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| 1569715041
| 9781569715048
| 1569715041
| 4.43
| 2,270
| 1995
| Jan 01, 2001
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it was amazing
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Now, a mere 700 pages into the narrative, we get the backstory we need to understand the events that set our Lone Wolf and Cub on the Demon Way throug
Now, a mere 700 pages into the narrative, we get the backstory we need to understand the events that set our Lone Wolf and Cub on the Demon Way through Hell. This third volume's third episode, "The White Path between the Rivers" finally depicts the horrific opening scene of the first movie, Sword of Vengeance, where Itto Ogami in his capacity as the Shogun's executioner, decapitates the child daimyo, the event which the Yagyu clan then uses to betray Ogami and murder his household, including his pregnant wife who delivers their son Daigoru as she is dying. Fans of the movies will also be happy to find here the title episode featuring Ogami's fight with the three ninja Hidari brothers, the "flute" in the title referring to "mogari-bue," Ogami's perfect killing blow to the throat of the third brother which makes a whistling sound. That fight with the three brothers, each with his own specialized killing weapon, makes up the final scene of the second film, Baby Cart at the River Styx. I have often thought that the brother with the iron claw must have influenced Chris Claremont in his portrayal of the Marvel superhero Wolverine, in the same way the blind swordsman Zatoichi must have inspired Stan Lee in his depiction of Daredevil. This third volume also features "The Virgin and the Whore," the story of Ogami saving the girl sold into prostitution which comprises much of the third film, Baby Cart to Hades. And speaking of baby carts, although Itto Ogami and Daigoru sled away on the baby cart in the final scene of the last movie, it seems the baby cart has already outlived its usefulness here in this third volume of the manga. Here’s hoping we’ll see that baby cart again soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 15, 2023
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Nov 20, 2023
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Nov 15, 2023
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Paperback
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| 1594561818
| 9781594561818
| 1594561818
| 3.68
| 2,479
| Aug 12, 1845
| Feb 02, 2004
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liked it
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The opening scene of Netflix’s new limited series The Fall of the House of Usher begins with a funeral in a church for three of the children of Roderi
The opening scene of Netflix’s new limited series The Fall of the House of Usher begins with a funeral in a church for three of the children of Roderick Usher. The words spoken by the minister here come from Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” an odd little story in the form of a confession by a deranged man who has committed an irrational murder (perhaps that of his father?) years before, and now has publicly confessed to the murder in an equally irrational burst of impulsive perversity. Our killer, a little reminiscent of the madman in The Tell Tale Heart, faces imminent execution, but his motive for speaking here is not so much to excuse himself but to shed light on the irrational nature of the human soul which is too often slave to this “imp of perversity.” The scriptwriter’s odd choice for the show’s opening voiceover begins to make sense once the viewer discovers that the framework for the series seems to be the lengthy confession of Roderick Usher to C. Auguste Dupin of his and his family’s foul crimes and sordid misdeeds. I’m not sure if the show is going to be all that good, but its writers know their Poe well and have done a masterful job distorting its details to flavor this new show which combines equal parts Succession and American Horror Story.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 18, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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Paperback
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| B0DLT2ZTJ3
| 4.02
| 46,680
| Feb 16, 2016
| Feb 16, 2016
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really liked it
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Not as good as Ring Shout, but pretty darn good. One day in the not-so-distant future, courses at the university level will examine the horror genre as Not as good as Ring Shout, but pretty darn good. One day in the not-so-distant future, courses at the university level will examine the horror genre as a vehicle for exploring the pernicious effects of racism on the black man in American society. Ring Shout will be on the syllabus, along with Lovecraft Country, Octavia Butler, and maybe even grumpy, old Lovecraft himself. They’ll study film in these classes, too: Night of the Living Dead, of course, and Jordan Peele’s movies, Get Out, Nope, and Us. I hope they’ll even find time to squeeze in Blacula. These courses will not be taught in Florida. Fuck you, Ron DeSantis. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 05, 2023
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Oct 18, 2023
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Oct 05, 2023
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ebook
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| B0DTTD9SQ5
| unknown
| 3.60
| 47
| Jan 01, 1919
| 1919
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it was ok
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Borges, what a jokester! Like an excerpt from a book never written, yet shelved in the infinite Library of Babel, this puzzling fragment of a ghost sto Borges, what a jokester! Like an excerpt from a book never written, yet shelved in the infinite Library of Babel, this puzzling fragment of a ghost story appeared first in the 1940 collection Antologia de la Literatura Fantastica, compiled by Jorge Luis Borges and his two collaborators, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo. Attributed to an I.A. Ireland, the fragment, along with the author and his spurious bio, are all creations of Borges, who would be quite pleased today to see the way his little forgery has taken new life on the Interwebs. In the Antologia, there is at least one more sham mini-story inserted by Borges into the other supernatural tales (“Un Creyente” by George Loring Frost), and this second fiction has taken an even greater life online, as George Loring Frost not only has a FaceBook page where he offers language instruction (“Learn Spanish in your office or at home”!), but quite a few dupes have gone on to memorialize online this fictitious author and his story, one man even posting online a song based on “Un Creyente,” which is then critiqued by numerous respondents in a discussion thread. This is particularly fascinating to me because in “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges has written about how artifacts from a fictitious world suddenly begin appearing in the “real” world where we read about this fictitious construct. (Interestingly, in “Tlon” our narrator is accompanied by Bioy Casares when the two search for the manuscripts attesting to the existence of Uqbar and Tlon. In a way, it is much like the crazy online quest I’ve recently gone on, trying to unlock the mystery of I.A. Ireland and his ghost story by searching for something that doesn't really exist.) So what’s “Climax” all about? Well, one idea that fits nicely into my understanding of Borges and his craft is that we have a mini-narrative here that covers some of the same ground Borges explores in much greater detail in many of his stories and essays, the way reality can be created through language wielded by a writer with great powers of the imagination, and that’s something writers of genius have been exploring for centuries. Shakespeare does it to great effect in The Tempest, and notice Ireland’s bio—our fictitious author claims descent from the famed Eighteenth Century Shakespeare forger, William Henry Ireland. (In some ways the bio is of more interest to me than the narrative. Notice the 1899 date for “A Brief History of Nightmares”? That’s the year Borges was born!) At the end of The Tempest, the great sorcerer Prospero (our stand-in for Shakespeare) says to his audience, both on the island as well as in the theatre or even holding the script,
And that seems to me to be what Borges is doing in “Climax”: the author has led the reader into an eerie world of words, shut the door and then melted into thin air, leaving the reader to find his way out of the labyrinth. Five stars for Borges, that erudite genius who blows my mind each time I encounter him. Two stars for his little literary joke on us because although it’s clever, the piece itself doesn’t do much for me, although it has certainly opened some fascinating doors. ++++++++++++++++++ Read for my GoodReads short story discussion group ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 15, 2023
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Sep 15, 2023
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Sep 16, 2023
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Unknown Binding
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| 0374312710
| 9780374312718
| 0374312710
| 4.19
| 41,520
| Apr 28, 2020
| Apr 28, 2020
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it was ok
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This is a really crappily written book, and the author comes off as a bit of a dick who is just way too full of himself. There. I said it. But at the s This is a really crappily written book, and the author comes off as a bit of a dick who is just way too full of himself. There. I said it. But at the same time, I purposefully chose to read this memoir to its end and I find myself defending it against the attacks of Christo-fascist, homophobic parents who with their pitchforks and torches are acting like real assholes these days, firing off angry emails full of Bible verses and going to school board meetings shouting their stupid bigoted nonsense into the microphone while they accuse teachers and librarians of being sexual groomers. Because, just in case you live in a country that is not filled with homophobic morons making a nuisance of themselves right now, All Boys Aren't Blue (along with Gender Queer) is at the top of the list of books that have come under fire these days in school libraries. Such a fine time it is to be an American right now, and especially to be a sub-sub librarian who just wants to immerse himself in cetology and enjoy being surrounded by good books... However, my personal opinion about the quality of this book hardly matters because, being an old heterosexual mostly white guy, I am not the audience it was written for. And fortunately, unlike all these dipshit parents these days, I understand the world does not revolve around my own singular existence and there is a whole world out there filled with people very different from me. I also remember my own mother asking me, back when I was a little kid, "Wouldn't the world be a boring place if everyone were exactly like you?" And here's the funny thing, because my mother was a Regular Baptist, possibly the most