The Play’s The Thing

Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes

I’ve had this book for decades and have read it many times, but not recently.  So I’m coming to it relatively fresh; while I know the basic outline of it, and am aware “whodunit,” I’m enjoying as though for the first time all the lovely layers of wonderful things, not least the author’s light hand with true erudition and wit.  It’s a lovely scary funny terrifyingly suspenseful beautifully subtle occasionally punny completely serious glorious wicked superb concotion of a novel, with an absolutely thundering nail-biter ending, one of the best ever written. It’s an elegant masterful work of fiction, not just a great mystery novel; it’s so much more than merely a “whodunit.”

The book was written in 1937, and it’s set then; the Duchess of Horton is giving one of her brilliant house parties, this time featuring the production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by some of the guests, with the rest as audience. The cast and audience are a large group of distinguished personages, from the Lord Chancellor of England (a longtime friend of the Duke and Duchess) through scholars, friends, acquaintances, and many more, all meeting for the event at the Duke’s palatial estate, Scamnum Court. The performance promises to be a distinguished one — one that is interrupted by a shot  behind a curtain… and Inspector Appleby of Scotland Yard is called in. For story, characters, wit, pace, and compelling action this novel has never been equalled, in my opinion.

What a book! Stunning, wonderful, great… truly a classic.

Michael Innes wrote many mystery novels featuring Inspector Appleby, all excellent, and all very different from each other in setting and plot — no ‘formula’ here.   Other Innes novels stand alone or follow the adventures of Charles Honeybath, portrait-painter.

Michael Innes is the pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart; details of his life and work may be found

here.

Book, Baker, Kindle, Eucalyptus, Gutenberg

No, it’s not a rival to Big Bang Theory’s Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock (thanks, Captain Randy, for alerting me to this).

It’s an article by Nicholson Baker in the August 3 2009 issue of The New Yorker titled A New Page: can the Kindle really improve on the book?

It’s an article well worth reading, not only to learn what Baker’s experience of the Kindle2 was, but what others think too, and much else about ebooks and ebook readers (whether hand-held dedicated devices, like the Kindles and the Sonys and others, or like other types of more general devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, Palm organizer and others).

Just one of Baker’s points:

There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace.

You can see videos of the Eucalyptus app in action on the web here.  Just sit and let the video play…

The Eucalyptus app draws on the volumes offered by the Gutenberg Project, which is at home here.

Note to the budget-minded (or iPod-impoverished, depending on your point of view): you can also download books directly from the Project Gutenberg site onto your desktop or laptop computer, and read them on those devices. It’s not handheld — which is what Baker’s article is about –  but it’s a free download (plus any contribution you care to make; see below) and you already have the necessary equipment if you are reading this post.

Should you find yourself interested in the Gutenberg Project, donations of volunteer time as proofreaders (details here; no special experience or training is required, just read the FAQ and register, then do as much or little as you can — a page a day, perhaps?) or of money, even a little, as you download titles, to keep the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation going.

The Foundation is a section 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization which attempts to preserve literary and other intellectual works and make them available free or at the lowest possible cost to people everywhere.

So, book and ebook lovers — OK, OK, ebibliophiles, excuuuuse me — if you want to read those books as ebooks, or if you need a place to make a few more charitable donations to help out your tax picture, or just want to help the project, now you know how to do it.

A Mere Child Could See It

Picasso: a biography, by Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian is a writer and translator of far wider scope than even those who have read his superb Aubrey/Maturin series may realize.  One of his masterpieces is a biography of Picasso, the great artist of the 20th century.  Picasso and O’Brian lived near each other in the South of France, but this book is not a series of memoirs or conversations, it is an attempt to present the man and his art — a well-researched work that is never dry or dull.

In O’Brian’s introduction, he states carefully that this is neither a life of the man divorced from his art, nor an attempt at explicating the art.  O’Brian uses all his considerable skill as translator (documentation of Picassos’s life occurs in many forms and languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Freench, and even Picasso’s own somewhat fractured French in his letters and notes, drawing on documents donated to the Museo Picasso in 1970, requiring a linguist and translator like O’Brian to do them justice) to bring us Picasso, whose art and whose life are inextricably part of each other.

