mimics the introduction - poetry can be political but isn't necessary so. This is the pointless aspect of the book - stating the bleeding obvious. Anyone could have come to these same (non-)conclusions. What saves Orr is his writing - you may not be being told anything but you are not been told anything in a manner that is clear, engaging and amusing.

A further two other chapters, 'Ambition' and 'The Fishbowl', focus as much on the world of poetry as much as poetry. 'Ambition' asks the the question of what constitutes greatness in poetry, focusing on Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Orr contention is that while alive Lowell was seen as the dominant poet, his poetry dealing with bigger issues, but since their deaths Bishop's reputation has risen while Lowell's has diminished. The premise being that Bishop's quiet detached style has weathered better than Lowell's slightly hysterical tone. What does this say about greatness though? That it is a game played in the long run? That the literary David will beat Goliath? Orr's suggestion is that while some poets aim for greatness it is a pointless task because what makes something great is being constantly re-defined.
In 'The Fishbowl' Orr discusses the academic world and poetry competitions. The natural environment for the poet is now seen as academia - a poet can't make enough money from writing to survive so teaching is the next best thing. of course this has created an almost incestuous atmosphere where poets are doing more than just praising each other's work but awarding each other prizes (with suitable cash awards), helping get jobs, and producing a poetry house-style. However this is only part of the picture - just because someone is in academia it doesn't mean that they will produce something mediocre, and likewise an non-academic poet is not necessarily producing wonderful work.

The best, and most informative, chapter is on form but this was always going to be the case. Poetry is so much about form (or structure) that it is at the heart of any meaningful discussion on poetry. It is also the area that captures my attention most - I want to know why one poem works and another doesn't. This isn't the most in-depth discussion on form (that probably requires a book by itself) but it is still very interesting - I particularly liked the short section on mechanical form which looked at the poems, and poets, based on linguistic puzzles, i.e., removing letters/vowels, writing a poem where each line utilised the same letters, etc. It may not be great poetry but it is fascinating insight into the construction of a poem.

The final chapter asks 'Why Bother?' and at the end of it Orr still hadn't produced a convincing answer but that could be because there isn't a single convincing answer. The most common answer to this is that poetry uses language in a unique manner, that it makes language special but as Orr points out prose can be equally powerful (his example being Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail). In the end all Orr can say is -
I can’t tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them; I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.

It is difficult to think of a single strong reason to read this book - it fails as a guide to modern poetry because there is not enough discussion of modern poetry in it and partly because Orr is not strongly opinionated enough. The most enjoyable books by literary critics tend to the ones where the writer has an axe to grind or wants to promote his/her opinions as gospel - judgments, whether you agree or not, are good fun to read. (One of the few times Orr expresses a strong opinion is to dismiss Jewel's poetry - which is the literary equivalent of kicking a soft furry kitten). There are also much better introductions on poetry and yet....I enjoyed this book and I think other people with an interest will as well. But then again rather than reading a book poetry you could spend the time reading poetry.

109baswood
Sept. 21, 2011, 8:19 am

I enjoyed your review of Beautiful & Pointless, David Orr which from what you say seems more informative about the "World of Poetry" than as an introduction to modern poetry. I am working my way through The Poetry Handbook by John Lennard that has got so much information about form and structure that its difficult to take it all in.

I think Mr Orr got an excellent reaction when he was at that party. I can imagine much worse. I was trying to imagine what reaction I would get if I said that I reviewed poetry for a living. The most likely response would be "and so what car do you drive" (anything to change the subject)

110avaland
Sept. 21, 2011, 8:47 am

>108 Jargoneer: Are you following me around? I just bought this book yesterday (after dithering over it a few previous times in the bookstore; I wondered if the book would have any new for me). I haven't read your review yet, will do so after I finish. But I did read the introduction and first chapter yesterday.

111Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 22, 2011, 10:18 am



Collection of four stories by highly acclaimed fantasy writer.

Crowley is not an natural short story writer, producing less than one a year since his first one appeared in 1977. Over the same time period he has produced a number of first class novels, most notably Little, Big, which may not have attained bestseller status but is consistency listed among the best fantasy novels ever.

The opening story, The Nightingale Sings at Night, is the weakest. Not that it is badly written, but rather it is an overlong alternate take on the story of creation mixed with a Kipling 'Just So' tale ('How the Nightingale got its name'). In this variation God is replaced by Mother Nature. the serpent by the Moon and new knowledge is signified by the process of naming. This tale flows along nicely enough but there is no real depth to it and there is something in this reader that sinks when confronted with yet another variation on the Adam and Eve myth, possibly the result of reading too many tales where stranded space travellers are revealed to be....

Great Work of Time is the longest piece in the collection, a novella on another hoary idea, that of time travel and the resultant time paradoxes. In Crowley's version the key event is the assassination of Cecil Rhodes and subsequent development of a secret society tasked with the aim of protecting the British Empire. At the heart of the story is Denys Winterset, a young assistant district commissioner of the police in Bechuanaland - the year is 1956 and he is travelling home to England for a holiday. Stopping off in Khartoum he meets another Englishman, Davenant, who tells of his incredible adventures and an equally incredible tale of an organisation, created through the will of Cecil Rhodes, that secretly protects the interests of the Empire.
Perhaps the novelist is only a special case of a universal desire to reshape, to ‘take this sorry scheme of things entire,’ smash it into bits, and ‘remold it nearer to the heart’s desire’—as old Khayyám says. The egoist is continually doing it with his own life. To dream of doing it with history is no more useful a game, I suppose, but as a game, it shows more sport. There are rules. You can be more objective, if that’s an appropriate word.”

This is the epitome of the English gentleman - travelling through time and altering history is simply described as a sport, a game (which references 'The Great Game', the struggle for ascendancy in Central Asia between Russia and Britain). Crowley is without doubt an Anglophile and much of fiction reflects this, not just in content but in tone. While many American writers get the facts correct, Crowley nails the sensibility as well.
Back in London Winterset finds the club and informed that Rhodes didn't die young as he believed and in order for this world to exist he has to be killed at a certain moment. The man chosen for this mission is Winterset. As chapters alternate we follow the mission to assassinate Rhodes and an old man in a resultant time line where various new life intelligent forms have been accidentally created as the society have increaisngly tweaked away at the 'real' time line. What is important? An individual life? An empire? Fixing the past can break the future.
This is all fantastically well done. Crowley even neatly explains time travel and the possible paradoxes question by creating “orthogonal logic” -
Any conceivable movement is into the orthogonal futures and pasts that fluoresce from the universe as it is; and from those orthogonal futures and pasts into others, and others, and still others, never returning, always moving at right angles to the stream of time. To the traveler, therefore, who does not ever return from the futures or pasts into which he has gone, it must appear that the times he inhabits grow progressively more remote from the stream of time that generated them, the stream that has since moved on and left his futures behind.

It is all tosh, of course, but it is superior tosh. This is one of the best time travel stories ever written because Crowley doesn't just dwell of the dynamics but successfully humanises the dilemma. It isn't the maths that counts but the heart.

In Blue is the story of a man's (Hare) breakdown in an utopian or dystopian setting. I say utopian or dystopian because it is difficult to pin down exactly which it is. It is a managed society where everyone's place is determined by 'act-field theory' -
We know that only acts (as defined by the special and general act theories) can have meaningfulness; an act’s meaningfulness is a
function of its definition as an act, a definition made possible by the infinitesimal social calculus.An act bearing high meaningfulness and low probability generates a high coincidence magnitude. To calculate meaningfulness against probability, and thereby arrive at the magnitude of the coincidence, requires that coincidence magnitude calculation be operable within act-field theory as a differential social calculus.
Act-field theory predicts the occurrence, within any given parameters of the field, of coincidences of a certain magnitude. It is said to account for these. The appearance within those parameters of coincidences greater in magnitude than the theory accounts for is a coincidence of implicitly high magnitude, generating its own parameters in another dimension, parameters calculable within the theory, which then accounts for the higher level of coincidence.The generation of such new parameters is called an implicit spike,and the process is itself accounted for.

- which is can be thought of as a form of chaos theory for society. Act-field theory can never be wrong, it can only fail to predict events because the correct data is not provided. Normally a managed society is portrayed in the negative but Crowley's approach is more sophisticated, this is a society where it is important that the individual finds their place and therefore finds a level of contentment. Hare was initially ear-marked as one of the few that could program the act-field but he failed to make the grade and now sees his life in a downward spiral, that he will fail in his new role and be further downgraded (possibly no longer even serving the state - the title refers to the colour of the state uniform). He constantly looks backward, to his failure to comprehend the act-field, to his failure as partner and father. He gets permission to visit Eva and his son, who have left the city and are working on a collective farm but Eva is planning, with a new companion, to move further away, outwith the reach of the revolution. This is something that Hare can barely grasp so he returns to the dorm and increases his obsession with the young female couple in the next room. As Hare becomes more unstable so does the narrative; Hare finds himself in court on charges that he cannot understand because he has lost his grip on reality. Slowly Hare is returned to a stable mental state but has to leave the cadre, out of blue and having 'fallen out of the universe' he experiences an epiphany regarding the act-field and achieves a measure of personal peace.
This is one of those stories that while you are reading you don't always grasp the subtlety and skill of the writing. It is only after you are finished reading that you find yourself thinking through the piece more thoroughly and discovering the full effect of it and also that it lingers in the head, that you may find yourself thinking about it more than you expected.