narrow-minded type of Baptist there is out there, but she was way, way more Christian than all these wackjobs today who call themselves Christians while they try to remove books from school libraries and yell at school board members to repent. Because she understood the essential Christian teaching of having love and compassion for the underdog and the downtrodden and the miserable and the hurting. And there's no one more downtrodden and miserable and deserving of our compassion these days than gay or trans kids in high schools who see a growing wave of intolerance against them as backward states pass legislation designed to deny their existence and libraries face pressure to remove books written for them that provide affirmation and assistance navigating the obstacles the rest of society places in their ways. So, instead of carping on and on about what annoys me in Johnson's memoir (well, let me just mention one example of what annoys me and I'll be done: the "trauma" Johnson goes on and on about in this book involves getting beat up one day in grade school, and it had nothing to do with his race or his sexual orientation. George, my friend, we all got beat up in grade school, and we're all better for it today, so stop your whining. Wait, how about two examples? George, you definitely did not coin the endearment, "Honeychild." Okay, now I'm done), I'll leave it at this : All Boys Aren't Blue is not pornographic or obscene, and reading it will not make any tightly wound Bible-loving paranoid parent's kid gay. Listen, insane Moms and Dads of America: Books don't do that. But what it will do is provide guidance and support for young readers like George Johnson was himself who need help as they figure out the world around them and the world within them. It is sensitively written and necessary to be on the shelf in the school library. To demand that it be removed from the shelves of our school libraries is the real obscenity and is tantamount to demanding our students like George Johnson be removed from our schools. P.S. If you want to read a review that gives voice to many of my concerns about the content and quality of this book, read the one-star review by A Aus. He's got better standing than me to criticize it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 28, 2023
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Mar 13, 2023
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Feb 28, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0063251922
| 9780063251922
| 0063251922
| 4.49
| 594,142
| Oct 18, 2022
| Oct 18, 2022
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really liked it
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I lived out in the country for a couple of years when I was a kid. The four brothers across the lane from us lived in a house that wasn’t really a hou
I lived out in the country for a couple of years when I was a kid. The four brothers across the lane from us lived in a house that wasn’t really a house at all; it was more like a basement beneath a house under permanent construction. We lived in the basement of a house, too, but at least ours was finished. My friends across the way said “crick” instead of “creek” and “timber” instead of “woods.” They were good people, and in the summer their mom drove us to the swimming pool every day in the back of their Chrysler station wagon. Their dad never talked and would work on the house on the weekends. He was still working on it when we moved. I don’t think he ever finished it. On the bus ride to school in the morning, we’d pick up kids who lived in the woods. Maybe I should say “timber.” One girl’s house looked like something out of an FSA photo shoot from the ‘30s, junk piled everywhere, the screendoor swinging in the wind. Some days she’d come out of her house on the run, screaming back at her mother who’d be stumbling after her, swinging her fists. Nobody ever acknowledged her, and the girl never said a word the two years I rode that bus, although sometimes she’d cry quietly to herself. If I’m remembering right, the farthest stop out on that route before the bus headed back was at a trailer park near the reservoir. Those kids were rough, and Johnny Semon was the roughest of them, a live wire with a foul mouth and a bad haircut, rawboned in ill-fitting hand-me-downs. Most of us had bad haircuts back then and clothes that didn’t fit right either, but he was something else altogether. I was terrified of him and in awe at the same time, and I learned a lot of new words, eagerly eavesdropping on his conversations during those early bus rides. That was in Iowa, geographically rather far removed from Lee County, Virginia, the setting of Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon Copperhead, but as I was reading it, I found myself mentally returning to those bus rides and thinking about the kids who lived in the woods and the special kind of misery they grew up with, so far removed from my own experience because, even if I lived in a basement out in the countryside, I had two sober parents with jobs, books in the house, and meals to eat, every day of my childhood without fail. So, while it’s not like I had any real personal insights to the lives of the characters in Demon Copperhead, on the most superficial of levels, Damon Fields, Matthew Peggott, and the other youngsters of Kingsolver’s novel remind me of some of my classmates and fellow bus riders back then. More importantly, though, now that I’ve finished my stroll down memory lane, is what Kingsolver does here in her book with these characters, fleshing them out and humanizing them far beyond what I could see out the windows of that yellow school bus, and telling their story in a way that just about no one else in American society is doing because these are the “deplorables” of America, a term you might remember from the 2016 election, a segment of our population that has fallen between the cracks and that almost no one pays attention to. Republicans lie to them, get their votes, and then ignore them. Democrats ignore them without the lies, seeing them too often as unredeemable to begin with, a major mistake made by Hillary Clinton, and one which helped her lose the election. And so what Kingsolver is doing here is a fascinating bit of craft on her part, choosing to tell the story of a young boy growing up against the awful backdrop of poverty, addiction, ignorance, and social disintegration of western Virginia and telling that story in the framework of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, and thus elevating the subject matter beyond its setting and details to something remarkably transcendent and utterly human, and in doing so she is shining a spotlight on this area of society that too many of the rest of us have chosen to ignore. And it works. To a point. Damon Fields (Demon Copperhead, his nickname based on his reddish hair, part Melungeon, another fantastic choice on Kingsolver’s part) is a dynamically appealing character with an inner goodness to him that will remind you of his Dickensian counterpart. And if you don’t know Dickens, well that’s fine, too. Enjoying the novel is not dependent on knowing the source material at all, although fans of Copperfield will discover that Kingsolver knows that novel quite well. So why only four stars, despite this being the best book I’ve read so far this year? Well, in part because Kingsolver fails to stick the landing, and also in part because (much like Dickens himself) Kingsolver can be a bit heavy-handed and pedantic at times and overly sentimental at others. What I forgive Dickens for in the Victorian Age, I find myself being a little annoyed with today in whatever shitty age the historians will deem this awful time. Nonetheless, here’s a book that I heartily recommend is worth the read and even needs to be read by the rest of us. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 21, 2023
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Mar 19, 2023
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Jan 21, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1451648707
| 9781451648706
| 1451648707
| 3.80
| 3,494
| Nov 01, 2022
| Nov 01, 2022
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it was amazing
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Here’s what Bob has to say about the Fugs in Chapter 27: Buying records by the Fugs was like buying some Sun Ra records; you had no idea what you woHere’s what Bob has to say about the Fugs in Chapter 27: Buying records by the Fugs was like buying some Sun Ra records; you had no idea what you would get. One record would sound pretty slick….Then you’d pick up another release and it sounded like it was recorded by a tomato can telephone on the end of a broom handle....They dared you to figure out what they were about. And that’s a pretty humorous paragraph to encounter midway through The Philosophy of Modern Song because daring you to “figure out what they were about” has generally been the case with Dylan himself over the course of his long career and specifically what you’ll discover as soon as you crack open this book which lurches along over the course of Bob’s 66 short chapters devoted to the 66 songs (you think that number’s a coincidence?) he discusses here, careening from the absolutely brilliant to the totally baffling with no rhyme or reason for why he has selected these songs, how he’s ordered them, or what he wants to say about each. Here in his new book Bob dares you to figure things out for yourself, and that’s often an impossible task based on some of the strange content. For example, how did Cher's “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” make the cut while there’s nothing here by Woody Guthrie? And if you really need to include the Eagles, of all the tunes you could pick, why choose “Witchy Woman,” especially when Santana's “Black Magic Woman” appears just a few pages later? Or “The Whiffenpoof Song”? Really, Bob…? I’m not complaining, mind you. I’m a fan, and I have been since my grade school days, so I’m used to Bob being inscrutable. We’re talking about the guy who helped me develop a love of language, the guy who wrote “Highway 61 Revisited," “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” all those great tunes I listened to on the radio back in the '70s, but when by the time I had a job and earned some spending money of my own to take to the record store, he was putting out the insufferable Slow Train Coming or Shot of Love or Saved. That was a kick in the balls, but I rolled with it and although it took me decades, I can even listen to some of that stuff now. But he’s also the guy who long before that changed things up at the ’65 Newport Festival when he went electric, riling up all the folkies there, and then a year later went to England and got the Brits’ panties in such a bunch they called him Judas. Bob is so elusively mercurial that he was played by six different actors in the 2007 film I'm Not There, including Cate Blanchett. When you are least expecting, he’ll release an album of Christmas carols. And then he’ll go and put out a triple set of the dusty old tunes he enjoyed as a lad, whether anyone out there is interested or not. So with Bob, you never know what you’re going to get, and that's how it is with the Jokerman. But unlike those folkies, I don’t feel betrayed, although still a lot of numbskulls today will attend a show on his