A single illustration will show O’Brian’s masterful handling of this complicated subject:  O’Brian supplies a discussion and several illustrative excerpts, explanations by contemporaries and anecdotes showing how analytical cubism was understood and accepted when it was new (ca. 1910).  After several paragraphs of these, very helpful in setting context, we find:

‘A more open, or a less conditioned mind goes straight to the point without these detours: Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Vollard was the object of a good deal of merriment among the dealer’s friends–”What is it meant to represent?  Which way up is it supposed to be?”–but a child, still young enough to speak imperfectly, looked at it and instantly observed, “That’s Monsieur Voyard.” ‘ — p. 170

I found it helpful (but not vital) to have available a source of illustrations of Picasso’s work. I bought the Taschen Verlag 2-vol edition which has many fine color reproductions on glossy paper, arranged chronologically.  Many of the works O’Brian discusses can be seen reproduced here. (Yes, “Monsieur Voyard” is in there, and yes, I could see the face at once.) Of course, everyone knows a reproduction doesn’t have anything like the impact of the real thing — but the ‘real thing’ is far away in a collection somewhere, often not available for viewing at all (at least by the casual visitor), and the reproductions, if as well-done as these are, can provide satisfactory reference images for the works mentioned in O’Brian’s text.

O’Brian’s books are superb — never found one less than excellent yet — and this is the best (and clearest, and most enjoyable to read) book I know for the general reader to understand Picasso, his life and art.  The position is filled.  No other candidates need apply.

Little Things

So often it’s the little things that give a determined hermit the greatest pleasure. Let me share a few:

1. The Ink Shipment. I like writing with a fountain pen and have several I’ve picked up over the years. I noticed the other day that I was getting low on ink — I like to fill the pen from the bottle — and decided to put it into background processing for a while — I wasn’t going to run out of ink the very next day, or even the one after that. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a sale catalog from Levenger’s. Levenger’s has nice inks and good colors, but they tend to be somewhat costly for my pocketbook. This time, however, between the sale catalog and a special-offer coupon, I did manage to put together an order for ink in bottles and in long cartridges that satisified my desire to use different colors now and then, and still not break the bank. Also, I’ll be able to fill my pen until the year 2030 without reordering… Levenger’s offers an ink six-pack in two different assortments and cartridges in the same sets of colors. I looked forward to the arrival of that ink so much, and when it came, I hardly knew how to act — except to open it, set it out, and fill a pen, grinning the whole time.

2. I Saw a Deer. I was driving to lunch with a friend and as I was travelling along a leafy and narrow side road I saw a deer. She was beautiful, and walking in a slow and stately manner into nearby woods. I had to struggle to keep my eyes on the road, but in the glimpses I got of her, she was still moving with great dignity and slowness, looking as though she had browsing on her mind… So beautiful! So beautiful! I felt lucky to see a deer, and lucky to live in an area where they can still survive in the wild, but close enough to housing that they can’t be hunted. There’s more than one reason to have woods between the houses and the road.

3. I Saw Lightning Bugs. At twilight, I looked out onto the small lawn at the side of my house and saw the little green lights blinking on and off against the evergreens that border it. Lightning bugs! I never wanted to catch them. They’re so nifty, just flying around, seeming to float from one spot to the other, illuminating each, and moving on… In order to see and enjoy them and let them come nearer, you have to just stand (or sit) quietly for a while. Not a bad thing in itself.

4. Circles. Yes, I like things to give me delight, especially things I get to use every day, and when I saw that circular filters were available for my Chemex, I bought some. You get to fold the circles, first in half, then in half again, then open out one side so you’ve got a cone. You have to understand what fun this is, handling something as neat as a circle in paper and folding it just so, and then actually using it to make great coffee… Great stuff all around!

5. It’s Raining. it started raining about half an hour ago, and I hope it continues. It started out moderately strong, backed off to nothing, then went to very light drops. It’s currently stopped again. Come on, you guys, we can use some more! Anyhow, we need it and the light and shade is beautiful, modulated and muted, yet still definitely daylight… Rain on…

There, I told you they were all little things, but each one gave me a huge amount of pleasure. Some of them keep on giving me a big kick, day after day. Who knew that getting a shipment of ink, folding circular filter paper, seeing a deer and some lightning bugs, and watching the rain, could all be so much fun. Just having fun… experiencing life. All of it.