The title story makes up the collection. This is the tale of writer, who has written one moderately successful novel but struggled to come up with a follow-up, sitting in a bar thinking about what he could write about next. Writers writing about writers and writing can strike fear in even the most intrepid reader - the self-satisfaction, the tortured misunderstood genius, the solipsism, etc. (There is something ironic about criticising writers for writing what they know considering, for some people it is the mantra of creative writing). The best writers usually can overcome the readers' worst fears and Crowley is no exception (in a fairer world, Crowley would be widely recognised as one of the best American writers) - the simplicity of the outlining this story does no justice to how riveting this piece is. Intellectually and emotionally satisfying there is enough in this for a lesser writer's novel.
The theme would not be religion at all, but this ancient conflict between novelty and security. This theme would be embodied in the contrasted adventures of a set of characters, a family of Catholic believers modeled on his own. The motion of the book would be the sense of a holy thing ripening in the stream of time, that is, the seasons; and the form would be a false history or mirror-reversal of the world he had known and the church he had believed in.
Absurdly, his heart had begun to beat fast. Not years from now, not months, very soon, imaginably soon, he could begin. That there was still nothing concrete in what he envisioned didn’t bother him, for he was sure this scheme was one that would generate concreteness spontaneously and easily.


Despite reservations about one story I highly recommend this collection - the other three stories are excellent and well worth anyone's time.

112baswood
Sept. 22, 2011, 12:53 pm

Parts of your excellent review made my brain hurt. perhaps not for me

113avaland
Sept. 22, 2011, 4:55 pm

Nice comments on the Crowley.

114dukedom_enough
Sept. 23, 2011, 7:50 am

Jargoneer,

I like Crowley a great deal when I feel up to tackling him; I especially love this collection, and mostly agree with your take. I just realized: the alternate British Empire in "Great Work..." is, just incidentally, steampunk done right in a few strokes. It seems ideal - in this Empire, even racism is ended, and world peace reigns. I think most time-travel stories ultimately don't make logical sense, but this is one of the best for getting a feeling correct.

Agreed that the society of "In Blue" is not simply dystopian, and may be utopian - a lot of readers don't understand that.

Your quote from "Novelty," "...a false history or mirror-reversal of the world he had known..." could be a part-description of the Aegypt quartet that Crowley must have been working on in 1983. Hadn't thought of that - I should reread these stories more often.

115Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 23, 2011, 11:10 am



Vonnegut's third, and first non-SF, novel.

My name is Howard W. Campbell, Jr. I am an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination. The year in which I write this book is 1961.

Thus begins Vonnegut's third, and first non-SF, novel. Or it would if Vonnegut hadn't prefaced the main body of his novel with an editor's introduction about how the manuscript had come into his possession - an old trick and one used here to little effect. (Later versions also come with an introduction by Vonnegut, written in 1966, claiming that this is his only novel that he knows the moral to - he promptly then gives the reader four possible morals).

Campbell is writing his memoir in an Israeli prison awaiting execution for war crimes. Campbell's crime was to produce virulent propaganda for the Nazis but what no-one knows is that he was also an American spy and that his propaganda also contained messages for the Allies.

Before the war Campbell was a successful writer of 'Romantic' (in the literary sense) plays which happened to utilise the same ideas as the Nazis making him writer-at-court with the senior hierarchy of the party. (Most of the big names make an appearance in Campbell's memoir – Hitler, Hess, and notably, Hoess, commander at Auschwitz, who, in the next cell awaiting execution, asks him for advice in writing a memoir). Campbell doesn't care about politics, he only cares about his wife, his leading actress and muse, Helga. They exist in a bubble outside of everyday concerns but the real world doesn't respect any artificial boundaries and Campbell is soon recruited by the Americans to be a spy. For Campbell it is all artifice - on the radio he delivers diatribes of hatred (which also contain information for the Allies although he doesn't know what) which he doesn't believe, he creates his own over-the-top uniform mixing American and Nazi regalia, but he never conflates what he does with what is happening outside.

At the end of war he is captured by the Americans and sentenced to death. No-one knows he has been a spy, to everyone he is a traitor. An escape is arranged and he flees to New York, to get lost in big city anonymity. He has lost his wife but on the whole everything is going well, he lives a quiet life, gets on with his neighbours, and generally has regrets. Then he starts playing chess with a neighbour who is an artist. Unfortunately George Kraft is not just an artist, he is also Colonel Iona Potapov, a Russian agent. Potapov, who is now more American than Russian, still sees an opportunity to do something for the motherland. It is in doing this Campbell's life stands spinning out of control.

Soon Campbell's 'true' identity is known again and he becomes the focus of pro- and anti- fascist groups - a hero to one, a villain to the other. His wife turns up from Russia, bringing with her all his lost work, and he is ecstatic. But he can't create the same bubble as before: the pro-Fascists want him to lead them to a new promised American, the anti-fascists want to hand him to Israelis so he can stand trial and Kraft wants to get him back to Russia. In the typical manner of a farce all this keeps gets more confused and is only brought to a head when his wife, who it turns out is not his wife but his wife's sister, is killed at a party meeting and he is offered the chance to escape. By now Campbell has realised that you can't live outside of the real world, that actions have consequences and he hands himself over to some local Jewish businessmen.

Vonnegut's books are always easy to read and this is no exception. Campbell's memoir jumps about in time and focus but the reader is never left wondering where and when the action is. This is a method Vonnegut used a number of times, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five, and he does it very skillfully. However it also begs the question - does Vonnegut sacrifice seriousness for lightness of touch?

At the heart of this novel are two concepts, the first is about identity - in his introduction Vonnegut suggests that the moral of the novel is "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be", but then he also provides another 3 including "When you're dead you're dead". Virtually everyone in this novel is pretending to be someone or something they are not and there are consequences for keeping up this pretence: Resi pretends to be Helga and is shot dead, Popatov pretends to be Kraft and ends up in prison, Campbell pretends to a Nazi and ends up on death row. Of course, mistaken, or assumed, identity is at the heart of farce - it cracks the veneer of ordinary life revealing the true chaotic absurdist life underneath.

The second concept is one of personal responsibility - if you pretend to be someone else you can shrug this off. It is not you who is personal responsible, it is the character you have created. In the end this is a novel in which the lead character has to come to terms with their own actions, to embrace the absurd nature of life and achieve personal freedom. It is because of this that Mother Night could be read as an American version of Camus' The Stranger. Both novels have lead characters who do something unconscionable, are embraced by others who want to use them for their own ends, are offered chance to escape but refuse because they have finally embraced who they are and the consequences of their action. It is only because Campbell has embraced his fate that he can reveal truth in his memoir.
It wasn't that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can't say, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.


The problem I have with Vonnegut's premise is that the dice are loaded. It is all well and good that Campbell embraces his responsibility as propagandist for the Nazis, guilty of promoting evil policies that contributed to the death of millions of innocent individuals but what about Campbell the spy. It is true that Campbell does not know what information he is transmitting to the allies but he is still putting his life on the line for the side of good. The logic of this is - in order for Campbell to be a useful spy he has to perform his radio talks, in order to keep doing his radio talks he needs to sound like a good Nazi, therefore the Allies need Campbell to play the good Nazi.
Throughout the novel Campbell is shown as not taking responsibility for his actions, that he created a artificial existence for himself and his wife at the cost of helping to destroy the real world. However in making the decision to spy for the allies does Campbell not make a decision based on the realisation that the Nazis are evil? Therefore he already progresses a degree of self-awareness before he becomes self-aware.The counter-argument could be that Campbell embraces his voice of Nazis position with too much brio, that he doesn't fully understand that words have power, that his speeches have consequences. As Campbell states to his recruiter:
..."you're mistaken. When I go home, it will be to have a fine meal with my beautiful wife, to listen to music, to make love to my wife, and to sleep like a log. I'm not a soldier, not a political man. I'm an artist. If war comes, I won't do anything to help it along. If war comes, it'll find me still working at my peaceful trade."

Campbell is re-iterating the old ideal that art is something rarefied, above the concerns of the material world. When Campbell's 'wife' returns to him midway through the novel she brings with her a suitcase full of all his old writings. It is revealed that a Russian soldier had found the suitcase in Berlin, taken it back to Berlin, and become a highly successful writer by passing the plays off as his own. Everything is going well until he runs out of Campbell's material and he starts to write a work of his own, the KGB search his house, find the suitcase and he is executed for the content of his work. Vonnegut makes the joke that he was executed for being original but this is untrue, surely he was executed for being critical of the state. He wouldn't have been executed for writing a piece in praise of the government. It could be argued that Campbell was never original, that he re-worked old romantic ideas in his plays and Nazi propaganda in his radio pieces, so is he being executed for not being original? Perhaps Campbell's artistic defence would never old in his case because was never an 'artist', merely a hack.
It is interesting to compare this with the real world where Celine is pilloried for his beliefs but defended for his art. A closer example would be P. G. Wodehouse, who was exonerated for delivering radio talks while held by the Nazis on the ground that he was naive. No-one believes Wodehouse was a Nazi or had any sympathy for them but Wodehouse was never forgiven by many in the UK for his actions. How foolish does a person have to be not to realise the true nature of the Nazis.
What is the proper stance for an artist faced with overwhelming moral evil? Most would say to stand up to it, to denounce it. Campbell doesn't denounce the Nazis, rather he is seen to embrace them but behind their backs he is delivering information that may help to their downfall. Isn't this the action of someone standing up to them though? At the end of the novel Campbell is provided with a chance to prove his identity as a spy but he decides not to use it and this is the fundamental flaw in Vonnegut's argument - Campbell embraces his guilt but he doesn't embrace the fact he may are done something brave, worthwhile. Surely Campbell should embrace both aspects of his actions to come to a full understanding of who he is?