Never Ending Tour and leave unhappy because they don’t recognize any of the songs he’s played. And then they see a playlist later and discover those mysterious tunes were actually some of their favorites turned inside out by a performer who likes to change things up. Bob don’t really care and I fully understand. Bob’s Muse is not subject to the simple whims of mere mortals. Thus it is with The Philosophy of Modern Song, a book which contains precious little “philosophy” and hardly anything in the way of “modern song,” depending on your definition of that term. The most “modern” of the 66 songs is an obscure tune by John Trudell called “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” which is already well over 20 years old by now. The earliest song of the bunch is by Stephen Foster, going all the way back to 1849. By and large, the table of contents reads like your grampa’s “Favorite Songs” playlist on Spotify set to “random,” if your grampa is still alive and knows how to use Spotify. Today’s casual reader will recognize far fewer than half the titles that appear. To make things stranger, on the cover is an image of Little Richard and Eddie Cochrane flanking Alis Lesley, the so-called “female Elvis Presley.” Why is she on the cover? I dunno, because Alis is never referred to in the book, as far as I can tell, although Little Richard gets two chapters (“Tutti Fruitti” and “Long Tall Sally”). Go figger. The book opens with a discussion of Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” interpreted by Bob as a confessional from the Prodigal Son and closes with Dion’s “Where or When,” which gives Bob a chance to rap on and on about reincarnation, memory, and repetition, before moving to a discussion of the 1937 Broadway show Babes in Arms reincarnated and ruined by Busby Berkeley two years later for Hollywood and then on to Dion himself, a performer who went through a number of his own rebirths: “an earnest Teenager in Love to a swaggering Wanderer, a soul-searching friend of Abraham, Martin and John to a hard-edged leather-clad king of the urban jungle who was a template for fellow Italo-rocker Bruce Springsteen. Most recently, he has realized one of his early dreams and become some kind of elder legend, a bluesman from another Delta.” And that’s all true, and equally the case for the inscrutably ever-changing Dylan. So here’s what the book is not. It’s definitely not what the dust jacket claims it is, “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting,’ which makes me think Simon and Schuster should make their editorial staff read the books before they assign them the task of writing the blurb. No, it’s not that at all, no matter how much maybe Bob’s editor hoped it would be. What it is instead, at least what it seems to be, is Bob woke up in the morning, had a cup of coffee and chose the first song that popped into his head, maybe a song he dreamed about that night, maybe some song he remembered from the radio back when he was a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, maybe just some song that has stuck with him over the years, and once he had it, he hammered out some random musings on the song maybe on a Smith-Corona, maybe longhand on a Big Chief tablet, again, I dunno. It would be fascinating to actually hear from Bob about what his creative process was or why he wrote this book in the first place or how he chose these songs, but nope, like I said, he gives us no clues. Instead, as with Montaigne or Pascal, we get a collection of pensées from Bob, as variegated and diverse as Montaigne musing on cannibals one day, and then moving on to thumbs or smells or cowardice. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes Bob discusses what the song is about; sometimes he reflects on its historical context. From time to time he gives you a consideration of the artist or the writer or the arranger, but more often than not he goes on a free-wheeling, first-person stream-of-consciousness rap about what it is like to live inside the song itself. Like I’ve been implying all along, if you’re not a fan of Bob Dylan, this is probably not for you. And it won’t help convince you of his merits receiving the Nobel, either. But then if that’s your attitude, you probably wouldn’t pick up this book in the first place, which would be too bad because even if it has nothing to do with the art and craft of songwriting, let along anything close to philosophy, it’s brilliant from start to finish, albeit baffling at times. Let’s be as random as Bob and just pick a page for example. Here’s how Dylan starts off his reflections about Perry Como’s version of “Without a Song”: “This song doesn’t really name the song that the world would be worse off if it never heard. It’s a mystery….Perry Como was the anti-Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn’t be caught dead with a drink in his hand, and could out-sing anybody…Perry is also the anti-American Idol. He is the anti-flavor of the week, anti-hot list and anti-bling. He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine. Perry Como stands and delivers….” And it’s all true and all good, delivered in a sort of rapid fire staccato here, but not what I’d ever call “philosophy” and not what anybody in 2022 would mistake for either “modern music” or “craft” (if we return to that blurb on the book cover). The only real craft here is the craft at work within the infathomable mind of Bob Dylan, daring you to figure out what he is all about again. And he then he goes and does it 65 more times. Sometimes Bob will strike out on a tangent, saying almost nothing about the song or the performer, like when he skips over Webb Pierce and “There Stands the Glass” and spends most of the chapter spiraling off from an observation on Webb’s outfits to rap about fashion designer and country music enthusiast Nuta Kotlyarenko (Nudie Cohn, you might know him as), telling us about Nudie’s flamboyant fashion sense: “Nudie dressed four US presidents and two Popes. Two Oscar winners have picked up their awards in Nudie suits and Neil Armstrong is buried in one.” And that’s one of the supreme delights of this book, finding nuggets like that liberally sprinkled into his meditations, leading you to being a lot smarter when you close the book than when you started. Even some of the odder choices (and what could be odder than the mildly offensive anthem to sexual grooming sung by Rosemary Clooney in her best Mario Brothers voice, “Come on-a My House”) have some profound insights to offer the reader. Of “Come on-a My House” Bob says, “this is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer," but despite that raw assessment, in the course of one page Bob will let you know that this novelty was written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country road trip and borrows from traditional Armenian practices of hospitality. And that Bagdasarian is unbelievably the same guy who did Alvin and the Chipmunks (under the name David Seveille) and Bagdasarian even plays the role of the piano player across the way in Rear Window, one of the neighbors spied upon by Jimmy Stewart in that film. And that’s the kind of “master class” you can expect here, some fascinating insights into the workings of Bob’s mysterious mind leaving you with some nuggets of wisdom and musical insights popping out on every page. Just don’t expect coherence or training wheels or an index or any captions at all for the hundreds of fascinating photographs illustrating the book. And that’s the one gripe I have with this brilliant book…why oh why don’t they tell us what we’re looking at? On Spotify you can listen to the songs on a playlist with the book’s title. They are all accessible there except of course for a nineteenth century rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Nellie Was a Lady.” I’d recommend some serious listening before reading to get a sense of what Bob is talking about before you read each chapter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 17, 2023
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Feb 09, 2023
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Jan 17, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0968709184
| 9780968709184
| 0968709184
| 3.98
| 24,950
| May 29, 1902
| Jan 01, 2003
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really liked it
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Probably I first read Jack London's bleak story about man's foolish insignificance in the face of nature's unforgiving power way back in seventh grade
Probably I first read Jack London's bleak story about man's foolish insignificance in the face of nature's unforgiving power way back in seventh grade for good old Betty Rosse in Southeast Junior High. And I've probably read it a couple of times since then, but I can no longer recall at this point. However, the story and its brutal imagery have stuck with me over all these years, as has my mother’s stern warning to me years before back in grade school to wear my winter gear and not be an idiot because if the bus went off those Iowa back country roads on the way to school, I’d be dead before someone came and found us in the drifts at the bottom of some gully somewhere. I doubt I fully believed her back then, but I diligently wore my hat and gloves and scarf, and my black buckle-up galoshes with the Wonder Bread bags inside, because she was right. It could be really cold back then, 20 below on those coldest days, and that's just the temperature on the thermometer. We didn't talk much about windchill back in the day. And twenty below is nothing, compared to the dangerous Yukon temps in "To Build a Fire," which our greenhorn goldminer on his way to his claim has blithely disregarded despite warnings from an older, more experienced man back in Sulphur Creek: "The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone." I may have been smart enough to listen to my mother back in second grade, but our "chechaquo" (Chinook maybe for dumbshit white man?) pays the price for his hubris, as his husky watches in dismay. Nature gives no fucks about us and our petty concerns. It's not forgiving of human stupidity, and it's so much bigger and more powerful than most of us in our mundane first-world experience realize. We rarely encounter the sublime power of nature in the little lives we lead in our modern world, and when we do, the outcome is often overwhelming, and unlike the man at the center of "To Build a Fire," we would do well to realize this before going into the wild alone. ++++++++++++++++++++++ Reread for GoodReads short story discussion group ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 18, 2022
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Sep 20, 2022
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Sep 18, 2022
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0871918269
| 9780871918260
| 0871918269
| 3.64
| 4,715
| 1897
| Jan 01, 1685
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it was amazing
