Bibliophilia Obscura

The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney

2011-11-08T09:40:00.006-07:00

A charming and satiric fantasy. Dr. Lao's circus pulls into the dusty little town of Abalone, Arizona, beguiling the jaded residents with impossible creatures and tapping into their deepest dreams and desires. Published in 1935, Finney's book is escapist entertainment, but with a particular bite. The residents are, for the most part singularly unimpressed with the parade of chimeras, satyrs, sea serpents, hermaphrodites and unicorns.

Dr. Lao is a stereotypical eastern sage, speaking in an appropriately musical Charlie Chan voice, herein exasperated with a family of skeptics:

"Whatsah mattah? You tink someblody makeum fool allah time. I no fool you. You come this place looky look; you looky look. By Glod, I no charge you nothing. You go in flor nothing; takeum whole dam family flor nothing. You see: I no fool you. This place no catchum fake. This my show, by Glod!"

But falling into carney-speak when the mood strikes:

"Don't be foolin' with that animal, mister..."

While the men attend a risque tent show, the town Lonelyhearts consults Apollonius of Tyana for a fortunetelling session, a session in which, at wit's end at the woman's persistence, the oracle is forced to give it to her straight:

"Well, I paid you, read my future."

"Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them anymore. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well has never lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste."

"I thought you said you didn't evaluate lives", snapped Mrs. Cassan.

The evening ends in a an impossible phantasmagoria under the bigtop, with a full scale sacrificial ritual to the great god Yottle complete with virgins, a spectacular from which the townsfolk file out and home to bed, to rest and rise another day.

Finney supplies a detailed and hilarious appendix cataloging in minute detail the residents of the town, the beasts, and the questions and contradictions in the book that pass unresolved. The Bison Books edition includes the wonderful illustrations by the appropriately exotically named Boris Artzybasheff. Terrific fun.

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

2011-11-08T08:22:00.006-07:00

I have no critical expertise with regard to science fiction, and don’t count myself as a particular fan of the genre, but no such expertise is necessary in making the assertion that A Voyage to Arcturus is a seminal novel with far reaching influence in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Published in 1920 in the aftermath of the Great War, Lindsay’s novel represents a quest for a utopia, a philosophical search for the ideal condition to which man must aspire, but doomed to end in the pessimism which was the enduring legacy of that war. Tweedy ol’ Professor Lewis found in this book inspiration for his own Space Trilogy, and recommended it highly to Professor Tolkien. Decades later, Harold Bloom praised the novel enthusiastically, and, picking up on the many Gnostic elements in the tale, attempted a sequel, a Gnostic fantasy entitled The Flight to Lucifer.

There are certainly others who have made a touchstone of this novel. It is a classic of science fiction, but not the comparatively mundane sci-fi of Verne and Wells, but rather a whole different breed. There is little in the way of hardware or mechanics of space travel: there are no ray-guns or esoteric technologies (the means by which the protagonist, Maskull reaches the Arcturian planet Tormance is almost laughable: the flimsy spacecraft is projected back to Arcturus by means of some “reverse rays”, kept corked in a bottle, which travel back to their source), but one can easily imagine the producers of a film like “Avatar” seeking inspiration in the exotic and dynamic life forms of Tormance.

The hero Maskull, who is himself a bit of an odd duck on planet Earth, witnesses a strange physical manifestation during a séance in an English country house. He is approached by a stranger, the demonic Krag, who proposes that he and a companion meet at an abandoned observatory in order to partake in a particular adventure – travel to the region of Arcturus, a distant binary star system. The scenes in the observatory are weird enough, for the structure is clearly a portal through time and space, but once on Tormance, the magical mystery tour begins in earnest. I won’t catalogue the personalities Maskull encounters in the strange realms of this distant world. His adventures are rather episodic, with each encounter exemplifying a particular lifestyle seen by its adherents as ideal, and while there are various ethical and moral viewpoints presented, Lindsay most definitely has some perspectives on sexuality that were ahead of their time.

Once on Tormance, Maskull finds he has the peculiar ability to sprout (and lose) extra limbs and manifest new sense organs as necessitated by the situation. This seems to be entirely appropriate to the planet, which in itself seems to be in a constant state of dynamic change. There are strange life forms and landscapes that seem to mutate constantly, and new colors occasioned by the fact that each of the two suns around which the planet revolves emit an idiosyncratic spectrum of light. One can detect some Buddhist concepts floating around in this novel, none perhaps so obvious as the Buddha’s admonition that “change is inherent in all things”: on Tormance, change appears to be fast and constant. Lindsay invents some remarkable descriptions for the planet, and they are one of the beauties of this well-imagined novel.

Another peculiarity of Tormance is that it appears to be a sort of ghost world. The entities that Maskull encounters are almost all solitary, or at least live in solitary surroundings. Again, there is no indication of “civilization”, and no evidence of advanced technologies. The higher powers, which must be imagined as dieties, seem to be specific to the planet, and do not seem to possess omnipotence, another mark of the Gnostic demiurge. It almost seems to be a planet of anchorites, each integrated into a unique landscape, or perhaps into its own private heaven or hell.

Maskull was invited to Tormance with the full understanding that his death would be inevitable. The few days’ time in which the narrative takes place form a quest, a quest for a Gnostic demiurge known variously as Shaping, Surtur, and Crystalman (the latter being known primarily through the sardonic death mask which reshapes the face of the deceased immediately after death - a remembrance, perhaps, of the war dead Lindsay had seen in the trenches). One must also mention that Maskull has the odd and disturbing compulsion to murder just about every sentient being that crosses his path on this alien world, either through anger, self defense, or simple misadventure. Maskull is quite the fickle soul, making an earnest promise to the first ethereal space sylph he meets to abstain from eating any living thing during his sojourn (the intoxicating water should suffice), but abandoning the vow at the first whiff of some extraterrestrial barbecue. In fact, for all his avowed independence, Maskull seems to be putty in the hands of every alien he meets, coming round to each of their unique philosophical points of view with alarming facility. The downside of this (for the alien, that is) is that he doesn’t need much persuasion to bash one alien’s head in with a handy rock so that he can move on to the next chapter of his intergalactic pilgrim’s progress, for Maskull is heading for a revelation, and he ain’t got time to waste.

Fascinating as it is in places, A Voyage to Arcturus has, through much of its narrative a rather tedious quality for the 21st century reader. It is one of those influential novels the daring of which has become blunted with time and imitations, but which was close to inaccessible for its contemporaries. It is certainly a necessary read for anyone interested in the roots of modern fantasy and science fiction. It is available as a volume in Gollancz’s excellent “Fantasy Masterworks” series, and in an edition of Bison’s equally worthwhile “Frontiers of Imagination” series.

The Three Imposters by Arthur Machen

2011-10-13T11:00:00.007-07:00

The press notices included in the appendix to my Everyman edition of The Three Imposters (1895) testify to the almost universal revulsion this novel induced upon publication. The Liverpool Mercury - which one must assume comes down firmly on the side of the necessity of moral fiction - reported that “(n)o one can be made happier or better by such a book as this, but on the contrary the reader’s mind is likely to become stored with images and ideas that cannot but have an undesirable effect.” The Liverpool Courier was even more blunt in declaring “Ugh! A more repulsive catalogue of horrors it would be difficult to imagine, and its existence can only be attributed to the occasional perversity of man.” Other reviewers simply found the book unimpressive, and derivative of the recent work of Stevenson, particularly his New Arabian Nights, a debt which Machen seems to readily acknowledge in his characterizations and plot devices. In short, Machen tended to be seen as a sensationalist, dwelling on the ugly and repulsive, and making the clear choice of reveling in the descriptive horror of the grotesque, rather than leaving anything to the imagination. Machen himself disavowed all but a couple of episodes in the book.

From a distance of more than a century, we can appreciate the book on its own merits, and recognize its publication as a signal event in the development of the fiction of the weird and uncanny. This novel is, to me, greater than the sum of its parts, although the parts have merit on their own. Within the frame story of the elusive character of the “young man with spectacles” the book is largely a collection of tales of the demonic and grotesque, there are weird tentacled humans, dripping with slime such as might warm the heart of a Lovecraft fanatic (as it did Lovecraft himself), a Jekyll and Hyde character (another homage to Stevenson) who taps into his atavistic demons in the “Novel of the White Powder”, and a secret society whose tentacles are metaphorical, if none the less deadly. There are scenes of grisly torture, and a moment or two of grim humor besides (note: always read the instructions for your new torture devices before operating!).

The novel utilizes a minor “a long the riverrun” device, and I can’t imagine turning the last page without proceeding immediately to the first, as the ending elucidates the Prologue. Beyond the individual stories told by the so-called “imposters”, there is an undercurrent of deception and evil intent. The imposters are on the trail of the gold Tiberius, a rare talismanic coin which serves as this novel’s macguffin. The central pigeon is a Mr. Dyson, a hapless figure only slightly less clueless than his friend, Mr. Phillipps. It is he who hears from the imposters the series of improbable tales regarding the (supposedly) sinister young man with spectacles, and the two are witness to the morbid denoument in a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of London.

The Three Imposters is an extended piece of strange fiction which enthusiastically utilizes Machen’s favorite themes of cruel human obsession and demonic atavism as presented in The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. It is an entertaining work, with a nice balance of horror and humor, and it has survived its critics to become a classic of the genre.

Two Novels of Horror and Suspense from the 1970s

2011-09-06T11:09:00.006-07:00

William Hallahan's The Search for Joseph Tully is one of a number of supernatural thrillers dating from the late 60’s-early 70’s that include Rosemary’s Baby, The Other (see below), and the best of the lot, The Exorcist. This particular story centers on a dual narrative involving Peter Richardson, a Brooklynite having horrible, maddening premonitions of death, and Matthew Willow, a British genealogist searching for the descendants of one Joseph Tully, a resident of London in the year of Our Lord 1779. The book is a decent page turner, even though one figures out pretty quickly just how the narratives are likely to intersect in the latest iteration of the eternal recurrence of a revenge narrative necessitated by events in the gruesome prologue, set in a Roman catacomb in 1498, in which two bound men are sickeningly pierced, sliced and decapitated by a red hot sword. The dramatis personae are mainly the residents of Brevoort House, a decrepit building awaiting the wrecking ball and include the obligatory clairvoyant; an artist who dies trying to warn Richardson of his impending doom by means of a creepy mural; and a defrocked priest with a deep interest in the teachings of Giordano Bruno regarding the transmigration of souls. The story attempts to make genealogical research sexy - with limited success – although this angle does underline the perspective that we are attending to a story that spans centuries and the lives of numerous individuals. Mr. Hallahan apparently had an abiding interest in Pre-Revolutionary American, having written a couple of nonfiction works set in this time frame, and he fleshes out this book with descriptive passages on life in the wilds of colonial New Jersey.

This book is nicely atmospheric, with the backdrop of a suitably bleak winter with the wind cutting through the pages like a steel blade (hint, hint). Still, I found the ending unsatisfyingly abrupt for my taste. It seems Millipede Press brought out a nice new edition of this book a few years ago, but Hollywood apparently resisted the temptation to add it to the list of supernatural horror flicks that deluged theaters in the wake of the film adaptations of the aforementioned works.

A subgenre of the thriller/horror film trend of the early 1970’s was the gruesome “evil child” melodrama, one of which was derived from Thomas Tryon's novel The Other. Tryon’s novel is indeed gruesome and melodramatic, as well as gratingly pretentious in places. But it has not aged too badly, despite having been subsequently swamped by the Stephen King tidal wave of popular horror fiction. It has all the hallmarks of latter-day gothic – a creaky and labyrinthine old New England house, strange children with strange powers, insanity, a family seemingly under a dark curse, comfortingly predicable plot twists, and a satisfyingly sufficient number of creepy deaths. There are those who hail The Other as a significant work of modern horror, and, not having read widely in modern horror, I won’t argue the point. A quick and passably entertaining read.

The World Through Blunted Sight: An Inquiry Into The Influence of Defective Vision On Art and Character by Patrick Trevor-Roper

2011-07-28T11:42:00.009-07:00

This book has gone through a few editions since its first publication in 1970. I first read it many years ago (I seem to associate it with a rather enthusiastic recommendation by Anthony Burgess), and was pleased to find that my enjoyment has not diminished on a second reading. Written by a renowned ophthalmologist, it looks at specific visual deficiencies and their effects on art and artists. In another sense, it is also an examination of how our perception of the world is influenced by the brain’s interpretation of sensory, particulary visual, stimuli.

Trevor-Roper is an enthusiastic author, with a knowledge of evolutionary biology as well as art history, and writes particularly well on ophthalmological conditions with a minimum of jargon. The book is loaded with anecdotes and interesting divergences (for instance, it is remarked that Aristotle, Milton, and Goethe shared the belief that there were only three colors evident in a rainbow), although I would have to say that some of Trevor-Roper’s assertions and conclusions strain credibility (I believe that his identification of personality types based on visual acuity are rather broad and clumsy, ignoring much more significant factors). He also has a Eurocentric - or rather a latent Imperial - bias that is too easily dismissive of “primitive” art in favor of the “high” art of Constable, Turner, El Greco and Cezanne, although, admittedly, those artists are more instructive for his purposes. Still, there is much in this text that is fascinating, and it deserves its reputation as a sort of overlooked classic.

Image: Brueghel's "The Blind Leading the Blind" or, "The Parable of the Blind". Trevor-Roper notes "the five beggars...representing, from left to right, ocular pemphigus with secondary corneal opacities, photophobia possibly from an active kerato-uveitis, phthisis bulbi and corneal leucomata. A similar painting by Hokusai has the blind man descending from right to left, possibly reflecting his racial directional gaze."

Elias, or The Struggle with the Nightingales by Maurice Gilliams

2011-07-18T07:59:00.004-07:00

First off, I am somewhat puzzled by the lack of interest in this book. On LibraryThing, I seem to have the only English translation, that being the one issued by Sun and Moon Press in 1995. Its representation in the original Dutch isn’t overwhelming either: there are 42 copies noted, and with an average rating of two and a half stars (it fares better on Amazon). Now, the back of my copy indicates that this semi-autobiographical novel, the first of a trilogy, is widely read in Belgium and Holland, and yet I find it somewhat strange that Sun and Moon describes the book as a “children’s classic”. Unless your child has the uncheerful aspect of a diminutive Ingmar Bergman, I just can’t see this as a beloved children’s book.

Elias is a coming of age story, a short episodic novel about the life and impressions of a twelve year old boy living on a country estate with his mother (his father is, curiously, absent for most of the book) and a variety of aunts, uncles, and cousins. His strongest attachment is to a cousin four years his senior, a self-willed young man named Aloysius, who neglects his studies, and pushes back against the stifling and hypocritical adults of the household. He and Elias sleep in the same bed, and share their sense of isolation, making small paper boats which they set loose in a small brook on the estate. In a pivotal moment early in the book, following a creepy family party in which some of the children are made to act out the roles of two recently dead children, Aloysius leads Elias to a clearing in the woods, where they meet two young girls and spend the night engaged in dancing, singing, and other mysterious rites, wherein Elias feels “searching lips come and burst into blossom on (his) hammering temples.”

After this nights revelry, Aloysius fades into the background of the story for a while, eventually returning to boarding school, where his failure to engage with his studies will have consequences. Elias focuses on the behaviors of his older relatives, particularly his aunts, the strict pedagogue Theodora; Zenobia, who fights with and frets over the free willed Uncle Augustin; and Henrietta, with the long blonde hair, addicted to pills, who is going mad and to whom Elias has an awakening erotic attraction. There is an ancient Grandmother, wheeled from room to room, and other children who are largely silent and unseen. Elias’ only other intimate is his cousin Hermione, “very nervous, thin, transparently pale, and given to sudden crazy ideas.” How Edward Gorey missed out on illustrating this book, I can't imagine.

The narrative is made up of young Elias’ impressions of the people and events around him. He sits with his Grandmother and muses on the fact that what she sees through her dimmed eyes, and her memories of the estate, are so very different from his own. He muses on her inevitable death (death, too, is a preoccupation of the book: in one episode, he follows Aloysius through the night to stand outside the window of a villager as his family and neighbors sing his wake, with Aloysius singing along silently for the soul of the stranger) and the doings of his crazy Aunt Henrietta. He is troubled by her, not least erotically. He goes to his room, but cannot sleep:

This is what the speechless stone walls of the room are teaching me tonight. They, too, die to nothing behind the outer shine of what they hide in their denseness. You can bruise them with hammer-blows, stick wallpaper on them at whim, soil them with ink spots in childlike revulsion. They will keep their secret, even if you were to destroy them stone by stone. With almost microscopically small letters I write on them: Lucifer’s regal name. I cannot immediately express in words what I mean by it; it does not matter anyway. I go to sleep, at peace again. I sin of my own free will, fully conscious of what I am doing, to placate the monsters of my imagination.

Aloysius’ obstinate refusal to apply himself at school (and at home, under Theodora’s punishingly sadistic gaze) means he will be shipped off to join the navy. In turn, a trunk materializes, and Elias’s mother demurely packs it under the harsh eyes of Theodora. As they get the carriage ready to transport Elias to the school about which Aloysius has told him such horror stories, later recanted - “it won’t be bad for you” - it is decided that it is an opportune time for Theodora to shoot the estate’s ailing old dog. Aloysius tears apart his rosary, tossing the little wooden beads into the brook and letting the cross be buried in the sand: later Elias searches for it in vain. He finds the swampy basin where the paper boats have come to their end, without ever having reached the sea. As he rides off in the carriage, Elias has the heartwrenching realization of the universal adolescent: “I have to choke back my anger until I feel sick; I cannot understand the need for this - why does it have to be so sad, and so unjust?”

Maurice Gilliams made his mark as a poet, and there is a real lyricism in this book. It forms the first portion of a trilogy, although it doesn’t appear that Sun and Moon was able to complete publication of the additional volumes. It would be a precocious child who found satisfaction in the bitter and fatalistic page of this “children’s classic”, (although it rivals The Catcher in the Rye in its portrayal of the hypocrisy of the adult world) and while the narrative flows rather languorously, with minimal dialogue, I found this to be an affecting and engaging, if dark, coming of age story.

(No product link, as the Amazon page for this product is remarkably screwed up. I wouldn't recommend ordering from there.)

50 Watts showcased in The Atlantic

2011-06-13T01:19:00.002-07:00

An old acquaintance from LibraryThing and a connoisseur of book illustration and design (as well as a favorite of many followers of this blog), Will "Journey Around My Skull" Schofield was recently showcased by Steven Heller in The Atlantic.

50 Watt is a real treasure for lovers of books and design, and an obvious labor of love! I would steal so many of his illustrations, if it weren't so obvious where they came from.

Congratulations to Will on this well-deserved attention.

Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura / The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

2011-06-07T15:36:00.004-07:00

A review begun but never completed, rediscovered this evening. Apologies for its incompleteness, but as this is a book which one must come back to, perhaps a fuller assessment can be made at some future date…

An air of mystery surrounds the authorship (now generally attributed to Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann) of this work of high pessimism from the early German Romantic era. The Nightwatches are scattered and sometimes confusing statements on the vanity of human existence in a hostile and meaningless universe. The narrator is a foundling and former poet; in the madhouse he plays Hamlet to Ophelia, an actress who has adopted the mask as her own face, who dies in childbirth, and who he will glimpse again as a grinning corpse, snuggling with the infant in the grave. The madhouse, quite simply, is the world itself, with the inhabitants rushing about in various delusional guises, marionettes in a cosmic farce The watchman wanders the darkened, colorless streets, witnessing episodes of pathos and farce, raging against human manipulation and oppression, exemplified by the frequent appearance of marionettes in the narrative. For amusement, he rouses the town with the pronouncement of a false apocalypse, he composes a funeral oration for the birth of a child, and a too-pointed satire upon a local worthy lands him in the madhouse. The narrative takes the form of sixteen “night watches”. A dark cloud of hopeless despair covers this midnight shadow world, the shadow world of life, which someone famously described as a dream (nightmare?) from which we struggle to awake.

As a work of fiction, there are frustrations in the Nightwatches. The narrative is chronologically confused, and there are strange devices such as the tale of Don Juan, told twice – once as a straight narrative and then immediately afterwards as a marionette play. There are abrupt changes in focus and disconcerting alternations between sardonic wit and outright nihilistic rage against the injustices of being. Not only textually difficult, the book itself is rather difficult to find, at least in an affordable edition. My copy of this book was published in 1972 by the Edinburgh University Press in a bilingual edition. I have recently discovered a 1968 thesis translation by Elmar Theissen online. Thanks to benwaugh for alerting his acolytes to the existence of this unique - and uniquely disturbing - work.

Doctor Sleep by Madison Smartt Bell

2011-06-03T13:19:00.005-07:00

Doctor Sleep, published in 1991, is a novel describing three frantic days in the life of an insomniac American expatriate, an ex-addict practicing hypnotherapy in West London. In the absence of real sleep, the protagonist, Adrian Strother, externalizes his subconscious by immersing himself in the hermeticism of Giordano Bruno. This obsession, one suspects, also acts as a substitute for the dangerous ecstasies of heroin, a habit which Adrian managed to kick a few years previously by an act of will.

While hermetic philosophy gives Adrian an inner framework for assigning a metaphysical order to the universe (and a conduit for the higher powers to which he aspires) his life on this mundane plane of existence is a bit of a shambles. His girlfriend, alienated by his restlessness and inner turmoil, has left, and he is currently suffering unwelcome intrusions into his life by acquaintances from his days on the streets, including a reformed addict named Stuart, who has found Jesus and is attempting to establish rehabilitation centers in England, and Nicole, an ex-prostitute and girlfriend of Stuart’s who beat her cruelly and who Adrian had somehow managed to marry in their wild days, although they never cohabitated and their relationship was anything but conventional. Adrian’s constant is a West Indian bartender, Terence, with whom he practices a particularly brutal form of Korean martial arts. (The punishing aspect of the martial arts sessions, the physical consequences of which – including a possible concussion - Adrian carries for the course of the novel, is clearly a form of self-punishment, or spiritual cleansing that Adrian must subject himself to for the sins of his past. It also provides him a necessary focus for his mental and physical energies.) Other essential elements of the novel are a patient of Adrian’s, an agoraphobic whose secret shame comes out in hypnotherapy, a sadistic West End crime lord, a shadowy Scotland Yard official for whom Adrian does freelance work, and a series of child rapes/murders that grace the covers of the lurid British tabloids.