Novel Software

I looked the other day for some text-related software that might help me in my efforts to think through and set out story, plot, characters, setting details, and other things along with writing the actual text of some fiction. I knew I didn’t want a word processor, and I knew I wanted more than just another low-level text editor… but what?

On Version Tracker, I found Jer’s Novel Writing Software. Great stuff! Slim and elegant, does what you want it to do, runs like a dream on Tiger.

You can type your text, and quickly make a marginal note or set a bookmark for later editing, revision, additions, reference points, or whatever. You can keep character or other notes, and general notes. A very helpful outline feature lets you see what you’ve done in concise form, with collapsible and expandable sections, and it’s created as you type. You can set up your novel’s general structure — say, Book, Part, Chapter, text block — in advance and then not worry about text formatting, just write. And you can control screen appearance and printed appearance separately and very flexibly.

And lots more; look here to find out more about it. You can download it for free to examine it, and you can buy a key for $30 if you decide to use it.

Any piece of software that comes with a document called “Please Please Read Me” and an EULA worded like this one already has significant points going for it. I hope you’ll try it to see what it can do and how it does it if you’re interested in writing fiction — or even if you just want to look at some excellent and novel software.

The Pot of Basil

I went shopping Friday morning and had fun picking out tomatoes, peppers, onions, buttermilk (for curries), tofu, and, along with the rest of my groceries, a basil plant growing in a pot. Mine has none of the grisly attributes of Isabella’s much larger plant in a very large pot; it has lots of nice slightly curly leaves, large and small, and, with reasonable care, will supply fresh basil for a good long time to come.

One decision, once I got it home, was where to put it? It fit very nicely on a small shelf over the sink, with good bright light and occasional direct sun from the skylight. Seeing it there will remind me to check to see if it’s dry enough to water. And I’m getting ready to put a note on the refrigerator of the last time I fed it… about every two weeks, it says on the little piece of paper that came with it.

I told a friend, who lives in warmer climes, and she said they have pots of it growing on their screened-in patio all year round. Mine will do fine in my kitchen; although it’s warmer there than anywhere in the house in summer, and correspondingly colder in winter, it’s still all really moderate indoor temperatures as far as plants are concerned. And my friend assures me that basil plants are hardy. Good; that’s what I like to hear.

For my first leaf-picking, I’ve got some tomatoes ripening, and plan a tomato-mozzarella salad drizzled with olive oil and topped with fresh basil leaves. Can’t wait.

Current Puns

Wouldn’t you like to hear the brilliantly funny Stephen Fry tell you all about puns? Take your wordplay where you find it, in this case in a half hour program on BBC radio 4 — excellent, and full of puns.

The title of the show is Current Puns — well, it may help US listeners to know that you can buy something from English bakeries called currant buns — but listen carefully and you’ll get it all. Great stuff!

Sharpe’s Challenge

Fans of the Sharpe Chronicles will be glad to see Sean Bean return for the first time in 8 years as Richard Sharpe. In 1817, Wellington sends Sharpe, a veteran who has already seen action in India in 1803, back to India to unravel an intrigue. Darragh O’Malley returns as Harper, and the adventure, loosely based on several of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels set in India, is back with lots of action and intrigue. The acting and production are excellent; this one was filmed on location in India. Well worth seeing. If you haven’t seen the other 14 filmed adventures, you’ll enjoy them too, adapted from Cornwell’s twenty novels about Sharpe.

The Doctor’s Case

I’ve just been rereading my copy of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and I came on one of my favorite Holmes stories, ‘The Doctor’s Case’ by Steven King. It’s a fine tale, blending originality with staying strictly within the limits established by the canon, it does not imitate any canonical story in terms of type of crime or method of solution (as so many uncanonical Holmes stories seem to), and it gives us glimpses into the characters of Holmes, Watson and Lestrade that are original and yet do not conflict with those we already know.