| A man said to the universe: If Step A man said to the universe: If Stephen Crane is remembered at all these days, it's probably as the author of that short Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a book I've read twice maybe but sadly never warmed to. That might be Crane's fault, because despite its brevity it's a rather hard book to finish, stiffly off-putting and overly symbolic, if I am recalling right. (As a teacher, eventually I took the title off my novel research paper list because not only was I never a fan, the book was inevitably chosen by the dimmest bulb in the classroom, selected for its short page count, and then never finished or understood, and the resulting paper was always a horrendous mess.) Or maybe it's Richard Thomas's fault, because from an early age I never liked that guy, and he was Henry Fleming in the movie version I saw as a kid long before I ever even tried to read or enjoy the novel. I am a fan of Stephen Crane, however, as strange as that might sound now, mostly due to his poetry and shorter works, which appeal to me far more than his famous novel. His poetry is short and brutal, iconoclastic and cynical, devoid of the bells and whistles in his novel, and far more "modern" than anything being written at the time. Crane is a visceral author writing from the gut instead of the brain, and in that way his writing feels much closer to Norman Mailer or Charles Bukowski than it does to most of the authors who are nearer to him on the timeline. One of my favorite poems gives voice to Crane's gritty aesthetic: Many red devils ran from my heart "The Open Boat" certainly feels as if it is written in the red muck of things from Crane's heart, as it directly grows out of his experience as a newspaper correspondent on his way to cover the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Crane is attached to the S.S. Commodore, a boat carrying weapons to Cuban rebels, which goes down off the coast of Florida, and he spends two excruciating days in a small dinghy with three other shipmates battling the elements and desperately attempting to reach shore. The story is a brutal look at man’s relationship to nature, a hostile world that has no sense of obligation to us humans. Crane captures the sublime power of the ocean with his blunt, matter-of-fact description: “As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.” But there’s also a terrifying sort of beauty here, too, that Crane captures: “The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse; shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.” It might have been even more glorious if Crane and his shipmates were not fighting for their lives to stay afloat and keep themselves within sight of shore. “The Open Boat” is also a study of the resilience and dignity humans are capable of, and the camaraderie developed by the four men on that small boat (“Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea”!). Here Crane depicts the way humans on the edge of disaster can develop a mystical sort of bond that helps transcend the hardship: “It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him. They were a captain, an oiler, a cook, and a correspondent, and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common.” Crane aptly writes, ‘ there was this comradeship that the correspondent, for instance, who had been taught to be cynical of men, knew even at the time was the best experience of his life. But no one said that it was so. No one mentioned it.” Crane also depicts in the story another kind of existential beauty in the way these men face the sea and the elements with a dignity in the face of mortality, and that too puts him in a rather remarkable, modern light as an author. As Crane writes in the newspaper article which eventually he adapted into this short story, he says, 'Here was death, but here also was a most singular and indefinable kind of fortitude," and that grace under the worst sort of pressure might just remind you of Hemingway, an author who owes a debt of inspiration to Crane. However, there’s another reason why Crane should be read and remembered today. Although I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get credit for it, with "The Open Boat" Crane deserves to be recognized as the literary forebear of the New Journalists of the 1960s and ‘70s. If you think of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, Mailer's Armies of the Night, or Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, four of the biggest non-fiction novels of the period, Crane is writing the same kind of "faction" here in this story more than half a century before these writers. Crane is the original gonzo journalist inserting himself into the action of the story and filtering the reporting through his own personal experience, and his writing lays the foundation for the kind of reporting that came to be known as “The New Journalism.” I’m sure Tom Wolfe would have liked to be given credit for the genre, and he did publish the collection that gave this term currency in the public’s eye, but Crane was doing the same kind of writing long before anyone in that anthology. “The Open Boat" has its origins in the newspaper article Crane wrote three days after his experience in the boat, and it's very interesting to compare the way the original newspaper piece is later shaped into the short story. Here's a link to that article, "Stephen Crane's Own Story: He Tells How the Commodore Was Wrecked and How He Escaped," which gives a lot more background to the sinking of the boat: : https://www.ponceinlet.org/z/-vf.0.0.... ++++++++++++++++++ Read for GoodReads short story discussion group ...more |
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| 1852864982
| 9781852864989
| 1852864982
| 4.20
| 41,829
| May 1993
| Jun 09, 1994
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really liked it
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I dunno why I’m so late to this party. It’s taken me nearly thirty years to get around to reading Death: The High Cost of Living and what with Neil Ga
I dunno why I’m so late to this party. It’s taken me nearly thirty years to get around to reading Death: The High Cost of Living and what with Neil Gaiman as probably my favorite living writer and Death as one of my absolute favorite characters, I should have read this years ago. So now I’ve finally got it done and under my belt and I’m a better person for it, even if it’s not really the best work that Gaiman has ever done with Death. That would probably be “The Sound of Her Wings” (Sandman #8), which also just might be one of the finest hours of television I have seen in years and years and years, courtesy of Netflix’s new Sandman series (episode 6) and the beautiful performance by Kirby Howell-Baptiste. Watch it. Seriously. Or maybe it’s “Three Septembers and a January” (Sandman #31) which tells the story of Joshua Norton, the emperor of the United States, whom Death tells at the end, “I’ve met a lot of kings and emperors and heads of state in my time, Joshua. And you know something? I think I liked you best.” Or maybe it’s even “Facade” (Sandman #20), where a compassionate Death comes to poor Urania Blackwell, Element Girl from the DC Silver Age, and gives her a hand. Death: The High Cost of Living is a three-issue stand-alone spin-off from Gaiman’s Sandman series, and tells a tale alluded to in Sandman #21 when, speaking of Morpheus, it says of his elder sister: “He heard long ago, in a dream, that one day in every century Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality that is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after.” And Death: The High Cost of Living tells the story of the most recent of those days when Death takes the form of a 16-year-old girl named Didi whose family has recently died and spends the day in New York with the unfortunately named Sexton Furnival, another teen who has been contemplating ending his life. The two of them have a rather busy day, and at one point Death/Didi trying to prove who she is recites that passage from Sandman to Sexton, and asks, “Haven’t you heard that before?” Sexton says “no” and wonders what it’s from. Death doesn’t remember. Their full day eventually takes them to a deli with checkered table cloths and a portrait of Groucho Marx on the wall, and then on to the fountain in Central Park. “I had a good time today,” Death tells Sexton. “The good bits and the bad bits and the dull bits and the painful bits.” And later she says, “I met such neat people. And I heard a song and went in a taxi, and I had a hot dog and a bagel and…I wish it could have gone on forever.” Which it cannot, and that is one of the very beautiful and the very terrible things about it. Speaking of favorites, my favorite DJ, Lin Brehmer at WXRT, is taking some time off for cancer treatments. But I used to listen to him every day, and every day Lin would tell his audience, “It’s great to be alive.” And that little nugget is what Sexton figures out by the end of his day with Death, and it’s ultimately what she is reminded of on her day in New York City in mortal flesh. ...more |
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Aug 20, 2022
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Aug 20, 2022
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| B00C5WS5OE
| 4.48
| 8,551
| 2012
| Apr 16, 2013
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it was amazing
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John Keats admits to being half in love with easeful Death, and I confess I am too, as long as we're talking about Death of the Endless and not that s
John Keats admits to being half in love with easeful Death, and I confess I am too, as long as we're talking about Death of the Endless and not that silent, spooky bag of bones that Thanos has the hots for so bad. Death may be Neil Gaiman's greatest contribution to the world, and he's given us a lot. The older sister of Dream (Morpheus the Sandman), Death generally manifests as a pale pixie-ish goth girl, the kind of sexy young woman you'd see across the room in the clubs and concert halls I where I spent a lot of time in the mid-'80s. She's got an important job to do, and she does it well, but with a good humor and a gentle kindness that transcends the way this figure is usually portrayed in art and story. This deluxe anthology from DC collects a fascinating grab bag of odds and ends from Gaiman's work featuring Death. It's not all-inclusive because that would be nearly impossible as she cameos so often in The Sandman, but it includes a small handful of those issues, most importantly the spectacular issue #8, "The Sound of Her Wings," where Death is first introduced by Gaiman. That excellent comic has been been recently adapted into an excellent hour of television you can see in the sixth episode of Netflix's Sandman series, which also incorporates a little of the lesser known short comic called "A Winter's Tale," also collected here. The anthology features the two multi-issue storylines with Death in the spotlight, "Death: The High Cost of Living" and "Death: The Time of Your Life," and there is a fantastic gallery of portraits of Death here from the numerous artists of fame who have worked with Gaiman over the years, including Dave McKean, Jill Thompson, Michael Zulli, Chris Bachalo, Mike Dringenberg, and Colleen Doran, among many others. There are also a couple of intriguing extras thrown in, including the AIDS awareness/safe sex short comic where Death talks about AIDS prevention and correct use of condoms, with a little help from John Constantine. (If you're too young to have lived through the '80s and '90s, you might think this is strange. But AIDS was something we really didn't understand very well, and it was a topic many people were afraid to address head on, and so Neil Gaiman performed an essential public service here.) And there's another interesting little story called "The Wheel," from the DC 9/11 anthology, where Death and her brother Destruction talk to a kid who lost his mother when the towers fell. ...more |