The novel runs on adrenaline, following Adrian’s ceaseless transits of London during Carnival as it is celebrated by West Indian immigrants (Bell has also written a trilogy of novels set in Haiti). The narrative, it grieves me to say, drags in places, and seems largely unfocussed until we reach the last quarter or so of the novel, when the pieces begin to fall into place for a conclusion that is not, in my opinion, completely satisfying. Bell is good at showing Adrian’s increasing raggedness and mental diffusion as he drinks, gets beaten (both willingly and not), suffers hallucinations, contemplates the fate of Bruno, searches for his estranged girlfriend, gets dragged to jail and to meetings with kingpins on (ostensibly, at least) both sides of the law, performs a particularly creepy act of hypnotism, agonizes over a lethargic pet snake (in the novel’s most blatant act of kundalini symbolism), drowns a sick mouse and, over the same bathroom sink, pries the blade from a disposable razor for use as a means for himself to slip the surly bonds of earthy existence.

Doctor Sleep is an intelligent thriller, capable of sustaining interest despite its meandering flow. It was, curiously, made into a film entitled “Close Your Eyes”, with a screenplay by Bell, which seems from its description to have absolutely nothing to do with the novel other than having a hypnotist as a main character. Bell’s novel might actually have made a decent Roman Polanski film, with its arc of brutality, insomnia, and psychic disintegration.

Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

2011-05-21T00:45:00.006-07:00

Published in German as Verstorung (“Bewilderment”) in 1967, and given the imprecise title Gargoyles in the 1970 translation by Richard and Clara Winston, this is Thomas Bernhard’s first novel. It is a bitter pill, describing the day-long trajectory of a young engineering student as he accompanies his country doctor father on his rounds among the hopeless inhabitants of Austria’s rural Styria.

The first 80 pages introduce us to some increasingly grotesque figures as the two make a Dantean pilgrimage deep into the granite defile of a remote mountain gorge leading upwards to the Saurau Castle, Hochgobernitz. Bernard’s pessimism regarding the human condition is laid out clearly in these vignettes. The first episode, which haunts the book, relates the casual murder of an innkeeper’s wife by a drunken miner. We also meet an old woman whose world has shrunken to the dimensions of a stale, unkempt bedroom as she awaits death, who relates her contempt for her stupid and brutish son, born of her and her educated husband, now dead. She dreads the Sunday visits of the son and his nasty family, whom she regards with loathing. There is also an industrialist with a mania for solitude, who lives sequestered in his country house, from which all comforts have been banished, with his nervous sister, with whom he appears to have formed an incestuous attachment. The industrialist works obsessively at a bare desk with pen and paper, preparing his great work “which might possibly boil down to a single thought.” Silently, as they make their rounds, the doctor and his son anguish over the ruptures and insurmountable obstacles in their own relationship, and in their relationship with the boy’s sister, who is apparently descending into psychosis.

Over lunch, the two discuss a former patient, a young schoolteacher who has committed an impropriety with a “nervous boy” and whose psyche had been shattered by his subsequent trials such that his only occupation had become the composition of remarkable pen drawings of a world “intent upon self-destruction,” with “birds torn to pieces, human tongues ripped out by the roots, eight-fingered hands, smashed heads, extremities torn from bodies not shown, feet, hands, genitals, people suffocated as they walked, and so on.” The doctor relates how he marveled at the teachers idiosyncratic surrealism, which has something original in that “there was nothing surreal in his drawings, what they showed was reality itself.”

Leaving the restaurant, the son’s eyes fall upon a group of schoolchildren and he reflects “what gruesome people these innocent creatures will inevitably become…” They approach a mill, where the workers torment a Turkish hired hand and engage in the systematic killing of the exotic birds in the proprietor’s aviary, for their cries, echoing through the gorge, are driving the denizens mad. They hope to preserve the birds, which they have laid out on a plank in full view of their doomed fellows, through crude taxidermy so that they may repopulate the aviary with the lush plumage of their silent remains.

Before reaching the castle, there is one more unnerving stop. They visit a violent and deformed young musical genius, kept safely locked in a caged bed. This young man has posted annotated portraits of the great composers around the room, labeling Hayden as “Swine”, Berlioz as “Horrible”, Schubert as “Womanish”, but noting Mozart’s greatness and the phrase “I am listening!” across Bartok’s face. As they leave, the son notes the broken necked violins hanging bundled by a cord.

Among the madness and degeneration of these subjects, we detect a theme relating to the inversion of creativity – futile attempts to come to grips with human reality through the artifices of philosophy, art, and music. A certain control, an ordering of reality, is sought, but slips away. One can only ponder the inexplicable vagaries - and the inconsistent bestowal - of genius, which lurks at the borderline of insanity. This descent into hell, however, is but a prologue to what lies ahead, for, like the immense Lucifer chewing the flesh of the arch-sinners in the icy pit of Hell, the mad Prince of the Sauraus waits on the walls of Hochgobernitz Castle.

Although patriarch of a small household, the Prince maintains a queer and solitary existence. He lives in a state of extreme misanthropic solipsism and despair, and the doctor seems to have become his sole confidant. He patrols the inner and outer walls obsessively, keeping an eye on his vast forested estates. He has, in fact, only this morning broken his solitude for the purpose of interviewing three potential overseers for his estates, a task he approaches half-heartedly, for he is convinced (through the testimony of a dream) that his son, currently studying and preparing a socio-philosophical thesis in London, is intent on not just dismantling the ancestral lands upon the Prince’s demise, but on allowing the forest and fields to rot into the ground.

The last hundred pages of the novel are a Beckettian tour-de-force of sustained monologue, a stream-of-consciousness binge of logorrhea, with its leitmotif being the utter hopelessness of human life and aspirations. The monologue is delivered in a voice once removed, as it is related to us through the recollection of the doctor’s son, who meticulously notes the old man’s obsessions. The Prince’s visitors are mostly silent, a state which the Prince clearly prefers (“Incidentally, the art of listening is nearly extinct. But I observe that you, Doctor, are still practicing it”, says the Prince in the novel’s only true comedic moment, coming over halfway into the monologue) - he has no interest in the opinions of others. He relates minute preoccupations and paranoias (he accuses the entire household, one by one, of having stolen and read a small notebook that he keeps and has inadvertently – or subconsciously – left on the kitchen table), and approaches his dreams as verified realities. He is clearly sliding down a steep slope towards madness.

The Prince’s monologue gives the book as a whole an apparent sense of unbalance, yet it is effective in that it touches the themes presented in the previous section, binding their ugly hopelessness into a complete whole, an apotheosis of pessimism. The sense of estrangement between the doctor and his son is mirrored in that of the Prince and his. When the visitors leave, it is with the clear (to us) knowledge that their estrangement, reflecting that of the human race in general, is unreconcilable.

Gargoyles reflects Bernhard’s publicized hatred of his Austrian patrimony – its uncouth, stupid (in his eyes) baseness, and his violently dim view of humanity with its self-delusions and hypocrisies. Bernhard may not have exorcised his demons in his writings, but he has cast them forward for all to see, and tremble before. With the Prince in a central role as a demented Superman, this book is a profoundly pessimistic and difficult work in the Germanic tradition of Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen and the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

The Archaeology of a Smile

2011-05-18T19:36:00.008-07:00

Kore, c. 530-515 BC
from Richter, A Handbook of Greek Art (Phaidon Press, 1967)

Angel, Riems Cathedral, about 1240
from Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, Volume II: Gothic Art (Phaidon Press, 1963)

La Gioconda (Mona Lisa), Leonardo Da Vinci, completed ca. 1519

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

2011-04-26T23:34:00.008-07:00

James de Mille’s tale, serialized in Harper’s Weekly before its publication in book form in 1888 is a late Victorian contribution to the lost world/hollow earth genre that had its modern genesis in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but with roots stretching back to Lucian’s True Story and some of the more fantastic medieval traveler’s tales. Whatever merits it held as an adventure story at the time of its first publication seem to have been quickly forgotten in the wake of Rider Haggard’s tales of mystery and thrills in darkest Africa as exemplified in She and Ayesha (the book business must have been quite different in those days, for in our present time one successful novel, or series, in a specific genre – let’s say, warlocks or vampires – opens the floodgates for a plethora of imitators ready to be gobbled up by the undiscerning reader at alarming rates). De Mille also seems to have been aiming for some sort of social satire in the Swiftian mode, but to dreary effect.

The story relates the contents of a copper cylinder found at sea by a group of upper class idlers yachting out amongst the Azores. They have hit the doldrums, and are glad for the amusement of the narrative, although they have divergent perspectives on the veracity of the adventures detailed on the papyrus pages. The token skeptic is convinced that the story is a hoax, cleverly planted in the mid-Atlantic to bob in the waves, collecting barnacles and seaweed until such time as some lucky sailor fishes it up and publishes it to his own financial advantage. Others take a more scholarly interest, interrupting the narrative to give speculative lectures on the linguistic correspondences between that of the antipodean cannibals described therein and the ancient Hebrews (one of the idlers notes that this connection between the polar death worshippers and the Thirteenth Tribe makes no sense, because the barbarians abhor wealth, and well, how Jewish is that?).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The narrative details the adventures of one Adam (get it?) More who, deciding to go penguin hunting on a remote Antarctic island with a companion, ends up being lost in a fog as his ride home sails blissfully away. He and his buddy paddle around for a few days in their dinghy, but loose all sense of direction in the eerie bleakness. They finally make landfall on a godforsaken volcanic shore inhabited by a degenerate race of subhumans who treat them royally until dinner time, at which point they figure More’s companion might taste good jerked and slow-roasted. The cries of More’s companion, warning him to get away before he becomes the second course is genuinely creepy. More gets back into the boat and is swept safely away from the cannibals, which is a good thing, into a dark and deepening chasm inhabited by prehistoric sea monsters, which is a bad thing.

He eventually passes, by means of a subterranean river, into a true Antarctic world, comprising a warm ocean encircled by mountains which are terraced with strange temples and caves, and inhabited by more friendly cannibals. This is where the social commentary comes in, for these lost folk live in a topsy-turvey society which, as previously mentioned, abhors wealth and views death as the biggest trip of all, man! These people practically fall over themselves giving away every pittance they earn, and clamor for the honor of having a nice big shiny dagger plunged into their hearts at certain times of the year. They also pursue giant prehistoric beasts for the express purpose of being torn limb from limb by said beasts. More’s response to these revelations, not surprisingly, is “include me out!” Did I mention that the really really BIGGEST thrill is to know that you will be the guest of honor, so to speak, at the next cannibal feast? This certainly doesn’t appeal to our sailor, especially since he’s fallen hard for the only girl on the polar continent who can pass for “normal”, a hostage from a distant land, and the fact of their love necessitates that, in this place where every day is opposite day, they must part until such time as they get to have the honor of having their hearts ripped out and their bodies eaten. (The worst thing about it, of course, is that the natives are just so damn cheery,as they relate these quaint customs to More. Despite his innate Victorian indignation at these plans, he can’t really bring himself to dislike these chaps, although he doesn’t mind plugging a few of them with his “thunder stick” before all’s said and done).

So, anyhoo, there are lots of dinosaurs, a cavern of mummies that sweetie must tend to, bloody rituals, and desperate attempts at escape. There are also droll and droning lectures aplenty (this is a Victorian narrative, so you don’t really have to worry about too many belly laughs creeping in) on prehistoric fauna, and obsolete linguistic speculations interspersed just to pad out, - er, I mean - give a sense of verisimilitude to the narrative. All in all, not a bad adventure yarn in a genre that has been revisited so many times that one might be excused for seeing this story as derivative, rather than a somewhat original adventure narrative, predating Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, and all the other spinners of lost world yarns.

Link to text at Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/astrangemanuscr02millgoog

The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

2011-04-26T08:01:00.003-07:00

The Hill of Dreams (serialized in 1904 as "The Garden of Avallaunius") is a supernatural/decadent novel by the Welsh writer Arthur Machen. Machen was a native of the Welsh town of Caerleon-on-Usk (now Gwent), which has strong Arthurian associations and a history going back to the Roman occupation. Machen, a prolific author who died at a ripe old age in 1947, retains a reputation as a master of supernatural fiction, although he wrote in several different genres. In circumstances of poverty such as described in the semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams, he translated Casanova and prepared an extended essay on The Anatomy of Tobacco. He also subsequently authored several volumes of autobiography. His pagan and occultic preoccupations make him a fascinating writer to encounter, as does the richness of his prose in describing (as Huysmans does so well in Against the Grain and, for me, Walter Pater does less successfully in Marius the Epicurean) the world of sensation.

This strange novel is one of the handful of things by Machen that I've read. It involves a sensitive youth, Lucian Taylor, who has a strange mystico-sexual experience in the ruins of a Roman fort, and who has a brief affair with a local girl. When Lucian later moves to London to pursue, as did Machen himself, a writing career, he falls into a life of poverty, squalor, and opium addiction. His mystical fantasies (if they are indeed fantasies) of the Celtic-Roman past occupy his mind during his opium dreams. In his increasingly rare lucid moments, he rails against the barbarous, dehumanizing metropolis (In his A Baedeker of Decadence, George Schoolfield notes the resemblances between Machen's London and that portrayed in Thomson's influential long poem The City of Dreadful Night). Poor Lucian spirals further and further into a madness driven by deprivation, opium, and his search for "new and exquisite experiences". He is as much a decadent touchstone as Huysman's Des Essientes and Wilde's Dorian Grey.

Machen continues to have a following among aficionados of supernatural fiction. The Hill of Dreams is a rather different work than, for instance, The Great God Pan, a creepy tale of sexual and demonic atavism induced by modern science, but certainly bears testimony to Machen's interest in the occult (he was, like Crowley, Yeats, and Algernon Blackwood, an active member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). l would recommend this novel to anyone interested in the history of decadent literature in Britain.

The Hill of Dreams is available in a variety of edition and formats, including some shoddy modern reprints. The Dover edition is worth seeking out. My edition is the yellow-covered Machen series published by Knopf in 1922.

On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui

2011-04-15T20:43:00.003-07:00

The narrator/diarist of On Elegance While Sleeping personifies a particular type current in the yellow literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - that of the immoralist. The Dalkey Archive translation makes reference to Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Lautreamont’s (another South American of invented nobility) Maldoror, and we also see in the novel a direct association with the character Lafcadio in Gide’s Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars). We perceive in these works the literary reflection of the precocious violence of the naïve genius Rimbaud, and the contempt for bourgeois society evident in the works of Jarry and the brief florescence of the Dadaist agitators, with their stated goal of disturbing the ceremony. In his Foundations of Modern Art (1931, revised 1952), Ozenfant draws parallels between Gide’s antihero and the surrealists, noting commonality in “their particular turn of thought: anxious, elegant, melancholy, tangential, incidental, elliptical, their taste for evoking emotion through what is singular: their oneiric glossolalia: and their interest in the unmotivated act.” These are also the characteristics of the pale criminal with the delicate hands at the heart of Tegui’s novel.

This decadent novel indeed opens on a surreal note. In his diary entries, the protagonist rarely speaks of immediate experience, but rather uses the journal as a means of reminiscence. He recalls his youth in the town of Bougival, down the Seine from Paris. Down the river would come the corpses of the drowned (and implicitly, those of the murdered and the suicides): our young hero would count coup by fishing the bodies, with their hands waving from the muck, from their entanglement in the mill wheel, at the same time slipping a business card from the town mortician in the pocket of the bloated corpse. This scavenging of the human effluence issuing forth from the great metropolis is only the beginning of a catalogue of transgressions against bourgeois conventions that will include pederasty, homosexuality, voyeurism, transvestism, bestiality, rape and murder. There is, in the narrator, a random bipolarity between the extremes of ironic dispassion (speaking of a North African café and a local brothel – “We felt entirely at home in both places: we took off our jackets in one and our pants in the other”) and a sickly sentimentality (“There’s nothing more in life than to love someone. To be loved. Such is the happy monotony of my life.”). The only other significant character is the coachman Raimundo, who has his own obsessions with the debauchery of Don Juan.

The eyes and ears are passive. The hands are a mode of action. The protagonist fusses over hands, particularly his own. He is a manicured dandy, a solipsist of whom someone exclaims on the first page “He cares for his hands like a man preparing for a murder.”

The journal moves between brief reminiscences and opinions, mostly of a carnal nature and evident of a healthy dispassion towards the suffering of others (he enjoys news of disasters and fatalities: “what are a few deaths compared to the moral serenity…provided to people like myself”). At last the diarist comes to that moment, the penultimate step before the summit of his debaucheries and immoralities, that inevitable Nietzschean moment which calls for the courage of the knife:

Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected – something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

He finds his victim easily enough. It is the perennial victim of the 20th century, that one small and insignificant person, deemed valueless, whose murder will be magnified over the century by the thousands and the millions, depersonalized by neglect and violence into non-existence:

As I passed her in the market, I found her concentrating heavily on some change she’d been thrown. She counted it coin by coin, like a child or a savage. Her slowness in counting, her obvious limited ability, made up my mind. It authorized my act. To unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness.

From Baudelaire on down, the decadent illustrates the most immaculate morality in his immorality. For what is a greater morality, than to wish to excise the malignancy, the sickness, or, like the Gnostic Sethians, to exterminate it by exhausting it? Tegui’s pale criminal accepts the knife with gusto, and is rewarded by the indifference of his fellows. In the aftermath of the bloodbath, he walks the streets and notices the dismal face of the town clock, and realizes that he, the murderer, is of the common run of mankind.

Dalkey Archive’s resurrection of Tegui’s novel almost a hundred years after itscomposition is a noteworthy event, as we can see by the notices it has generated. It shows that a gem may be pulled from the muck and cleansed, and put forth for consideration by a new and worthy audience. Idra Novey’s translation perfectly captures the essence of the author’s words and sentiments.

The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats

2011-04-06T08:27:00.002-07:00

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than he
can understand.

The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick

2011-03-17T13:58:00.008-07:00

One of the saddest legacies of the Twentieth Century was the invention, by necessity, of a new literature, the literature of the Holocaust. We find, next to the histories of the war in general and the liquidation of the Jews specifically, personal memoirs of survivors (an inadequate designation) and those who did not survive. We have the works and testimonies of Weisel, Levi, Appelfeld, and a nondescript girl from Amsterdam whose name is etched forever into the annals of human sorrow. Included in this literature are secondary works, echoes of the loss, which reveal the scars which have passed to second and third generations, and which continue to manifest themselves.

The author and artist Bruno Schultz lived 50 years before his life was ended by a bullet from the gun of a Gestapo officer. This death occurred not in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but on the streets of the Polish village of Drohobycz, where Schultz, carrying a luxurious loaf of bread and living on borrowed time, was under the apparently inadequate protection of another officer who admired his visual artistry. The author of Cinnamon Shops (aka The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, two surreal autobiographical works set on the streets of Drohobycz, died on one of those very same streets.

Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) is another of the echoes of loss. It concerns one Lars Andemening, a book reviewer for a mediocre Swedish newspaper, who has immersed himself in the literature of Central Europe and who had come to the conclusion that he is the son of Bruno Schultz, who died on a cold November day in 1942, killed by a nonchalant Gestapo officer and who, in addition to two published works, is rumored to have left the manuscript of an lost work entitled The Messiah.

Lars shares his obsession with the owner of a small bookshop, an elderly German refugee named Heidi. Heidi also claims to carry the scars of the Holocaust. As a girl, she lived near one of the camps, and would venture out on dark nights to lob packages of food over the barbed wire, listening for the sound of the Jews pouncing upon the packages like hungry dogs. Heidi is an irascible sort, with a rumored husband whom Lars never sees and who feeds him documents and letters pertaining to Schultz smuggled out of Poland. This is the totality of Lars’ life: reviewing the works of Kundera and Kis for an unappreciative public, sleeping through the afternoons, and meeting Heidi in the hopes of obtaining new relics of his “father”.

Soon enough, events occur which cause Lars to re-evaluate his paradigm, his lost childhood and his lost father. A woman has arrived in Stockholm, a Polish immigrant, and she carries with her, in a white plastic bag, a manuscript salvaged from an old tin box and old shoes. It is the last known work of her father, the writer and artist Bruno Schultz – the manuscript of The Messiah.*

The theme of Ozick’s short novel is the question of how one reconstructs one’s life and identity when true identity has been stolen. How do we claim a birthright, a personal history? How do we insert ourselves into that mystical flow of heredity when our unknown fathers and mothers have been obliterated from the face of the earth? And how do we react when our carefully constructed reality is challenged by that of another orphan?

Ozick’s novel takes some turns which it would be inappropriate to reveal. Questions remain, particularly regarding an agonizing decision for Lars, who, when faced with the dubious manuscript of The Messiah and what appears to be a cabal of swindlers, takes an irreversible action that necessitates the creation of an entirely new persona to mitigate the potentially devastating psychic effects of that action. While perhaps not a major addition to the canon of Holocaust literature, The Messiah of Stockholm is nevertheless worth a read as an echo of the loss, a testament to the memory of one man among millions who died a tragic and undeserved death.

*Ozick’s speculation regarding the theme and content of this work, revealed through Lars’ reading of it, is wonderfully imaginative.

Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire

2011-03-16T08:31:00.004-07:00

You are weary at last of this ancient world
Shepherdess O Eiffel tower whose flock of bridges bleats at the morning

You have lived long enough with Greek and Roman antiquity

Here even automobiles look old
Only religion stays news religion
As simple as hangars at the airfield

Alone in Europe you Christianity are not antique
The one modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom windows watch what shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing your sins this morning
Handbills catalogues advertisements that sing overhead
Furnish your morning's poetry for prose there are newspapers
Dime detective novels packed with adventure
Biographies of great men a thousand and one titles

This morning I saw a fine street whose name slips my mind
New and bright the sun's clarion
Where executives and workers sweet stenographers
Hurry every weekday dawn and dusk
Three times a morning sirens groan
A choleric bell barks at noon
Billboards posters and
Doorplates twitter like parakeets
There is charm to this Paris factory street
Between rue Aumont-Thiéville and the avenue des Ternes

Here is the young street and you still a baby
Dressed by your mother only in blue and white
A pious child with your oldest friend René Dalize
You like nothing so much as church ceremonies
Nine o'clock the gas turns blue you slip out of bed
To pray all night in the school chapel
While an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ's flaming halo revolves forever
He is the lovely lily we all worship
He is the red-haired torch no wind may blow out
Pale and scarlet son of the sorrowful mother
Tree hung with prayer
Twofold gallows of honor and eternity
Six-pointed star
God who dies Friday and rises on Sunday
Christ who flies higher than the aviators
And holds the world's record

Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows his business
And changed to a bird this century ascends like Jesus
Devils in hell raise their heads to stare
They say it imitates Simon Magus in Judea
They say if it lifts to call it a lifter
Angels soar past the young trapeze artist
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover near the original airplane
Or give place to those whom the Eucharist elevates
Priests rising continuously as they raise the Host
At last the plane lands with wings outspread
Through heaven come flying a million swallows
At full speed crows owls falcons
Ibises flamingoes storks from Africa
Roc so celebrated in song and story
Clutching Adam's skull the original head
Eagle from the horizon pounces screaming
Hummingbird arrives from America
From China long supple phis
Who have only one wing and fly in couples
Here comes the dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyrebird and ocellated peacock
That funeral pyre the phoenix engendering himself
Momentarily veils all with his ardent ash
Sirens quit their perilous perches
And arrive each singing beautifully
Everyone eagle phoenix phis
Fraternizes with the flying machine

Now you stride alone through the Paris crowds
Busses in bellowing herds roll by
Anguish clutches your throat
As if you would never again be loved
In the old days you would have turned monk
With shame you catch yourself praying
And jeer your laughter crackles like hellfire
Its sparks gild the depths of your life
Which like a painting in a dark museum
You approach sometimes to peer at closely

Today in Paris the women are bloodstained
It was as I would rather forget it was during beauty's decline

From fervent flames Our Lady gazed down on me in Chartres
Your Sacred Heart's blood drowned me in Montmartre
I am sick of hearing blessed words
My love is a shameful disease
You are sleepless anguished but possessed by an image
Which hovers never distant

By the Mediterranean
Under lemon trees that flower the year long
You take ship with friends
One from Nice one from Menton two from La Turbie
Terrified we see in the depths giant squid
And fish the Savior's symbols gliding through seaweed

In a tavern garden near Prague
You are content instead of writing your stories
To watch a rose on the table and
A rosebug asleep in the rose's heart

Agahst you trace your likeness in the mosaics at Saint Vitus
And that day almost died of grief to see yourself portrayed
As Lazarus distracted by daylight
The hands of the ghetto clock run backward
You also creep slowly backward through life
Climbing to the hradchen listening at twilight
To Czech songs from the taverns

You in Marseilles among piles of watermelons

You in Coblenz at the Giant's hotel

In Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree

In Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty but who is ugly
And engaged to a student from Leyden
One can rent rooms there in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember three days there and three at Gouda

You are in Paris arrainged before the judge
Arrested like a criminal

You went on sad and merry journeys
Before growing aware of lies and old age
Love made you unhappy at twenty again at thirty
I have lived like a fool and wasted my youth
You no longer dare examine your hands and at any moment I could weep
Over you over her whom I love over all that has frightened you

With tears in your eyes you see the shabby refugees
Who have faith in God and pray the mothers nurse their children
Their smell fills the waiting room at the gare St. Lazare
Like the three kings they believe in a star
Hoping to strike it rich in Argentina
And return home wealthy
One family carries a crimson quilt as you your heart
Quilt and our dreams are equally unreal
Some of these refugees stay on and lodge
In slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Écouffes
They keep close to home like chessmen
And are mostly Jewish their wives wear wigs
Pallid they sit at the back of little shops

You stand at the counter of a dirty bar
Taking a café for two sous among the wretched

You are in a huge restaurant at night
These women are not evil only careworn
Each has tortured her lover even the ugliest

Who is the daughter of a Jersey policeman

Her hands which I had not noticed are calloused and cracked

Pity fills me for the scars on her belly

Now I humble my mouth to a poor creature with a horrible laugh

You are alone morning comes
Milkmen clink bottles along the street

Night leaves like a lovely Métive
Ferdine the false or watchful Lea

You sip a liquor as burning as your life
Your life you drain like an eau-de-vie

And stride home to Auteil
To sleep among your fetish from Oceania or Guinea
Other forms of Christ and other faiths
Lesser Christs of dim aspirations

Farewell Farewell

Sun slit throat

Guillaume Apollinaire
1880-1918

Accumulated Wisdom

2011-03-11T20:43:00.002-07:00

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.

Letter from Niccolo Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 1513

Tun-Huang by Yasushi Inoue

2011-03-11T08:34:00.014-07:00

In his classic travelogue The Ruins of Desert Cathay, the archaeo-adventurer Aurel Stein describes his first visit to Tun-huang (Dunhuang) in 1908, lured by stories of cartloads of ancient Buddhist manuscripts hidden away in secret niches in the sacred “Caves of A Thousand Buddhas”. This richly decorated shrine was carved out of the low hillsides amidst a freezing, windswept desert along one of the most inhospitable stretches of the famed Silk Road. One thousand years ago, this desolate country – the topography of which is as central to this novel as anything – boasted two particularly significant aspects. For one, it lay along the main east-west trade route connecting the great civilizations of East and West, and for another it was in close proximity to the steppe region in which the prized thoroughbred horses of Liang-chou, essential to the Asian cavalries, were bred. It was for these reasons that the area was of importance to the Sung Empire of China, and it was in the potential for glory and riches that the ethnic peoples of the region engaged in seemingly endless wars for autonomy and vassalage.

It is by the most accidental of circumstances that Inoue’s protagonist, Hsing-te, comes to the inhospitable lands of extreme western China. An educated young man, he has but one more interview to go in China’s infamous examination hell to complete in order to enter into a highly desirable civil service career. He is confident of his success, having passed all previous examinations brilliantly, but on this day, fate intervenes. He dozes off under the courtyard elms as he waits for his name to be called and dreams of a meeting with the Emperor, who quizzes him on the best means of subduing the upstart peoples of the Central Asian steppes. By the time he awakens, the courtyard is empty, and the interviews are complete. He has lost his opportunity to sit for the coveted Palace Examination. He wanders despondently through the town, until his attention is caught by a spectacle at the marketplace: a barbarian from the west has an exotic woman, a naked His-hsia, whom he is selling. He is, however, selling her piecemeal, and as the crowd watches, he severs two of her fingertips to prove the seriousness of his proposal. Hsing-te is intrigued by the woman, with her dark and vaguely Caucasian appearance and intense stoicism. He purchases her. She is leery of his intentions, but when he assures her that she is free to go, she leaves him with the only real possession she has, a strip of silk with strange, undecipherable writing on it. It is, she tells him, the newly conceived script of the His-hsia. It is the combined effect of this remarkable woman (whom he never sees again, but whose numerous avatars he sees in the mud-brick towns of the His-hsia) and the strange script that pulls him to a new life among the warring peoples of the Inner Asian desert.

I shall not enumerate Hsing-te’s adventures in detail. A not particularly adept soldier, he survives, with his new commander Wang-li, waves of brutal battles on the steppes as part of the mercenary Chinese vanguard in service to the His-hsia. As they take one particular town, Hsing-te discovers a woman hiding in an unsearched watchtower. He is awed by her regal beauty, and seeks to protect her from the ravaging troops by sequestering her in a storeroom, where he visits her and nourishes her, and where, overwhelmed by her beauty, he aggressively makes love to her. Hsing-te’s facility with words and language lead to his reassignment to a distant city in order that he may learn the language of the His-hsia and compile a useful Chinese/His-hsia dictionary. He is suited to the task, but his reassignment requires that he reveal the woman to Wang-li, placing her under his protection. The woman, who is in fact a Uighur princess, has but a brief role in the narrative, but she is the Helen figure which binds four men and leads not only to a civil war in Central Asia but the preservation of one of the world’s great cultural treasures.

Stoic and beset by loss and weariness, Hsing-te becomes over the years attracted to the Buddhist doctrine (particularly the Diamond Sutra, with its theme of non-attachment), and leads an effort under the aegis of a studious local potentate to translate the scriptures into the His-hsia script. But as the civil war initiated (for reasons significant to the narrative) by Wang-li rages, it becomes imperative that the texts be saved from the ravages of war and fire. He must enlist the aid of a caravan leader, a proud and temperamental man of royal blood, whom he must trick into protecting his “treasure”, and it is with this man that Hsing-te must face his destiny…

It is a strange matter of fate that Yasushi Inoue, the Japanese author of Tun-Huang, did not visit the Central Asian locale of his adventurous tale until almost 20 years after the 1959 publication of his novel, and even then he did not have the opportunity to visit the caves themselves. His story was born of his curiosity as to how the priceless manuscripts came to be sequestered and hidden for centuries in the Thousand Buddha Caves, how there are stories in history that we cannot know, and which we must fabricate to the best of our abilities given stark historical facts, the vagaries of human nature, and the inventiveness of the human imagination. Inoue’s fabrication is as good as fact, for it rings true in its epic scope and its fine characterizations and motivations. It is a story that takes to a distant place and time outside of ourselves, that gives flesh to the bones of history, and passion to the shades of the nameless dead.

Malpertuis by Jean Ray

2011-02-21T10:01:00.004-07:00

I read Jean Ray’s novel Malpertuis (1943) over the course of two evenings, and each night I experienced strange dreams of forgotten identity. (I also became reacquainted with an ancient structure riddled with hidden passageways that has haunted my dreams since childhood.) Characterized by the publisher as a “modern Gothic novel”, this book does indeed reflect the conventions of that genre: a sprawling house exuding evil, a cast of strange characters, a naïve protagonist, and a sense of overpowering malignancy casting its shadow over the proceedings.

The narrative is epistolary, with four or five persons contributing to the arc of the story. A prologue describes the discovery by a thief of a collection of manuscripts hidden away in an ancient Belgian abbey. The proper story begins with a ship seemingly lost at sea, in search of a mysterious Aegean island that appears on no charts. There is a storm worthy of Poe, Coleridge, or Lautremont, and an ancient mariner glimpses, above the rocks of the island, gigantic and repulsive corpses. His ship lost, the mariner in his delirium relates his vision to his rescuers, one of whom, a malignant priest, repays the information the sailor provides by having him strangled and cast into the stormy froth.

We then come to Malpertuis itself, inhabited by a dying magus who holds various relatives and acquaintances in his thrall. He is a repugnant presence, and in his dying days reveals, in the contents of his will, that his unimaginably vast fortune will go to the luxurious maintenance of his heirs (with the balance going to the last survivors) under the stipulation that they must remain in residence in the old man’s sprawling and decrepit house. The house is the namesake of the abode of the evil and perhaps Satanic fox Goupil in the medieval romance of Reynard the Fox. As a primary character itself in the drama, the house is described at length. The overwhelming atmosphere is one of decrepitude and darkness. The grounds are grey and seemingly perpetually stormy, and the house is inadequately lit by meager candlelight.

The inhabitants are a queer and motley lot. The narrator is young Jean-Jacques, and it is his cruel and sensual sister Nancy who largely runs the house. The others are strange and in some cases pathetic “cousins” with various obsessions that run the gamut from an unhealthy interest in taxidermy to an overweening obsession with ensuring that some degree of illumination remains in the house as protection from an ominous dark shadow. There are, in addition, small strange daemonic creatures scuttling about in the attic and currents of sexual desire and meticulously kept antipathies passing among some of the inhabitants.

Along the way, Ray drops enough clues to point the attentive reader towards an assessment of the true nature and identities of the doomed souls occupying Malpertuis. The novel is heavy on atmosphere, a delicious atmosphere that pervades the bulk of the novel. For the thick-witted, each chapter contains a relevant epigraph or two from the likes of Hawthorne (no stranger to tales of doomed houses) and others which light the path towards the ultimate revelations. For me, the narrative begins to fragment towards the end, losing momentum as poor Jean-Jacques has to suffer through a number of swoons as Satanic powers pursue him and the inevitable explanations are painstakingly revealed. But this is a minor complaint. Malpertuis, while it may not be a high water mark in world literature, is original, creepy, and compellingly atmospheric enough, with a peculiar hallucinatory power and sense of melancholy earning it a place of honor as an obvious touchstone of the latter-day gothic romance. I am aware of one recent fantasy novel that exploits Ray’s particular conceit of the existence of the old gods, whose power waxes and wanes in accordance to the degree that mortals believe in them. Were I more conversant with that genre, I could no doubt identify others.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

2011-02-11T08:18:00.003-07:00

A hefty (almost 700 page) epistolary novel set in Restoration Oxford. The dual plot involves shadowy political intrigue and the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of a young woman purported to be, by turns, a witch and a whore. The four narratives are, by necessity, somewhat contradictory, giving the novel a Rashomon quality as we attempt to fit together a true picture of what happened during that brief period in the midst of a bitterly cold English winter.

Pears' characterizations are finely drawn, with some individuals standing out quite vividly. A couple of the narrators are rather repugnant, however, most of the motivations and circumstances are clarified in the final narrative, that of an Oxford antiquarian. For me, the narrative did tend to drag in a few places, but not enough to abandon the effort. It helps to have some understanding of the English Commonwealth period and the circumstances surrounding the restoration of Charles II. While I wouldn't describe this as a philosophical novel, the currents of discovery relating to physiology and empiricism do play their parts, with cameo appearances by Robert Boyle and John Locke.

I will admit to being somewhat dissatisfied with the conclusion, which veers into a somewhat heavy handed mysticism. I would have no problem with a metaphysical gloss on the chain of events, but Pears' clarification of the identity of Sarah Blundy, one of the best drawn personalities in the narrative, strains credibility. Still, an enjoyable and well written tome for a winter's night reading.

Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus

2010-12-16T08:47:00.003-07:00

The Basement Tapes, recorded in the summer of 1967, was a loose collection of material born of Bob Dylan’s seclusion following the burst of manic creativity that produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. It was also the product of exhaustion and a self-imposed exile following a motorcycle accident and/or a bout with drug addiction. The songs turn away from surrealism and psychedelia, finding their wellspring in what we would now characterize as roots music – the country blues, hillbilly tunes, and murder ballads recorded in the 1920’s and 30’s, but which reach back beyond the advent of the phonograph.

The Basement Tapes trickled out on publishers’ demos and bootlegs before being officially (and only partially) released on a double album in 1975, an album for which Marcus wrote the liner notes. Some of the material such as the gnomic and dirge-like “I’m Not There” have only recently seen the light of day on official releases. A definitive release of these sessions is long overdue.

Invisible Republic includes analyses of individual songs from the Dylan album wrapped up in an almost impenetrable mythologizing prose. There is also a fascinating long digression on the Virginia coal miner Dock Boggs, who abandoned his short musical career during the Depression when record sales slumped and his God-fearing wife gave him an ultimatum to put aside the Devil’s music, only to pick it up again 30 years later in the heyday of the folk revival. The centerpiece of the book, however, is a chapter on the magico-illuminatus Harry Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music as if he were preparing an alchemical treatise, complete with Renaissance woodcuts and a numerologically significant ordering of tunes. Smith’s Anthology remains, as it was in Dylan’s youth, a powerful talisman, a unique undertaking for its time which rescued dozens of country blues and murder ballads from oblivion just as upstart rock and roll was gaining its first footing as the latest iteration of Satan’s music. Anyone paying attention to Dylan’s output, especially over the last 15 years or so, will find the source of many of his best lines and imagery in the Anthology. To put it bluntly, Dylan has sampled those old 78s to a fairly astounding degree, weaving new cloth from old, and preserving therein the vernacular of a fascinating, bygone era of American folk tradition.

Marcus’s first book, Mystery Train, although a bit dated at this point, was a thoughtful and readable placement of rock and roll into its American context. (I still have a photocopy of the Robert Johnson chapter tucked into my King of the Delta Blues LP.) The great weakness of the present text is that Marcus over contextualizes the material, laying a too heavy burden on both Dylan’s Basement Tapes and their antecedent folk tunes by pushing them too hard into a mold of Americanism going back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the sermons of Jonathan Edwards. His writing is maddeningly oblique and top-heavy by turns, sacrificing clarity in pursuit of a grand idea. Still for fans of old-time Appalachian mountain music and the soundtrack of (in Marcus’ memorable if overexposed phrase) “the old, weird America”, this is essential reading.

Note: Link below is to the more recent edition of the Marcus book, retitled The Old Weird America. Dock Boggs trading card by R. Crumb.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

2010-11-11T21:40:00.003-07:00

As he reminds us with almost comic regularity, Hanta has been operating an antiquated wastepaper compactor on the outskirts of Prague for thirty-five years. He has some acquaintances in the town, but for most of his time he shares his solitude with his compactor, and with the mice that swarm the cellar in which he works. He works at a Sisyphean labor, taking time out only to go fill his pail with beer, because he truly loves his beer. He passes his days in greasy clothes and a state of inebriated equilibrium.

Amongst the newsprint and bloody butcher paper that Hanta compacts are books - beautiful old, leather bound volumes that have no use in a totalitarian society. Hrabal's book is a memoir from Hanta's point of view. He seems a simpleton, but one with an eye for books, and the ability to recall quotations from Hegel, Erasmus, and Schopenhauer. And he does more: he blesses each bale of compacted paper with a carefully chosen book or art print, often open to a particularly significant passage. When he can, he rescues books from the brink of oblivion. Some he gives to furtive acquaintances, a churchman interested in the history of aviation, a professor with a passion for old theatre reviews. He takes books home and fills every available space with them; he sleeps under a precarious platform upon which he has stacked two tons of books, and which could crush him instantly should he make an unfortunate shift in his sleep. He clearly has a mania. It is only late in the book that we will find out if there is a purpose to his madness.

As he performs his assigned role, his holy calling, Hanta recalls his life. He relates the tragicomical story of a love found and lost in two scatalogical episodes, with a denouement that is told with perfection. He remembers the strange gypsy girl who followed him home and waited at his door every night, who fed his meager fire and warmed his bed, whose name he does not recall and who disappeared when the Nazis occupied Prague. (He takes particular pleasure in compacting Nazi propaganda.) In the present, he sees the future in the form of a huge, state of the art, compactor manned by efficient young men in immaculate uniforms who eat their lunch with bottles of milk and who cast nary a glance at the volumes of humanity’s intellectual heritage riding the conveyor belt into oblivion.

His goal is to retire and move his faithful compactor to a spot on his uncle’s property, where he can give artistic expression to the memory of the sorry task he has spent his life performing. He has visions of young Jesus and old Lao-Tzu, and armies of rats fighting it out in the sewers. When his boss peers down at him and calls him an imbecile, and hires two uniformed young milk-drinkers to work the compactor, he beings to see the writing on the wall. Tense dualities abound in this book, particularly the progressus ad futurum and the regressus ad originem, but dualities yearn for integration, a state of completeness. Hrabal’s book is itself simple in execution, yet enormous in its implications, both sad and hopeful. In its brevity, it approaches a state of perfection.

A Reader's Delight by Noel Perrin

2010-11-08T22:19:00.003-07:00

When I started this blog a few years ago, it was for the vague purpose of making note of books that were by and large obscure and forgotten, yet deserving of wider acquaintance. Little did I know that Noel Perrin (among, I am sure, others) had had a similar idea many years before. He had published dozens of short reviews of such books in the Washington Post, and it is these that are collected in A Reader’s Delight.

I consider myself fairly well read, but Perrin has noted many worthwhile books that I have never heard of, but which I will no doubt be tracking down in the months and years ahead. His list, I am glad to note, also overlaps my own somewhat, and we find in it such treasures as Lord Dunsany’s The Blessings of Pan, Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and Charles Williams supernatural thriller All Hallow’s Eve. He also includes works by James Branch Cabell, Stendhal, and Herbert Read. Many of Perrin’s titles I recognize from having passed over them on the shelves of used bookstores. Thanks to his enthusiastic endorsements and the knowledge that his judgments ring true, I now know to stop and give them a second look. I’m happy to recommend A Reader’s Delight to all my fellow bibliophiles.

Tales of the Inquisition, or, You Can't Torquemada Anything!

2010-11-08T15:09:00.005-07:00

The Inquisition: A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church by E. Vacandard

This work, published in English translation in 1907, was apparently an attempt to rebut the perceived anti-Catholicism of the 19th century chronicler of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea. In a short work, the author traces the Church attitudes towards heresy from the earliest Church Fathers through the 14th century. One has to give some grudging admiration to the author’s perseverance in asserting, in the face of the most heinous evidence, that although the Inquisition was bad, it wasn’t quite as bad as some would make it out to be. His is a decidedly uphill battle.

With memory fresh from its own brutal suppression under the Roman Empire prior to Constantine, the early doctors of the Church adopted a rather gentle approach to heresy. In his Divinae Institutiones (308 AD), Lactantius wrote: “If you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, by tortures and by crime, you no longer defend it, but pollute and profane it. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion.” While Tertullian wrote harshly of the Gnostic heresies, he likewise declared that “(i)t is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his convictions. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion.” The preferred method of dealing with heretics and apostates was that which could be traced back to St. Paul: simple excommunication. Augustine, a former Manichean who also dealt with the Donatist schism in North Africa, began with a policy of absolute tolerance which ultimately evolved into a reasoning that errant sheep must be goaded back into the fold, sometimes with firm measures (flogging is acceptable, as was exile), but that the death penalty was contrary to the ideal of Christian charity. His is an interesting evolution, inasmuch as he had to contend with secular authorities for whom the death penalty was justified in cases of groups fomenting civil unrest, a perspective which Augustine ultimately noted had some justification.