And if anyone is in doubt that Steven King is a fine author and stylist — and no, there is no horror or gruesomeness here, it’s a pure Holmes story — this story will be proof.

There are many other fine stories in the book, which is well worth reading and can bear re-reading, as the canonical (I nearly typed conanical) stories do. Besides, if you got hold of a copy, you could read ‘The Doctor’s Case.’

Picasso by Patrick O’Brian

I have literally just got done reading O’Brian’s Picasso, and I have to say I have found a great book! Not just good, fine, well-written, excellent, brilliant, bravo and adios — it’s all that; but it’s great, too. Not so many of those around. I did think as I was reading it that this made O’Brian to biography what Tuchman was to history… taking events from the records, not just hearsay or what someone else wrote, by itself; unafraid to say the plain truth, when the truth was plain; aiming at neither praise nor blame, but clearly full of liking and admiration, without any kind of truckling, worship, or excuse-making, and similarly full of profound respect for the work, the work, the work, that Picasso continued to turn out almost without interruption until almost literally the day he died, some years past 90 (he was born in 1881).

So many biographies, especially of artists, somehow miss the point, the reader feels at the end. After all the stories of love marriage children births deaths bad luck and good luck, friendships made and friendships broken, you quite often feel as though you’ve had a lot of detail without any real picture of the person — many leaves without a glimpse of the tree. That is emphatically not the case here. O’Brian is well-acquainted with research using primary documents, interviews and secondary documents, and the problems of sifting evidence and coming to what conclusions one can, and when one can’t, saying so in clear terms. Also, while O’Brian knew Picasso slightly (his own term), since O’Brian lived in the Rousillon for so many years, and Picasso spent his summers in various places in the Midi, in no way is this a buddy book or anything like it.

One of the nice things about the book is that, only as far as is justified, O’Brian lets you know as major events happened in the world, if there was or was suspected to be an influence on Picasso’s art. Picasso lived in Paris during the Occupation of WWII — he was in his sixties and the Spain that had originally issued his passport was long gone behind the Spanish Civil War, so he was effectively a stateless alien, quite an unsafe thing to be anywhere let alone in occupied territory in wartime. He didn’t truckle, a difficult position to maintain under those threatening and ugly circumstances, and many records and accounts of his life at this time provide evidence for this, not just some boastful statement after the fact. The anecdotes of what happened to him and what he did during the war as various Germans from troops sent to ’search’ (even at times when troops had just searched and knew there was nothing to find) up to a visit from the German ambassador himself are recounted in the book, and I won’t spoil them here (but a hint: Guernica was still in his Paris studio at the time).

Hardcover copies of the original 1976 edition titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso are available occasionally, and only on the used book market, while a fine paperback edition titled simply Picasso and with a new preface by the author (the only textual difference from the original edition) was brought out some time after 1989 and itself reissued by HarperCollins in 2003.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) – dir. John Madden; Nicholas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale, Irene Papas
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a love story, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the overwhelming events of World War II. It is based on the novel Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernieres, which is a novel of the war as it happened devastatingly on Cephalonia, told through the lives of several fictonal characters, but historically accurate in its depiction of the war and its effects.
Every movie that attempts to portray a book, or bases itself on a book, especially a long and complex book, is the result of a struggle to deal with all the complexities and events of a much longer tale than a feature-length movie can tell. This is a superb movie, reflecting key events and characters of the novel, and showing and expressing much of what is there, and deepening some aspects, changing, collapsing or deleting whole story threads in order to make a feature-length movie. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin does an excellent job of this, sifting and refining,and not losing its focus on the relationship between Pelagia (Penelope Cruz) and Corelli (Nicholas Cage), with Pelagia’s father (John Hurt), her fiance Mandras (Christian Bale), and Mandras’s mother (Irene Papas) as major supporting players. Both book and movie keep you wondering if Pelagia and Corelli will find a way to get together. Fittingly enough, given their different emphases, the movie answers one way, and the book another. Go see this fine movie.

Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle

Let me start out by saying that Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my all-time favorite marvelous terrific films, viewable over and over. And I say film, advisedly. It does not fall into any particular genre (anime, animation, fantasy), although it partakes of all of these. It belongs right up there with great feature films of all time. It’s not an accident that Miyazaki’s earlier Spirited Away won the best animated feature Oscar in its year, 2003. There is no substitute for seeing them yourself, if you haven’t, or seeing them again, if you have (they both bear re-watching very well).

I bought the original book of Howl’s Moving Castle just because I’ve approached the movie from every other possible angle, including the Studio Ghibli book on the art of the film, which contains the entire filmscript as well as the pictures.��

As one would have to do to translate a book into a feature-length movie (one film contains script/story material of roughly one short story, so a novel of necessity has to be changed, pared down, maybe characters combined or omitted, some scenes ditto, and maybe even new material put into the place of old material which has been deleted), Miyazaki has begun with characters and situations present in the novel (a wizard Howl with a moving castle, a Sophie who is changed into an old lady, the Witch of the Waste casting a spell out of jealousy, Calcifer, the hat shop, the gushing stepmother, the attractive sister Lettie) and lifted them out of the more complex novel (Sophie has two sisters in the novel, and there are many other differences and complications — including that Markl is a young man of 15 named Michael and a rival at one point with Howl for Lettie’s attentions, and Howl has a sister back in ‘our world’ — Wales, in fact — who has a family herself. Howl’s name in Wales is Howell Jenkins; and many other differences).

I note that Christian Bale (who does the English-language voice of Howl) is Welsh, although in the featurette about the English-language voiceovers, they chose him (Bale, himself a wizard of a thousand accents, gives Howl’s voice as a US voice without any regionalization) as an actor who could present an unusual character (unusual to the US — a hero without being a he-man, one who calls himself a coward during the film, although he’s actually quite brave when confronted, and says his strategy for dealing with problems is to run away) to the US audience convincingly. They picked him, they said, after seeing his success in Batman Begins — who, I note, is another widely-accepted American ‘hero’ who overcomes his fears in order to battle fiercely.

My point is: Miyazaki has transformed and streamlined the story to concentrate on Howl and Sophie, with Howl’s castle and Calcifer, and changed somewhat the role of the Witch of the Waste, and created the Madam Sulieman character out of other characters, and made the war over the missing Prince a major factor in the film, showing Howl’s character development and role as a lone struggler against the war’s depredations. If there can be said to be a Miyazaki original ‘message’ or ‘theme’ in the film, it’s the one about the pointlessness and destructiveness of war, and how the war has no real reason that justifies the war itself.�In the book as well as the film Sophie does find a way to set Calcifer free and give back Howl’s heart, and Calcifer does return afterwards because he likes them (and because it’s starting to rain).�And Sophie and Howl do get together.

But let me say this: the book is a much more lightweight confection than the film, shelved in the ‘teens’ section of the bookstore when I bought my copy, clever and inventive, but not terribly deep, nor intended to be. It’s filled with literary allusions and references that are well-handled and integrated into the plot, and also many plot twists and reversals that seem to my eye more busy than substantive, although they all have to do with and lead to the final unravelling of what’s been going on. And while Sophie has to solve the basic mystery of the Howl-Calcifer relationship in the book, too, she stumbles along there from minor calamity to minor calamity, not learning much about herself while doing so, until at the end of the book things are cleared up all at once (not without a struggle). By contrast, Miyazaki’s film has transformed the materials and characters of this book into a brilliant, moving, beautiful film with amazing depths, the work of a true genius. Beautifully crafted, beautifully produced, both visually and in terms of story and character. Amazing, astounding, incomparable.

Go see it.

The Intersection of Art and Disaster

Columnist Jon Carroll visited a show of photography of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco — I can’t believe it’s 100 years already, can you? — and loved the show but had a problem with the labeling and signage, or lack of information in same. He tells us about it in today’s column:

The problem here is the failure to acknowledge that the photographs were an information-rich environment. When we see a Monet seascape, we are indifferent to its precise location. It’s not about the place; it’s about the light. But these photographs were journalism before they became art. They are our shared history, the worst thing that ever happened to the city that we admire (even if we can’t afford to live there), and we want details — not details about cameras, but details about destruction.