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| B00JJVPRE0
| 4.01
| 1,770
| Jan 01, 1934
| Apr 29, 2014
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Mean girls on vacay! I’ve often unfairly dismissed Edith Wharton as just Henry James in drag, and I'll probably say it a few more times before I die. F Mean girls on vacay! I’ve often unfairly dismissed Edith Wharton as just Henry James in drag, and I'll probably say it a few more times before I die. Fans of the Gilded Age might enjoy their tales of the tragically elite told in turgid prose, but it's just not for me and I stand by my narrow-minded assessment of the two even if it's unbecoming of me as a former English major who ought to know better. But, barring Hegel and a few other German philosophers, is there anyone else quite as dull to read? Rather humorously, in 1904 Wharton herself confessed to her editor that she had been unable to read anything James had written in the last ten years. I'm not aware if history records what James really believed in his heart of hearts about Wharton's novel and stories. Having said all that, overall Wharton does seem a tad more readable than James, and there's a bluntness at the end of "Roman Fever" that I doubt James capable of. Here, Wharton introduces us to Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley, two well-heeled, middle-aged widows from New York who might well have sprung from the pages of The Age of Innocence, on interminable vacation in Europe, past their glory days now as their two daughters sample the Italian nightlife leaving their mothers behind to their conversation and knitting on the terrazzo of a restaurant overlooking the splendors of Rome. Ansley and Slade are frenemies from way way back, and as the evening goes by their conversation becomes more pointed and secrets are revealed. Perhaps Wharton is doing something ironic and fun here with this conversational combat between these two older women, as the restaurant is described in the opening lines as having a parapet and the Colosseum can be seen from where they sit. Drinks are not thrown and knitting needles are never wielded against opponents here, but for a Wharton story, things do get a little brutal. Maybe I've even made the case that it's not as dull as I earlier suggested? Nonetheless, there’s a limit to how much I want to read about wealthy Americans abroad in their evening wear having coded conversations at exclusive soirees. And 23andMe would have been a real gut punch to this generation of stuffed shirts. If you're interested and can access the New York Times, here’s the article I referenced about the friendship and correspondence between Wharton and James: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/09/bo... +++++++++++++++++++ Read for GoodReads short story discussion group ...more |
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Aug 26, 2022
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Aug 19, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1558611584
| 9781558611580
| 1558611584
| 4.08
| 317,998
| 1892
| Sep 01, 1996
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it was ok
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For years I've seen "The Yellow Wall-Paper" anthologized in different collections, but until this past week I'd never attempted to read it and knew no
For years I've seen "The Yellow Wall-Paper" anthologized in different collections, but until this past week I'd never attempted to read it and knew nothing more about it other than it had something to do with a woman who did not fancy the wallpaper in her room. I also knew little to nothing about its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, beyond her feminist credentials. Now, after reading the story for my GoodReads short story discussion group and then spending some time reading about Gilman's life along with a number of essays of literary criticism, I have to dismiss her as a godawful hypocrite who, while usually labeled a proto-feminist, actually is more representative of a different movement in U.S. society at the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of racist, anti-immigrant American nativism by whites who sought to keep their country pure from the taint of inferior races arriving from southern and Eastern Europe, as well as from China. In short, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a Karen, a century before that term came into existence, who used her position and privilege to spread hatred and intolerance for blacks and Jews and immigrants. On first read, I was fascinated by Gilman's story, a horrific, creeping study of mental illness that is at once both engaging and profoundly disturbing. The unnamed female first-person narrator has recently given birth and begun to suffer from what today we would call postpartum depression. Her doctors, including her doctor husband, have prescribed bedrest, and they have leased an old house in the countryside where she is consigned to the upstairs room which in the past was a nursery with bars on the windows and a rather awful yellow wallpaper patterned with a convoluted design that over time our mentally ill narrator begins to project messages and meaning onto. In her isolation, as her condition develops into a horrific psychosis, she imagines a woman entrapped in the wallpaper whom she seeks to free. Over the course of the story, the narrator's mind breaks; she begins to harm herself and tear at the wallpaper, and slowly, a kind of terrifying dissociative identity disorder unfolds for the reader, as the rips in the wallpaper, the strange smearing low on the perimeter of her walls, and the teethmarks on the furniture are revealed to be her own doing. Gilman’s narrator fits in nicely between the madmen of some of Poe’s earlier stories and the disturbed individuals later in Lovecraft’s fiction. However, like with Chopin, she is also focused on issues here related to a woman’s role in a male-dominated society and the way Gilman intertwines the abnormal psychology and the horror in the story with her concerns regarding gender and power make this story far more than just a gothic tale of madness in an old house in the country. For me on the second read, the feminist reading presented itself much more clearly as the issues of gender and power at play in the story are developed. Clearly, the male-centered medical establishment has failed our narrator; she has been infantilized by her husband and stripped of her personal agency and voice. Not only has she been essentially imprisoned in the upper room as a form of treatment, she has even been denied the opportunity to read or write, and she furtively tells us her story, while her minders are away. I’m also fascinated by how Gilman tips her hat in her story to an earlier Charlotte by making our narrator’s experience in her upstairs room/prison recall the figure of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. As she begins to believe the patterns in the wallpaper indicate a woman trapped in there behind the designs, I began to wonder if this woman behind the wallpaper had become Bertha Mason in the diseased imagination of the narrator. Not only is our narrator a "madwoman in the attic," much like Bertha, she contemplates setting the house on fire, as Bertha does. One strange detail that jumped out at me on finishing the story the first time is at the end when the narrator yells at her husband, “…in spite of you and Jane!” On second read I tried to make sense of that line. Who is Jane? Is Jane the unnamed sister of her husband John? Or has the narrator in her psychosis actually stepped into the shoes of Bertha Mason here after she has ripped all the offending wallpaper from the walls? If you look back at the first page, our narrator is a reader familiar with the gothic tradition, and thus it stands to reason that both she as well as Gilman are quite familiar with Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre. And yet, despite my fascination with the story, my recent dive into Gilman's prevailing nativist ideology has led me to discount her as an author or even a feminist because although she demonstrates a fine-tuned understanding of the systemic oppression of women, to discover that she strenuously advocated for the oppression and exclusion of non-whites in American society is just so horrifically hypocritical on her part that I cannot find a way to rationalize it, despite the way many others seem to have done. If I can connect back to Lovecraft again, I am quite aware of his virulent racism; however, for me it's easier to look past his unwholesome, intolerant views and enjoy his stories of the Elder Gods because Lovecraft isn't a proponent of tolerance and diversity in the first place. He doesn't criticize systemic oppression or racism in his fiction and then go on to argue for the exclusion of the lower races from American society in his essays and letters. That's the kind of rank hypocrisy that Gilman is guilty of, a kind of "rights for me but not for thee" worldview based on her own privilege and elite status. And to think that she was the grand niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe is even more amazing when you consider the terrible things she asserts in her writing and private correspondence about Black Americans. In her 1908 essay "A Suggestion on the Negro Problem" she promotes the idea of a return to servitude for American Blacks, whom she saw as a "backward race," calling for "state organization of the negro, under conditions wholly to his advantage, and therefore to ours." So, this past week's study of Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-paper" has led me to some really interesting revelations, and ultimately while at first I was thinking I would jump right into her feminist novel Herland, I think now I'll take a pass on it. I'm surrounded by enough white supremacy bullshit and conservative hypocrisy in the world right now. I'm sure that Anne Coulter and Laura Ingraham have some fascinating ideas about supply-side economics, but I don't need to read about them either. Anyway, perchance you think I am being a tad too "woke" (lols, for anybody who knows me) or engaging in some hyperbole regarding Gilman and her views, here are some links: "The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman," The Paris Review (March 11, 2021): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2... "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America" by Susan S. Lanser, Feminist Studies 15.3 (August 1989): https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177938 "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Shadow of Racism" by Denise D. Knight, American Literary Realism 32.2 (Winter, 2000): https://www.jstor.org/stable/27746975 And, here's one of my favorite discoveries, an awful anti-immigrant poem by Gilman about the dangers of diversity and multiculturalism in American society: The Melting Pot As someone who is a queer mixture "commingle[d] at will" in the melting pot of American society, I confess to being both amused and mildly offended by Gilman’s shitty poem. ...more |