Over the next few centuries, as the corpus of canon law grew, the Church found ways (albeit with some dissention) of utilizing the powers of the civil authorities as a means of punishing heretics, which meant that although the Church could identify and condemn heretics, their hands stayed “clean” as the guilty parties were handed over to the State for punishment. The condemnation and execution of the heretic Priscillian in the late 4th century was an early instance of this procedure, although it was a controversial one at the time. It was during the years from 1000 to 1250 that a great leap towards the classic model of the Inquisition took place. The irruption into Western Europe of the Manichean (later Cathar) sect shook the Church hierarchy, which saw in the sect a strong vehicle for undermining Church authority, and a rival ideology in its own right. (A threat that may seem rather odd to our eyes, as the Cathars condemned equally marriage and procreation, hardly a model for exponential growth.) The logic, which echoed earlier formulations, was that heresies such as this represented nothing less than treason against God. As it was long established that the punishment for treason against the State was death, how could treason against the Creator be any less serious? The suppression of the Cathars was intense and brutal, and increasingly went well beyond the more humane punishments of imprisonment and/or confiscation of property. Taking a cue from Germany and northern France, the authorities of which more often than not prescribed the stake for “anti-social” activities, the Ecclesiastical authorities did not long dwell on the theological aspects of the Cathar errors. It is in the chapters dealing with the “anti-social” and “anti-Catholic” aspects of the Cathar/Albigensian heresy that Vacandard is most vehement in his assertions, asserting with no small level of hyperbole that if the rigorous ideal of chastity promulgated by the Cathars was allowed to be realized, “the human race would have disappeared from the earth in a few years.” He concludes with the breathtaking statement that “(i)n bitterly prosecuting the Cathari, the Church truly acted for the public good.”

The next portion of the book deals with the establishment of what we have come to know as the classic model of coercion in the Church, the monastic (i.e. Dominican and Franciscan) Inquisition. Vacandard notes that the true beginning of the Inquisition dates to the Sicilian Code of Frederic II, prepared in response to Gregory IX’s request that heretics be prosecuted with utmost severity. It became codified that all suspected heretics were to be tried by an ecclesiastical tribunal, with the guilty and unrepentant being condemned to the stake. The persecution was an active one, with bishops and archbishops being directed to visit once a year or more any parish where heresy was thought to exist. One or two “trustworthy” men were then compelled to denounce any citizen whose mode of thought or living deviated from that of the “ordinary Catholic”. It was the reluctance or ineptness of the bishops to engage in such practices, with such latitude for abuse that compelled the Pope to put the real power of the Inquisition in the hands of the mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans. The procedures established under the Inquisition were, to our sensibilities, atrocious. Suspected heretics were not informed of who might have given their names to the authorities, they were not allowed counsel, and witnesses in their defense were rarely given the opportunity to appear (and most likely wouldn’t have, given the risk of associative guilt). All these were considered by the Inquisitors to be adequate “safeguards” against abuse, although we find them tragically laughable today. The accused had a simple choice: abjure his heresy and repent, or deny heresy and suffer the consequences. Penance might range from (among other minor humiliations) having to wear the yellow cross for a period of time to confiscation of property and imprisonment. Quoting Lea, Vacandard notes that the “Inquisitor never condemned to death, but merely withdrew the protection of the Church from the hardened and impenitent sinner who afforded no hope of conversion, or from him who showed by relapse that there was no trust to be placed in his pretended repentance.” In other words, there was no appeal to individual conscience in the face of the authority of the Church.

Next, the establishment of the use of torture in 1252 under the papacy of Innocent IV is discussed. Vacandard makes some objection that the heinous activities of the Inquisitors did not necessarily echo the directives of the Popes, who “exercised a supervision which was always just and at times most kindly.” I need not go into the details of the cruel procedures inflicted by secular authorities under the “direction” of the Inquisitors, but suffice it to say that they do not bear out Vacandard’s summation that “we must at least give [the Church] credit of insisting that torture ‘should never imperil life and limb’”. It is interesting to note that he admits that, although they did utilize hideously cruel means of extracting confessions, the Inquisitors did in fact realize “so well that forced confessions were valueless, and that they required the prisoner to confirm them after he had left the torture chamber.” It was the fact that it was the confession taken outside the torture chamber that counted as “official” that allowed the preceding torture to be downplayed, a tactic that plays right into Vacandard’s hands as an apologist for the Church.

The remainder of the book is largely a summation of what was discussed before, with emphasis on the thinking of theologians and canonists on the purpose and methods of the Inquisition, which saw heresy first and foremost as an offense against God. By the end, Vacandard’s attempts to mitigate the worst excesses of the Inquisition as being subsequently exaggerated, or being prosecuted with a cruelty beyond that prescribed by the Papacy, or being simply reflective of the harsh times in which they occurred ring hollow. The Inquisition was symptomatic of a pervasive mindset in which deviation from a dominant ideology was simply not allowed, and could be punishable by anything ranging from confiscation of property to imprisonment to death. It was the evolving political situation in Europe, and the rise of the Protestant reformation, quite bloody in its own right (John Calvin’s condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus was hardly more humane than the persecutions of the Catholic Church) that slowly reined in the Church’s coercive authority, not any great humanistic awakening on its own part.

If one reads Vacandard’s apologetics with a critical eye, this is not (considering its age) a bad short summary of the history of the Inquisition. For the gruesome, gothic details, Lea’s work remains entertaining. For another perspective, we have Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, which treats in exhaustive detail the persecution of converted Jews in Catholic Spain, an area ignored in this study.

This work is available through Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/inquisitionacri01vacagoog), and in a reprint edition as linked below.

City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems by James Thomson

2010-10-28T20:40:00.006-07:00

My LibraryThing friend and Master of the Chapel of the Abyss ben waugh recently led me to a consideration of Thomson’s work. Of the poems in this volume (available on Internet Archive), most of which I have admittedly only skimmed, none carries the force of the title piece (although “Sunday Up the River” contains a nice tribute to my beloved Jameson’s whiskey). “City of Dreadful Night” is an extended night wanderer’s meditation on the vanity of life and the comforts of the grave’s dreamless sleep. It is a kind of British cousin to the more exquisitely constructed - but thematically similar - German masterpiece Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura.

Atheistic at heart, the wanderer cannot help a knife thrust at the great deceiver, the absent God, author of this deficient world, who created man in a spirit of mockery –

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

There is, in a litany of circumstances, a refrain that speaks of the vanity of human wishes in a meaningless existence -

I wake from daydreams to this real night.

And yet there is some comfort in the void, in the liberation from the fear of God and the monotony of eternal life-

Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
.
.
.
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again

The wanderer views the corpse of a dead beauty on a bier before ending up in a dark and gloomy cathedral, in which a preacher, announcing the nonexistence of God, gives absolution to all who seek relief from the vale of tears and presents the holy sacrament of suicide -

Lo, you are free to end it when you will-
Without the fear of waking after death.

The gloomy odyssey continues on to the River of Suicides before ending before a colossal statue representing Durer’s Melancholia, the guardian spirit of the City of Dreadful Night. Thomson’s verse may not be a high poetic achievement, but it is an impressive statement of a subterreanean current of existential despair in the Victorian era.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

2010-10-21T10:52:00.006-07:00

The House, located in our dimension within a remote region of Ireland, is a simulacrum of its celestial archetype, a tear or portal in the universe by which the reclusive narrator of the tale encounters the terrifying gods of ancient lore, gigantic and inhuman. In the physical present, the house is besieged by swinish creatures from the depths of the earth, noxious beings which resemble a creature of unimaginable foulness which assails the narrator, driving him to madness at novel’s end.

Following several chapters in which the narrator seeks to preserve the house from the repugnant creatures, he is ultimately translated into a realm beyond time and space. As the physical universe accelerates, he witnesses the decline and death of the earth, the sun, and, ultimately, the universe before he returns, like Muhammad from his night journey, to his familiar study, with only one important bit of evidence revealing that his journey has not been a hallucination. The excursion through the dying cosmos is, it must be admitted, rather overlong, veering towards tediousness, but still with some remarkably evocative passages - not least being the recluse’s recognition that it is his own body that has crumbled to dust on the stone floor after the passage of eons. There is a certain unreality in the recluse’s tale that gives one pause to consider if his experiences are no more than madness, a worm in the brain. (His elderly sister, with whom he lives, seems quite unaware of the remarkable occurrences passing within the environs of the old house.)

It has been rightly noted that Hodgson’s tale is a transitional form between the gothic romance and Lovecraft’s tales of ancient evils and unspeakable interstellar horrors. Despite a curious and overindulged attention to the details of imagined astronomical phenomena – dark nebulae, green suns and the like – The House on the Borderland stands, even as it utilizes the standard narrative tricks of the nineteenth century while finding new ways to exploit old fears, as a classic work of modern horror.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

2010-09-29T08:28:00.007-07:00

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology

Expanded from a Harper's magazine article, this short and entertaining book introduces readers to the strange Museum of Jurassic* Technology in Culver City, California. With nary a trace of irony the proprietor, David Wilson, has stocked his storefront museum with weird and mind-boggling curiosities (a bat embedded in a solid block of lead, illuminated from the inside, no less!) and accompanies the exhibits with pitch-perfect museum quality explanatory texts and recorded remarks. The MJT is a Chinese box of fiction and reality - an elaborate puzzle begging to be deciphered.

The MJT is a modern iteration of the Renaissance and Enlightenment Wonderkammer, private museums which can consist of (as the name suggests) a collection of curiosities exhibited in a cabinet or an entire suite of rooms given over to the bounty of natural oddities encountered during the first centuries of European exploration and discovery. David Wilson's cabinet is chock full of imaginative and awe-inspiring panoramas and exquisitely detailed minutiae, and has a healthy cult following among museum professionals. Weschler's fascination with the MJT is genuine and his story (which he seems reluctant to put to bed) is enthusiastically told.

The second half of the book, an expansion of the narrative, looks at the history of the Wunderkammer in general, and Weschler doggedly runs down connections and convergences between some of the more famous ones and the MJT. One feels admiration for Wilson's having pieced together such a remarkably seamless reality, while still feeling a tinge of regret for seeing some of his minor secrets revealed. Weschler also cites some apparently remarkable books on the history of wonder cabinets, works which are, alas, ridiculously rare and expensive, but to which Wilson clearly had access. This book is a good exposition of our ancestors' curiosity about the world of wonders around them, and a reminder that our world is no less wonder-full.

*As a note of explanation, Jurassic in Mr. Wilson's imagination refers not to the time of the terrible lizards, but rather to a what is prosaically known as the Nile River Delta.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson

2010-09-07T21:37:00.005-07:00

Shirley Jackson was always quite effective, in her own way, in portraying the inner life of the psychically disturbed. This tale in the tradition of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a signal bit of American Gothic, with a proto-feminist twist.

Two sisters, one quite mad, and an old uncle have sequestered themselves on the family estate after one of the sisters has done off the rest of the (apparently) unpleasant family with arsenic. They live in a reasonably comfortable stasis until the arrival of a male cousin whose motives seem torn between freeing the older sister into society and plundering the family's hidden weath. His presence breeds resentment and threatens the delicate balance, until a crisis is reached on one dreadful, apocalyptic night when the house burns and is trashed by vengeful villagers right out of an old Frankenstein movie. Jackson does not end the novel there, but instead shows how a new normalcy is built in the chaos by the beleagured sisters. This is a popular novel that is, at the same time, deserving of its reputation as a modern classic.

Note: I have the classic 1963 Popular Library paperback edition of this book (shown above), however, the link below is to the recent Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, with the wonderfully weird cover illustration by Thomas Ott.

The Last Museum by Brion Gysin

2010-08-27T09:48:00.012-07:00

Of an older generation, Brion Gysin was a precursor to the Beats and a catalyst for them and for the bohemian generation that followed. His activities and interactions are the stuff of legend: he introduced Burroughs to the Dadaist “cut-up” method of writing; he worked as a multimedia artist, creating the “Dreamachine”, a stroboscopic device alleged to alter consciousness; he was proprietor of the “1001Nights” bistro in Tangier; he was artist in residence at the Beat Hotel in Paris; he submitted a recipe for hashish brownies to the Alice B. Toklas cookbook; he did avant-garde sound recordings and introduced the master musicians of Joujouka (his former house band) to Brian Jones.

But for all his accomplishments, Gysin ended his life in 1986 (succumbing to cancer) with a wistful regret for having not pursued specific disciplines more diligently. He was a catalyst for so many, but in his own career he was all over the place. His was a peripatetic existence, following whatever artistic whim took his fancy at any particular time (he might now be classified by heartless psychiatry as ADHD). There is perhaps a lack of rigor in his work, more than made up for by enthusiasm, and in the end he was more muse than artist (Burroughs describes him in the Introduction as “the only man I ever respected” and “regal without a trace of pretension”). Still his art is worth seeing, and as such he is currently the subject of a major retrospective at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Arts. It goes without saying that he died poor.

The Last Museum is Gysin’s final novel, a loose and freewheeling remembrance of the famous Beat Hotel, told as postmortem adventure in the Bardo, the intermediate death state of Tibetan Buddhism. The work itself is, sadly, a truncated version of Gysin’s much longer unpublished text. There is a progression through the rooms of the Hotel, which is itself being removed piecemeal by the Interdead International Movers to a vast museum site on the San Andreas faultline (the west is the realm of the dead), where it will share space with the Sphinx, the Louvre, the Acropolis, and other detritus of human civilization. Anyone hoping for a simple and straightforward narrative will be disappointed; there are a dizzying number of shifts of name, gender, and sexual orientation, quite often within the same sentence. One of the pleasures of this book is in the anecdotes, the thinly disguised references to the Beats and their associates that we tease from the text. Gysin’s reimagining of his life as he travels the stygian stream of memory is scatological, raunchy, at times tedious, and at times hilarious. Apparently a life of Rabelaisian pansexuality was, in his last years, Gysin’s fondest recollection. He reveals himself - and I say this with no malice - as the pervert’s Dante.

And yet the revelry - or the summary memory of it, the blessed and profane recollection- hurtles toward an end. After 28 days in the Bardo, the soul becomes rank. It was not meant to be stationary, and our hero, our Little PG, our Gysin surrogate with all memory spent yearns for that state to which all good Buddhists aspire: release. Despite the comfort, or horror, of a vision of the interconnected totality of existence, the obligatory peek at that Great White Light, and a cameo appearance by the Devourer of Souls, he longs for that laminated Get Out of Jail card, he seeks to beat cheeks from this mortal coil and not look back. “There is no one in this world I want to see again.” Before this freedom, the freedom which comes from nonexistence, all others pale. But is the sensuality a sacrament or an impediment? Does the road of excess lead, to paraphrase Blake, to enlightenment? Can the story have a happy ending?

Brion Gysin died at the age of 70. Perhaps in the fullness of time he (or some constituent elements of him) will return to this plane of existence in yet another fleshy iteration and read his own text, and remember.

Note: Nothing Is True - Everything is Permitted is a biography of Brion Gysin written by John Geiger. I have not read it, but it seems to have elicited favorable reviews.

The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues by Giles Oakely

2010-08-18T21:50:00.005-07:00

This book was first published in 1976 as a companion volume to a BBC television documentary series on the blues. That such a deeply American musical form would receive such capable treatment from an Englishman should come as no surprise, given the enthusiasm for the blues felt by a generation of British musicians that included Clapton, Page, John Mayall, The Rolling Stones, et al. The book forms a social history as much as a musical one, giving documentary testimony to the grinding poverty and oppression suffered by generations of African Americans in the Deep South. The arc of the blues, of classic blues as it were, was a relatively short one. The blues developed from a variety unschooled musical forms - field hollers, jug band music, stomps and other manifestations that were miles away from what was considered respectable music at the turn of the 20th century. When in 1903 W.C. Handy, a formally trained musician and bandleader, heard a guitarist on a train platform in Clarksdale, Mississippi playing with an old knife for a slide, and later had a request for his orchestra to forgo his more accomplished tunes in favor of “native music”, he began to see the potential of the blues. Handy’s revelation was a somewhat conscious turning, as opposed to the pianist Jellyroll Morton, who absorbed the music in whorehouses, gambling joints and dives along the Gulf Coast. The Holy Land of the Blues was the fertile delta between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers near Clarksdale, where the music - unamplified as it was, and performed by men (and women) who toiled all day at hard labor - had to be loud to compete with the whoops and shouts of the gamblers, johns and drunkards in some pretty rough spots scattered among isolated communities. Even as the music spread, west to Texas and up to Chicago, it was looked down upon as a very low, unsophisticated type of music, the music of the downtrodden and the poor, attitudes that persisted even among some black communities as the momentum of the music wound down in the postwar era. The blues largely remained a rural music, despite being carried to and being revitalized in cities such as Chicago, Memphis, and Dallas. It was in some ways analogous to the “hillbilly” music of the southern whites that would coalesce into country music, and there was clearly some cross influence going on, even if the performers tended to labor under segregation.

Oakley’s book, while putting the music in social context, does not skimp on discussions of the great blues artists of the 20’s and 30’s such as Mamie Smith, Peetie Wheatstraw (“the Devil’s Son-in-Law”), “Ragtime Texas”, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Victoria Spivey, and the big-hearted Ma Rainey. The legends are also here – Charley Patton (whose only known photo, with his serious mien, belies the man’s expansive sense of humor), Skip James, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Son House – as well as the postwar greats such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Elmore James. If you are lucky enough to have recordings of these artists, you’ll want to supplement your reading with some listening. When Oakely and company were preparing their documentary, they had opportunity to interview some of the greats and get some terrific anecdotes. (A vaudeville performer tells the notoriously unlovely Ma Rainey that there are only two things he’s never seen, “an ugly woman and a pretty monkey”, to which Rainey replies “bless you, darlin’”.) This book is a sympathetic, informative, and entertaining history, with an emphasis on the singularly remarkable blues of the 20’s and 30’s, and is well worth the attention of any blues enthusiast.

Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg

2010-08-17T17:01:00.003-07:00

A short psychological novel, told through the diary entries of a Swedish doctor in his mid-thirties, at the crossroads of isolated youth and lonely middle age. Doctor Glas has largely gone through life as an observer, a non-participant. His attraction to women is limited to those already flushed with love, to who he is invisible. His unknowing nemesis is the toadish elder clergyman, Reverend Gregorius, who inspires in the doctor an almost tangible disgust. By some coincidence, the clergyman’s young wife comes to Doctor Glas’s consulting room. She has an embarrassing anguish: her husband, an old hypocrite whom she has come to despise, is given to forcing himself upon her sexually in the name of the divine duty of procreation, a revelation that the doctor finds confirms his repugnance towards Gregorius. Glas promises to assist her – to give testimony to the Reverend that his wife is of a delicate constitution and must practice abstinence for the sake of her health. Despite his acceptance of this diagnosis, the Reverend cannot resist, and after a few days is once again going after his bride like a satyr in an attack that she characterizes as a rape. A new ruse must be devised, that of giving Gregorius the impression that he has a severe heart ailment, one which could be fatal in the event of sexual overexertion.

This sequence of events ties into the doctor’s increasing perception of himself as a kind of self-appointed savior to the wife (even as it conflicts with his judgmental attitudes towards the sexual responsibilities of his other patients). He is already aware, from her confession, that she has a lover, and the doctor has easily determined who this might be. The doctor’s motivations towards the wife are not overtly sexual, although he finds himself having disconcerting dreams in which she appears naked, offering him a rose, like a maiden to a knight. In the course of the novel, Glas becomes more obsessed with, and agitated at, the problem of Gregorius. He begins to look for means by which he can free Mrs. Gregorius completely, so that she may live a happy life with (who the doctor imagines to be) her true love. But Glas’s isolation increases even as he seeks to put his plan into effect, and he comes to a too-late realization that his perceptions of the situation (and of his own motivations) may not be as he believes them to be. Soderberg’s 1904 novel is, like the works of such contemporaries as Strindberg and Schnitzler, remarkable for its modernity, addressing issues such as abortion and euthanasia against a backdrop of Freudian analytics of the self and the nature of obsession. A perceptive introduction by Margaret Atwood is included in this edition.

Accumulated Wisdom

2010-07-30T13:08:00.003-07:00

"This world is fulla people seekin' the advantage of other people...Now this type of person don't care about anything, and the least thing he get, he'll make out with it. He don't have no sympathy for those that are tryin' to do right and be honest. You go to Dallas, Texas - there's a place where you can pay fifty cents and see anything you want. Some guys there would sell their brothers. Crimes against nature: make you sick to your stomach.

I never did seek for those things, but it's a good idea sometimes to experience things because heaps of times everybody ain't gonna tell you exactly how things are. You might think or say 'Aw, I don't believe that humans would do things like that.' Well, you take your fifty cents then you go there and you'll see things you may not think are existing in the world."

Skip James,
quoted in Giles Oakley,
The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues

Painted Veils (1920) by James Huneker

2010-07-30T11:04:00.005-07:00

I happen to think that one of the worst things an author can do in a novel is to constantly remind his or her readers of books that a) are much better than the one that they have written, and b) they really ought to be reading instead. James Huneker’s decadent American novel, an attempt to bring the fin de siècle sensibilities of Paris to Manhattan is at bottom a rather melodramatic morality play. It is the story of Ulick Invern, the Paris-born son of an Irish drunk who, thanks to his maternal grandfather’s money, has managed to secure a place for himself on the outskirts of New York society, while not neglecting his studies of Baudelaire and Huysmans and the practical application of Baudelairean aesthetic theory in his field work among the demimonde . (To be fair, the pursuit of whores seems to be the boy’s greatest vice – he neither smokes nor drinks - and Huneker doesn’t quite convince me that he even engages in this particular vice wholeheartedly. Honestly, for a rakish protagonist, he’s a bit of a windbag.)

The apparent catalyst for the novel is the appearance, subsequent long absence, and reappearance of a naturally gifted soprano from Virginia, Miss Esther Brandes (who calls herself Easter, and who takes the professional name Ishtar, and who much later comes to be known as Dame Lucifer – but I’m getting ahead of myself). It appears that Easter and Ulick have had some previous acquaintance, having gotten swept up into the company of some sort of Negro temperance cult known as The Holy Yowlers (or rather, “De Holy Yowlers” - Huneker employs all the stereotypes of his age, down to the rolling eyes and blubbery lips). Of course, the leader of this little revival, one Brother Rainbow, gathers his sheep into a tent, blows out the candles, and an orgy ensues. When Easter and Ulick meet up again, their relationship is colored by their recollections of who may have bumped into whom, accidentally on purpose, when the joint went dark and the night was rent with animalistic cries of pain and ecstasy. Woo Hoo!