If the three most important things about real estate are location, location, and location, then the three most important things to say about exhibited photographs — remarkably effective photographs — taken and exhibited to show the extent of a disaster and bring the emotional impact to us — are context, context, context — those details about ‘where was this taken from?’ and ‘what is that building or that statues that is still standing?’ as well as ‘how did they get the camera high enough to take that shot?’ and ‘what kind of camera was used for this?’

One book that does a really good job of giving us both kinds of information is the recently published Mystical San Francisco, a book of photographs by Frederic Larson, photographer extraordinaire, with text by Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle Press, 2005).

Admittedly, it’s a book depicting the beauties, not the disaster, of the city in a series of amazingly beautiful photographs, with words by the late great Herb Caen.

As you page through the book, the caption of each photo tells you what you are seeing — the context/content of the photo (“Oil on California Street cable car tracks”). At the back of the book,in an Afterword by Frederic Larson, are some hints for (when, where, how) taking such photos and, one by one, the technical photographic details: notes about how the photo was planned and taken, as well as type of lens, f-stop, speed, ASA setting, and whether with a digital camera or using color negative film.

Best of both worlds, I think that’s called.

Jonathan Cott

The Captain lent me his copy of On the Sea of Memory, by Jonathan Cott, the story of Cott’s permanent loss of memory after electroshock treatments, followed by a series of interviews with people expert in various aspects of memory-related fields — or fields in which memory of different kinds play a strong role. You only think you might not be interested, until you open the book and then can’t tear your eyes away from the page.

This is a superb book on its own merits, but its list of the other books by Cott also intrigued me. I was in the middle of a project to learn more about the great pianist Glenn Gould, and I saw listed among Cott’s other books these titles: Conversations with Glenn Gould; and Forever Young, a series of conversations with (among others) Glenn Gould, Maurice Sendak, Stephane Grappelli.

That book in turn gave me some insights into the scope and depth of Cott’s earlier career as a writer, part of which has been lost for him with his memory loss. He’s an astoundingly gifted writer (note the present tense) and interviewer. One test for of the skill of an interviewer is that the person being interviewed thinks the questions being asked are good ones. We find this over and over in Cott’s work. Besides being skillful and intelligent, he’s compelling reading, both then and now.

Get hold of On the Sea of Memory (I’ve now got my own copy) and some of his other books as well, and enjoy them — and yourself. Read him and weep, while wishing that you could write so well; read him and smile, as he unlocks the sophisticated ideas and personalities he interviews; read him and — most importantly — be intelligently engaged.

Jack Irish

Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s blog for a link(December 13) to Jenny Davidson’s best of 2005 books list.

I took a look and I’m glad I did, because that was where I saw Jenny’s recommendation of Peter Temple and especially of Temple’s works featuring Jack Irish. I got hold of those books and read them, and they live up to Jenny’s recommendations and more.

These books are so well-written and fast-moving and filled with that terrific, packed, indirect, allusive, sideways glancing, to-the-point but never on-the-nose Australian speech. Your eyes could happily chew your way from cover to cover and beg for more at the end. Mine did.

And funny as hell. Did I mention funny as hell? Aside from the suspense, maneuvering, and action, that is.

The first two Jack Irish books are available; I hope a third one and many more come out soon. The two are: Bad Debts and Black Tide.

Enjoy them!

The Best Thing For Being Sad

The Wise Owl and I have been enjoying The Once and Future King together.
It is a great book for reading out loud, whether short bits or long sections of it. Not every book that reads well silently also reads well aloud, but this one does.

I’m going to post my favorite short quote here. Of course it is Merlyn speaking:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you my lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn–pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and economics–why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

The book was published in the 1950’s, but it would be a mistake to think of it as old-fashioned, or, worse, only for children. People often look back at those who lived in earlier times — especially times before they were born — and think that those earlier people are somehow less intelligent or savvy than the present-day people.

Privately, though, I think that the earlier people, if they could see the world today, would marvel at how little — almost nothing, in fact — we of today have managed to learn from their hard experiences of being people who lived and struggled in the world, despite our ubiquitous cell phones and instant messaging.

The Wrong Lizard

I’ve just been re-reading Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I re-read it every so often just to clear out any cobwebs that have accumulated since the last time I read it.