This is not just an enjoyable novel - easy to read and full of good jokes - but thought-provoking as well.

116Jargoneer
Sept. 23, 2011, 11:30 am



Following the news of REM splitting I decided to have a listen to them again. It's probably been a couple of years since I have heard this album. Now I wonder why. After 28 years it still shimmers: a wonderful collection of songs ("Radio Free Europe", "Pilgrimmage", "Talk About the Passion", & "Perfect Circle" being stand-outs) played brilliantly by a band who got everything right first time. As the Allmusic review states R.E.M. may have made albums as good as Murmur in the years following its release, but they never again made anything that sounded quite like it. They may have become the biggest band in the world (or second after U2) but they never lost themselves in rock bombast, there was always something delicate at the heart of their best work. If you can, take another listen to this - you will find yourself remembering why you liked them in the first place or wondering how you managed to miss music this good the first time around.

117baswood
Sept. 23, 2011, 11:43 am

Ah yes jargoneer. Murmer. When I first heard this I remember being underwhelmed, but the songs soon grow on you and you realise what a subtlety unique sound the group had. Stipe's slightly world weary vocals pull the songs along. Great stuff and always worth a listen.

118dchaikin
Sept. 24, 2011, 9:43 pm

I've never heard Murmur...I had a cassette of Document at one time, my first REM album. I just purchased The Best of the I.R.S Years a few weeks ago.

Catching up from Hemmingway-to-Vonnegut, terrific entertaining stuff here.

119baswood
Sept. 25, 2011, 6:14 pm

Great essay on Mother Night jargoneer. All those moral questions!

120dukedom_enough
Sept. 25, 2011, 6:57 pm

In the decade and a half before Vonnegut began publishing, the world of science fiction was influenced, if not dominated, by John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding magazine; the name Howard W. Campbell, Jr. sounds to me like it might have been a reference. Does anyone know?

121Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 26, 2011, 5:24 am

>120 dukedom_enough: - I wondered that as well, so much so I googled it and found this in an interview:

NUWER:...Was the name of 'your character' Howard W. Campbell, Jr. in Mother Night inspired by John W. Campbell, Jr. leading editor of science fiction magazines Astounding Science Fiction and Analog? I read some criticism by critic James Lundquist, which said it might be. Was it?

VONNEGUT: Not at all. I know who he John W. Campbell, Jr. is, but I never had a damn thing to do with him. No. I guess he had enemies, but I don’t know that much about him. But I gather that he was a controversial person. Hell, no.


Of course, Vonnegut was unlikely to answer in the affirmative so this may not clear anything up.

122dukedom_enough
Sept. 26, 2011, 7:24 am

Well, if Vonnegut really had nothing to do with Campbell, there's no reason to parody him - but also no reason to fear retribution. If I can believe ISFDB, Vonnegut's early stories were published in Collier's magazine more than anywhere else, plus places like Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Atlantic Monthly. General interest magazines rarely publish fiction these days, except the New Yorker.

123dchaikin
Sept. 26, 2011, 8:27 am

The natural environment for the poet is now seen as academia - a poet can't make enough money from writing to survive so teaching is the next best thing. of course this has created an almost incestuous atmosphere where poets are doing more than just praising each other's work but awarding each other prizes (with suitable cash awards), helping get jobs, and producing a poetry house-style. However this is only part of the picture - just because someone is in academia it doesn't mean that they will produce something mediocre, and likewise an non-academic poet is not necessarily producing wonderful work.

Thinking about this. (I appreciate your point. ) It occurs to me that the implication here is that academia is not promoting high quality poetry...that instead of providing an environment that drives towards the exceptional, instead it provides an inhibiting environment...that it actually promotes the mediocre.

124Jargoneer
Sept. 26, 2011, 10:42 am

>122 dukedom_enough: - I remember reading a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and was surprised at how much money a writer could make placing stories in the publications you mention. A couple of short stories could make you more money than a novel.

>123 dchaikin: - this is one of the big debates (if it is possible to now have a big debate) in poetry - do poets in academia produce poetry for readers or for other poets in academia?

125Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Sept. 26, 2011, 12:31 pm



Collection of seven stories by highly acclaimed fantasy writer.

In music terms this could be viewed as the difficult 'second album' but it is closer to an odds'n'sods collection comprised of a b-sides, demos and out-takes that have been thrown together while waiting for the real collection.

This collects together the remaining seven short stories Crowley had published between 1977-1993 and had not appeared in Novelty. This is a completely different beast than the previous volume, with the seven stories being much shorter, the whole volume taking up the same number of pages as Great Work of Time on it's whole. It should be that this wasn't a commercial release but a small press one limited to a 1000 copies.

The title story was Crowley's first published story and is an early outing for his Anglophilia. It is a club story: the narrator being told a tale by a friend while in the confines of a gentleman's club. In the 1880s a plague of inconstant husbands strikes northern Chesire; a wife openly murders her husband claiming that she did it to save the others; while, mesmerised, a man reveals an encounter with sensenous Egyptian cat goddess. Some months before, Sir Geoffery reveals, the freight ship 'John Deering' delivered a cargo of three hundred thousand mummified cats to London, the fate of which was to be chopped up as fertiliser and shipped to....northern Chesire. This is a nice homage to earlier writers of the fantastic, neatly crafted and told. (Although I should add that I have a soft spot for tales like this).

Her Bounty to the Dead is the story of Phillippa Derwent who is given the opportunity to return to her childhood home when her nephew, John, returns. As they travel to the farm Phillippa relives moments from her past, finally realising that this past may be reaching out to take her. This is a subtle ghost story, he piece most like his later writing (possibly due to the fact that it is actually re-worked from an earlier story). Like Crowley's later work the amount of effort the reader puts is reflected in the satisfaction they feel in the end - whether an almost throw-away story deserves so much effort is another question.

The Reason for the Visit could easily be mistaken as another ghost story, Virginia Woolf visiting the narrator in modern day New York but if it is one this is haunting by design or invitation. The narrator and Woolf have tea and conversation, and then Woolf leaves. Less a story and more a meditation on time and Woolf's ability to capture it in prose -
She turned, orienting herself. As she did so, she sensed Time as an enormous conical spiral. She sensed it tightening as it rose, tightening toward some furious stasis of immediacy. Time is compressible; it was quite simple really, she could compress it to a point. She could compress it all into the tiniest of compasses—into a day, into an evening—no, into an hour, even into the turning of a head: the single half-turn of a single great-eyed head.


The Green Child is based on the medieval legend of two children with green skin, brother and sister, being found in Woolpit, Suffolk. They claimed to come from a land beneath the earth and had got lost while tending their father's cattle. The brother died after being baptised, the girl grew up to be 'wanton and wild' before finally settling into marriage. Crowley doesn't really do much with this tale other than expand the details a little. (A few years after Crowley's version appeared a Scottish astronomer suggested, in Analog that they may have been aliens - interesting this wasn't the first suggestion of this, that belonged to Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621).

Snow is possibly the most straight-foward SF story Crowley has published. The narrator, a writer, marries Geordie for money, just as she had done with her first husband. This husband presented Geordie with a Wasp, that is an insect sized recording device which followed her around, transmitting the data back to place called The Park. The theory being that once someone was dead their partner or family could re-live the memories. In a Philip K. Dick story this would be the start of some sort of conspiracy but in Crowley's world it becomes a method to discuss memory, failing, strong or faulty, as the root of a person. Unfortunately we know the narrator will never embrace the film in The Park from the start because SF has taught since the beginning that technology usually reduces humanity rather enhances it. Not a bad story, nicely written.

I have nothing much to say about Exogamy. Crowley was obviously going for a dream-like quality in a tale of marrying outside your community but it doesn't do much. I assume that he is trying to be amusing by having the hero fall in love with a harpy.

The last tale (not in collection order) is Missolonghi 1824. A dying (unnamed) Lord Byron tells a young boy he has employed a story of an earlier visit to Greece. Out travelling he happens upon a hunt, not for a beast but for some form of madman. Later he reaches their village, they have been successful in their hunt but they will not let him. The priest talks of many rapes, or the possibility of, avoided and Byron thinks of tales of wild boys abandoned and brought up by wolves. Eventually he is able to make his way to the dell where the madman is caged, except it is no madman, it is a satyr, about the size of a small boy. Byron, feeling pity toward, and some empathy with, the creature frees it. As he does so it holds his arm gently.
It wasn’t true, what he had told the boy: that he had been given no gift, made no promise. For it was only after Greece that he came to possess the quality for which, besides his knack for verse, he was chiefly famous: his gift (not always an easy one to live with) for attracting love from many different kinds and conditions of people. He had accepted the love that he attracted, and sought more, and had that too. Satyr he had been called, often enough. He thought, when he gave it any thought, that it had come to him through the grip of the horned one: a part of that being’s own power of unrefusable ravishment.

Is this a true story? Perhaps even Byron no longer knows.
This is my personal favourite of the seven tales and I would argue the best in the collection. Whereas the tale told in the opening story, Antiquities is straightforward this is a tale that shifts and alters in the telling. It is also interesting to contemplate the relationship between this tale and Crowley's later novel, Lord Byron's Novel - it could have appeared in the novel within the novel. The Evening Land and perhaps is the seed that led to the later work.