Most of the novel takes place without Easter. Ulick, in her absence, has to contend with his growing feelings for the sister of his seminarian friend Milt, an independent but sweet girl with a strong mother instinct which creepily manifests itself in the form of imaginary children and a large doll with whom she shares her bed. There is also, to round out the cast, a rich jackass with a loud checkered suit and slicked back hair (or so I imagine him) who keeps showing up to make an ass of himself, a sort of sexually ambiguous friend who moves the story along with his catty gossip, and a nicely stacked prostitute.

Well, I won’t go into a lot more details. I’ll just say that there is a lot of decadent intellectualizing in the pages that follow, most of it coming from Ulick (who has the unfortunate tendency to sort of “go off” on extended flights of aphoristic fancy, none of which are worth quoting, but many of which revolve around sex and a highly romanticized view of bodily excretions) but also, for the sake of some kind of balance, from his friend Milt the seminary student, who tries his damndest to throw a wet blanket on all the fun by quoting Thomas a Kempis. Aside from the whore-mongering, the best bits involve an elaborate orgy (Yes! Another one!) staged for the benefit of a select crew of young bucks. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hunecker, as if to prove that he isn’t just some staid ol’ music critic, tries with all his faint might to shock his 1920 audience. For a while, I was afraid there wouldn’t be any homosexuality, but he managed to get a whiff of lesbianism in just before the closing pages.

I’ve noted that Mr. Huneker had previously issued a work entitled Egoists: A Book of Supermen, in which he interprets for his American audience all the most exciting intellectual celebrities of 19th century Europe: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Huysmans, Wagner, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, Flaubert, Barres (whoever the hell he is). He manages to name drop most of these figures into this book. I can’t fault his enthusiasm for at least some of those then-electrifying figures, but as a philosophical novel, Painted Veils is a bit of a dud.

Note: An item of interest pertaining to the orgy scene in the novel:
http://jameslbreese.blogspot.com/2009/02/james-l-breese-pie-girl-dinner-by-jim.html

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf

2010-07-22T13:48:00.003-07:00

The violent incursion of the Norman princes and their fanatical allies into Asia Minor and the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard in the closing years of the 11th century could be reasonably characterized as the last of the great barbarian invasions. Through a 200+ year ebb and flow of hostilities and alliances, the establishment of so-called “Frankish” states in the Middle East left deep scars upon the Muslim psyche which the intervening centuries have not effaced. The narrative of this misadventure is by turns thrilling and horrifying – with episodes of gracious chivalry exhibited between sworn enemies alternating with the most heinous atrocities.

The exploits of the combatants have passed into folklore. For generations, western children heard the tales of Richard Coeur de Lion, while the eminent and just Saladin, an ethnic Kurd, remains a strong symbol of Arab resistance. More recently, the well known chronicles have been supplemented with eyewitness accounts from the other side, most readily accessible in Francesco Gabrieli’s excellent anthology Arab Historians of the Crusades. The Lebanese journalist and novelist Amin Maalouf, using these writings as a starting point, has spun a compelling narrative history. As one might expect in a popular history, battles and personalities dominate. One gets a sense of the Western war machine, well disciplined in the beginning by the desire to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem. Upon first view, the Franks were terrifying – mounted giants with armor impenetrable to Asian arrows and an apparently inhuman bloodlust. We also see the weaknesses of the Muslim princes – rivalry and intrigues that undermined united resistance, a highly developed code of honor which often compelled them to release prisoners following victory (leaving them free to fight another day), the tragic inability to establish mechanisms for succession, leading to violent bloodbaths which weakened their ability to resist the invader.

We also see that, upon establishment of the Crusader states, the Franks were quite willing to “go native” to some degree. They learned Arabic, made use of the medicine and sciences which the Arabs inherited from the Greeks (the Muslims were shocked at the quality of medical care exhibited by the Franks in the early years) , and introduced a tolerant and well-organized variant of feudalism. On the defensive, the Muslim princes never ceased to have some measure of disdain for the Westerners and, understandably, learning the languages of the intruders was not a priority. It took time for the Arabs to develop coherent strategies to push back against the Westerners, most notably exhibited in the genius of emirs such as Zangi and Saladin.

Over the years (and with some exceptions), the presence of the Crusaders became a tolerated fact of life, and a certain balance was achieved. All this changed, however, in the late 13th century, with the Mongol invasion of Persia and Syria. Many prominent Mongols had sympathies with Nestorian Christianity, and were thus potential allies of the weakened Crusaders. At one point, this threat was so great that Islam might have been, with the loss of its heartlands, reduced to a marginal religion at best. Yet again fate and blind luck intervened. Fighting over Khanic succession and some lucky breaks for the fierce Mamluk military machine enabled the Tartar threat to be minimized and the last of the Crusader strongholds to be reduced and their knights expelled. The dream of Jerusalem faded as the Europeans returned home to fight their own interminable battles on native soil, and a new political entity under the Ottoman Turks gained ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades were, ultimately, an exercise in futility.

Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf

2010-06-10T22:43:00.004-07:00

In the year 1666 (“the Year of the Beast”), mystically inclined adherents of the three Abrahamic religions have reason to believe a transformation of the world is at hand. In a small Levantine town, a bookseller and antiquities dealer named Balthasar Embriaco, descendant of an impoverished Genoese house, becomes aware through the agency of a Russian pilgrim of the existence of a book of Islamic scholarship which purports to reveal the secret and powerful “hundredth name of God.” Astonishingly, the only known copy of this rare book is subsequently given to him under strange circumstances, and is just as quickly whisked away from him by a French diplomat who visits Balthasar’s shop at the very moment he prepares to examine the precious tome. While Balthasar prides himself on his lack of superstition and what we nowadays would call his moral compass (in his case, a weathervane might be a more apt symbol), he is also – as we shall see in the course of the story - easily manipulated, and the more pious of his nephews convinces him that he must pursue this most divine book.

The narrative takes Balthasar and company to Constantinople, to Smyrna and Chios, to Genoa and even to London through a convoluted series of coincidences and unlikely circumstances. Who could not see in this odyssey the hand of Fate? Along the way, he falls in love with the wife (widow?) of a notorious brigand and develops intimacies with a series of sympathetic confidants, including a kindly and skeptical Jew, a rich Genoese merchant (who sees in Balthasar – the descendant of a noble yet almost extinct house – the perfect potential son-in-law), a dour ex-Puritan chaplain who almost incidentally possesses what Balthasar seeks. There are also myriad minor characters, including the mystical false messiah (and subsequent convert to Islam!) Sabbatai Sevi.

Now, given the geographical and philosophical distances traveled in this novel, one would expect that the text would progress towards some essential unity – some grand design or intrigue in which each character has a secret function in facilitating Balthasar’s odyssey. It seems we are in the midst of a grand novel of 15th century conspiracy, and we furrow our brows trying to tease out the connections and significances of people and events. But we do so in vain. Throughout the book, Balthasar is torn between his preferred rational skepticism and the strong pull of apocalyptic mysticism and superstition. Clearly, the signs are there pointing to an impending transformative conflagration, either in the form of Sevi’s rumored dominion yet to come or in the fire that engulfs London before the protagonist’s eyes. Yet such dramatically definitive resolutions are not in the cards for poor Balthasar, the supreme ditherer, for whom all vital decisions are made either by others or by the hand of Fate. He is, ultimately, soft and indecisive, given to the attractions of comfort. When he hits a new town, the first order of business is to find out where the good food is, and if it’s delivered by a plump and buxom redhead, so much the better. Is this a man who really wants to know the secret name of God? Given the opportunity, his eyes go dark, either from psychological blockage or his inherent unworthiness in the eyes of the Divine.

In the end, the great treasure is all forgotten in the face of an impending betrothal to the rich merchant’s teenage daughter, the book destined to be left “discreetly on a shelf in some bookshop, so that one day, years hence, other hands may take it up and look avidly into it, eyes which may by then be able to read it.”

Live Together, Die Alone

2010-05-23T14:57:00.005-07:00

The Birds Discover the Simorgh

The thirty birds read though the fateful page
And there discovered, stage by detailed stage,
Their lives, their actions, set out one by one -
All that their souls had ever been or done:
And this was bad enough, but as they read
They understood that it was they who’d led
The lovely Joseph into slavery -
Who had deprived him of his liberty
Deep in a well, then ignorantly sold
Their captive to a passing chief for gold.
(Can you not see that at each breath you sell
The Joseph you imprisoned in that well,
That he will be the king to whom you must
Naked and hungry bow down in the dust?)
The chastened spirits of these birds became
Like crumbled powder, ant they shrank with shame.
Then, as by shame their spirits were refined
Of all the world’s weight, they began to find
A new life flow towards them from that bright
Celestial and ever-living Light -
Their souls rose free of all they’d been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh of the world - with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end.
They see the Simorgh - at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one.
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound)
The meaning of these mysteries that confound
Their puzzled ignorance - how is it tru
That ‘we’ is not distinguished here from ‘you’?
And silently their shining Lord replies:
‘I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendor see
Themselves, their own unique reality;
You came as thirty birds and therefore saw
These selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;
If you had come as forty, fifty - here
An answering forty, fifty, would appear;
Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far,
It is yourselves you see and what you are.’
(Who sees the Lord? It is himself each sees;
What ant’s sight could discern the Pleiades?
What anvil could be lifted by an ant?
Or could a fly subdue an elephant?)
‘How much you thought you knew and saw; but you
Now know that all you trusted was untrue.
Though you traversed the Valley‘s depths and fought
With all the dangers that the journey brought,
The journey was in Me, the deeds were Mine -
You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine.
And since you came as thirty birds, you see
These thirty birds when you discover Me,
The Simorgh, Truth’s last flawless jewel, the light
In which you will be lost to mortal sight,
Dispersed to nothingness until once more
You find in Me the selves you were before.’
Then, as they listened to the Simorgh’s words,
A trembling dissolution filled the birds -
The substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shade before the sun;
Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.
The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned.

From The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar

"The Hangman" by Maurice Ogden

2010-05-03T22:24:00.002-07:00

Into our town the hangman came,
smelling of gold and blood and flame.
He paced our bricks with a different air,
and built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
only as wide as the door was wide
with a frame as tall, or a little more,
than the capping sill of the courthouse door.

And we wondered whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal? What the crime?
The hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were with dread,
we passed those eyes of buckshot lead.
Till one cried, "Hangman, who is he,
for whom you raised the gallows-tree?"

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye
and he gave a riddle instead of reply.
"He who serves me best," said he
"Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree."

And he stepped down and laid his hand
on a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for anothers grief
at the hangmans hand, was our relief.

And the gallows frame on the courthouse lawn
by tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way and no one spoke
out of respect for his hangmans cloak.

The next day's sun looked mildly down
on roof and street in our quiet town;
and stark and black in the morning air
the gallows-tree on the courthouse square.

And the hangman stood at his usual stand
with the yellow hemp in his busy hand.
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike,
and his air so knowing and business-like.

And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done,
yesterday with the alien one?"
Then we fell silent and stood amazed.
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."

He laughed a laugh as he looked at us,
"Do you think I've gone to all this fuss,
To hang one man? That's the thing I do.
To stretch the rope when the rope is new."

Above our silence a voice cried "Shame!"
and into our midst the hangman came;
to that mans place, "Do you hold," said he,
"With him that was meat for the gallows-tree?"

He laid his hand on that one's arm
and we shrank back in quick alarm.
We gave him way, and no one spoke,
out of fear of the hangmans cloak.

That night we saw with dread surprise
the hangmans scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
the gallows-tree had taken root.

Now as wide, or a little more
than the steps that led to the courthouse door.
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
half way up on the courthouse wall.

The third he took, we had all heard tell,
was a usurer..., an infidel.
And "What" said the hangman, "Have you to do
with the gallows-bound..., and he a Jew?"

And we cried out, "Is this one he
who has served you well and faithfully?"
The hangman smiled, "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows beam."

The fourth man's dark accusing song
had scratched our comfort hard and long.
"And what concern," he gave us back,
"Have you ... for the doomed and black?"

The fifth, the sixth, and we cried again,
"Hangman, hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick", said he, "that we hangman know
for easing the trap when the trap springs slow."

And so we ceased and asked now more
as the hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night
the gallows grew to monstrous height.

The wings of the scaffold opened wide
until they covered the square from side to side.
And the monster cross beam looking down,
cast its shadow across the town.

Then through the town the hangman came
and called through the empy streets...my name.
I looked at the gallows soaring tall
and thought ... there's no one left at all

for hanging ... and so he called to me
to help take down the gallows-tree.
And I went out with right good hope
to the hangmans tree and the hangmans rope.

He smiled at me as I came down
to the courthouse square...through the silent town.
Supple and stretched in his busy hand,
was the yellow twist of hempen strand.

He whistled his tune as he tried the trap
and it sprang down with a ready snap.
Then with a smile of awful command,
He laid his hand upon my hand.

"You tricked me Hangman." I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men,
and I'm no henchman of yours." I cried.
"You lied to me Hangman, foully lied."

Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye,
"Lied to you...tricked you?" He said "Not I...
for I answered straight and told you true.
The scaffold was raised for none but you."

"For who has served more faithfully?
With your coward's hope." said He,
"And where are the others that might have stood
side by your side, in the common good?"

"Dead!" I answered, and amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me.
"First the alien ... then the Jew.
I did no more than you let me do."

Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
none before stood so alone as I.
The Hangman then strapped me...with no voice there
to cry "Stay!" ... for me in the empty square.

Vanished Splendors: A Memoir by Balthus

2010-04-07T08:09:00.005-07:00

This “as told to” memoir of the painter Balthus leaves one wanting. If we expect some revealing statement as to why he painted such unusual portraits and tableaux, it isn’t here. Those famously unladylike young girls were, he assures us, not intended to have any (or rather, not as much as some would like to read into them) erotic appeal, but were rather created as an expression of transitional adolescent innocence, painted consciously in the manner of the Renaissance masters. Ok, I’m skeptical, but I’ll go along with it for argument’s sake. On a personal level, I must say that I find the artist’s paintings strangely compelling, interesting for their subtle surrealism (which he claims to abhor, but see the weird 1933 composition The Street, painted when he still had some obvious connection to that crowd), their overt creepiness (his portraits of Derain and Miro), and their occasional technical maladroitness (Cat with Mirror III, with the impossibly poor figure of the girl). And yet the paintings and drawings still have an undeniable mastery, particularly in works such as the Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre and The Children. Strangely, while this book contains several pages of photos of the artist, there are no illustrations of his paintings other than the self- portraits on the front and back covers .

Born into the Polish nobility, the painter’s father made the laughably bad decision to sink the family fortune into Russian railroad stock on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution (ouch!). The financial prospects of young Balthus and his brother were somewhat redeemed by what he refers to as a small legacy from another relative. Balthus spent the 20th century amongst the intellectual nobility of Europe. As a child, his mother played footsie with Rilke, who encouraged his artistic interests (Balthus published a picture “novel” as a child which revolved around the first of many cats who answered - or not, as cats do – to the name of Mitsou), and he casually name-drops the likes of Gide, Artaud, Picasso, Malraux, Fellini, etc. in the course of this memoir. (He also notes that Bono was a visitor to the chalet, although that may overstretch the term “intellectual nobility”.)

The main issues with this memoir are its repetitiveness and apparent coyness. Balthus stresses his indebtedness and kinship with the old masters such as Piero della Francesca and Poussin and his distrust of Breton and the Surrealists. He stresses (rightfully) the significance of his friendships with Rilke, Picasso, and Giacometti. He describes his favorite relaxations of contemplating the canvas with a cigarette and of stretching out in the chateau and letting Mozart’s operas wash over him, resounding through the empty rooms. He emphasizes that he is, as befitting old-school titled nobility, a conservative Catholic. As interesting as these facts may be, they are repeated quite too often, and there is no real depth or revelation to the memoir. There are some madding allusions to situations that call out for explanation : the relationship with his niece Frederique, with whom he lived before the Countess Setsuko came into his life being the most tantalizing bit of coyness. There is also the odd caption that reads “The painter and his daughter, Harumi, understand each other perfectly.” Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? Balthus’s relationship with his brother, the notorious author Pierre Klossowski de Rolla, is passed over quickly, in a chapter of less than a page (he sees his brother’s work as “transgressive”, lacking luminosity). He notes that Klossowski’s work is “a black diamond, while I try to paint starbursts, shuddering wings, and children’s flesh lightly touched by angels.” Okay, then.

I can’t help coming away from this memoir feeling that something has been hidden, that there is some dimension of honesty that is lacking. Whether deliberately, as of an old man whistling past a graveyard, or from some deeper sense of denial, I can’t say. The repetitiveness, if not born of senility, seems to suggest a strategy of “here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it”, and the absence of any reproductions of his paintings suggest that the artist would just as soon not be confronted with them as any sort of evidence to the contrary in terms of the image he is attempting to project. There are some lovely and strange passages, such as Balthus’s jaw-dropping confession that “I’ve never felt a real attraction to horror, ugliness, and oddness” and his wonderfully politically incorrect cultivation of “the aristocratic taste for displeasing”, which he attributes to the 19th century dandies. There are also some passages replete with unctuous piety. In the end, what we get in this book a nice portrait of the outer trappings of a man – the silk kimonos, the hundred-windowed chalet in the Alps, the aristocratic profile – but the inner man seems out of reach.

The Marquis of Bolibar by Leo Perutz

2010-03-31T08:18:00.005-07:00

This novel relates an unlikely series of events surrounding the annihilation of a garrison of occupying troops in a Spanish town during the peninsular war. The eponymous figure of the Marquis appears only briefly in these pages, yet he sets in motion the mechanism by which the German units of Napoleon’s army occupying the town of La Bisbal will be destroyed almost to a man, with one significant exception who survives not only to relate the incidences, but who also comes to strongly identify with the now-legendary Spanish nobleman.

Perutz’s tale is told with a certain lightness, as a group of German officers plot the sexual conquest of their Colonel’s new Spanish concubine who, in a book where the double and issues of identity play important roles, has an uncanny resemblance to the Colonel’s dead wife, whom the officers had managed to seduce in the past.

The story is told from the perspective of the 18 year old officer von Jochberg, and begins by relating how a wounded German officer eavesdrops on a conversation between one of Wellington’s officers, a guerrilla leader, and the Marquis in which the Marquis outlines a plot by which the garrison at La Bisbol may be destroyed. The plot relies on the ability of the Marquis to infiltrate the town incognito and give three signals intended to set the stage for its liberation. Unfortunately, in the guise of a poor mule-driver, the Marquis overhears the German officers planning their seduction, and he is taken out and summarily shot so that the secrecy of the planned seduction may be maintained. Before he dies, the muleteer asks that they fulfill a promise that he has made. When the officers ask for specifics, he replies cryptically “God will tell you.” The remainder of the novel details how the officers, both deliberately (driven by jealousy and lust) and unknowingly fulfill the doomed man’s plans.

The characters in this historical novel are finely and satirically drawn, and Perutz’s themes of the motivations of evil and the fluid nature of identity do not get in the way of the unlikely yarn at the core of the story. Originally published in Perutz’s Vienna, an English translation was first published in 1926. . It appears that an Austrian film based on this novel was made in 1922, with a UK production following in 1928. Perutz’s idiosyncratic novels were admired by Borges, Greene, and Calvino. It ought to be pointed out that Perutz makes sly reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew while at the same time lightly satirizing both Spanish piety and the contemptuous rationality of the Germans. The Marquis of Bolibar is a nice page-tuner - a worthy entertainment which concludes with a neat twist.

Ugetsu: Moonlight and Rain

2010-03-27T22:55:00.003-07:00

The supernatural tale has a significant history in East Asia. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, in the Dover edition and recently updated by Penguin has long been a favorite for browsing, with its enchanters, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. A couple of months ago, I enjoyed reading Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of some Japanese ghost stories in his In Ghostly Japan. These tales put me in a cosmically fortuitous state of mind when, browsing a nondescript bookstore in a Scottsdale strip mall, a copy of Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain fell into my unsuspecting hands. This is a collection of supernatural stories written in the 18th Century by Ueda Akinari, most with settings in medieval Japan and reflecting a worldview steeped in Buddhist (and Daoist) mythology and ultimately derived from the literature of Ming Dynasty China. (According to the introduction, Akinari was particularly indebted to the Chinese collection “New Tales for Lamplight”.) Moonlight and rain evoke romantic sentiments in the West, but translator Leon Zolbrod’s introduction explains that in Japan, ‘rain’ and ‘moon’ are contrasting qualities, with the former implying qualities such as life, love and passion, and the former evoking grief and melancholy, but wisdom and enlightenment as well.

The stories evoke those seemingly precise aesthetics of Japan - the scent of pine on a mountain road, the rustle of silk, the gentle sliding of a rice paper door - and also contrasting elements such as a ruined mansion, a hoard of rusting weapons, an abandoned temple and a skeleton among the weeds. One of the best stories is “The Lust of the White Serpent”, wherein a studious young man is repaid for an act of chivalry with an offer of marriage from a beautiful noblewoman. Little does he know that he is under a dangerous enchantment - that the fine mansion in which he reclines is a ruin and that the beautiful girl is in fact a noxious spirit endangering his very soul. In these tales, the dividing line between our world of illusion and the deeper world of the spirits is thinner than a gauze curtain.

It was also through this edition that I was made aware of Kenji Mizoguchi’s enchanting 1953 film “Ugetsu”, which reworks two of these stories (including the story mentioned above) along with a tale by de Maupassant into a parable of avarice, honor and seduction in the midst of a brutal civil war. The Criterion Collection edition of this film includes a beautifully done restoration of the film, a booklet with an essay and translations of the pertinent stories, and a lengthy documentary feature on the director.

Traditional and World Music

2010-03-05T08:39:00.008-07:00

I have been slowly cataloging my music collection on my LibraryThing account. I am about 1/6th through the vinyl, with most of the classical stuff entered except for multiple disk sets. Now I'm deeply into the traditional/world music, and it's been fun listening to forgotten recordings while working on the computer. As a result of this activity, I've come across a nice blog for fans of this type of music called "The World's Jukebox". This site is now listed on the blogroll. On this site, you'll also find links to sites "Excavated Shellac" and "The Old Weird America". If you enjoy ethnic and world music, I hope you'll enjoy these links.

To browse my collection in progress, look for the "Music" collection on my LibraryThing profile. Be warned - it is tragically uncool.