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Aug 13, 2022
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Aug 19, 2022
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Aug 13, 2022
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| B000FTO6EW
| 4.26
| 1,346
| Jan 01, 1988
| 1988
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it was amazing
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Morpheus finds himself back in the Dreaming after his seventy-year imprisonment, and this second issue of The Sandman introduces us to Cain and Abel a
Morpheus finds himself back in the Dreaming after his seventy-year imprisonment, and this second issue of The Sandman introduces us to Cain and Abel and their gargoyle Gregory, the “Imperfect Hosts” of the title who live in the Houses of Mystery and Secrets. Gregory has found the weakened Morpheus in the shifting lands on the fringes of the Dreaming, and in his diminished state he seeks the aid of the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone to learn the fate of his three missing tools, his helm, his pouch of sand, and his ruby moonstone, after they were stolen by Roderick Burgess. Cain and Abel have been excellently cast in the new Netflix series, and the treatment of the triple goddess was nicely done as well. I assume we will see more of this female trinity as the series develops, as by his three questions Morpheus’ doom has already been established here in the second issue. “We haven’t helped you,” the Mother laughs. And the Crone ominously warns, “Your troubles are only just beginning.” These are the Morrigan; call them the Fates, the Weird Sisters, or eventually, as we will see, the Kindly Ones. Their presence hangs over the entire arc of The Sandman storyline taking it to its fated conclusion. Gaiman again weaves the DC universe into this second issue in ways both subtle and obvious, and this time the show includes many of those connections, although many of them will zoom right over the heads of most casual viewers. Most subtle is Cain’s dwelling, the House of Mystery, and the House of Secrets, where Abel lives. Both names are titles of DC horror/fantasy comics from back in the Golden Age, and interestingly over time the two Biblical brothers become Crypt Keeper style hosts of these two creepy story mags. Even more interesting, John Jonzz the Martian Manhunter makes his first appearance in House of Mystery, and the Swamp Thing makes his first appearance in House of Secrets, and both characters eventually cross paths with Morpheus many years later. More obvious, however, is the twisted figure of John Dee, son of Ethel Cripps and Roderick Burgess, who has the ruby and has gone insane, now residing in Arkham asylum. Fans of DC may recognize Dee as Dr. Destiny, although this alias is never used here. The show leaves out reference to the League of Justice, but the comic has a panel of Batman and the Green Lantern subduing Dee. A demon in hell holds the helm, and John Constantine has the pouch of sand, although unfortunately the show has replaced his character with Johanna Constantine, who is a Gaiman creation from later in the series and an ancestor of John’s. I assume replacing John with her has occurred due to copyright problems as John Constantine had his own show about ten years ago on NBC, and more recently has appeared in the CW. I assume Netflix didn’t have permission to use his character, which is too bad, and he will be missed, especially once we get to the Cereal Convention. Morpheus’ journey to retrieve his stolen items will take us into the next several issues of the series. ...more |
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Aug 06, 2022
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Aug 06, 2022
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Comic
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| 1568461933
| 9781568461939
| 1568461933
| 3.84
| 7,883
| Feb 17, 1884
| Sep 01, 2004
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liked it
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“Real recognize real,” the kids say, but Mathilde Loisel wouldn’t know real if it walked up to her on Main Street, shook her hand, gave her a business
“Real recognize real,” the kids say, but Mathilde Loisel wouldn’t know real if it walked up to her on Main Street, shook her hand, gave her a business card, and then bit her in the ass. Pauvre Monsieur Loisel…married to a miserable woman who goes and ruins his life. That’s always been my takeaway. And, of course, it sucks to be a member of the petite-bourgeoisie, but at least I don’t dream of footmen in knee britches or eating quail wings. Or borrow expensive things from my rich friends. (Who am I kidding? I don’t have any rich friends.) I taught this story a couple of times to freshmen until it seemed like most of them had already read it in middle school. And then I used it in the textbook to teach punctuating dialogue for the next twenty-five years. It’s okay, nothing profound here, a bit like an O Henry story, if O Henry had been born a snarky Frenchman. ++++++++++++++ Here, this song has little to nothing to do with the story, but if you don’t know it, you should. Give a listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Di Black Petty Booshwah (Dem Fulla Flaw)”: https://youtu.be/5jA9tmm4_To ++++++++++++++ Read for GoodReads short story group ...more |
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Hardcover
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| 0974607800
| 9780974607801
| 0974607800
| 3.93
| 69,211
| Dec 1853
| May 01, 2004
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it was amazing
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Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! –Samuel Taylor Coleridge At first glance, it might not seem like there’s much common ground betwe Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! –Samuel Taylor Coleridge At first glance, it might not seem like there’s much common ground between “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Moby Dick? For sure, you could imagine Ishmael saying those very words, but there is no seafaring in “Bartleby,” a short story which take place on the island of Manhattan, not in the tropics of the South Seas, with most of the action occurring on Wall Street, which seems far removed from the wide, wide sea. And yet with the pallid, forlorn figure of Bartleby, there is a kind of resemblance to the Mariner, and in Bartleby’s rejection of work, responsibility, friendship, and even food, you might even say he functions as a kind of “life-in-death” that haunts his employer’s law office before dying alone in the Tombs. Bartleby is an enigma and despite the narrator’s attempts to understand this strange cipher of a man, Bartleby resists the narrator’s efforts to make any sort of connection with him and remains isolated from everyone around him despite the bustling city around him. As its subtitle reminds us, "Bartleby" is a "Story of Wall Street," and there are many walls in the story surrounding Bartleby, both in the office where he has been employed as a copyist, as well as later in the Tombs. In particular, Bartleby spends a lot of time staring at the bleak wall just outside his office window, and there are plenty of metaphorical implications of these walls related to the dehumanization of burgeoning capitalism and urban life. I would suggest, however, that there is another enormous "wall" in the story that surrounds Bartleby and cuts him off from the world, a wall he is actively constructing himself as a scrivener, the wall of language and words. This is an ironic wall, I understand, because language and communication should be what brings us together as a species, but we know too often that is not the case. If this sounds a little like Pink Floyd meets Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos with a light sprinkling of Wittgenstein, well, I’m kind of making this up as I go along, but I am sure that Melville is thinking about the failure of language and words, what some have called a language crisis, in his story about a copyist who refuses to use the tools of his trade. The idea of the Dead Letter Office at the end of the story which the narrator tags on as a sort of epilogue to the tale, got me thinking about this idea of language as another type of wall in the story. For years as a lad, I worked as a casual for the USPS. I also worked in the bowels of a Big Ten university in the mail room where I had a number of co-workers even more colorful than Bartleby, Turkey, and Nippers. In this capacity, I have handled hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail and could go on and on about it, but I'll restrain myself. Mail is communication over distance through language, and a blessed type of human communication that unfortunately most of us have given up these days. A “dead letter” is a letter that cannot be delivered because the recipient has moved with no forwarding address and is often deceased. It cannot be returned because it lacks a return address and the sender is impossible to locate; in some cases the sender may even be dead themselves. Therefore, a dead letter is a failure of language and communication, and the result is a rather sad one, especially when the letter is opened by someone else and the contents turn out to be something quite personal. The narrator describes some hypotheticals for us at the end of the story, the ring undelivered, the charity too late, the words of hope not conveyed, etc. This has been Bartleby’s employment in the past, opening dead letters and then consigning them to the fire when they are undeliverable. Possibly Bartleby’s anti-life response to the world around him comes out of his crushing realization in the dead letter office about the absolute finality of death. For some of us, that realization is what makes life worth living. For Bartleby, it seems to have had a very different kind of result on his life, a nihilistic rejection of everything, work, family, community, friendship, love. But again, this is just one more thing that the narrator, and we as readers, cannot truly know about Bartleby. Whatever the case may be, Bartleby's refusal to participate in life is presented to us by Melville as a failure of communication as well. His refusals begin with reading his copy; then he refuses to write, then to speak, rejecting all forms of communication and language. To each of these, he tells his employer, “I would prefer not to,” which others have pointed out is a negation of language and communication itself. Possibly you could consider his mantra a dead letter itself; it cannot reach its destination, linguistically imploding in on itself. (And at the same time, his strange wording spreads through the office as “prefer” begins to be used by the other copyists. “Language is a virus,” says William Burroughs. Interesting how prescient a writer Melville is in so many ways.) When you consider the other things Bartleby refuses to do, one of the most prominent is that he refuses to run errands for his employer to the post office, again a refusal to participate in the process of language and communication. And think again of the early description of the office: on one end a white wall, on the other a “brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade.” Bartleby is stuck between the black and white of that office, the two colors of the written word, which he rejects. Language is a wall that expresses the limitations of our experiences as humans and ultimately fails to adequately convey those experiences and ideas most important to us. So in “Bartleby” is Melville already exploring the crisis of language, a concept that really didn’t come into play until half a century later? There is no moral and no real message here beyond the sad realization of the loneliness of life itself. Unlike the Mariner, Bartleby has no story to tell the narrator, who cannot become a sadder or wiser man by the end because Bartleby has absolutely nothing to tell him. The narrator himself also suffers his own language crisis, failing to communicate both to us the readers as well as to Bartleby. On the first page he admits he is unable to relate Bartleby’s story as he would like, something he terms “an irreparable loss to literature.” Words have failed him, you could say, and he acknowledges this failure at the beginning before wrapping things up with his rumination on the Dead Letters Office. So could we conceive of his story to us as a dead letter itself? What he wants to say cannot truly be said, what he wants to tell us comes too late and will never be entirely understood. ++++++++++++++ Read for GoodReads short story discussion group ...more |
