Celestin, Ray: Mobsters Lament (City Blues Quartet)
Whoops. Forgot to write about this after I finished it a few weeks ago. Celestin continues to follow the path of the black diaspora in North America, this time taking us from Chicago to New York. He paints a lively and convincing panorama of the Gotham of the immediate post-war years, from Brooklyn docks to gangster-inhabited penthouses to bebop clubs in Harlem. Our understanding of the regular characters deepens, and we are happy to see Louis Armstrong once again make an unobtrusive appearance.
Next stop: Los Angeles.
French, Tana: In the Woods: A Novel (Dublin Murder Squad)
I've read a couple of Tana French's standalone novels and admired them for her willingness to allow things to move very slowly. In an artistic world in which suddenness and shock are valued it is nice to see a writer push back against that. Seeing that French's deliberateness of pace seems to be almost a trademark, I was interested to see what her version of a police procedural would be like, and thus I opened the first in her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods. I must confess that, in a context where things generally move at a sprightlier pace, I found myself wanting things to move a little faster, but that was only at first. Once I had let go of my expectations of the form I settled down and enjoyed turning, deliberately, the pages. I especially admired French's misdirection. The mystery that we think will be solved by the end of the book is simply given up on as unsolvable, and the crime that the murder squad detectives are working on is resolved in a way that is satisfyingly inconclusive. It's hard to see where French will go, with her eminently dislikable protagonist, from here, but there are, I think, five more books in the series so go she does.
Harvey, Alex: Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles (Reverb)
This is a good overview of Tom Wait's career up to around "Swordfishtrombones." Waits is an interesting enough guy, and Alex Harvey a skillful enough writer, that one isn't really disappointed that the book is about eighty-five percent Waits and only fifteen percent "the spirit of Los Angeles." Likewise, one isn't too bothered by odd errors that suggest that Harvey is much more interested in and up to speed with Waits than in the metropolis and its literature, the raw materials that made Waits possible. (Homer Simpson—no relation to the character of the same name on a popular animated TV series—is an important character in Nathaniel West's classic LA novel, The Day of the Locust, but he is not an artist or the protagonist of the book as Harvey claims.) There's no evidence Waits or his partner and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who, Harvey rightly recognizes, reinvigorated Wait's work and perhaps even saved his life, talked to him at all; Harvey did a good job with what he had.We're left eager for their version, but maybe they've been giving us their version all along, in the art.
Miskowski, S.P.: Knock Knock (Skillute Cycle)
I haven't read a horror novel since . . . maybe I've never read a horror novel. (Surely Frankenstein doesn't count.) I heard about this one from an acquaintance on Twitter, and thought I might as well try something different. I'm not sorry I did, because in addition to the, well, horror, there's an excellent picture of life in the Pacific Northwest and—if a man can get away with saying this—what seems like an excellent depiction of what it's like to grow up and live female. The novel follows three girls in the small Washington town of Skillute from the time they innocently perform a half-understood ritual in the forest (this is a horror novel, after all) in the late 1960s up through the present day, though actually not all the girls make it that far. We come to know and care about these girls and then women through alternating sections devoted to each of them. Most interesting, perhaps. is the dreadful thing that is at the root of the horror Miskowski gives us: an alien life invading and then emerging from your body: pregnancy and childbirth. That's what the initial ritual is meant to ward off, and it's from this that the horror emerges.
von Reinhold, Shola: Lote
To misquote Eliot Weinberger, this is not a novel about someone "getting divorced in Connecticut [written] by someone . . . getting divorced in Pennsylvania." That is, it is not conventional lit-fic. It is, instead, a work that is informed by literature, art, and theory. The protagonist, Mathilda, is a black Briton fascinated by the bright young things, a group of flamboyant and mostly gay socialites on the scene in the 1920s and 30s. She notices that in their milieux, and among the somewhat more restrained Bloomsbury bunch, people with her pigmentation are, to say the least, underrepresented. She begins to look for them and, finally focusing on an (imaginary) black poet named Hermia Druitt, sets out in search of this Afro-Scottish artist who, Shola von Reinhold convinces us, hobnobbed with BYTs and Bloomsberries alike. Mixing actual scholarship with historically grounded fiction, von Reinhold lets us follow Mathilda on her quest. Mathilda's efforts to bring attention to the forgotten Druitt remind us of actual black artists whose lives and works have been suppressed.
West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust (New Directions Paperbook)
The Day of the Locust is one of those novels that gets better with every reading. Thanks to West's ruthlessness and the clarity of his vision it is certainly the best Hollywood novel we have seen or are likely to see. And in the great mob scene that closes the novel can any contemporary reader fail to see a Trump rally?:
" . . . the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious . . . all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super 'Dr. Know-All Pierce-All' had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screw boxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames."