Photo: Makifat's Museum of Obsolete Technology. You may be happy to know that I've recently installed bigger and better speakers.

The Student of Prague (1913)

2010-02-06T23:49:00.007-07:00

With a screenplay by the controversial German author Hanns Heinz Ewers (author of Alraune and the classic horror story "The Spider"), IMBD gives "The Student of Prague" the distinction of being the first horror film.

The story is another iteration of the Faustian bargain, but is effective in a way that most silent films are not for modern viewers. The Devil or his emissary has once again struck a deal with a hapless soul, in this instance stealing the very soul from the student's mirror. Mischief and tragedy result as Balduin's doppelganger materialises to interfere in his courtship of the Countess. This 41 minute film builds an adequate atmosphere of paranoia in portraying Balduin's realization of the full significance of his bargain. The special effects utilized in this 97 year old film are restrained yet effective (the double stepping from the mirror is like something out of a Bunuel film).

A good appreciation of this film and its context as a forerunner of German Expressionism in film can be found at

http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/studentofprague1913.htm

Blaugast: A Novel of Decline by Paul Leppin

2010-02-02T11:13:00.007-07:00

Paul Leppin's Blaugast: A Novel of Decline is a chronicle of the degeneration and humiliation of a debauched syphilitic in old Prague. Blaugast is an office worker who spends his down time among the lowlifes of the saloons and whorehouses. Stumbling home one evening, he bumps into an old school chum who intrigues him with a question: "Are you interested in catastrophes?" He follows this fellow Schobotzki home where he meets, and invites home, the prostitute Wanda. Wanda quickly moves in, and, pleased to have a roof over her head and a free lunch in Blaugast, begins to indulge his every sexual whim and fantasy with her troupe of whores. There is a touch of the fetishist in Blaugast, and the sexual tableaus become more and more elaborate while Blaugast sinks deeper into debauchery, forsaking everything for these pleasures. When in a post-coital torpor, the prostitute Johanna confronts him accusingly: “Why are you doing this? It isn't worthy of you!" Faced with the shame of his degeneracy, Blaugast beings a downward spiral. He goes from master of the house to its pathetic servant - shining shoes, fetching water, sleeping in a dirty corner and soaking up the abuse of Wanda's “gentleman” callers.

He abandons the house to roam, as his syphilitic condition becomes more pronounced, ravaging him mentally and physically. He performs - for the amusement of tradesmen, the slumming well-to-do, and their whores - despicable acts for drinks of cognac; he accosts school girls in the park; his body begins to fold upon himself and his mind turns to mush; he remembers his past, sometimes cruel, encounters with women. Meanwhile, the disreputable Schobotzki, who runs a sleazy costume shop for the debauched, is being tormented by vandals, and is looking for retribution. This leads to a final brutal humiliation for Blaugast, a descent into the deepest pit of hell. But there remains a chance for grace, for some redemption in the arms of a lonely fallen angel….

Paul Leppin (1878- 1945) an older contemporary of Kafka, was a German Czech working as an accountant by day, and a decadent bohemian by night. As his reputation grew among the artistic set, his work was denounced as pornographic by the authorities. Still, he became a bridge between the Czech and German artistic communities, having been hailed by the Expressionist movement in Berlin. By age 60, his work was receiving recognition in prizes and awards. Disease and the Nazi occupation of Prague shadowed Leppin’s final years: he was tormented by the Gestapo (who may have suspected him of being a Jew) and his own syphilitic dementia. He died in April 1945. Twisted Spoon Press has helped rediscover and revive some of Leppin’s considerable oeuvre in English translation. This edition of Blaugast includes useful appendices on Leppin and his work.

The Marquise of O- and Other Stories by Heinrich von Kleist

2010-01-27T13:59:00.003-07:00

The introduction to this volume mentions, with regard to Kleist's Penthesilea, the Bacchae of Euripides. The anti-rationalism of that particular drama is a thread which runs through these stories of tragedy, violence, injustice and despair. Living in that rational age of Goethe (who spurned his one-time protege) and Schiller, and hot on the heels of the Enlightenment, Kleist (1777-1811) began his young adulthood with a plan for success. Whatever that plan may have been, it fell to pieces rather quickly, and Kleist lived the remainder of his short life in a state of restlessness and disillusionment. (A clue may be found in Kleist's reading of Kant, whose epistemological theory pulled the rug out from under Kleist's tender notions of the perfectability of man, an experience which seems to mirror that of the 20th century Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky.) This dissatisfaction with human nature and political and ecclesiastical authoritarianism are well reflected in these remarkable stories, which range from a ghost story ("The Beggarwoman of Locarno"), to tragic tales of love ("The Earthquake in Chile" and "The Betrothal in Santo Domingo"), to a chilling tale of kindness repaid with betrayal ("The Foundling"), a precursor of Kafka (the title story), and an excellent novella of a man driven to madness and violence by a corrupt and unresponsive bureaucracy. ("Michael Kohlhaas").

In addition to this venerable Penguin edition, Archipelago Books has recently published Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist, a collection of “short stories, novellas, and literary fragments". The aforementioned Penthesilea is included in the out-of-print Five German Tragedies, also published by Penguin, and in the collection of Kleist's plays in Continuum's excellent German Library series.

Fechner's Little Book of Life After Death

2009-12-21T11:26:00.003-07:00

Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a 19th century experimental psychologist and philosopher credited with several discoveries in perceptual psychology, such as the Weber-Fechner Law and the visual illusion called Fechner Color, in which colors may be perceived in a moving pattern of black and white. As per William James’ introduction to his Little Book of Life After Death (the present volume brings together this work and some supplementary materials from Fechner’s other writings), God for Fechner was “the totalized consciousness of the whole universe, of which the Earth’s consciousness forms an element, just as in turn my human consciousness and yours form elements of the whole earth’s consciousness.” One may see in Fechner a bit of the pantheist, or a forerunner of Bucke’s cosmic consciousness and Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious.

Fechner saw our life as an intermediate stage between fetal development and the third, postmortem, stage. Each stage is an outgrowth and fulfillment of the previous stage, as (in the timeworn analogy) the butterfly is the realization of the chrysalis. All is well and good, so far, for those willing to accept Fechner’s conception of meaningful existence, but then the good doctor makes a further leap and proposes that each human soul on this earth is an arena of influence for other souls existing in the afterlife, and that these souls, both good and evil, exert themselves through the individual‘s soul in such degree as the soul has affinity with these spirits. Sometimes one follows the better nature and guidance of these spooks, sometimes not.* Now, where Fecher has come up with this scenario, he doesn’t say. There is no appeal to precedent, although an illustration in the text gives one to believe that it is somewhat based on Fecher’s work with color and color blending. There is also a nod to the Great Man conception of history: “No man’s life is without consequences that remain always and eternally.” Fecher supports the sweet idea that when we think of the deceased, then live not only in memory, but are in fact brought to us spiritually, which naturally leads to a discussion of ghosts and why it’s not such a good thing to think of the dead too often.

All in all, Fechner’s hypothesis seems an odd and inadequate explanation for the workings of human consciousness, and given this, one’s sense of dubiousness (not to mention tedium) increases as one proceeds further into this book.

*One is also tempted to see the influence of Swedenborg in this conception.

Note: The edition under review is the Pantheon Books edition of 1943, with introduction by Willam James and preface by John Erskine. The link below is to a different edition.

Accumulated Wisdom

2009-11-17T13:31:00.003-07:00

Born in Kiev to Catholic Poles, Krzhizhanovsky was the youngest of five children, the only son, highly musical. As an adolescent, he secretly read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a deeply unsettling experience: "Before it had all seemed so simple: things cast shadows. But now it turned out that shadows cast things, or perhaps things didn't exist at all." Kant, as he put it, had erased the fine line between 'I' and 'not I.'"

-From the introduction to Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future (New York Review Books, 2009)

The Other Side by Alfred Kubin

2009-11-10T12:18:00.005-07:00

The Other Side, Alfred Kubin's only extended literary work, is a strange and fantastic dystopian nightmare, and a book which would make my list of 100 favorite books, if I were prone to making such lists.

The Central Asian "Dream Kingdom" established by the enigmatic Claus Patera is ruled by manipulation of the subconscious and furnished with the tarnished and threadbare cast-offs of Europe. It is to the capitol of the Dream Kingdom, the city of Perle - a place perpetually oppressed by grey skies - that the narrator is inexplicably summoned. The eccentric inhabitants of Perle live as if under a spell, subject to bizarre hallucinations and ruled by the secluded Patera. To the degree that Patera may be an emanation of Patera’s mind, it is subject to his increasing madness as events in the physical realm reflect the explosive violence of his mental disintegration.

Alfred Kubin was primarily a visual artist. The Penguin Modern Classics edition* includes drawings by Kubin and an autobiographical appendix. Born in 1877 in northern Bohemia, Kubin’s was a morbid personality, given to torturing small creatures in childhood and obsessing over death. He later fell under the thrall of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he considered the only reasonable response to life. He “found keen pleasure in dwelling in imagination on catastrophe and the upsurge of primeval forces”, a perspective that informs the cataclysmic climax of his novel. In his collected illustrations, Kubin’s dark and fantastic imaginings are a natural (or unnatural, as the case may be) progression from Redon’s cyclopic, grinning spiders and the sexual fetishism intimated in Rops. Click on David X's blog over there on the right for more about Kubin and his art.

*There is also an edition published by Dedalus (link below), which appears to be out of print.

The Origin of the Brunists by Robert Coover

2009-11-05T08:27:00.003-07:00

Written in 1966, way before he became a proponent of non-linear “hypertext” literature, Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists is an excellent narrative fiction detailing the rise of a religious cult in the aftermath of a coal mine disaster. There is a certain mastery of narrative in this first novel, realistically told, as Coover explores the motivations of several disparate characters over 500-plus pages.

The quiet lynchpin of the novel is one Giovanni Bruno, an Italian-American miner, rather dim and shiftless, and (like his near namesake) a bit of an apostate from the local Catholic church. The early chapters effectively portray the crude humor and dangerousness of the miners world. When one Oxford “Ferd” Clemens saves his young new partner from a sexually humiliating hazing deep in the mines, they slip into a side room to share a smoke, unaware of the deadly accumulation of noxious gases awaiting only the spark of a match to send the mine and 98 of its workers to the appropriately titled “kingdom come”.

By some random miracle, Bruno has sequestered himself in a tight spot, avoiding the death by asphyxiation that kills several co-workers. Overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning, he lingers in a coma for weeks before awakening to utter a very few cryptic words. By the time he awakens, there is an intimation of religious revival in the air, occasioned by a short enigmatic note left by another miner, the Reverend Ely Collins, to his wife. Rumors have also been circulated about a mystical white bird seen in the mine just before the disaster.

It is at this point that several characters, including former local golden boy, sexual conquistador, and newspaper owner “Tiger” Miller and Mrs. Eleanor Norton, a mystagogue with an unhealthy interest in teenage boys who receives signals from a transdimensional character named Domiron, descend upon Bruno and the widow Collins. With Norton as the catalyst, that most American of institutions - the apocalyptic cult - begins to form around Bruno and the “martyred” Reverend Collins. Against the backdrop of economic depression in the town of West Condon, and increasing suspicion of the cult by the Nazarene preacher Abner Baxter and local big wheel Ted Cavanaugh, the elements of the drama come together like cogs in a wheel, moving inexorably towards a explosive climax on The Hill of Redemption, formerly a makeout point near the mine known by the cognocenti as Cunt Hill.

Coover constructs the novel intricately and with fine and humane characterizations, although once can see the continued fascination with the male organ that first appeared in his first collection of stories, Pricksongs and Descants, and which has apparently continued in his later works. The experimentalism for which Coover is known, while present in this novel in a series of gnomic (and ignorable) italicized sections, do not interfere with the narrative. Humor and the pathos of shattered dreams and human gullibility imbue this novel with a distinctly timeless realism.

Claude Levi-Strauss

2009-11-04T12:08:00.006-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?hpw

Way back in 1979, entering my freshman year as an Anthropology undergrad at the University of Texas, I picked up a copy of Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked. This was the initial volume of a four volume work on structures of human thought. I took it back to the dorm, cracked it open...and was immediately mystified.

Levi-Strauss on myth was completely alien to the facile narrative-based comparative mythologies of Joseph "Masks of God" Campbell and Mircea Eliade. It took a perusal of The Savage Mind and two volumes of material on Structural Anthropology to start to get a handle on him. It didn't help that my first class on Levi-Straussian thought was taught by a disciple of his, Ira Buchler. Buchler came into class on the first day, stood thoughtfully for a few minutes, and then, in a barely audible monotone, started to relate a story of a turtle his daughter had found in the middle of the road. This led into a monologue so opaque that it wasn't until two classes later that one brave soul stood up and, speaking for the rest of us, made it known to Buchler that we had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Fortunately, things got better after that.

Over time, I drifted away from Levi-Strauss, and I understand that his theories have not aged particularly well, at least in American academia, where structuralism seems to have joined the field of sociobiology on the intellectual dustheap. But maybe this is a harsh, ill-informed, judgement on my part.

Still, once one gets into his mindset, he is a fascinating and intricate author and thinker. Despite the difficulties of his works, I can state unequivocably that his memoir of fieldwork*, Tristes Tropiques, is one of the classics of 20th century writing, no matter how you slice it. I still get goose bumps reading the final elegaic pages:

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

*Levi-Strauss, back in the 1930's, contributed to the "Tropical Forest Tribes" volume of the excellent Handbook of South American Indians, by far the most expensive book I had hitherto bought when I special-ordered it in the early 80's.

Thank You

2009-09-12T12:36:00.003-07:00

A quick "thank you" to old and new friends who follow this blog. I don't pay much attention to the social aspects of blogging, so I was quite surprised to have a look this morning and notice that I have a few "followers". I look forward to mining your very intelligent blogs for good books, films, images, and other pleasant diversions. I'm quite impressed with the amount of work you all put into your blogs! I hope to return the favor in the near future by linking to these blogs so that others may find and enjoy them.

On the negative side, knowing that someone is reading will goad me to put my sloth aside and work harder to come up with more thoughtful reviews and opinions!

Cheers, and happy reading!

-Maki

P.S. In case you don't know, I also have a sister site on blogger called "Tijuana Bible", dedicated to random images, unusual short films and strange old cartoons. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this site exists until a few minutes ago. I suppose I had better think about updating it.

Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood

2009-09-11T14:04:00.004-07:00

The weird stories of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) are supernatural in the truest sense. They testify to an awareness that the natural world is greater and more powerful than the puny destiny of man. Blackwood the nature-mystic holds the certitude that there are deeper forces at work in the universe, of which man is ignorant and before which he is helpless. These forces are not malignant per se, but are rather of such immensity of power and so mysterious in their purpose that before them man is but an insignificant microbe. The horror in Blackwood is the realization that modern man is insignificant to the degree that nature hardly deigns to perceive him, or perceives him only as a slight impediment in the fabric of the cosmos. Blackwood writes of a terrifying nature spirit or elemental (“The Wendigo”) that haunts the great northern forests of North America, of the Danube willows which threaten to engulf two stranded campers on a island crumbling in flood (“The Willows“), and of the innate animalistic instincts of the atavistic soul (“Ancient Sorceries”, which loosely inspired the film “Cat People”). Anyone with an interest in tales of the strange and uncanny ought to be acquainted with the stories of Algernon Blackwood.

The Penguin Classics edition of Blackwood contains four fewer stories than the Dover publication misleadingly named The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, but does contain a useful introduction by S.T. Joshi, who has also compiled editions of the works of Lovecraft, Machen, and Lord Dunsany.

Accumulated Wisdom

2009-08-30T09:55:00.003-07:00

History as Existential Despair, or, What Fools These Mortals Be

She that once appeared the mistress of the world, we have seen what has become of her, shattered by everything that she has suffered from immense and manifold misfortures - the desolation of her inhabitants and the menace of her enemies. Ruins on ruins...where is the Senate? Where the people? All the pomp of secular dignities has been destroyed...and we, the few that we are who remain, every day we are menaced by scourges and innumberable trial...No more Senate, no more people, but for that which still survives, sorrows and groanings, multiplied every day. Rome is deserted and in flames, and as for her buildings we see them fall down of their own accord.

Gregory the Great (540-604)

The entire human race, both present and future, is condemned to death. All the cities that have ever held dominion or have been the splendid jewels of empires belonging to other - some day men will ask where they were. And they will be swept away by various kinds of destruction: some will be ruined by wars, otheres will be destroyed by idleness and a peace that ends in sloth, or by luxury, the bane of those of great wealth. All these fertile plains will be blotted out of sight by a sudden overflowing of the sea, or the subsiding of the land will sweep them away suddenly into the abyss.

Seneca
Moral Epistles lxxi. 15

The future belongs to future men. No Sibyl uveils to our view the roads which mankind will travel after us. As it advances in the mass, we will recede into the background. Today we look back upon the past's social and political culture forms as upon obsolete stages of spiritual development. In exactly the same way, subsequent generations will glance backwards upon the constitution which society, state and church have achieved in our present. We know only this: that the synthetic spirit of man forms the world's panorama more splendidly and more uniformly with every day, and that every miracle of its inventive power opens an inconceivable series of miracles yet to come.

Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821-1891)
Historian of the City of Rome and Incurable Optimist

Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq

2009-07-29T08:41:00.004-07:00

Chateau d'Argol (1938) is a curiously moody work and, in the precise phrasing of the inestimable magus benwaugh, “baroquely oblique”. One seems constantly on the verge of revelation, only to have the spectres dissolve into the mist of incomprehension. The novel has the ephemeral quality of a dream, and shares with de Chirico’s Hebdomeros (see previous review) the dubious reputation as a “surrealist” work. The narrative is gothic and atmospheric, centering on a decaying castle in Brittany recently purchased by Albert, “the last scion of a rich and noble family.” Ordinary reality holds no attraction for Albert, who shares the name of a the medieval philosopher and reputed alchemist Albertus Magnus, who was reputed to be in the possession of a brazen head. His doppelganger and secret sharer is Herminien, with whom he has pored over ancient manuscripts and shared elevated discussions. In my copy of the book, I have penciled real or imagined references to alchemical phrases, as the text is itself a kind of chemical retort where various elements are conjoined and refined, with volatile consequences.

(A crib note: we find the following under “Hermes” in the flawed but invaluable Wikipedia: “An interpreter who bridges the boundaries with strangers is a hermeneus. Hermes gives us our word “hermeneutics” for the art of interpreting hidden meaning.”)

Albert receives word of a visit from Herminien, who will be bringing a mysterious friend named Heide. Trancelike, he ponders the significance of this visitor, he know that the name is rumored to be associated with “violent revolutionary outbreaks”, and thus is a potential disruptor of the intellectual camaraderie he shares with Herminien. Wandering, he reaches an ancient cemetery, and absentmindedly scratches the name of the stranger on the decayed face of a gravestone, a dark portent.

Heide is a white-skinned beauty, ephemeral but captivating, an element of discord and potential estrangement between Albert and Herminien. As in a gnostic parable, she is an attractor, a tempting and physical being who plucks the companions from their spiritual and intellectual pleroma. Albert is captivated by her, and thus begins an uneasy cycle, played out in the isolated landscape, of degeneration, renewal, violence and death, culminating in “the icy flash of a dagger gliding between…shoulder blades like a handful of snow”.

Gracq’s writing is maddeningly voluptuous and oblique, with the concentrated potency of an alchemical process. The Pushkin Press edition is translated from the French by Louise Varese.

Accumulated Wisdom

2009-07-02T12:18:00.002-07:00

"Since we are compelled always to relate things to ourselves, let us remember that there would be fewer martyred children if there were fewer tortured animals, fewer sealed trains carrying the victims of whatever dictatorship to their deaths if we had not become accustomed to cattle cars in which animals die without food or water en route to the slaughterhouse, fewer human game felled with guns if the taste for and habit of killing were not the prerogative of hunters."

Marguerite Yourcenar
"Who Knows Whether the Spirit of Animals Goes Downward"

Insatiability by Stanislaw Witkiewicz

2009-07-01T00:13:00.002-07:00

“A study of decay: mad, dissonant music; erotic perversion; widespread use of narcotics; dispossessed thinking; false conversions to Catholicism, and complex psychopathic personalities.”

-Czeslaw Milosz on Insatiability

It’s bad form to introduce a review with another review, but Milosz’s concise summary can scarcely be improved upon. As a work of modernity and madness, Insatiability prefigures Gravity’s Rainbow by half a century, and there is a certain resemblance between the two - the hypersexed antihero facing a crisis of self in the face of an overwhelming force, the young man in a historical moment headed for a schizoid breakdown, the biting social satire and grim humor and, not least, the secret transformation of civilization.

Insatiability takes place in a hypothetical late 20th century Poland . A quasi-Bolshevist Europe, and specifically a hedonistic Polish upper class, receives disturbing reports of an Asian tidal wave, an overwhelming Chinese army rolling in from the East, engulfing greater Russia and setting its sights on the puny European peninsula, bearing with it a new religion that utilizes a narcotic as a means of social control. Once again, Poland is the bulwark, the great plain through which the invaders must roll to get at the creamy center. But let’s begin at the beginning….

When choosing my destiny, I choose insanity
-Tadeusz Micinski, quoted by Witkiewicz

Genezip (Zipcio) Kapen is marked from birth as a prodigal son, a Valentino-faced scion of the upper middle class drawn towards melancholy and the salon society of the nobility. By means of his repulsive and perverted older friend, the avant-garde composer Putricides Hardonne, he gains entry into the salon of the aging Princess di Ticonderoga, a “blue-eyed vulture” (one of the kinder descriptions) who adopts Zipcio as a sexual initiate, an indefatigable boy-toy. The first half of this long book is mostly taken up with this relationship and the yin-yang of attraction and repulsion he feels for this spoiled and decadent siren. In addition to Hardonne (who early on debauches the boy in the woods) and the Princess (who debauches him everywhere else) there is a bizarre cast of characters dizzying Genezip’s mind with philosophies and perspectives which set the stage for his breakdown in the latter half of the novel. Insatiability is a sardonic and misanthropic novel with nary an attractive character, a cesspool of ideas in the form of Witkiewicz’s extended rants and ramblings. Actual dialogue is minimal, and usually in the form of extended philosophical discussions, intellectual ramblings which bear little on the perverse passions which form the undercurrent of the interpersonal relations. Most of the pages are either Zipcio’s interior monologue or pages upon pages of sarcastic third person observations on the grotesqueness and psychological vileness of the characters.