This is not a bad collection but not an excellent one like Novelty. Writing this review has certainly increased my regard for some of them.

126dukedom_enough
Sept. 27, 2011, 7:41 am

Prices at abebooks for this book are rather high, though you don't have the really high-end edition. I think all the stories in Novelty and Antiquities are also in Novelties & Souvenirs.

127Jargoneer
Sept. 27, 2011, 9:07 am

>126 dukedom_enough: - I was going to post something to that effect. Unless you are a serious collector I couldn't recommend buying the hardback to anyone (I actually managed to pick it up cheaply - not sure if the seller knew the value or just wanted shot of it). Not only are all the stories from both collections in Novelties and Souvenirs, there are another three (which I'm thinking of reviewing separately).

128Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Okt. 21, 2011, 7:29 am

Started a course on "Vampire Fiction" a few weeks ago (a semi-serious course I should point out, not a 'I love Twilight' jamboree). At the time I thought it would be a laugh but I've found myself enjoying it less than expected.

The beginning:

Ludwig Tieck - The Bride of the Grave (aka Wake Not the Dead
Although commonly attributed to Tieck it is likely that he didn't write the tale, that the real writer was Ernst Raupach. It is also now seems unlikely that this was originally published in 1800 but rather in 1823, meaning that Polidori's The Vampire predates it.
Walter loves (obsessively) the beautiful Brunhilda but she dies suddenly, possibly the result of too much sex. (Yes, they were enjoying themselves that much). Overcoming his heartache Walter marries Swanhilda, who may be less attractive but gives him children and is better at performing the other duties of a wife. This isn't enough for Walter, he still dreams of Brunhilda and wants her back. As is often the case it just so happens that there is a sorcerer standing near Brunhilda's grave and after ignoring three warnings Walter gets the mage to raise Brunhilda. She comes back as voracious as ever but with an added appetite. After Swanhilda is chucked out the castle Brunhilda gets to work satisfying Walter's, and her own, cravings. Eventually, having consumed everyone including Walter's children, she turns on him, at which point he comes to his senses and wonders what has he done. After consulting the sorcerer again Walter destroys Brunhilda by stabbing her through the heart, cursing her and promising never to think about her again. Now feeling a little lonely he visits Swanhilda and asks her to take him back but she is obviously a little miffed by her children now being dead. Walter feels terrible but fortunately a beautiful mysterious woman appears and Walter falls again and this time there is no escape.
Although nominally a vampire tale this is really a fable warning men not to be blinded by beauty, to appreciate what is really important - Brunhilda was beautiful but barren and destructive, Swanhilda less attractive but fertile and a home-maker. The fable aspect of it means that there is little characterisation but the story gallops along, a melange of sex, death and sorcery.

Thirteen years Théophile Gautier produced The Beautiful Dead, a story much more in the Romantic mode.
An old monk, Romuald, recounts a strange adventure from his youth. From a very young boy all Romuald wanted to do was join the church so he didn't experience life as an ordinary boy would have. Then at the final moment of his admission to the priesthood he sees Clarimonde and is instantly smitten by her. Fighting temptation he submits to God but he is still haunted by her. His mentor, Sérapion, informs him of Clarimonde's debauchery and hints that she may have had many lives. Given a parish in the country Romuald attempts to re-dedicate himself to God but one night a man on horseback arrives pleading with him to deliver last rites to his mistress, who is, of course, Clarimonde.
Unable to contain his grief Romuald kisses Clarimonde and unwittingly brings her back to life. Three days later he awakes at home believing it all to be a dream but that night Clarimonde visits him informing him that he should prepare for a journey. The following night she returns and takes Romuald to Venice. From then on Romuald lives a double-life, country-priest by day, debauched noble by night. This leads him to question whether he is a priest dreaming he is a nobleman or a nobleman dreaming he is a priest. Clarimonde however feels her 'life' is ebbing away until one night Romuald accidentally cuts himself and she tastes his blood. From then on she drugs Romuald every night to take a little blood but realising something odd is happening one night Romuald doesn't take his prepared draft and finds out what Clarimonde is doing - rather than being disgusted he is happy with the trade-off. After a significant amount of time, and a few warnings, Sérapion decides enough is enough, drags Romuald to the graveyard and destroys Clarimonde by pouring holy water over her.
What makes this story particularly interesting is that the narrator is not horrorified by being the victim of a vampire or by his actions while under her thrall. (Does Romuald actually create Clarimonde the vampire?) Even as an old man he is saddened by the demise of Clarimonde and the loss of his wild life. Of course, Romanticism is about the rejection of the church and 'scientific reason' and the embrace of the other so we should expect no less. Gautier was also an exponent of Orientalism and we see that in his use of colour, which is usually utilised with respect to Clarimonde. I recommend this tale to anyone with an interest in vampires or Romanticism or Orientalism - and when I get the chance I will be checking out other stories by Gautier.

Edgar Allan Poe - Ligeia
I'm guessing Poe had read Wake Not The Dead since this is in essence a variation on the same theme. The unnamed narrator marries the brilliant Ligeia who then succumbs to one of those handy 19th century obscure diseases that often consume female characters but not before she has declared her intention not to remain dead. Overcome by grief, another stand-by of the era, the narrator leaves Europe and moves to England wherein he creates a completely over-the-top Gothic dwelling-place and acquires a second, not so brilliant, wife. She too soon starts to succomb to whatever but the narrator, who now has a laudanum addiction, is convinced that Ligeia is poisoning Rowena and is coming back through her.
There are two ways to read this story - firstly as a straightforward horror story which plays on the ideas of transcendantalism and the influence of the spirit world on the material world; secondly, as a warning, 'readers don't do drugs' because if you do you too could be as hopping mad as this guy. There are times Poe reminds me of the Spinal Tap joke of the amp going up to 11 and this is one of those times - all the classic aspects of Poe (the Gothic settings, the dead wife, laudunamm etc) are all ramped up in this tale. Like most of Poe an acquired taste.

129baswood
Okt. 21, 2011, 8:02 am

#128 Are these books from your reading list on your "Vampire Fiction" course ? Anyway reading through my back issues of the TLS (May 6 2011), yes I am that far behind. I came across a feature on vampire literature in which the following books were recommended:

Dracula's Guest: A connoisseur's collection of Victorian vampire stories Ed by Michael Sims
Dracula's Precursors: "The Mysterious Stranger" and other stories Ed by David Annwn
Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film by Eric Butler

130Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Okt. 21, 2011, 8:33 am

>129 baswood: - the set book for short stories is

- a book so large that you can feel your muscles straining when you lift. God knows what would happen if it fell on anyone. This contains most of the stories in Dracula's Guest and a few of the other collection.

The book I would recommend is
- especially for the introductory essay. (He's also very good on Spaghetti Westerns but that's another for another time).

The course is solely on the literature but it is punctuated by clips to demonstrate ideas (and give everyone a little rest). One of this week's clips was from the 1970s version of Dracula starring Frank Langella complete with big hair ready just in case they opened a disco in 19th century Whitby.
I still haven't seen Jack Palance's portrayal although I have high hopes that the ending would make a nod to Shane - perhaps having a small Romanian boy running after a coffin-bearing carriage - Dracula. Dracula. Come back Dracula..

131Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Okt. 26, 2011, 11:20 am



There isn't really much point doing a traditional review so I'll just make a few points instead.

Modernity versus Tradition
It is interesting to note in our age of information explosion that one of the advantages the heroes have over Dracula is the ability to collate knowledge using devices such as the typewriter (including portable), carbon paper and the dictaphone. Mina's ability to type and produce copies of the script means that all the heroes can be kept up to date. Also when Dracula destroys the contents of a safe he can't destroy the information as it now exists in multiple copies - contrast that in earlier Victorian novels which turn on the existence of single important documents.
When Lucy is victimised she is given blood transfusions in order to help her recover. Science can counteract the effects of the superstition. (The limits of knowledge are also highlighted here - Van Helsing chooses the blood to help Lucy based on the vigour of the man rather than any detailed blood type).
In the final chase sequence Dracula is stuck using the traditional mode of transport over sea the heroes utilise the railway system across European which means they can travel more directly, faster.
However it should be noted that Dracula initially succeeds because of the weakness of modernity, that technology and progress will answer everything. The state of modernity mitigates against the existence of vampires and if you cannot believe in their existence how can you then fight their menace. By losing the link to the past modern societies are at risk from the past.

Parenthood
Early on in the second section all the parent figures are dead (in fact, they die so quickly it makes you wonder why everyone is worried about a possible vampire plague) that Dracula and Van Helsing can be viewed as replacement parents fighting over the children.

Heroic Stupidity
There are times in the novel you find yourself wondering why the heroes are acting in such a manner.
For example, Van Helsing should save Lucy but he havers and prevaricates rather than just arranging decent round the clock supervision and using some crucifuxes etc to ward off Dracula. Then he does the same when she's dead - rather than destroying her when he has a chance he endangers the populace at large. It's the literary equivalent of a big game hunter stalking an elephant and deciding to wait until it's closer only to wait too long and get trampled.
Then we have Mina. 'Mina, you are looking pale and tired', everyone says but no-one thinks perhaps she is under the curse of a vampire. Duh.