Today, I read the bit about the planet — one where everyone has the vote — where the people are people, the lizards are the leaders, the people hate the lizards, and the lizards rule the people.

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they”ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

‘Oh, yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

That’s from Chapter 36 of So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Truth to Tell

On Bullshit is a fascinating little book by Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. I wasn’t sure just how seriously to take a book with that title, but I took a chance on it, and I’m glad I did.

A central idea in the book is that bullshitting is actually about how the bullshitter wishes to be perceived by his/her audience, rather than chiefly about the truth or falsehood of what is said.

An example in the text is that of a Fourth of July orator, who dredges up historical cliches and pontificates about how great this country is.

But his address is not so much about the country or its history, the truthfulness of historical or rhetorical assertions, as it is a means to get others to see him as a patriot, one who thinks and cares deeply about the country — that is, to portray his sincerity. Whether it actually exists or not.

Why do I bring this up? Because, while this country is rich in political manure at all times, the recent events surrounding Katrina and her aftermath of lost lives and suffering, largely attributable to unpreparedness and what looks an awful lot like incompetence, bring this aspect of things into particularly sharp relief.

It’s important, but not enough, to ask yourself, “Is what they are saying true or false?” With the pictures of devastation in front of us, and the words of people actually stranded there, this time we can easily see and hear for ourselves a great deal of what is true.

Now is a time when we might also ask ourselves, What about all those fancy words and phrases, promises and rhetoric from all those officials and higher-ups who were so conspiciuously absent during the events and at key times immediately afterwards, who were so busy giving not aid but promises, press conferences, and television appearances? They were absent, that is, when something might actually have been done to alleviate suffering and loss of life. They are now working hard to portray themselves as caring and in charge. Sincere. I think a lot of people in America now have their own opinions about that. Those opinions may not be in line with what the speakers hope to portray about themselves.

I note EveryFool’s excellent post on hypocrisy, a closely allied topic.

In addition, though, Professor Frankfurt’s ideas give us a clear standard by which the murkiness of much rhetoric we see and hear today can be measured.

Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra

From the Hermit’s correspondence:

As background information for a piece I’m working on, I looked into my copy of The Complete Etchings of Goya, foreword by Aldous Huxley and a standard tome that I now have in my personal library, thanks to the terrific and wide-ranging Pedro: he acquired it as one of his secondhand book bargains and brought it as a gift (magnificent!) on one of his visits. One of the four series presented in the book is Los Desastres de la Guerra, the Disasters of War. The war in question is the 1808 French invasion of Spain by Napoleon’s forces.

Since you and I have recently pursued lots of reading about the Napoleonic wars, especially Wellington’s Peninsular campaign, as part of the Sharpe and the Aubrey/Maturin series, as well as through nonfiction historical works, I now found myself in a position to view and understand the etchings as I had not been able to earlier: I now comprehended their historical context.

Huxley reminds us that Goya had always been a close observer of the Spanish scene of all castes and types. He had most recently published a series of etchings, the Capriccios, when he was in his fifties, in 1799. In 1808 the war — invasion — came. Between the ages of 65 and 75 he created the 83 etchings in the Desastres. From firsthand knowledge.

While the books we’ve read are necessary to give an understanding of the backgrounds, ins and outs of the battles and warfare of Napoleonic times — as you and I have discussed, actually the first of the World Wars, affecting areas far away from Europe — those books cannot give a real idea of the horrors of that (or any) war. They are not meant to, and also they cannot convey it. The Desastres can, and do. In fact, it may be worth it to go back to some of the books we’ve read and reread them after seeing the Desastres, this time taking with us pictures of what it’s really like when invasion comes.

Aldous Huxley’s foreword to the book is short and very much worth reading. How do you introduce great masterworks like Goya’s etchings? Huxley explores the idea of a master collection of Late Works from all fields of art. After some brief discussion of what he means by that, and artists and their works who would and would not qualify (this discussion is an education in itself), he points out that all four of the series of etchings of Goya are Late Works, with all that that means.

I urge you strongly to look at the Desastres and read the Huxley foreword. But be warned: war is horrible; and this is the horrors of war with no punches pulled.