After Zipcio’s awakenings in the first half of the novel, part two (titled “Insanity”) follows him into young adulthood. The “Yellow Peril” has become all too real, and society braces for the impact. Genezip has been through school and is now a military officer. He becomes attached to the staff of the Quartermaster General Sloboluchowicz (the “Great Slob’), the dominant figure of the second half and a self-styled, self-assured Nietzschean superman whom Zipcio comes to idolize. Through his sister Lilian (for whom he, of course, has incestuous longing) and her connection with the theatre, Zipcio makes the acquaintance of the delectable Persy, who brings him to her rooms only to torture him with extended sexual teases, which give her a sadistic satisfaction. Zipcio is unaware that Persy is also the Great Slob’s mistress, who, in the intervals of strenuous lovemaking sessions, rebuilds his lust by recounting her teasings of Zipcio. Finally, at one point, it appears that Zipcio can control himself no longer and is on the verge of rape when Persy leaves the room. From another door enters another man, an adjunct of Sloboluchowicz, who has been spying on the two under orders of the General. Perhaps as a result of his own arousal from viewing the proceedings, he approaches Zipcio with clearly unwholesome intent. Zipcio picks up a hammer and buries it in the man’s temple. He leaves, disoriented but remorseless, and by lucky turn of fate guerilla warfare between rival factions begins that very night. Zenezip is wounded and wakes up in an infirmary.

He finds himself in the care of the gentle and virginal Eliza. Following the murder, Zipcio has experienced a breakdown of sorts, a disassociation from reality. He sees in Eliza a boundless calm and none of the guile that has characterized the women with whom he has heretofore associated. Eliza explains that she is a convert to a new religion, a religion that takes the form of mysterious pills dispensed by an Indian named Djevani, who is a sort of advance man, an infiltrator spreading the neo-Buddhist gospel of Murti-Bingism through Davamesque B2, a pill that takes away the anxieties and concerns of philosophy, the obsessions and insatiabilities of the artist and the intellectual, by revealing the “Grand Truth“. Zipcio partakes of the drug and experiences a mind-bending alteration of reality, which leaves him in a schizoid state, by turns docile and psychotically manic.

Zipcio keeps his hands off Eliza, mostly worshiping her virginity and wondering at her inner peace, but also bearing silent witness to a certain contempt of her. Finally, on their wedding night, they consummates their relationship, an act which turns Eliza sexually ravenous - in a word, insatiable. In the heat of sex giving way to his revulsion of her, Zipcio grips his hands around Eliza’s throat and strangles her in a last erotic convulsion. He rises the next morning, puts on his uniform, informs the desk that Madame will be staying an extra day, and calmly leaves to join his unit. He travels with Persy and the Great Slob to Polish Byelorussia, where a minor Armageddon is to be staged in the face of the advancing Chinese (the acknowledgement of this second murder is taken calmly by the Great Slob, as he is certain that Zipcio will perish at the front anyway along with the rest of the army, obviating the need for punishment). But it turns out that the Great Slob himself has partaken of Davamesque B2 as well. He knows that resistance to the Chinese is futile, and that his army will be slaughtered. At this point, under the influence, this great leader who has planned martyrdom and a blaze of glory for himself makes the astonishing decision to surrender. Despite angry rebellion by other units in the Polish army, the deed is done, and the group is taken to the camp of the Chinese general, where a group of Chinese are being lazily beheaded for minor infractions in the preparation for a battle that never takes place. Sloboluchowicz has assured himself that a man of his experience, stature and charisma will be invaluable to the Chinese, but he allows no show of emotion when he is calmly informed that they really have no use for him, and he is taken out to be summarily decapitated. In the aftermath, Zipcio, after a brief emotionless fling with Persy, takes up his new position in the new order, a “consummate lunatic, a mild catatonic” and is forcibly married off to a noble Chinese beauty. The new devotees of Murti-Bing, freed of unproductive intellectual inquiry and decadent Western ennui, take their assigned places in the new order.

A summary of the main narrative of Insatiability hardly does the book justice. The neologisms, the obscenities, the mad jargon, poisonous satire, and tooth-grinding contempt of Wikiewicz for the banal shine forth crazily from every dark page. Insatiablity flows forth like a manuscript smuggled out of an asylum, a bizarre, unique document of the early 20th century avant-garde, and a work of breathtaking genius, decades ahead of its time. In a strange coda for one who had created such a novel, Stanislaw Witkiewicz committed suicide at the Russian border upon learning of the Soviet invasion of Poland. Later investigation, it is said, revealed that his coffin held the body of an unknown woman.

The Journals of Jules Renard

2009-06-17T14:54:00.001-07:00

As with most journals and books of aphorisms, Renard’s Journal is best taken in small bites. Still, as a whole it is a remarkable portrait of one man’s life, and highly recommended.

It is difficult to convey the beauty of this book without quoting extensively, but to do so would require missing some excellent passages and thus giving an incomplete picture (beware of Renard “quotes“ on the internet - some sound suspiciously like fortune cookies). Jules Renard (1846-1910) was a French author, a largely rural personage although he did have some success in Paris. Many of the longer entries concern his townsfolk, although Verlaine, Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt and Gide also pass through the pages.

Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He gives you a cigarette, but he selects it himself. He does not walk around a table, he moves a table out of the way. His face is kneaded with tiny red worms, and he has long teeth, containing caves. He is enormous, and he carries and enormous cane.

I don’t mind signing the petition for Oscar Wilde, with the proviso that he will give his word of honor to stop - - writing.

His journal entries tend to be decidedly mixed towards his parents - he seems to despise them both, perhaps a reflection of how they felt about each other (they ceased speaking soon after Jules was born):

She is resentful because of her humiliations, of his obstinate silence. But if he said a word to her, she would cast herself upon his neck with a storm of tears, and, quickly go repeating the word to the entire village. But it is thirty years since he has said a word.

Maurice took the revolver out of the drawer of the night table, saying he wanted to clean it. Papa, who feels well tonight, says:
“He said that but he was lying. He is afraid that I’ll kill myself. If I had a mind to kill myself, I wouldn’t use a tool that can only mutilate.”
“Will you stop talking like that!” says Marinette.
“I’d go at it squarely and take my rifle.”
“You’d do better to take an enema,” I tell him.

The story of his mother’s death, falling (suicide?) backwards into a well is too long to recount here, but it is masterful, betraying his inner conflict: “A skirt floating on the water, a slight eddying such as there is when one has drowned an animal. No human face.”

Renard died the following year.

Some of his more terse observations prefigure the paradoxical comic Steven Wright: “I like solitude - even when I am alone.“ “Truth that creates illusions is the only kind I like.” “What happens to all the tears we do not shed?”

He has a clear-eyed view of human nature, and can be in turns, lyrical and astringent. Religion, aging, and death preoccupied him, although with no clear conclusions drawn.

As a man, Christ was admirable. As God, one could say of him:
“What? Was that all He could do?”

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it. What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

And, at the end, this jewel:
“One should say nothing, because everything offends.”

Baudelaire on Decadent Literature (Essays on Poe)

2009-06-07T08:32:00.006-07:00

In his essays on Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire defined the aesthetics of "decadent" literature, with Poe himself as the exemplar. Here are a some extracts from "New Notes on Edgar Poe", included in Baudelaire as a Literary Critic (ed. Hyslop).

Decadent literature!— Empty words which we often hear fall, with the sonority of a deep yawn, from the mouths of those unenigmatic sphinxes who keep watch before the sacred doors of classical Aesthetics. Each time that the irrefutable oracle resounds, one can be sure that it is about a work more amusing than the Iliad. It is evidently a question of a poem or of a novel, all of whose parts are skillfully designed for surprise,whose style is magnificently embellished, where all the resources of language and prosody are utilized by an impeccable hand. When I hear the anathema boom out—which, I might say in passing, usually falls on some favorite poet—I am always seized with the desire to reply: Do you take me for a barbarian like you and do you believe me capable of amusing myself as dismally as you do? Then grotesque comparisons stir in my brain; it seems to me that two women appear before me: one, a rustic matron, repugnant in her health and virtue, plain and expressionless, in short, owing everything to simple nature; the other, one of those beauties who dominate and oppress one's memory, adding all the eloquence of dress to her profound and original charm, well poised, conscious and queen of herself—with a speaking voice like a well-tuned instrument, and eyes laden with thoughts but revealing only what they wish. I would not hesitate in my choice, and yet there are pedagogical sphinxes who would reproach me for my failure to respect classical honor. —But, putting aside parables, I think it is permissible to ask these wise men if they really understand all the vanity, all the futility of their wisdom. The phrase decadent literature implies that there is a scale of literatures, an infantile, a childish, an adolescent, etc. This term, in other words, supposes something fatal and providential, like an ineluctable decree; and it is altogether unfair to reproach us for fulfilling the mysterious law. All that I can understand in this academic phrase is that it is shameful to obey this law with pleasure and that we are guilty to rejoice in our destiny.—The sun, which a few hours ago overwhelmed everything with its direct white light, is soon going to flood the western horizon with variegated colors. In the play of light of the dying sun certain poetic spirits will find new delights; they will discover there dazzling colonnades, cascades of molten metal, paradises of fire, a sad splendor, the pleasure of regret, all the magic of dreams, all the memories of opium. And indeed the sunset will appear to them like the marvelous allegory of a soul filled with life which descends behind the horizon with a magnificent store of thoughts and dreams.
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There is in man, he says, a mysterious force which modern philosophy does not wish to take into consideration; nevertheless, without this nameless force, without this primordial bent, a host of human actions will remain unexplained, inexplicable. These actions are attractive only because they are bad or dangerous; they possess the fascination of the abyss. This primitive, irresistible force is natural perversity, which makes man constantly and simultaneously a murderer and a suicide, an assassin and a hangman;—for he adds, with a remarkably satanic subtlety, the impossibility of finding an adequate rational motive for certain wicked and perilous actions could lead us to consider them as the result of the suggestions of the Devil, if experience and history did not teach us that God often draws from them the establishment of order and the punishment of scoundrels;—after having used the same scoundrels as accomplices! such is the thought which-, I confess, slips into my mind, an implication as inevitable as it is perfidious. But for the present I wish to consider only the great forgotten truth—the primordial perversity of man—and it is not without a certain satisfaction that I see some vestiges of ancient wisdom return to us from a country from which we did not expect them. It is pleasant to know that some fragments of an old truth are exploded in the faces of all these obsequious flatterers of humanity, of all these humbugs and quacks who repeat in every possible tone of voice: "I am born good, and you too, and all of us are born good!" forgetting, no! pretending to forget, like misguided equalitarians, that we are all born marked for evil!

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

2009-06-05T08:38:00.002-07:00

Both of my parents are dead. My sister recently made good on a longstanding threat to send me some of their personal possessions, in three boxes of diminishing size, like children's stacking blocks. The boxes included a brass tea set (allegedly from Russia), a ceramic ink pot (also from Russia), some carved wooden boxes (Indonesian? - empty, but which used to hold family photos), a few odd pieces of crystal and ceramics, the smelly trunk which I always assumed my father had while in the Navy, but which, in fact, my grandfather brought over from Ireland, some photos (mostly of me at various stages of youthful development), and some assorted odds and ends: a little leprechaun statuette that my youngest son thinks looks as though it's pooping on a shamrock, some newspapers of the JFK assassination, and no less than three Bibles(!) and two Bible storybooks from the 1920s, now sadly fallen into heathen hands. The detritus of a few lives lived in the last century and a half, mostly of no monetary value, and hardly any (to me) sentimental value. Stuff that gets pass down a couple of generations, and then (all familiar associations spent) deservedly disappears without a trace.

This is the sort of thing Julian Barnes meditates upon in this book, a personal examination of family, memory, and mortality. Barnes is afraid to die. That is, he is afraid of being dead, and seems to fret about this incessantly. (The canard is that people are either afraid of dying, or of being dead. I suppose, as the prospect of total extinction has always held a certain appeal to me, I fall within the former category. But as long as there's not a lot of blood or exposed organs, I'm ok with it.)

Early on, Barnes makes generous use of insights by the likes of Jules Renard and the brothers Goncourt , Stendhal, and Shostakovich. Rachmaninoff makes a humorous appearance as a man so terrified of death that he ran shrieking from the first graveyard scene in "Frankenstein", but later became convinced, temporarily at least, that salted pistachios calmed his death fear. Stendhal is used as an exemplar of the faultiness of memory, as his diary entries of an early trip to Florence are compared to later recollections. There is a smattering of philosophical speculation and medical information, but little space devoted to religion, a perspective on death that Barnes, an atheist/agnostic, sees as little more than whistling in the dark. (Not that I disagree.)

Nothing to Be Frightened Of sustains interest for most of the first half of the book (thanks to Renard & Co.), but gets rather bogged down in the middle with somewhat unfocused meanderings and blathering frets and fears at the prospect of his eventual sloughing of this mortal coil (the title of the book, if you haven’t figured it out, has a double meaning). By the end, with a meditation on Stendhal, Barnes manages to pull it together again. If I were into ratings, I'd give this a middling one.

Sympathy for the Devil

2009-05-28T23:29:00.002-07:00

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

“Who told you there was no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!”

On a bench in Patriarchs’ Pond Park, two literary types discussing the Christian religion are accosted by a mocking figure. The boorish editor, Berlioz (an incidental figure, and the uncoincidental namesake of the composer of La damnation de Faust) has his death prophesized by the stranger, a prophecy which wastes no time in being realized due to the demonically inevitable conjunction of sunflower oil, a turnstile, and an all-too-punctual streetcar. Thus, another latter-day John the Baptist is beheaded.

With this prologue, The Master and Margarita begins a dual narrative which commences in the midst of Holy Week and reaches its culmination on Easter Sunday. The primary narrative (1920s Moscow) is satiric and brutally funny, while the story within the story, the Master’s retelling of Christ’s Trial and Passion is serious and delicately written. As the primary story unfolds, the identity of the stranger and his retinue (which includes a harlequin figure and a huge black tomcat with a gourmand’s appetite) becomes increasingly apparent, an identity which would be unmistakable even without the various hat-tips to the Faust legend. For the “magician” Woland, time and reality are pliable, lending a surreal quality to the story that is both hilarious and disconcerting (see the - literally - empty suit diligently catching up on its paperwork). The tendency of the narrative is more along the lines of a trickster cycle than a morality play, although the Pontius Pilate storyline is a study in existential dilemma worthy of Dostoyevsky or Kafka.

The prohibitions and paranoia of Soviet Russia (“Never Speak to Strangers” is one chapter title) are slyly satirized to the degree that Bulgakov’s novel was suppressed for decades before its first publication in 1966/67. The paranoia, the empty suits, the xenophobia, and the use of the asylum as a means of control are some of Bulgakov’s touchstones, yet even in Stalinist Russia, he managed to tell a tale of love and final redemption, courtesy of that scapegoat of humanity who is “Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux

2009-04-27T23:22:00.004-07:00

Lexicographic madness and Rabelaisian excess characterize this long novel of love, hate, madness, revenge and - perhaps - grace. Some chapters (particularly those pertaining to academia) are among the most hilariously misanthropic I’ve ever read. The latter portion (after the two black pages) are quite assuredly the most misogynistic pages ever written, and the lampoon of Southern culture is devastating, if unfair. Famously, Theroux wrote this after having been jilted, and having the gauntlet thrown before him - as he vowed revenge - in the words “Do your worst.” Foolish words, for Theroux is best at doing his worst. In fact, he attains here the supreme paradox of being stupefyingly brilliant. While you could skip entire chapters and not miss a beat of the narrative, you would miss out on the full force of Theroux’s treasure chest of obscure knowledge, inventive wordplay, and puns which are groaningly corny despite their sophisticated execution.

Darconville is an archetype as old as the hills - the sensitive soul undone by an unworthy woman (I think of Maugham’s clubfooted innocent in Of Human Bondage). The vituperation, the bile, is not his (he seems to remain innocent, if misguided, until the end), but rather is that of the sardonic narrator, and later given over to the Satanic eunuch Crucifer, who lives a shadowy existence in an opulent Harvard attic and pisses through a little silver tube (Theroux, the Catholic apologist, may commit many sins, but skimping on the details is not one of them).

Darconville is the object of undergraduate desire at an obscure girl’s college in the inbred heart of Virginia, but as fate would have it, he is instantaneously smitten by a mousy self-effacing girl with golden locks named Isabel Rawsthorne, a hick chick from the sticks. She constantly frets that he is too good for her, and after a false start, they are on the road to matrimony. But when Darconville publishes a respected novel and is offered a professorship at Harvard, Isabel becomes distant and uncommunicative, and then the the revelation that precedes the aforementioned black pages confirm his worst fears. Being jilted by a fat-legged girl for a jug-eared sailor does not sit well with Darconville: he falls into madness, and falls prey to the woman-hating eunuch, whose interest in Darconville seems mainly to revolve around his esteemed bloodline. True to form, the eunuch is both servant and master to the blue-blood, and leads him down unholy paths to the infernal regions of the soul, inspiring a Jacobean lust for revenge.

I will spare you the plot details. Honestly, if you like straightforward narrative, this probably isn’t for you. But if you like to savor the words and are willing to stretch your reading experience out to indeterminate lengths, and if you have a tolerance for mean-spiritedness in the service of art, you might consider looking into this philosophically rich and entertaining work.

Leonard Cohen at the Dodge Theatre, 4/5/09

2009-04-06T13:52:00.004-07:00

Here's a toast to the inspiring and sartorially magnificent Leonard Cohen. At the invigorated age of 75, he played the crowd through an impeccable 3.5 hour set at Phoenix's Dodge Theatre last night. A once in a lifetime event, an odyssey through a remarkable career, and quite simply, a true delight.

Plus, I got to share it with a beautiful woman.

Blanquerna by Ramon Lull

2009-04-03T14:57:00.003-07:00

The Catalan novel Blanquerna, described as “the first novel to be written in any Romance language” is less a novel than an extended work of religious instruction in narrative form. Written in 1283 by the Majorcan mystic, heretic, and martyr Ramon Lull - a neglected figure in the western mystical tradition - the work is severe, with an almost morbid religiosity and an emphasis on extreme piety and deprivation, rejection of the world and absolute submission to the (supposed) will of God.

Blanquerna is the eponymous hero of the tale, the son of the fanatically devoted Evast and Aloma, a noble couple who have forsaken all worldly goods to live in poverty. They attempt to arrange a marriage for their son, so that as a husband and householder he may manage their wealth in service to God while they retreat into a live of austere deprivation. To the consternation of her mother, Natana, the woman they have chosen for their son, decides after a few minutes interview with Blanquerna to retreat to a convent for the remainder of her life. The following section of the book is an extended description of the mortifications she introduces into the convent.

Meanwhile, Blanquerna sojourns into the forest to live as a hermit. He encounters a castle occupied by the personifications of the Ten Commandments, wailing bitterly over the fact that they have been forgotten in this wicked, wicked world. All our hero really wants to do is squirrel himself away in the woods to live a life of quiet deprivation. The problem is that the woods are chock full of knights, shepherds, merchants, and others to whom he can’t resist giving a detailed assessment of the wickedness of their ways. In no time, this killjoy has gained a reputation as a wise exemplar of godly living. (Be warned, the “action” in this story is thinly sandwiched between extended dissertations on various holy topics). Because of his wise counsel and pious example, Blanquerna (as always, against his will) is called upon to live in a monastery, where he becomes first sacristan (whatever that is), then abbott. He eventually rises to the bishopric, and is ultimately elevated to the papacy. Introduced into the story is a wise fool, Ramon, who assists the pope by citing the example of various pious works of reason and devotion (works which happen to be identical to those written by one Ramon Lull). As Pope, Blanquerna oversees the realization of one of Lull’s own pet projects, the establishment of linguistic academies in order to facilitate the conversion of foreign and ungodly souls, particularly the Saracens (Lull himself achieved martyrdom after being stoned by an angry mob in North Africa, presumably following one of his habitual anti-Islamic rants - see illustration). In the end, Blanquerna renounces the papacy in favor of the life of a simple hermit, the role he has fervently coveted throughout all his peregrinations.

Much of Blanquerna is taken up with crashingly dull expositions of the religious life, with a few anti-semitic talking points thrown in for good measure. Incorporated into the end of the narrative are two short works of mystical devotion, “The Book of the Lover and the Beloved” and “The Art of Contemplation”. Coming at the end of a rather tedious read, the former is a particularly refreshing, rich, and surprisingly vibrant work of mysticism, inspired by Sufi devotional books and in the tradition of the Song of Solomon and the works of San Juan de la Cruz. This edition, published by Dedalus Books under the guidance of the medievalist Robert Irwin, is a reprint of a ca. 1920’s translation by Edgar Allison Peers.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie by Sivadasa

2009-03-11T20:44:00.003-07:00

Despite the overall darkness of the frame story - the acrid stench of the cremation grounds, an ascetic who brutally murders a child he has had with a courtesan, a necromancer seeking mastery over the world, and a decaying corpse inhabited by a genie, telling tales to an emperor - the stories in this volume are court tales of romantic love and crossed destinies, magical yogis and fairy brides, wise kings and wiley tricksters. These tales haved a real charm about them, and reflect a rich oral tradition masterfully compiled by the medieval poet Sivadasa.

Each of the tales told by the genie are designed to test the wisdom of the legendary emperor Vikramaditya, who is called upon at the conclusion of each story to pass judgement regarding the actions of those within the story. As the tales progress, the emperor gains the trust and admiration of the genie, who ultimately reveals how Vikramaditya can vanquish the sorcerer and gain the Eight Powers which the sorcerer covets for himself.

The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie (which saw an earlier bastardized version by the Victorian adventurer and rogue Sir Richard Burton called Vikram and the Vampire) is one of a recent series of Indian/Sanskrit classics translated and published by Penguin. This excellent series illustrates that the legacy of ancient Indian literature is not confined to the justifiably revered epics Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico

2009-02-12T20:19:00.006-07:00

Hebdomeros is an extended prose piece by the Surrealist artist Giorgio de Chirico, a painter best known for his dark and desolate paintings of sterile town squares devoid of human beings. This novel (for want of a better word) was written in 1929, several years after the muse of painting had abandoned de Chirico.