Dracula - Lord of Nothing
Despite all his powers including the ability to walk in daylight but spends the last quarter of the novel stuck in a box waiting to be killed. Is this really the best he can do? One of the problems any writer faces when they create a super-being is how to destroy their creature without descending to stupidity - they rarely succeed.
What is fascinating is the difference between the image of Dracula and the character of Dracula. Talk to most people who have the read the novel about Dracula and what they talk about is the screen image of the Count, suave and sexy, seducing young virgins - this is not the character in the novel, this is from the movies. Dracula, in the novel, is not suave or sexy, he is not handsome at all and he stinks - if there is an image of Dracula in film it is Count Orlok from Nosferatu. The power of the movie vampire is such that it now so embedded in people's psyche that it overrides Stoker's actual creation.

What is the point of Renfield?
Renfield is one of the most memorable of the characters in Dracula but then you would remember a character that eats flies and spiders and oscillates between violence and philosophy but what does he actually do? His whole reason for being seems to as a method to provide Dracula an invite into the asylum.
Apart from one audacious moment where Stoker compares Dracula to God and Satan: he appears to Lucy as a column of cloud with burning eyes (which echoes the pillar of cloud and fire which helps the Israelites escape from Egypt); and, to Renfield offering him the kingdom of beasts to feast upon echoing the temptation of Christ.

Is Dracula misogynistic?
The most given answer is usually a simple yes.
Take Lucy, her encounter with Dracula sexualises her, she transgresses the Victorian idea of (nice middle-class) women as prim and proper by exhibiting sexual desire or so it seems. In truth there is already something in Lucy that can be corrupted - think of when she asks why can't a woman have as many husbands as want her. Interesting grammar there, not how many husbands that she wants but as many husbands as 'want' her. This is why partly why Mina can resist Dracula more, she doesn't possess these hidden desires.
Lucy transgresses again by feeding on children when a vampire - she is now the opposite of the good women; sexual, barren and the killer, not mother, of children. The corruption of Lucy is finalised in the staking scene which is a parody of the wedding ritual, complete with reading, penetration and orgasm.
Women beware - behave yourselves or else.
And yet - there is Mina; she is intelligent, resourceful and the most effective leader of the heroes - when they reach an impasse it is Mina that usually provides the solution. Mina is a new woman for a new age, she masters technology, is intellectually the superior to most of the men and demands to be taken on the hunt. (All of which probably accounts for Dracula's connection to her). And yet she is not allowed to be active in the hunt, she masters technology to be useful to her husband and others, and at the end is content to be a wife and mother - she is victorious over Dracula because she accepts the traditional role of the woman. (Possibly she accepts this role because Stoker can't really do characterisation so his characters move from point to point rather than develop).

Were Dracula and Jonathan Harker lovers?
What actually happens to Jonathan Harker in Castle Dracula? We are never told but there are hints. Dracula saves Harker for himself twice - from his wives, and in the discarded first chapter usually called Dracula's Guest. Saving him for what - we don't see him biting Harker but he is displacing him - as Dracula looks younger, Harker looks older; the vampire wears his clothes, etc. Dracula is stealing Harker's life force but how? Near the end Harker tells Van Helsing that the older man doesn't know what it feels like to have a vampire at his neck. So did Dracula visit Harker in his bedchamber and Harker edit these visits from journal.
Thinking about the first section again is Jonathan Harker not less romantic hero and more surrogate menaced heroine? Is the most shocking moment in the novel not the death of Lucy but one that is left to the reader's imagination - the seduction of Jonathan Harker?

As a novel Dracula is a mess - full of inconsistencies, little characterisation, and too many longueurs. However some of these structural weaknesses actually add to the power of the novel - the reader's imagination peers into all these cracks and sees something more than Stoker gives us, in the process re-inventing the novel. And this is a novel that owes much of its success to analysis and interpretation and re-workings; the novel we read now is not the original Victorian chiller but one that comes with a century of cultural baggage. What is the point of highlighting the failings of Stoker's writing when there are so many facets of the novel to discuss.


132Jargoneer
Okt. 28, 2011, 8:05 am



The first of Grant's novels set in the small town of Oxrun Station.

Natalie Windsor's husband is brutally murdered while out patrolling. A year later, despite encouragement to leave and start a new life elsewhere, Natalie is still in Oxrun Station, working at the town library and keeping to herself. Everything would be OK if it wasn't for her brother-in-law and head of the police ordering his men to keep an eye on her and his wife constantly checking up on her. All this attention seems a little more than concern. Attention of more welcome nature comes from Marc(us) Clayton, reporter on the local newspaper.
After a vagrant is found murdered in the same manner as her husband Natalie begins to think something more sinister may be happening. Rummaging through her husband's things she and Marc find an unusual ring. At a party heard by Ambrose Toal, the town's patriarch, she overhears a conversation that sounds like it is about her. There are more suggestions about leaving, her work into missing volumes at the library is stopped, her data 'accidentally' destroyed and a strange presence seems to be stalking her. Marc is sent out of her town, Natalie is isolated and this 'presence' tries to hunt her down but is held back by something. One night she is supposed to be working late her replacement is killed in the same manner as the vagrant and her husband making her realise this isn't a game any more, it's for keeps. She starts noticing that a number of other individuals have the same ring as the one she found and hidden away on a library shelf she finds a volume relating to these rings but neither she nor Marc can make head-or-tail of it. There is only one thing left to do, attend Toal's 'big party' and confront him head-on.

There is something reassuringly old-fashioned about this novel, despite being published a year before Stephen King's Carrie it doesn't feel as contemporary. Part of this is down to change in content, Grant belongs to a generation that approached the horror novel as one of suspense and dread, not the visceral product that now dominates. On the plus side this means the novel is nice and short, rather than the sprawling monsters of today.
Grant is a competent enough writer but he is more effective dealing with the suspense aspects than he is with the ordinary interplay of characters - the flirting/romance between Natalie and Marc is often awkwardly, occasionally embarrassingly, portrayed.
For aficinados of the genre the real importance of this novel is the first appearance of Oxrun Station, a small American town where the supernatural finds a natural town. Despite the increasing urbanisation of the US the small town defines the country for good and bad - it is The Waltons where all the positives of community are present, it is The Gilmore Girls where quirkiness is celebrated and it is Oxrun Station where evil can exist quietly. (The small town in American horror deserves a tome all to itself - from Lovecraft's Innsmouth through Oxrun and King's Castle Rock to Sunnydale in Buffy and beyond). Oxrun Station never brought Grant's much commercial success and he eventually more-or-less abandoned it (leaving it a ghost town?) after the 1980s but it is held in some esteem and no little affectation by readers who paid it a visit. The Hour of the Oxrun Dead is not the best of his Oxrun pieces (arguably Grant was always at his best in a slightly shorter form) but it will pass the time enjoyably enough and you may find that want to pay another visit to this strange town.

133baswood
Okt. 28, 2011, 8:49 am

Enjoying your reviews as ever. You really are into the dark side of late. Interesting comments on Bram Stoker's Dracula. I read it a long time ago and came away with the same impression that you did; a bit of a mess. I was thinking of re-reading it but your review has put that idea right on the back burner.

134Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Okt. 28, 2011, 12:20 pm



Charles L. Grant - A Crowd of Shadows

Nebula winning short story from 1976.

Not a supernatural/fantastical story from Grant but a straight ahead science fiction one.
The narrator has come to the resort of Starburst (an unfortunate choice of name which sounds like a hangover from pulp days) to relax. At the beach he watches a teenage boy and a couple arguing before noticing the line of numbers tattoo-ed on his arm designating an android. In the restaurant later he again sees the boy and his parents, and overhears some anti-android statements aimed at them. The following morning he gets a visit from Harrington, the chief of police, who is investigating a murder - the man who made anti-android statements has been killed, his throat literally ripped out.
At the beach later the boy comes up to the narrator and asks to talk for a minute. The boy mentions that people can be so cruel and that the detective seems to have decided that he is the murderer. The narrator makes the usual noises about some people being ignorant and that the detective won't leap to any conclusions. The boy leaves and the narrator falls asleep; when he makes his way back to the hotel he is stopped by Harrington who informs him that a man has had his head bashed in and asks him about his conversation with the boy. In the meantime a crowd has gathered demanding the boy gets locked up but Harrington disperses them. Later that evening the narrator look out his window and sees a crowd of shadows struggling. He rushes out of the hotel but it is too late, the boy is dead. In death he reveals his true identity as a human. The narrator returns to the hotel to search out the boy's parents and finds them in their suite, sitting motionless - they are androids.

Until this point this is a fairly well-written well-meaning short story. What is really interesting about it is the end. I would have ended the story with the narrator and Harrington meeting in the boy's room -
I had nothing to say. And Harrington didn't stop me when I left.

but Grant decides to add a little extra -
He had deliberately exposed the false identification on his arm and had never once looked me straight in the eye. It was all there, but who would have thought to look for it? He had been challenging me and everyone else, using the simulacra to strike back at the world. Maybe he wanted to be exposed; maybe he was looking -. for someone as real as I to stop the charade and give him a flesh-and-blood hand to shake. Maybe-but when--I think of going back to a city filled with androids and angry people, I get afraid.
And worse . . . my own so-called liberal, humanitarian, live-and-let-live armor had been stripped away, and I don't like what I see. As much as I feel sorry for the boy, I hate him for what he's done to me.
That crowd of shadows could have easily held one more.