For "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" read, well, you know who.
Cross, Amanda: In the Last Analysis (Kate Fansler)
Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia University—the first woman to obtain tenure in the English department there—who specialized in modern British literature. She tried to keep her mystery-writing alter-ego a secret, but a fan ferreted out the truth, and one can see why that fan was suspicious. All of the many entries in this series are set in academia, and the detective is a professor in the English department of a university not unlike Columbia. I should know by now that I don't do well with insufficiently hard-boiled mysteries, but the literature jokes and references made this one a bit less of a slog than it might have been for this one-time English major and incessant reader. Maybe I'll read another one someday?
Babel, Isaac: Collected Stories (Penguin Classics)
I'm not the first to note the similarity between Isaac Babel's stories and the paintings of Marc Chagall. In that both rose out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the similarity is unsurprising. As much pleasure as we take from Chagall's work, though, for all its similarity with Babel's fiction, we can't help but note that the violence among which Babel's stand-in, "with spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart," moves in the stories gives his fiction a harder edge, a conflict—Babel, the consummate Jewish intellectual, rode with Cossacks during the Russian Civil War—that seems absent from the nostalgia of Chagall's canvases. For that reason, the stories seem to evoke a level of existence that Chagall's work neglects. In the laconic detachment, too, Babel's creations seem quite different from those of the Russians we have known. Those of us fortunate enough to discover the Russians in our youth will always return to them and always be rewarded.
Celestin, Ray: Dead Man's Blues: A Novel
Dead Man's Blues is as good, or maybe better, than the first in the series. Author Ray Celestin continues to trace the black diaspora North from New Orleans to Chicago, and uses history effectively (rather than drowning us in fustian).
Louis Armstrong, who was, history attests, on good terms with Al Capone, reappears, and the mobster, too, takes a turn. I'm eager to move on with Celestin and his characters, to a new city, New York City, and a decade further on to the place and time where the next novel is set.
Ames, Jonathan: The Wheel of Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 2)
Happy Doll, having lost his private eye license after his shenanigans in the previous book is now a "security consultant." His new calling takes him to the Pacific Northwest, but there are still lots of good LA moments, including a bit in Marina del Rey where my parents lived for a while. One understands, somewhat in advance of detective Happy Doll, who the villains are in this book, but that doesn't matter. The fun is watching him find out, and then react. I wonder when book 3 will be out.
i agree with you. the campaign will kill more civilians
Posted by: Pallgutha | 07/23/2009 at 05:07 PM
i do.and yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,yes,and you are absurd..
Posted by: ken | 07/24/2009 at 09:06 AM
Thanks, Ken, for your eloquent reply to my post.
Perhaps you would like to engage in an actual dialogue? If so, please tell me how our presence in Afghanistan is helpful. Please tell me how this massive government program (I'm assuming you're anti-big government) might lead to an end which will make America, Afghanistan, and the world better places. I would love to believe that our intervention in Afghanistan is helpful, and that it is worth the price Americans and Afghanis are paying. Maybe you can convince me that it is.
Here's hoping,
David
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 07/24/2009 at 09:27 AM
well i saw you on the news and politics page and wasn't going to comment until i saw the three stooges pic,anybody who likes the stooges cna't be all bad.so i will give this a real try.lets look at that pretty little poppy plant first,i think we can agree that the best stuff comes from afghanistan and has for a long time,and there has been a cry for america to go and wipe out their biggest cash crop for decades.lets not forget the old u.s.s.r and now russia would very much have liked to have afghanistan for a colony.and then there is the current problem of the taliban using it for a base of operations.and then of course there is the fact that their next door neighbor is china a fact that most u.s. military minds have noticed.now last and maybe least in alot of peoples minds is the fact that afghanistan will enjoy freedom for the first time in 50 years.so there is 5 good reasons.i set them up you knock them down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: ken | 07/24/2009 at 10:42 AM
Hi Ken and David,
This is one of the other Blockhead stooges--Julian--here.
I'm going to take a wild guess that David wasn't convinced by what you wrote Ken, any more than you were by what Chris Hedges wrote in the original post. And I'll take another wild guess: that nothing either of you might say in these comments will convince the other.
