Kerouac, Jack: On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics)
The great mystery is why this mediocre book is so widely loved by so many people who should know better. The prose, for all Kerouac's blathering on about his technique, or lack thereof, is profoundly uninteresting. (It's telling that fans who quote from this book always quote the same line: "The only people that interest me . . . .") The "minor characters" as Joyce Johnson in her much better book of that title might have called them—women, Mexicans, Blacks, country people—are patronized, and for all the furious trips back and forth across the country, the novel is strangely static. A friend recently remarked that it really belongs in the YA section, but even there it would be outclassed. Beat poetry > Beat prose.
Sayers, Dorothy L.: Clouds of Witness: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery (Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries)
Two books in and Harriet Vane has yet to appear. I don't know if her appearance will make the books better or worse. I seem to dislike English jocular slightly less than I have in the past.
Doolittle, Hilda: Helen in Egypt: Poetry (New Directions Books)
Quality mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; Victorian novels; high modernist poetry and fiction: This is how my taste runs these days. H.D.'s anti-epic, Helen in Egypt, falls into the last category, and is profoundly satisfying for the way it draws us into the mysteries that Helen, in the poem, attempts to unravel. Among these conundrums: was she present at Troy, how did she end up in Egypt, why did Achilles attempt to strangle her when—maybe—they were already dead. H.D.'s imagism owes more to tanka than to Tennyson and is all the better for that. The language dances and sings without recourse to crude devices. It's worth a reread, another reread, and a deep-dive into the criticism. I'm glad I talked my graduate student into focusing on this.
Cherryh, C. J.: Inheritor (Foreigner series Book 3)
The third in the series satisfies, but as its ending is in no way conclusive it's not a surprise to find that the series goes on (and on and on). I'm not complaining. I'll probably continue, though not right away, mostly because the characters, even the non-human ones, are engaging. That I still can't really get a grasp of Atevi politics is not enough to deter me. I'm pretty sure the protagonist, through whose consciousness we experience this world, doesn't entirely get them either. (And yes, another cheesy cover.)
Nguyen, Viet Thanh: The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
This book came out in 2015. It’s sequel came out last year. I read a review that made me want to read that sequel, but figured I’d better read the first volume first. The result of doing so is that I probably won’t go on to read the sequel. The Sympathizer is okay, perceptive about life as a divided person and life in the Vietnamese refugee community, but somehow, at this late date, the perceptions don’t seem terribly fresh. I become increasingly convinced that contemporary literary fiction is just not for me.
le Carré, John: Call for the Dead: A George Smiley Novel
A favorite author, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, wrote an excellent article about John le Carré in which he convinced me that I really should delve into the work of that legendary writer more deeply than I had. I'm glad he did. His protagonist, the ironically named Smiley, is a marvelous protagonist: intelligent, morose, erudite, and depressed: He is human. Through Smiley we revisit the Cold War: Russia and East Germany are enemies, but communism is not without its attractions. The game is afoot, and Smiley, in his plodding way, is in the thick of it. I'm glad there are several more books in the series.
Cherryh, C. J.: Invader: Book Two of Foreigner
Boy, that's a cheesy cover, but it's a good book. Cherryh has gotten most of the "As you know, Bob" asides out of the way in the first volume, so the story moves along, but as she tells her tale from the point of view of the main character, and strictly limits herself to what that character knows, we often share his confusion, and Atevi diplomacy is nothing if not confusing, not least because they are not biologically human. This installment ends with two other human beings joining the protagonist on the planet of the Atevi. I've already bought the third volume to find out what happens next.
Cherryh, C. J.: Foreigner: 10th Anniversary Edition (Foreigner series Book 1)
It’s easy to think of the “science” in science fiction as being something akin to engineering: space ships, ray guns, jetpacks. But that association is naive. The science in science fiction has long included social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even archaeology. C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner draws on all of those and more in her picture of a planet inhabited by aliens called Atevi. A group of human beings stumbled onto their planet, and their first contact eventually gave rise to a war, the upshot of which was that the humans were exiled to an island off the coast of the mainland on which the Atevi live. The diplomacy necessary for these two species to coexist in the wake of the war, is handled by a foreigner, a human being who resides on the Atevi’s planet and works to interpret each culture to the other. Anyone who has lived in a culture different from his or her own will recognize the difficulties this foreigner encounters, even if the foreign culture in which one lives is populated by members of the same species.
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
One reason that Victorian novels are great in the way that they are great is that they seem to be written without self-consciousness as to the form. The novels are not about novels, but, at their best, are rich, thick, detailed looks at the societies they consider. This is perhaps more true of George Eliot in Middlemarch than it is even of her great contemporaries, the whole theme of the novel being the ways in which one's society acts on one, and how little scope one has for kicking over society's traces. Dorothea, whose individuality we can only admire, is no more successful in her efforts to live the righteous life she dreams of than are other less admirable (but oh so human in their faults) characters. The society in which she lives does not allow for an Antigone or a St.Theresa. 2022 is shaping up for me to be a year of returning to the Victorian novels I've always loved, and perhaps especially to those eminent Victorians I know less well than Trollope and Dickens.
Fagan, John Gerard: Fish Town
Fish Town is a collection of "poems" by John Gerard Fagan about his life in Japan from 2013 to 2019. I put "poems" in quotation marks because Fagan's verse is firmly in the chopped prose camp. We get lines like, for example, "they put TVs in the staff room for important news events / Scotland's vote on independence was one of them / I voted via proxy with my brother," and can detect none of the special attention to language that characterizes the best poetry. Other snippets are recognizable as poems because lines are broken in odd places, but there seems no rhyme (just kidding) or reason for why the lines are chopped up in the way they are. It's hard to take Fagan's snippets seriously as poems, but that doesn't mean the snippets, especially taken together, are unworthy of attention. He does succeed in giving a lucid picture of what life is like for a young man, newly washed up in Japan, lonely and drifting into a life. Those of us who have been there will recognize the picture he paints: being dispatched to secondary schools in rural Shizuoka and exurban Chiba, lonely in crap apartments in nothing towns, the drinking, the oddness. Maybe the reason for dividing up what might as well be called prose into "poems" is that readers like me, who would never pick up a prose memoir of the life of an English teacher in Japan (been there, done that) may be intrigued enough to give a poetic cycle about an English teacher in Japan a chance. I don't regret that I did. It's a quick and enjoyable read. Fagan mentions a couple of times in Fish Town a novel he is working on, but never that he is writing poetry. One wonders if the "novel" became the "poems."
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