In the space of a couple of paragraphs Grant diminishes his own story but refusing to trust both himself and the reader by bolting on moral exposition. We, the readers, know what the boy has been doing, we don't need it spelled out to us as if we are simpletons.
We also have to ask what Grant is actually saying here - why is the narrator afraid? why has his liberal armour been stripped away? would he really have joined the crowd of shadows?
Is he afraid that can no longer distinguish between humans and androids? If he believes that androids should have rights then why does this matter? Is it that androids can have rights to a certain point but not beyond? This seems to go against the liberal values of the narrator. It could be that he is afraid of the vigilantism that could erupt at any moment but doesn't the whole story demonstrate that fact. Wouldn't finishing the story with the "...I left" line highlight that more.
Why does he say that his liberal armour has been stripped away? Is narrator angry at himself for being duped or for not helping the boy more? If it is about helping the boy what was he supposed to do? He doesn't get involved but he is friendly towards him. What more could he do considering he thought the boy had parents and a murder investigation was ongoing? You could argue that he could have stood up for the boy more verbally but shouldn't what happened make him more likely to stand up in the future or is he saying I am coward and therefore cannot stand up for what I believe in. If it is because he is angry due to be being duped then the we have to assume he was never really liberal in outlook and is probably a prick.
But why the last line? Why does he say he could have been in the crowd of shadows? It doesn't make sense. As the last two paragraphs illustrate it just isn't believable that the narrator has so changed his views on things that he has become a racist thug.
This is a classic case of a writer not knowing when to stop and in an attempt to say something profound say something that doesn't make any sense at all.

135Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Nov. 3, 2011, 11:06 am



Robert Louis Stevenson Olalla
A wounded Scottish veteran of the Spanish Civil Wars of the 19th century is sent to recuperate at the remote home of a Spanish aristocratic family fallen on hard times. Here he finds the beautiful mother who spends all her time sleeping in the sun; Felipe, the son, who is a simpleton with a cruel streak; and finally, the beautiful Olalla, whom he falls in love with.
This is a strange story within which not much happens - the key event being when the mother tries to suck the blood from the soldier's wounded hand - but where subtle suggestion is to the fore. The best way to describe this tale is as a gothic mixed with Darwinism - the family has become degenerate through interbreeding and is in effect devolving. Olalla is at present untainted by the family 'curse' but she is equally trapped by it, by the fear that it will claim her just like it claimed her mother. She believes her only escape is to embrace Catholicism, a religion not followed by her suitor (the padre refers to the soldier as damned) and, in terms of science, holding no hope for the future.
Is this a vampire tale or is a tale railing against religion and superstituition or is it simply a muted gothic tale? Stevenson's tale is so subtle that it seems any reading is possible but also so gossamer light that, in mind of many readers, it just floats away.

136Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Nov. 3, 2011, 11:09 am



Mary Elizabeth Braddon Good Lady Ducayne
Bella Rolleston, an impoverished young lady, who needs to find paid work seeks a position as a companion despite having no accomplishments. This, she finds with Lady Ducayne, a rich, very old woman who travels about Europe with her personal physician, Dr Parravicini. The Lady Ducayne doesn't care about accomplishments but rather requires her new companion to be in robust health as her last two have just wasted away. Bella has no fear, she wants the money, and initially everything is fine; she is treated well and is getting to see Europe but evitably she starts to weakened, is troubled by mosquito bites and haunted by a recurring dream.
Later she meets again up with a brother and sister who are shocked by her frail appearance. Fortunately he is a doctor with a soft spot for him who recognises that the bites are not bites and the dream relates to chloroform use. He confronts Lady Ducayne and after he refuses her offer for a position lets Bella go with a nice compensation sum.
Thackeray once said of Braddon that if he had her skill with a plot he would be the best writer in English. Unfortunately that skill lets her down here. not because of the actual story but how she treats Bella. At the start Bella is a strong-willed individual but by the end is reduced to a bit-part player in her own story (she never finds out what Ducayne and Parravicini were doing to her), eventually settling for passive doctor's wife. It feels like Braddon started one story, a spoof Cinderella story where the heroine calls the shots, only to lose her nerve and produce a standard Victorian happy ending. This compromise is what makes the story disappointing; in the beginning we are rooting for Bella but in the end we feel saddened for her, she may win Prince Charming but has lost her spirit.

137Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Nov. 3, 2011, 11:10 am



Walter De La Mare Seaton's Aunt
To describe this tale as odd would be doing it a disservice, it takes oddity to a new level. Imagine a boy's boarding school story mixed with the Addams Family and you have the starting point.
Seaton is a thoroughly unpopular boy at school who can only buy a certain degree of friendship. He buys a home visit from Withers, the narrator, with "a whole pot of some outlandish mulberry-coloured jelly". Withers meets Seaton's aunt, "an under-sized woman, in spite of her long face an big head" with a large appetite and a perchant for putting down her nephew. On his part he claims his aunt wants to kill him and that she communes with the dead. During the visit Seaton attempts to verify his statements to Withers by getting him to spy on the aunt. While Withers is frightened it is difficult to determine whether anything unusual has gone on.
Years later Withers meets Seaton again and agrees to another visit. Everthing is more-or-less the same except shabbier and Seaton has a fiance. The aunt professes that she has little liking to her future niece and that she will be left with nothing other than her memories.
A little later Withers has the feeling that he should check up on Seaton again but when he goes down to visit the aunt tries to avoid seeing him. When she relents she tells him that the wedding never took place, that Seaton is dead. Despite doubting the aunt Withers decides enough is enough and the story ends.
Whether you will like this tale or not probably depends how much you accept the strangeness of tone and overlook the lack of incident. It is a story where nothing much seems to happen told in a told that is veers between the jocular and the creepy. I found it fascinating but I could imagine that many people could find it frustrating.

138Jargoneer
Nov. 3, 2011, 11:43 am



Guy de Maupassant The Horla
The nameless narrator lives by a canal and likes nothing less than sitting watching the ships go by. One particurly handsome ship from Brazil sails pass and he waves in appreciation. Over the next days he starts to feel lethargic, feeling drained. A holday revives him but when he returns home the symptoms return. He also feels increasingly uneasy and comes to the conclusion that something invisible is stalking him, feeding on his lifeforce. This he confirms to himself through water being drunk while he asleep and then by the report of invisible vampires stalking a Brazilian village. His fear increases over time and unable to leave comes up with a plan to destroy the creature.
The narrator rejects the idea of the supernatural, to accept that would be to accept the idea of God. He is obsessed by the idea that this creature is natural, perhaps from an alien planet, that it is proven by Darwin. If evolution proves man superior to the beasts then it must be possible that another creature more evolved, superior to man exists.
Of course, there is the possibility that none of this is happening, that the narrator is simply mad, that the journal we are reading is not one about a man being haunted by an invisible being and his increasing fear but the rantings of a paranoiac, his world closing in around him. The ending seems to suggest this is a major possibility while not precluding other possibilities.
This is not your standard Maupassant fare, there have been suggestions that he was suffering from mental health problems related to syphilis when he wrote it and it does possess a certain "mad" intensity which makes it a more difficult story to read. I found interesting without ever feeling fully involved.
(It is also worth noting that Lovecraft was a fan of this tale and that it influenced his The Call of Cthulhu)

139baswood
Nov. 4, 2011, 7:53 am

I take it that these short stories are from The vampire Archives.

140Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Nov. 4, 2011, 8:37 am

>139 baswood: - Olalla & Seaton's Aunt are from elsewhere (both are available online). The Stevenson tale is included in my Penguin copy of Jekyll & Hyde, primarily because it is another story that came to Stevenson in a dream. Interestingly there is also an essay by Stevenson on the use of dreams in his fiction, mainly focusing on Jekyll but where he states he was disappointed in Olalla, feeling the ending was a failure.
After reading Seaton's Aunt I had a look on Amazon for a collection of De La Mare's stories but couldn't find a decent cheap one.

I should have pointed out that these four stories are linked by being tales where vampiric activity takes place but are not vampire stories per se.

141edwinbcn
Nov. 6, 2011, 12:05 am

Interesting reviews and interesting stories / novellas. Could you use Touchstones? It makes it easier to lookup the stories and check for availability. Thanks.

142Rebeki
Nov. 7, 2011, 12:55 pm

Hi Jargoneer, your "few points" on Dracula look to be far more interesting and illuminating than many a review. The book's still on my TBR pile, so I haven't looked too closely, but I'm "favourite-ing" post 131 so that I can refer back to it when the time comes.

143JanetinLondon
Nov. 14, 2011, 12:17 pm

Hi, coming in late to say I loved your comments on Dracula. Although I had picked up on the sexual/gender related issues when I read it, I missed the modernity v. traditional theme, which seems to me now to be the most important aspect of the whole book. I, too, won't be re-reading it any time soon, but at least I have some new thoughts in my head about it. Thanks.

144Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Dez. 7, 2011, 11:48 am



The book primarily responsible for the rebirth of vampires in popular literature.

In 18th century Louis is overcome with remorse due to his part in the death of his very very pious brother. Although he knows he has to manage the plantation for the sake of his mother and sister he subconsciously desires death. One heavy night in New Orleans he is found by the vampire Lestat who understands Louis' desires and has a few of his own. An exchange of blood later Louis is now a vampire. Being a vampire he nows wonders what it means to be a vampire (Lestat doesn't wonder, he just revels in the blood) and here we have the basis of the novel - Louis search for understanding. The Existential Vampire would have been an equally valid title for this book.