A Long-Time Reader Speaks

It’s been repeated many times that a short story is a piece of fiction in which one thing happens (or some words very like those). I think so little of that idea either as observation or as advice to would-be writers that I’m not even going to look up who said it first. I’m here to say instead that a good story is one we want to read or hear (short story, novella, novel, epic, whatever); one in which INTERESTING events happen to INTERESTING people in INTERESTING ways, in INTERESTING places with INTERESTING realizations and told in an INTERESTING way, preferably one which does not in any sense resemble Pablum — predigested, mushy, bland, administered for one’s good, textured unpleasantly, etc.

Interesting stories: such as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, or Mark Helprin’s story “Perfection” in his collection The Pacific and Other Stories. Or like the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian. Or like The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers. Or like The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness or the Earthsea books by Ursula LeGuin. Or like Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold, or like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, or like Thurber’s Fables for Our Time, or like Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon or like Dan Simmons’s Ilium or… I hope you are getting the idea, which is not limited to these particular books or these particular authors or these particular “types” or genres of stories, however you care to classify them (I don’t).

I’m not talking about any one kind of story: action-adventure, techno-thriller, shoot-em-up, sf or fantasy (don’t bother reminding me it’s all fantasy; maybe so, but where does that get us at this point that we want to go?), “straight” fiction, mysteries, airport bestsellers, historical novels, Westerns, bodice-rippers, whatever. Excessive action and overplotting do not an interesting story make, just by themselves (Hollywood: take note). I’m talking about them all. Of course there are some kinds I personally like better than others, as you can tell if you’ve been paying attention to my examples, but I exclude none. In fact, interesting reading extends well beyond fiction into non-fiction. I’m especially fond of reading history — a non-fiction genre in which you have to be quite selective, lest you inadvertently run over the border back into fiction. Unless you’re merely feeding your fiction addiction and will read just anything at all written in your one favored fictional genre to get that fix, my guess is you want your favored types of fiction to be interesting.

Now you can go argue about whether it’s enough to have only, say, the events be interesting to make the whole thing interesting, and I won’t care. What I want, as a reader, is interesting stuff to read. Not ordinary, mundane drivel. I can have my fill and more of ordinary mundane drivel just by living my ordinary mundane life in an ordinary mundane way, and going nuts with it like the rest of the world. The last thing I need is to deal with a bunch of fictional people in the same boat as I am, or even worse, and not have them find a way to get out of it or at least transcend it in some way that’s INTERESTING.

And it’s another dubious truism to say writers need to make readers care about their fictional characters. That statement does the readers, the stories, the characters, and any would-be writers a disservice (I don’t think experienced writers of interesting stuff will be dissuaded that easily). I think writers have to make their characters, situations, locales, events and scenes interesting to us, and not worry about making us “care” about them. “Bleagh!” she said, quoting Snoopy. I don’t want to “care” about characters. Yukk. Ewww. I want them to stand up for themselves and be interesting to me, like Lyra and Will and Serafina Pekkala and Iorek Byrnison and, yes, even those two competing and very different kinds of villains Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, both of whom I wholeheartedly loathed in different ways for different reasons, in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. Make them interesting, and reader feelings of all kinds (way more than just “caring” and many a lot more genuinely mixed and subtle, which is what helps bring things alive to readers) will take care of themselves… with a little skillful help from the writers, of course; that’s their great art.

Why should you listen to me? Because I’m a voracious reader, and have been so all my (fairly long, so far) life. That’s an awful lot of books in a great many fields, fiction and nonfiction. I’m the audience: an experienced and attentive audience. My idea of a great way to get away from the pressures of the job when I worked for someone else all day long was to spend the first day of a long weekend or vacation scarfing down 6 or 7 short (i.e., ca. 200 pages each) new-to-me mystery novels in whatever series (more than one at any time) I was currently following: a way to catch up with my mystery-genre series-character buddies, and in the process free my own mind from the job rut enough to look around and see what else I could read, in whatever field or genre, and give me a chance to have a real life beyond the page, too. Maybe even find my way back to myself.

Do yourself a favor: read — or even write — something interesting today.