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| 0871917726
| 9780871917720
| 0871917726
| 4.24
| 110,756
| 1843
| 1980
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really liked it
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I wrote a Poe-m in the gazebo this morning: While obsessed by a murderous preoccupation, Poe’s killer gives voice to the strangest fixation: “Dissemble n I wrote a Poe-m in the gazebo this morning: While obsessed by a murderous preoccupation, Poe’s killer gives voice to the strangest fixation: “Dissemble no more! It’s there under the floor! Can’t you hear his heart’s thunderous beating pulsation?” —Reread for GoodReads short story group ...more |
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| B0DLT7X5TF
| 3.67
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| Jan 01, 1983
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it was ok
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Back in those days of yore when people still read magazines, it was not uncommon to see a variety of them, mostly women’s magazines, prominently displ
Back in those days of yore when people still read magazines, it was not uncommon to see a variety of them, mostly women’s magazines, prominently displayed at the check-out counter of your local grocery store, attesting to whatever hairstyles and clothes and body shapes and faces met the approved standards of fashion and beauty of the time. And I well remember how in the mid-‘80s, a beautiful dark-haired woman with a rather attractive mole on the lower left side of her face began to make a regular appearance on those covers of Vogue and Cosmo and Elle and maybe even Good Housekeeping. I didn’t know her name for some time, but eventually the entire world learned her identity. It was Cindy Crawford, and in those days she was just embarking on a modeling career that has continued over the last four decades and made her incredibly wealthy and incredibly sought after, and today almost forty years later, she’s still incredibly attractive. Aylmer, that eminent man of science at the center of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark,” would have found Cindy Crawford sickeningly hideous. “The Birthmark,” Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century take on toxic masculinity, aka total assholery, would be a total hoot to read if it weren’t so depressing and true to life today as much as it was back in 1843 when he wrote it. In the story, our man of science, “proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” is so troubled by the minor birthmark on his wife’s face, that he obsesses over it until he kills her in the process of attempting to remove it. It’s been about thirty years since I first read The Birthmark, and I don't recall thinking much of it then, and truth be told I’m not all that fond of it now either, but my GoodReads short story reading group has it on the agenda for this week and now that I’ve reread it twice, I’m glad to have done so because it calls attention to a terrible flaw shared by too many human beings, and that flaw has nothing to do with the birthmark of the title. Sadly, I’m also glad to have read it again, because like “Young Goodman Brown,” the story we read last week, it still has much to say about the world we live in today. At first glance, The Birthmark doesn’t seem to share much common ground with YGB. Set around one hundred years after “Brown,” “The Birthmark” has precious little in the way of a narrative and almost no movement to it at all, certainly no night journey into the heart of darkness, no grim Puritans, no midnight communion with Satan, and not much at all to keep a reader involved on a plot level. What it has is Aylmer, this so-called eminent man of science, and his young beautiful wife Georgiana, who on her left cheek has a rather curious blemish of sorts in the shape of a small hand, reddish in color but quite faint so that you cannot even see it when she blushes or exerts herself. But this birthmark is there for all to see and while some of the ladies take a kind of mean-spirited pleasure thinking it diminishes her otherwise appealing features, most of the men around her find it quite captivating and a nice added feature to her charming looks. Alas, her asshole of an older husband Aylmer is not among their number and while he has somehow compelled this younger beautiful woman to marry him, he finds her birthmark to be a fatal flaw, a grim imperfection which ruins her appearance, and he cannot restrain himself from commenting on it, obsessing over it, driving Georgiana to become ashamed of the mark herself, and finally insisting on having Georgiana undergo a procedure to remove it, a procedure that this eminent man of science in his arrogance is quite sure will be an instant success. To make a rather long short story short here, and zipping over much turgid prose and florid descriptions of Aylmer’s mad-scientist laboratory (accent on the “bor,” my fellow Americans) along with pages of Aylmer’s self-aggrandizing bullshit contrasted with Georgiana’s self-effacement and her ridiculous willingness to do whatever her genius of a husband wants her to do, things don’t go well. And so he ends up murdering her because he can’t stand this minor imperfection in her physical features. Big sigh. Although this story of science gone awry seems to be quite a departure from Young Goodman Brown and its emphasis on religious themes, upon closer examination it shares a number of the concerns of that earlier story. Much like YGB, Hawthorne here examines the effects of a single-minded obsession with an arrogant, unrealistic emphasis on perfection that causes both Brown and Aylmer to break their essential bond with humanity, leading to a loss of compassion for and connection to their fellow man. And their fellow woman, because both men here ruin their relations with their wives, Aylmer fatally so. Both Aylmer and Young Goodman Brown refuse to acknowledge and accept the flawed nature of human beings and with this rigid rejection of imperfection, they also reject humanity itself and become moral monsters. In both Brown and Aylmer, Hawthorne also explores the dangerous arrogant hypocrisy at the core of too many men in positions of power. Brown’s finely tuned sense of morality at the end of his story is laughably hollow for a man who has earlier demonstrated such an amiable familiarity with Satan, and for all of Aylmer’s assertions of his scientific genius, when Georgiana reads his personal logs recording his scientific endeavors, it is apparently a long recitation of failure, something that should have tipped off our patient that her procedure would not result in success. We aren’t exactly sure what Aylmer has been up to in his lab over the years, but the emphasis on electricity at the beginning of the tale along with his study of Paracelsus and other occult early scientists should bring to mind another early mad scientist, although to be fair Victor Frankenstein meets with a lot more success in his experiments and procedures, although the end result is regrettably the same. While the emphasis here on the realm of science seems to set “The Birthmark” apart from “Young Goodman Brown” with its focus on religious matters, this is where again something rather “modern” can be found in Hawthorne’s thinking, despite the dense prose which gives today’s readers so much trouble. We tend to think of science and religion as polar extremes, and in many ways they are, witness the unvaccinated fools today who reject science to embrace the superstitious nonsense of Qanon or their misguided religious fervor during a world-wide pandemic believing that Jesus, not a shot, will protect them from Covid. However, much like Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle who illustrates the twin dangers of both science and religion when the dogma of a system of unwavering belief in so-called progress replaces a pragmatic, compassionate focus on humanity, in both these tales Hawthorne shows his readers the terrible destruction caused by a rigid faith in an ideology than denies both common humanity and common sense, be it Aylmer’s natural philosophy or Brown’s Puritanism. Much has been made of the parallels between Aylmer and Frankenstein, and of Aylmer’s compulsive obsession leading to madness and murder like the obsessive maniacs of Poe’s writing, but I also see an interesting influence here from William Shakespeare’s Prospero of The Tempest on Aylmer, in his role as a natural philosopher, his isolation from the rest of the world, and a domineering, oppressive presence which seeks to exert control over the lives of others, and, it seems, over life itself. Interestingly, Prospero also has an earthy, deformed “assistant” in Caliban, which seems to have influenced the character of Aminidab, Aylmer’s lab assistant who does the heavy lifting and yet who is subjected to the same sort of abuse from his master that Caliban receives. (Aminidab functions as a sort of Igor figure for our mad scientist here, an archetype not introduced by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, despite popular culture’s representations of her novel, so I am left wondering about the origins of this brutish laboratory assistant.) In a specific scene that reminds me of The Tempest, Aylmer even entertains the waiting Georgiana with dancing elemental figures, similar to the scene where Prospero entertains Miranda and Fernando: “Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world.” However, the similarities between these two controlling older men end there. Whereas Prospero is redeemed by the love for his daughter, sees the terrible hubris he has been guilty of, and releases his prisoners and breaks his staff before returning to live in society, Aylmer has no such redemption and fails to reach that “profounder wisdom” which would allow him to live happily with his wife and accept imperfection as the common state of humankind. Without belaboring the point, much like YGB, Hawthorne in this story has addressed issues in society and shortcomings in the human heart which still torment us today, especially in America. Social media such as Instagram have infected the minds of too many people with absurdly unrealistic standards of beauty, and too many teenagers, most of them no different from young Georgiana, suffer from an anxiety as a direct result of being over saturated with images of superficial perfection they will never achieve. Aylmer's scientific procedure in “The Birthmark” makes me think of the absurdly named Brazilian Butt Augmentation procedure, the mad scientists who perform it today, and the pathetic, deluded women who seek it out knowing the high risk of mortality they face. And if that wasn’t absurd enough, I also think of the rank hypocrisy of the modern-day Puritans and Aylmers in their black robes on the Supreme Court in the U.S. today who are set to overturn Roe v. Wade, unwilling to accept the flaws of their fellow human beings as they attempt to exert their malign control over the lives of women, despite the terrible outcomes that will proceed from their inability to find contentment with the imperfection of human life in the present. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 05, 2022