Louis' desire to find meaning conflicts with Lestat desire to merely find victims. Louis is always on the verge of leaving but Lestat is always tempting him with more secrets of the vampire. Eventually getting tired of Lestat and eating rats Louis in despair bites a five year girl.(It could be debated that the film version improves Claudia by ageing her by 6-7 years, making her more 'believable'.) Lestat thinks this is funny and wouldn't it be nice if they had a family so he makes Claudia a vampire. Torn between Louis' thirst for knowledge and Lestat's thirst for blood Claudia eventually chooses Louis - what child wouldn't like to know where they come from? Being more dynamic than Louis, who is often worn down by self-analysis, Claudia decides to do something about, primarily getting rid of Lestat so she and Louis can go to Europe to search for more vampires.

In Europe they go straight to Eastern Europe, the traditional home of vampires but all they find are 'revenants', undead like themselves but devoid of consciousness. This is, of course, the author acknowledging her own antecedents while stating that her creations are radically different, not just animated corpses but (un)living beings with recognisable traits.
Depressed by their lack of success they make their way to Paris for a good time. Here they come into contact with the mysterious Théâtre des Vampires where real vampires put on shows where humans are killed for an audience who believe they are watching a dramatic production. Louis meets Armand, the nominal head of the group and who embodies everything he ever wanted in a vampire. Armand is equally drawn to Louis but this leaves Claudia out in the cold. The other vampires meanwhiles are suspicious of the new pair which turns to violence when Lestat reappears. In the aftermath Louis and Armand escape to travel the world eventually landing back in New Orleans.

It would be easy to dismiss this novel as a potboiler but Rice has produced something with a little more depth. Since this was written in the aftermath of her daughter's death it is perhaps not surprising the novel has such a bleak outlook on relationships - everyone ends up alone, broken or dead. In one interesting aside Rice has Armand tell Louis that the reason there are not many 'old' vampires is that after a while they give up on life; lonely, lost in time, unable to deal with societal changes. This is the vampire as metaphor for alienation and with the end of Louis' search for understanding Rice appears to be suggesting that there may not be any meaning, that life is meaningless, it only is. Is this Rice the individual voicing her despair and reacting against the tenants of the Catholic Church she was brought up in?

While Rice can be clunky in both language and the presentation of ideas on the whole this novel is an easy read. I personally have more difficulty about the novel's structure. Rice obviously wanted to write something from the vampire's point of view and rejected the the traditional, and slightly cliched, method of the found manuscript. The problem with Rice's solution is that it isn't constructed very well - in the first section the narrative breaks off from Louis' monologue to the interview situation to usually no great effective, in the later sections Rice forgets she has an interviewer and the story flows more smoothly. This scenario would have worked if the whole novel had been told in dialogue but arguably that would have created a less commercial work.
The interviewer could almost exist just for ending when he, and by extension the reader, is revealed to have misunderstood Louis' narrative, being seduced rather than repulsed. This now can be read as ironic as Rice herself was equally seduced by own creations and subsequently produced many more volumes of vampire fiction that undermine her initial achievement.

One aspect of the novel that can't be ignored is sexuality. IWTV wants the cake to eat - the vampires don't indulge in sex but the language is more suggestive. Louis is involved in three major relationships - Lestat, Claudia and Armand. While the homosexual aspect is played down with Lestat it is quite strong with Armand - the language going beyond friendship to that of lovers. It is probably due to this that the novel is quite often described as a 'gay classic'. Of course, the fact that the characters don't have sex means that the writer and publisher can always deny the gay angle and therefore avoid losing some of the potential audience.
A more problematic issue is Claudia. Essentially she is the 'vampire daughter' of Lestat and Louis but the language used to describe the relationship between Louis and Claudia is often couched in terms of lovers. Equally the dynamic between Louis, Claudia and Armand reads like a classic love triangle. Reading this can be uncomfortable, they may be two vampires but one of them is trapped in the body of a five year. At the same time the reader can't help but be drawn to Claudia, the adult trapped in the body of a child is, for that reason, the most interesting and least utilised character in the novel.

Generally I think that Rice did a decent job modernising her vampires, i.e., removing the ability to change shape, fly, become mist, etc, there are two aspects that irked me throughout the book. The first is - coffins. Why? In traditional vampire lore the creature must return to its own soil, hence the coffin laden with earth, but this is not a requirement for Rice's vampires so why do they drag coffins all around the world? It makes no sense, they just need to be protected from the light and that doesn't require a coffin.
The second one is - killing. Rice's vampires kill and kill, every night two or three victims. (It has been suggested that the novel can also be read as one of consumerism but I'm not completely convinced by that idea). The implausibility of this doesn't appear to have crossed Rice's mind. The zenith of this implausibility is in New Orleans. Louis, Lestat and Claudia are described as going out every night and killing between 2-3 each. That makes their killing total for a year between 2190 and 3285. The population of New Orleans in 1805 according to census was 8500. That would mean that the three vampires could almost kill almost 40% of the city's population in a single year. Bearing that in mind and the reputation New Orleans has for the supernatural it is fairly apparent that knowledge of the vampires existence could not have remained unknown. I know this is a novel of the fantastic but even then I do expect the author to exhibit some common sense.

For lovers of vampire literature this is one of the keystone works and therefore is essential. For those interested in the fantastic it is worth searching out. For everyone else it may not be worth taking a detour for but it isn't the worst place to visit.

145Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Dez. 7, 2011, 11:51 am



Poppy Z Brite - His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood

In the space of a few pages the two male characters have tried every kind of sex
and drug and decide to start robbing graves for their kicks. This being New Orleans they then hear of a powerful amulet that has been buried with its owner so they dig it up. This results in the usual back from the dead to claim what is mine scenario with the 'twist' being that the narrator wants to embrace death.

This is the literary equivalent of an author shouting "Look at me! Look at me! Aren't I shocking? Aren't I bad?" Well yes, you are bad but not in the way you want to be. You are bad because of the immaturity of your writing. Sex and drugs, death and black clothing may be shocking and cool when you are fourteen but it's a little sad and embarrassing when you are an adult.

146dchaikin
Dez. 7, 2011, 1:05 pm

Starting to catch up here. I really enjoyed your "few points" on Dracula.

147StevenTX
Dez. 7, 2011, 1:26 pm

Wonderful reviews here! Interview with the Vampire is on my near-future to-read list just to explore the genre beyond Dracula. I loved your observations, especially about the New Orleans death toll.

148baswood
Dez. 7, 2011, 2:14 pm

Great review of Interview with the Vampire I love the film but have not read the book. I even liked the follow up film Queen of the Damned.

149dchaikin
Dez. 7, 2011, 10:21 pm

That's a very sympathetic and very thoughtful review of IWTV. The New Orleans death toll really bothered me to the point that it's one of my clearest memories of the book, but that was a while ago now.

150Jargoneer
Dez. 8, 2011, 10:52 am



Blood-soaked western by the coolest writer in the US.

Based on the exploits of the Glanton gang in 1849-1850. Hired by the Mexican authorities to kill hostile Apaches they soon started killing and scalping peaceable Indians and Mexicans to increase their bounty. Inevitably the authorities declared them outlaws and chased them out of the territory. Ending up in Arizona they killed some Quechan Indians for their ferry on the Gila River from where they would kill and rob American and Mexican passengers. A band of Quechan then reclaimed the ferry killing Glanton and most of his gang in the process.

Is McCarthy the most over-rated novelist in the US?
While that question may strike people as strange it was the question that frequently pops into my head when I read McCarthy. That is not to say I think McCarthy is a bad writer. There are times McCarthy is an astonishing writer. It is doubtful whether there is another writer in America at present his equal at describing the natural world, such is his skill that it sometimes feels that dust is coming off the page, working its way into a reader's pores.

But are novels about more than just description, they are about character and psychology, emotions and philosophy, the essence of what makes us human? McCarthy probably would dispute that, he famously said about Proust and James, "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." For McCarthy the good writers are ones like Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner. There is something strange about McCarthy's stance. It seems to me that Dostoyevsky and James are closer than Dostoyevsky and McCarthy. In truth what McCarthy is saying that the good writers are masculine writers. This makes perfect sense when we study his own writing. McCarthy doesn't do women. Not that he doesn't do them well, he just doesn't do them, he ignores them.

Actually you could say in Blood Meridian McCarthy doesn't do characters at all. Ostentiously BM is touted as the story of The Kid but while The Kid opens and closes the novel he is often absent from the pages, just another shadowy member of the gang. Nor can we say that ever know The Kid, we never get any insight into him, we are always looking at him from the outside, watching his actions. This is equally true for most of the other 'characters', we watch them rather than engage them. It is like watching the rough cut of a documentary, the camera moving here and there but without the focus of editing and the explanatory voice-over.
It is often stated that the exception to this is The Judge, a huge, completely bald Goliath who looms over his fellow outlaws and the narrative. The Judge is both erudite and the most brutal of the gang, a child molester who takes pleasure in the killing. The Judge is the character that haunts the reader but not because we know him, because we don't know him. His antecedents seem to more cinematic than literary, he is the unstoppable bogey man that kills because that it what he does. He is the literary equivalent of Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger, the unredeemable villain that becomes the fan favourite.
But then The Judge may well not be human, he could the devil or a demon and he must control all aspects of life, the most significant of which is death. However if The Judge is a supernatural does that not undermine the realistic tone of McCarthy's novel. The journey of the cowboys becomes one of the devil leading the damned to their ultimate destiny. There will be no redemption or consolation, nor will there will be any sympathy on behalf of the reader.