In this vein, I really like a story that Tim Kreider, the left-wing cartoonist, told in the comments to the original "Outrageous" post I blogged about a few days back. Here it is:
"I have a neighbor who's a Marine and a Republican. He and I disagree on just about every political issue. After he read my last collection of cartoons, his only comment, offered after a judicious pause, was: 'Well--some of us have to be right, and some of us have to be wrong.' We both laughed. Then he mixed us up a couple of gigantic tumblers of pure vodka garnished with pickled vegetables (which is what he calls a 'martini'), grilled some huge pepper-encrusted steaks, and we watched old Queen videos 'til we got all weepy. In this I believe there is hope for America."
Queen... the Stooges... With so much to divide us, here's to the things that unite us.
Have a great weekend!
--Julian
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 07/25/2009 at 08:51 AM
Ken:
Though Julian may be right that we should stick with
stooges and alcohol-impregnated vegetables, I do feel I owe you the
courtesy of a reply. Sorry to be tardy in writing it up.
I'll
begin with "that pretty little poppy plant" (opium poppies are
beautiful), and do my best not to drift into the farcically
unsuccessful War on (Some) Drugs, except to note that until Western
demand and willingness to pay big bucks for opium derivatives declines
substantially there will be no way to convince poor farmers to grow,
say, millet instead. But putting that to one side, let's assume there
is a way to convince farmers to grow something besides the highly
prized poppy. Would that be most efficiently achieved through force of
arms? I don't think so, but what do I know? Let's see what the folks on
the ground in Afghanistan think. This short item appeared a day or two
ago in the International Herald Tribune:
"The American-led mission in Afghanistan is all but
abandoning efforts to destroy the poppy crops that provide the largest
source of income to the insurgency, and instead will take significant
steps to wean local farmers off the drug trade - including one
proposal to pay them to grow nothing.
"The strategy will shift from wiping out opium poppy crops, which
senior officials acknowledged had served only to turn poor farmers
into enemies of the central government in Kabul.
So
yeah, let's send in an army, but not one of soldiers and drones (the
central government, not to mention the US government, already has
enough enemies). Rather let's deploy an army of agronomists and
teachers with enough money to pay farmers to grow other things (or
nothing at all).
Do I think that will work. As I've hinted
above, I don't. Until we deal with the dog--demand--there's no point in
harrassing the tail--poor farmers.
Regarding the USSR, perhaps
you've forgotten that our former allies, the Taliban along with some
Proto-al-Quaidists, handed the Soviets their ass in a bucket. I see no
reason to believe that the Russians want to enter that hornet's nest
again.
You point out that Afghanistan shares a (47 mile long)
border with China. Therefore the United States should intervene
massively in Afghanistan? I don't follow the logic here. China shares
borders with a lot of countries. Should the US invade all of them?
Hedges points out, and I think it is the case, that modern terrorist organizations have very little use for centralized bases. Rather, they seem to be highly decentralized and mobile. If things get too hot in Afghanistan for the Taliban they'll simply slip across the border into Pakistan. In fact they're already doing this. (And keep in mind that, as Hedges also points out, the 9/11 attacks were planned not in Afghanistan, but in Germany.)
You
write of "the fact that Afghanistan will enjoy freedom for the first
time in 50 years." That you use the future tense tells me that you
understand that even with the massive military presence, the bombings
of their villages, and so on, the Afghanis have yet to attain that
state that you, me, and most people of good will want for them. I don't see
how foreign military intervention, with which many Afghanis are far
from thrilled, is going to bring them freedom. If we kill enough
(suspected) Talibani, rocket enough wedding parties (attended by a
couple of Al Qaida hacks) will Afghanis suddenly slap a collective hand
to a collective forehead and say: "What were we thinking? We don't want
to live in a conservative Muslim state. We want to live in a liberal
democracy?" It'd be nice if such a collective head-slap would take
place; all I can say is you're more optimistic than me.
A Huge Pepper Encrusted Steak to You,
David
Posted by: Only a Blockhead | 07/26/2009 at 05:18 PM
if you'll hit the reply below my name i'll get your reply quicker,,there are already plans for a new crop to replace poppy,the only reason they are/were going slow is that america was paying more attention to iraq ,that has now changed.russia has alot of plans for the region alot of the ''stans'' in the area are under russian control.alot of american money and arms went into harrassing the russians when they were in afghanistan.the afghan people have been used by at least three different powers for a while,i still remember when the giant budda was torn down.alot of these people are crying out for peace,the u.s.a. will be the ones to bring it to them..pakistan and india have started to fight back against muslim extremist's and with america pushing from the other side this should stop being a military operation soon and turn into a humanatarion operation....the u.s, has looked for a land bridge into china for a long time they now have one,now this could lead to the u.s. using afghanistan as a ''colony'' for awhile but all things considered afghanistan is still getting the better end of the stick.
Posted by: ken | 07/27/2009 at 06:51 AM