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May 09, 2022
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May 05, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1557423628
| 9781557423627
| 1557423628
| 3.65
| 15,636
| 1835
| Sep 15, 2005
|
really liked it
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Young Goodman Brown, such a pathetic doofus and such an emblematic representation of the rot and confusion at the core of American society, then and n
Young Goodman Brown, such a pathetic doofus and such an emblematic representation of the rot and confusion at the core of American society, then and now… Nathaniel Hawthorne can be hard going, and after reading all of his major works and much of his shorter stuff, I thoroughly understand why he’s not being read much these days. Even The Scarlet Letter has mostly fallen out of public school curricula, and those English teachers that dare teach it will generally instruct their students to skip “The Custom House” entirely. Hawthorne is hard for today’s readers, which is too bad because his central message of the dark hypocrisy underlying the foundations of life in America and informing nearly everything we still do in America a century and a half later is a timely one, although it’s a message that sadly many states seem intent today on forbidding being taught in their schools altogether. It had been a good thirty years or so since I’d read “Young Goodman Brown,” and so it was long overdue for a reread and I’m grateful for the impetus this morning of being invited to a reading group that is taking it on. Over those last thirty years in America, that so-called Silent Majority of the Nixon years morphed into the self-righteously smug Moral Majority and now has become a frightening unsilent, immoral minority of screechingly intolerant neo-fascists and racists who parade about these days cloaked in a superficial facade of evangelical Christianity. A century and a half later, Hawthorne himself might be disappointed, but he would not be surprised at us. These are the same townsfolk of Salem, Young Goodman Brown’s neighbors, his community and religious leaders, his father and grandfather, these Puritans quite unchanged over the centuries, once quite eager to thrash a Quaker or burn down an Indian village, now content to deny their fellow citizens voting rights, spread a crippling pandemic, or flood their society with guns and lies. Today, thirty years later, it’s fun to imagine Jerry Falwell Jr, Madison Cawthorne, or Majorie Taylor Greene out there in the darkness of the forest engaging in foul rites, but the even more interesting aspect of the story for me as an older reader is the figure of the now old Goodman Brown at the end of the story who that night may have looked to heaven and resisted the evil one in the forest, but whose miserable life has been appreciably none the better for it. Over the years he has grown into a stern, bitter old man with no love in his heart for his family or his fellow man. Wielding his intolerant beliefs as a sort of cudgel against humanity and retreating into an emotional and spiritual kind of isolation from the supposed taint of the world around him, Brown has ironically not rejected the evil of the forest at all but instead embraced it with a blind intensity that plunges him into misery and ruins his life and happiness with his beloved wife, Faith. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Apr 22, 2022
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Apr 22, 2022
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| 0785190961
| 9780785190967
| 0785190961
| 3.66
| 687
| Oct 14, 2014
| Sep 30, 2014
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really liked it
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Thanks to the MCU and Disney Plus, along with Oscar Isaac's fine acting, this minor figure from the Marvel pantheon of superheroes is taking center sp
Thanks to the MCU and Disney Plus, along with Oscar Isaac's fine acting, this minor figure from the Marvel pantheon of superheroes is taking center spotlight right now, and for the True Believer who wants to acquaint himself (or herself) with Moon Knight's original appearances in the Marvel-verse, this nearly 500-page collection showcases his early years from 1975 through 1980. It takes a while for Marvel to puzzle out what to do with Moon Knight, his origin, his powers, what he's all about, or even who he really is, let alone what genre he fits into, but that's one of the great things about this early collection because the interested reader can trace the way Doug Moench, Ralph Macchio, Jim Shooter, and especially budding new talent Bill Sienkiewicz develop MK's character over these first five years, slowly working him into something the casual viewer of the Disney series might recognize today. Back when I was a kid in the '70s, Friday night sleepovers were all about secret agents and horror shows, and at just about any sleepover, you'd find us watching a James Bond flick on Friday Night at the Movies followed by a classic monster movie on Creature Feature at 10:30 and a second one at midnight. That hero/horror intersection is exactly where Moon Knight begins on the pages of Marvel Comics, and for a while it seems like Marvel isn't sure on which side of this pop cultural junction they want their new superhero to squarely land. After all he gets his start, of all places, in the pages of Werewolf by Night #32, one of those Marvel horror comics that were so popular in the '70s, along with Tomb of Dracula, Man-Thing, The Living Mummy, and a lot more. (And did you happen to catch the bus's call number "WBN 0032" in the second episode of the Disney series?) Early on in the comics, Moonie even fights a second werewolfish figure named Lupinor, and there are a couple of murderous psychopaths as well. Moon Knight's midnight powers are even rumored to have come from being bitten by our werewolf friend Jack Russell, something Marvel fortunately never commits to, and references to zombies and ghosts abound. But at the same time Marvel balances out the horror-lite fare here with Marc Spector's backstory as a former Marine and mercenary, someone who has a lot more in common with the Punisher than with Blade. In the past, Spector seems to have been working for the highest bidder throughout the Cold War, overthrowing third-world governments, fighting terrorists, and doing the dirty work for the CIA and other shadowy organizations, piling up a shit ton of money doing a lot of bad things that he's now funneled into his cover identity as millionaire playboy Steven Grant who wears a tux to swanky soirees mixing with the jet set crowd at his Gatsby-esque Long Island mansion. (Here in the original material, Steven Grant is definitely not the vegan milquetoast museum gift shoppist of the Disney series.) This James Bond/Bruce Wayne aspect of the Moon Knight early storyline shares way too much common ground with Brand X's Batman, something no doubt the MCU/Disney wished to distance themselves from, so they replaced him with their nerdish eccentric Egypto-phile Steven Grant who lives with his books and his goldfish in his London garret. Our original crescent crusader, like Batman, divides his time between his mansion in the countryside and the mean streets of New York City fighting thugs and garden-variety criminals. He has a stuffy butler, a secret entrance into his mansion, and his own bat-arangs in the form of the crescent knives he is constantly tossing about and leaving behind as his calling cards. Beyond the cape and the cowl, Disney has left behind most of these overt Batman parallels, thankfully including Moonie’s batcopter, which shows up in just about every one of his early appearances from the pages of Werewolf by Night to Marvel Spotlight, The Defenders, Marvel Two-in-One, and the Spectacular Spider-man before he finally becomes a regular in the back pages of the lesser-known The Hulk! color magazine, and then starring in his own title beginning in 1980. So I guess what I’m saying here is that over these first five years, there's little of the Moon Knight modern readers are familiar with...there's no mention of Khonshu at all in the beginning, and little pertaining to Egyptian mythology beyond the aptly named Mr. Luxor who has stolen a statuette of Horus in the Hulk magazine, although none of that is linked to Moon Knight's origin. A few years later that all changes when Moon Knight gets his own title, and suddenly in issue one we find the mercenary Marc Spector wreaking havoc in the deserts of Sudan where the more-familiar story of Moon Knight and his connection to the gods of early Egypt slowly begins to take shape. So you might say that Moon Knight's origins are as scattered as poor Steven Grant's brain in the Disney show, but that's another aspect of the Moon Knight superhero story that takes a long time to come together as well. Marc Spector, Moon Knight, Steven Grant, and the cab driver Jake Lockley (a figure who has yet to appear in the television show), along with other multiple identities alluded to, all seem to start off as merely simple aliases for our silver and jet caped superhero, not manifestations of a mentally ill individual. Although Marlene (his ass-kicking sexpot secretary whom I'm afraid has been watered down into a shadow of her spunky self in the Disney Plus figure of Layla) frequently calls him "schizo" for the way he shifts from identity to identity, and there is a toss-off reference to Sybil at one point, in these early pages our hero doesn't outwardly struggle with dissociative identity disorder or other serious mental illness the way his figure is portrayed in the show, as well as in more recent comic-book incarnations. Nonetheless, with his multiple identities, the shifts in his speech patterns while in character, as well as the curious way Frenchie calls him Marc, Marlene calls him Steven, and his bowery pals call him Jake, the early writers of Moon Knight have laid down a foundation for a deeper dive later into the psychological ramifications of what is going on in the mind of a hero whose personality seems quite fractured. ...more |
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Petergiaquinta
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