While McCarthy talks about Melville and Faulkner there are aspects of his fiction that link him more with Tom Clancy. The over-the-top, virtually cartoon-y violence - one man chopping another man's head off with a single swipe of a Bowie knife? (This scene almost seems to exist so McCarthy can describe the headless corpse remaining sitting and the blood spurting). Then there is the extreme detail given to weaponry. McCarthy may not describe any emotions but it will take his time describing a gun, lovingly. It is telling that one scene that highlights the depravity of the Glanton is when one of the gang members attempts to get a beautiful hand-made shotgun altered. What kind of man would do that?

Which leads to ask - what is McCarthy's point? To put it simply, it seems to be that man was born, will live and die violently. Violence is not just the defining aspect of man's life, it is the only true aspect. This may well explain further why women are so noticeably absent from his work - women are the antithesis of this idea; they bring life, family, civilisation. It seems odd that such a major novelist should have so little to say and the truth of what he is saying is deeply debatable.

Which brings back to the language. There is no doubt that McCarthy is a original stylist. His language, biblical, loosely punctuated, and sprinkled with old obscure words, feels like it has been hewn from stone more than rising from pen and paper. It is monolithic, unforgiving, demanding concentration. Occasionally it is also gobbledygook. Sentences start, twist and turn, twist and turn, losing their way and meaning. McCarthy does not have an easy style to read, it demands much from the reader but it can magnificent.

So is McCarthy the most over-rated novelist in the US?
The answer must be yes and no. Yes because of the reductive nature of his approach. No because as a stylist he is one of the best.

151Jargoneer
Bearbeitet: Dez. 8, 2011, 12:48 pm



Jerry Cornelius novella padded out by essay and interview.

The Cornelius novella is not an original, being a revised version from The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, vol.2. The gang's all here as they skip through time and the multiverse delivering death and indulging in sex. The fragmented nature of the tale - short chapters, paragraphs - eventually reveals itself to be a lazy satire aimed at soft targets and wallowing in a little too much nostalgia. Underneath the bravado there was always the suspicion that Moorock was a sentimentalist and over the years this has proven to be the case. This is a tired work where Moorcock pines for the London of his prime and bashes such old battered punch-bags like Thatcher, Blair and Bush. It's not bad, just inessential.

My Londons is yet another Moorcock paean to his city, this time in the form of a essay. As others have pointed out denizens of the major cities always think their city is the best in the world - more dynamic, more dangerous, more delightful. In it Moorcock remembers the good old days of London before it became the modern city it is now. Enjoyable enough, probably more so if you were there at the same time, but it does feel as if we have been here before.

In the interview with Terry Bisson Moorcock gets to discuss the same items as he has for the last 40 years - New Worlds. the New Wave, Ballard, SF, fantasy and Tolkien. I doubt anyone who has more than passing interest in him hasn't heard Moorcock's opinions before but he is still an engaging interviewee.

Not really worth purchasing but if you see it in the library it is still worth a couple of hours of your time, which is all it will take to read.

For those who would like to read what Moorcock has to say but don't want to search out the book, here's an interview with Hari Kunzu in The Guardian which covers most of the same points - When Hari Met Michael

152baswood
Dez. 8, 2011, 2:03 pm

Very interesting thoughts on Cormac McCarthey. If he is moderately difficult to read then he has done well to be a best selling author. It must be all that blood and gore. I have not read him and don't intend to anytime soon.

153StevenTX
Dez. 8, 2011, 2:07 pm

#150 Blood Meridian is one of my all-time favorites, and I can't think of a living American novelist I like better than McCarthy (not that I've read all that many).

Yale University has some recorded course lectures online, and here is a link to the first of two class sessions on Blood Meridian. The professor raises the points you have about what the judge represents, the literary allusions to Moby-Dick and elsewhere, and whether McCarthy is profound or pretentious.

http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945/content/sessions/session-1...

154Jargoneer
Dez. 9, 2011, 6:41 am

>152 baswood: - I'm not sure that he is difficult difficult but it is demanding. Even the professor from the link Steven provides asks her students if they were bored at one point. I think in the case of BM this may have been deliberate, the 'boredom' of the reader reflecting the relentless nothingless of the cowboy's existence.
I'm always intrigued by 'difficult' novels that become bestsellers. Who buys them? What do they buy regularly? Are they read?
(Note - BM is not as 'difficult' as Toni Morrison's Beloved which also became an American bestseller).

>153 StevenTX: - I listened to both of the talks. It is always interesting to hear other takes on a novel. I didn't really pick up on the Moby Dick allusions. I was thinking more along the lines of The Odyssey or Dante's Inferno when are travelling.
I was intrigued by the argument that the judge is representative of the artist, that he is representative of McCarthy writing for posterity, adding to the tradition - that he will never die because readers will always remember him. This only confirms to me the flat aspect of the character - it has always struck that the characters who leave the confines of the written word are flat, simply because their very flatness allows readers to constantly re-define them.
I think this is the key statement (for me):
He dismisses, for example, Proust and Henry James as important writers on this ground, because they're not writing novels about life and death. I would argue that McCarthy needs his novel to be about life and death because he is looking for the sound and the feel of literary authority.
This sums up McCarthy's true weakness. He dismisses James for not dealing with life and death and yet James is always dealing with issues of life and death, and in a way that the ordinary reader can relate to (assuming they can get past his equally complex sentence structuring). Paradoxically in McCarthy's novels we get a lot of death but very little life. He actually fails his own test.

155Jargoneer
Dez. 9, 2011, 7:05 am



Garry Kilworth - The Silver Collar

A man delivering supplies to a remote Scottish island is told a story by the only inhabitant. When younger, working as an apprentice silver-smith, a beautiful woman, with whom he instantly falls in love, makes an unusual request - she wants a silver collar that will protect her neck completely as she plans to get married soon. He realises what she is going to marry but cannot change her mind so he makes her the silver collar. A few days after her marriage she returns demanding that he removes it.

Despite a slightly clunky beginning this develops into a decent vampire story with a twist. Unfortunately the author ruins everything by including a two paragraph postscript that proves he believes his readers to be so intellectually challenged that he has to spell everything out to them. Lots of writers have difficulty furnishing stories with decent endings but to actually have one and then throw it all away in this way is unforgivable.

156dukedom_enough
Dez. 9, 2011, 7:27 am

Jargoneer,

Occurs to me that Geoff Ryman's short story, "The Film-makers of Mars" might be of interest to you. The link is to the complete story. It's very clever, but it does stop a bit abruptly, as though it's really just the first part of something longer.

157Jargoneer
Dez. 9, 2011, 7:57 am



Gardner Dozois & Jack Dann - Down Among the Dead Men

When this story first appeared it was published in Oui because none of the science fiction magazines would touch it. For them, a vampire story set in a concentration camp was a setting too far.

Bruckman discovers that one of his fellow prisoners, Wernecke, is a vampire and has been feeding off them a little at time for months now. However, with the end of the war and release beckoning, Wernecke is building his strength up and that means draining his fellow inmates dry. In his defence Werneck points out he is only killing 'musselmenn', those that are on the edge of death anyway, and hasn't he helped many others survive. While Bruckman admits the latter is true he is haunted by Wernicke preying on his fellow captives and possibly himself. So concerned is he about this that he soon stops sleeping and feels his strength ebbing away until he is in danger of becoming a 'musselmann' himself. This naturally increases his fear and he decides something has to be done...

If this had been set anywhere else, a prison, for example, it would have been published in the normal channels. Setting a vampire story in a concentration camp opens the story up to claims of bad taste, debasing 'real evil' by mixing (confusing?) it with 'fictional evil', and opportunism. But in truth Dozois and Dann treat the subject quite soberly, there is no sensationalism or voyeurism - the story is told simply and straight, and that is is why it succeeds.

158Jargoneer
Dez. 9, 2011, 8:24 am

And now for something completely different. I've been listening to this -



This is a bootleg collection of outtakes from the Empire Burlesque. It includes versions of all the songs on the released album bar "Dark Eyes", two from Knocked Out Loaded and four unreleased tracks. These are versions before Arthur Baker got his hand on them so are free from the terrible, albeit typical, 80s production that drowned the album. It shows that Dylan was still writing good songs but just wasn't releasing them in a proper manner. If you like Dylan this is worth hearing.

Note - in the good old-fashioned way of bootlegs I'll make a copy of this available via Dropbox if anyone is interested.
Note 2 - this is in flac format which means it is lossless but may require a different media player to play it.

159dchaikin
Dez. 9, 2011, 8:46 am

Really enjoyed your review and the discussion on Blood Meridian. These other two (Down Among the Dead Men, and Silver Collar) are completely new to me, interesting certainly.

160baswood
Dez. 11, 2011, 5:10 am

well jargoneer I like/love Bob Dylan and scrolled through my collection of Dylan bootlegs to find I have not got The Naked Empire. Am I right in thinking that the whole bootleg scene started with Dylan, I remember getting hold of a very bad copy of The Great White Wonder way back when - tremendous excitement.

That 80's production on Empire Burlesque sounded outdated to me when I first heard it and so I would love to hear the songs without some of that crap. I have opened a drop box account in anticipation of you making it available. Do I need to do anything else?