Writing in his introduction, the poet John Ashbery compares the mysterious protagonist to Maturin’s Melmoth or Lautremont’s Maldoror, characters which evoke the sense of a solitary superman, above and beyond ordinary human morality. While this characterization is not inaccurate, it should also be noted that there is a certain absurdist - comic, even – quality to Hebdomeros that is lacking in those brooding gothic antiheroes, and might even seem to be a parody of the idealized overman. (It should be noted that de Chirico was an admirer of Nietzsche.)

The difficulty in reading Hebdomeros lies in adjusting one’s expectations as to what one might expect in the way of narrative. Simply put, there really isn’t any narrative. To fall back on a cliché, de Chirico is painting pictures – sometimes wonderfully surreal pictures – with words. But there is also a similarity with the William Gibson story of several years back, which was marketed on a CD-ROM designed to melt into oblivion soon after it had been read. Hebdomeros is like this – the episodes, despite their beauty and humor, seem to fade almost immediately. Every time I picked up this short text, I had to reread the previous page or two, so quickly did they fade from memory. In this, the lyricism and strangeness of Hebdomeros resembles a dream which fades to oblivion upon awakening.

There is a cinematic feel to the text, as is appropriate for a visual artist. It helped for me to read this text while imagining (that crucial word!) it as one of those pioneering pieces of surreal cinema, as envisioned by Dulac or Bunuel. There is an undercurrent of anti-bourgeois sentiment through this piece, a certain savaging of middle-class norms and expectations, and the descriptions of the various personages encountered or described by Hebdomeros are quite in keeping with the conventions of the silent cinema, the bowler hat, walking stick, and waxed moustache of the mid-level clerk. Even so, anachronisms abound – savage Northmen are eternally poised to flood through those vacant town squares, leaving destruction in their wake, ancient Rome with its bestial gladiatorial combats, and Mediterranean coastal towns with their boorish tourists are evoked as well. Hebdomeros seems to stride across time and space, with his companions or disciples in tow, making Zarathustran pronouncements at once lofty and absurd. One has to be willing to approach surrealism, in any of its guises, with a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the ridiculousness of the common run of humanity. Hebdomeros is a minor work in the grand scheme of things, but it is a perfect period-piece for the surrealism of the early 20th century.

(Illustration: De Chirico’s “The Great Metaphysician”.)

Strange World by Frank Edwards

2009-01-28T13:51:00.002-07:00

Truth be told, Erich von Daniken was a johnny-come-lately in the field of extraterrestrial visitation. Still, just about the time his "researches" were hitting the paperback racks of the nation's drugstores, I was a curious and impressionable 12 year old looking for some mental stimulation. I discovered some new editions of two books by a Mr. Frank Edwards that promised to be a wealth of knowledge on the odd and paranormal (what with their Chariot of the Gods typeface and all), and I begged my parents to snag them for me. Happily, they heard my plea and the paperbacks popped up in my Christmas stocking that year, along with a pair of Groucho Marx glasses.

Flash forward a couple of years. I was now living in Roswell, NM, the interplanetary ground zero for Planet Earth. As the greater Roswell Chamber of Commerce hadn't realized the income potential of this fact, I was blissfully unaware. Still, in a little junk shop I found, among the crystal candy dishes and doilies, several back issues of FATE, a little pulp magazine out of the fifties, dedicated to the weird, the paranormal , and the sale of advertising space to the Rosicrucians. And there was good old Frank, a chunky meat-and-potato kind of guy, with his BCG's and portly frame. It seems Frank had a regular column in FATE, from which most of the pieces in his books had been lifted.

So, I found this book recently, in a lovely 1964 edition complete with dust jacket, and all the old favorites were there: "UFO Explodes Over Nevada", "UFO Over Hawaii", "The Search for the Hairy Giants", "The Monster Apes of Oregon", "The Enigma of the Atomic Tornadoes", "The Ghost Was Right!", "Monster on the Beach", "Ramu the Wolf Boy", "Bobby the Wonder Boy", "The Coffins are Restless Tonight!", "The Runaway Coffin Comes Home", "Exploding Fish Bowl", and the viral classic "Our Martyred Presidents".

Some of these pieces have the whiff of possibility, some seem suspiciously like Mr. Edwards had a deadline, and most seem like sources of Roky Erickson lyrics. No matter. Don't believe everything you read in a book, but at least stay awake to the possibility that the world is stranger, much stranger, than the evidence of pedestrian reality might suggest.

The Dark Room by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki

2009-01-27T11:32:00.004-07:00

Shuichi Nakata is a middle-aged writer living in 1960’s Tokyo. A widower, he has established a small network of available women with whom he meets for occasional sexual trysts, free of the concerns and constraints of commitment. Nakata maintains a chauvinistic attitude towards women, and, specifically, has a certain horror of the vagina, which he considers “has something very evil about it.” Still, he confesses in a magazine interview that he would “like to achieve a state where something evil looks like a rose.” It is this transformation, thorns and all, which gives this book its momentum.

In the course of the novel, most of the women in his network fall away for one reason or another, and he is left with Natsue, a woman in her early twenties. It gradually dawns on Nakata that he is beginning to form an attachment to this girl, a state which is abhorrent to him. Still, there is fascination in that Natsue is an outlet for his psychological aggression towards women. Like many young adult women, she has discovered The Story of O, and is fascinated by the themes of bondage and submission as a means of exploring sexuality. Nakata has little interest until he discovers that, by acting out, he can manifest in the flesh his ambivalent feelings towards Natsue. Envisioned perhaps as a means of maintaining distance from Natsue, the master/slave relationship ultimately pulls him emotionally closer to her, to the dark room of commitment.

In its essence a misogynistic novel, The Dark Room is interspersed with discussions of lesbianism, abortion (one of the female character states “I would love starting a kid and getting him [the doctor] to drag it out again"), prostitution and female sexuality, discussions which reflect, I assume, attitudes towards the increasing independence of women that may have been coming forth in 1960’s Japan. On the other side of it, it is a chronicle of a classic middle-age crisis, of a man sensing loss of vigor, physical stamina, and personal power, with the chill breath of decline and death on his neck. An interesting, if uncomfortable, novel of conflicted sexuality.

A Poem by Fitz-James O'Brien

2009-01-20T20:36:00.003-07:00

The Demon of the Gibbet
by Fitz-James O'Brien

There was no west, there was no east,
No star abroad for eyes to see;
And Norman spurred his jaded beast
Hard by the terrible gallows-tree.

"O, Norman, haste across this waste,—
For something seems to follow me!"
"Cheer up, dear Maud, for, thanked be God,
We nigh have passed the gallows tree!"

He kissed her lip: then — spur and whip!
And fast they fled across the lea.
But vain the heel, the rowel steel,—
For something leaped from the gallows-tree!

"Give me your cloak, your knightly cloak,
That wrapped you oft beyond the sea!
The wind is bold, my bones are old,
And I am cold on the gallows-tree!"~

"O holy God! O dearest Maud,
Quick, quick, some prayers—the best that be!
A bony hand my neck has spanned,
And tears my knightly cloak from me!"

"Give me your wine,—the red, red wine,
That in a flask hangs by your knee!
Ten summers burst on me accurst,
And I am athirst on the gallows-tree!"~

"O Maud, my life, my loving wife!
Have you no prayer to set us free?
My belt unclasps,—a demon grasps,
And drags my wine-flask from my knee!"

"Give me your bride, your bonnie bride,
That left her nest with you to flee!
O she hath flown to be my own,
For I'm alone on the gallows-tree!"~

"Cling closer, Maud, and trust in God!
Cling close!—Ah, heaven, she slips from me!"
A prayer, a groan, and he alone
Rode on that night from the gallows-tree

The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien

2009-01-20T20:20:00.004-07:00

Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an Irishman who, after dissipating his inheritance, moved to the United States, where he became an author of fantasies of science and the supernatural. From the 1850’s to his death in the American Civil War, he wrote numerous pieces which garnered him a reputation as the “Celtic Poe”. The introduction to The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien makes it clear that, due to the need for ready cash to finance the style of living to which he had become accustomed, his output was largely confined to magazine work - stories churned out to meet deadlines and thus considered in some way “inferior”.

While he perhaps did not attain the stylistic reputation of a Hawthorne or a Poe, O’Brien was clearly a pioneer of fantastic literature, following in the footsteps of these personages and their antecedent, Charles Brockden Brown. It is difficult to assess, in retrospect, the inventiveness of a talent such as his, for his heirs build upon his groundwork, and thus almost make his writings seem pedestrian. Still, he wrote, in “What Was It?” the story of a malevolent, invisible being long before Bierce and Wells, and, to my mind, “The Diamond Lens” (in which a “microscopist” uses cutting edge technology to discover a lovely, almost sub-atomic, nymph in a drop of water) prefigures the scientific fantasy of Wells. “The Wondersmith” fuses gypsy magic with prefabricated homunculi to bring forth an army of tiny assassins, programmed to bring about the extinction of American Christianity by murdering its children, as they sleep and dream of Christmas joys.

The purely supernatural has its place in O’Brien’s stories as well. “The Pot of Tulips” effectively retells a story, as old as antiquity, of a miser who in death reveals through signs and symbols the location of his hidden fortune. “The Lost Room” is reminiscent of an inferior Hawthorne – a young man steps out for a cigar, and returns to find his room weirdly transformed and occupied by a orgiastic party of Venetian revelers who, after a wager, turn him out of his habitation to wander forever in madness and despair.

“Seeing The World” is almost something out of the imagination of Borges. There is a mysterious stranger, returned from the East, who can heal the sick and confer poetic genius, but the price is outrageous, for the gift of seeing – of seeing everything in the world, in depth and simultaneously – the gift that Jupiter bestowed on Semele, is yet another doorway to madness. Finally, the collection is rounded out by the Oriental tale of “The Dragon Fang Possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lu”, another tale of power and magic.

O’Brien writes most of the stories in the persona, apparently well know to him, of the comfortable bachelor, ensconced in his cozy lodgings, be it a haunted boarding house or a decaying Dutch mansion in upper Manhattan. Late evenings with cigar or opium, discussing supernatural possibilities with companions set a cozy tone, which will be upended by a shift of reality as objects of speculation become all too real. It would be wrong to judge O’Brien’s themes as hoary simply because we have encountered them in more well known authors who followed him down these speculative paths. Taken as exemplars of early nineteenth-century speculative fiction, these stories are still worth a read on a chill winter’s night.

(The illustration is a contemporary caricature of O'Brien as a Union Army recruiter.)

The Stories of Paul Bowles

2009-01-11T11:58:00.004-07:00

The author, composer, and translator Paul Bowles was raised on the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and, like them, a not-so-subtle menace pervades his stories. Bowles exhibits no sentimentality in his writings but rather approaches the world as an outsider, an anthropologist of strangeness and cruelty. He is best in his stories of Morocco, which gives him an ideal stage for his dramas of fear and violence, the legitimate terror of the outsider in an inescapable downward spiral of detachment from identity. I think of the linguistics professor in one of Bowles’ most famous stories, “A Distant Episode”, whose western identity is severed when his tongue is violently (and needless to say, ironically) slashed from his mouth. Like Professor Unrat in the film “The Blue Angel”, his cultural persona flows from him like blood and he becomes less a man than a pathetic object of scorn and ridicule, wandering in incoherence, tin can lids jangling from his clothes for the amusement of ragged children. After many readings, the sudden and shocking violence of “The Delicate Prey” still gives rise to revulsion in the throat, and the deformed keeper of the underground pool in “By the Water” plays upon our age-old contempt for the grotesque. It is in the exploitation of the fearfully grotesque that Bowles found his métier.

A true expatriate, Bowles had the means to travel widely, and locales as diverse as Mexico and Sri Lanka show up in his stories. There are rare touches of humor, such as in “You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus”, but there are also instances of true American gothic, such as the madman of “If I Should Open My Mouth”, a 1954 tale of product tampering and the perverse “Pages from Cold Point”, an almost Nabokovian tale of seduction.

Bowles long had a reputation as a writer’s writer, and for many years his novels such as The Sheltering Sky, Up Above the World, and The Spider’s House languished in hard to find editions, until they were revived in the 1980’s. For the Beats, Bowles was a link to the past and a certain sort of respectability, and Burroughs and Ginsberg played out some of their most memorable antics in Bowles’ Tangier, the Interzone of Burroughs classic Naked Lunch. Later on, lured by his reputation as a composer and musicologist who pioneered recordings of the musicians of the Rif Mountains, Jagger and Jones sought him out (see Bowles’ notes for “Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka”). In truth, through recordings and translations, he did an invaluable service in attempting to preserve aspects of Moroccan culture before it became too contaminated by outside influences.

In documentary film and books such as Michelle Green’s The Dream at the End of the World, Bowles in old age became a pop icon, the dandy who traveled into the Sahara with a dozen trunks full of nappy suits and ties. The attention is deserved, but should not distract from the essence of Bowles: his novels, travel writings, memoirs, and short stories. Paul Bowles died in 1999.

Goethe's Tales for Transformation

2009-01-08T21:53:00.004-07:00

It should come as no surprise that the author of Faust had a long and abiding interest in alchemy and the mythology of renewal and transformation. This collection brings together five stories and a short libretto (conceived as a continuation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute"), most of which touch directly upon themes corresponding to the Great Work.

Some of these pieces are heavily allegorical, particularly "Fairy Tale", a parable of metamorphosis which, as Alice Raphael convincingly illustrates in Goethe and the Philosopher's Stone, draws heavily on Egyptian mythology as understood by Masonic acolytes. Archetypes of Thoth (as Ferryman), the Lily or prima materia, the transforming serpent (which as the ouroboros embodies continuity or eternity, the Elder or lamp-bearer (who hold the key to the Great Work), and others act out a ceremony of transformation, the understanding of which is essential to the philosophical study of hermeticism and alchemy.

"The New Melusina" is the most enchanting tale of the lot, relating a young man's discovery of and betrothal to a beautiful and mysterious gnome princess. "The Counselor" and "The Good Women" (a kind of symposium) explore femininity and male/female duality, with an emphasis on female "constancy" which must have been a matter of discussion and importance to Goethe and his circle. "Nouvelle" is another allegory, this time pertaining to the taming of emotional passions, another significant step in spiritual transformation.

The collection is rounded out with Goethe's continuation of "The Magic Flute", in which the Queen of the Night imprisons Genius, the child of Pamina and Tamino, in a golden sarcophagus upon which a terrible curse has been lain, a curse which is finally overcome by trial and initiation.

The stories collected in this short anthology should appeal to anyone interested in Goethe's Masonic involvement, his lifelong interest in philosophical alchemy, and the aesthetic impact of these studies on his work.

Oriental Tales by Marguerite Yourcenar

2009-01-01T13:50:00.010-07:00

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar's best known novel, is in the form of a fictional memoir of the Emperor Hadrian, written to his successor Marcus Aurelius. There are some lovely passages here - wistful meditations on astronomy, history, the living of life, and sensual passion. This melancholy novel is mostly based on the biography of Hadrian from the Augustan History , but downplays the late Emperor's more vile characteristics, which were probably somewhat exaggerated in the original telling anyway. Fully deserving of its reputation as a 20th century classic.

Oriental Tales is Yourcenar's collection of ten stories, encompassing an "Orient" which stretches from the Balkans to China, in fantastic tales seemingly derived from folklore. Yourcenar has a way with a sensual phrase, and a sympathetic ear for the roguish seducer. Seduction is, in fact, a leitmotif of these stories, be it the artist Wang-Fo, whose superb paintings render pale the real world for a young Emperor (a seduction which carries an awful penalty, until the artist devises a means of saving himself), or the aging Japanese Don Juan, Genji, whose memory holds loving remembrance of all women save the one who loved him most deeply. There is a touch of the ribald in the sun-dappled stories of Greece and the Balkans (it is not a smile which almost betrays Marko Kraljevic in the story "Marko's Smile", feigning death until a dancing girl awakens his manly passion) and hints of the unearthly power of the feminine in "The Milk of Death", "Our Lady of the Swallows", and "Kali Beheaded", stories which seem to trace the beginnings of folklore and myth in anguished cries against patriarchal injustice.

Revised and supplemented from the original 1938 text, and translated lovingly by Alberto Manguel, these stories affirm Yourcenar as one of the premier (and most enjoyable) storytellers of the 20th century.

Not to be overlooked are two enjoyably diverse volumes of Yourcenar's essays - The Dark Brain of Piranesi and That Mighty Sculptor, Time.

All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams

2008-11-19T22:40:00.004-07:00

The fact that Charles Williams has not had quite the rise in stock as his Oxford associates C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is interesting, although I do recall that when I was an undergraduate in the early 80’s, the campus Christian book shop was quite well stocked with his novels. I attribute his relative obscurity to the fact that his fiction, which is opaque to a frustrating degree, does not appeal to juveniles (there are no Hobbits). The present novel, Williams’ last, is given a kick upwards on the legitimacy scale through an introduction by that grand dame of English letters, T.S. Eliot, who was also addicted to detective novels and Marx Brothers films (Eliot carried on a brief correspondence with Groucho Marx that does no great service to either of their reputations).

Early in his life, before he found theological comfort in the bosom of the Church of England, Williams had an association with the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross which testified to his lifelong interest in things supernatural. This interest colors his major novels, including War in Heaven, The Greater Trumps (referencing the Tarot), and All Hallow’s Eve, which concerns the spirits of the dead in immediate postwar London.

Londoners Lester and Evelyn (of course one would have to be an Evelyn) had the bad luck to be occupying the space where an airplane chose to crash, and now they are disembodied spirits wandering a transdimensional London that is even gloomier than its archetype. Lester has her newlywed husband Richard on her mind, whilst Evelyn, despite her transubstantiation to the ghostly realm, still cannot keep her mouth shut. Lester is not too keen to spend the afterlife with this chatterbox, and lets Evelyn know it. Evelyn spends the rest of the novel harboring resentments against Lester, and a good/bad duality tends to color the novel through their relationship.

Now, the girls had an acquaintance in their school days who just happens to be the daughter of the Antichrist, or at least an ancient Magus a couple hundred years old who has acquired a reputation as a faith healer, and who is well versed in the magic arts, being able to conjure female homunculi with little more than spit, dust, and a weird unearthly light that he emanates when the feeling strikes him. His daughter, Betty (and who would have thought that the Antichrist would have a daughter named Betty?) was sired upon some ol’ sourpuss who goes by the name of Lady Wallingford.

Betty is important to the Magus (Simon the Clerk), because she can disembody herself and wander the streets of London, listening for whispers of the dead and intimations of future events (Simon's goal, if you haven't guessed it, is world domination). Betty is betrothed to a London artist who paints with a God-given clarity, and who has done a portrait of Simon which, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, reveals something of Simon’s true nature. The descriptions of the malevolent Simon and his nativity are some of the most rewarding (evil is always interesting) in the novel.

Charles Williams is not one to spend a lot of time on action, so be ready to read a lot of obtuse blather about the inner motivations of the characters, with generous Christian symbolism, between the surprisingly few scenes where something actually happens. In the course of the novel, Lester learns something about grace and the healing power of love, and comes compassionately to the aid of poor Betty, whose father is just about ready to make her his tool and a permanent resident of the land beyond, an idea to which her loathsome mother is fully in support. Evelyn, on the other hand, becomes even more small minded and resentful, and is clearly headed for the outer darkness.

Williams is a masterful writer, although clarity is not his strong suit. Some of the passages of All Hallow’s Eve are indeed eerie, the kind of eeriness which comes from the realization that Williams himself must have felt quite at home in that nether land between the living and the dead, and had a profound imagining of it. The complex character of Lester is particularly well described, although this makes most of the other characters seem rather one-dimensional in comparison. Despite long stretches of dense prose and thinly veiled theology, there is enough suspense to keep one interested, and by the last chapter, the author is finally willing to let the characters act and speak for themselves enough to propel the action forward. All Hallow’s Eve is a highly literary ghost story with some good points, but overall, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s worth the effort.

The Longest Memory by Fred D'Aguiar

2008-11-08T14:08:00.002-07:00

The Longest Memory tells the story of a pivotal event in the life of an antebellum Virginia plantation - the whipping to death of a young slave - from the perspectives of several different characters.

The aged slave Whitechapel is central to the narrative. He has learned the art of compliance, of accepting the slave's lot without complaint. For this he has earned the admiration and respect of the plantation owner, and acts as an elder to the slave population. For Whitechapel, existence, despite its sorrows, has become comfortable. In the context of the novel, Whitechapel is an ambigous character. He ultimately loses his status in the eyes of the slaves, for it is he who has revealed (following a promise of leniency) to the plantation owner the location of Chapel, the runaway slave, whom he regards as his son, but whose lineage is more complex. Chapel has committed one of the great sins of slavery. The plantation owner's daughter has taught him to read, and fired by this Promethean knowledge, his head becomes full of his own verses, and of visions of freedom.

I will avoid any further synopsis. This is a short book, imbued with the poetic sensibilities of its talented author, a Guyanese poet. Mercifully, D'Aguiar does not attempt to recreate the vernacular speech of the characters, but rather allows them to speak to us with a precise clarity well suited to the narrative. Despite its brevity, The Longest Memory speaks eloquently of the universally corrupting effect of slavery.

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

2008-10-27T22:54:00.003-07:00

Soul Mountain is a metaphorical pilgrimage by a modern Chinese writer, undertaken after he is mistakenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, only to find several weeks later that the diagnosis is in error, earning him a reprieve from death. It is a grand work, but curiously, grand in its individual pieces, not necessarily as the sum of its parts.

In the early 1980’s, Gao Xingjian was a playwright under suspicion by the Chinese government. Faced with a threat of forced rehabilitation, he sets out for the mountainous regions of western China. Once there, he seeks to undertake a pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Lingshan, or “Soul Mountain”. This is clearly a metaphor for a journey of self-examination, for although a mountain – or various mountains (ambiguity is a hallmark of this novel) – is explored, it is never explicit that they are the elusive Lingshan.

Wandering through villages and remote outposts, the misty valleys and isolated Daoist enclaves the protagonist encounters are almost timeless, like images from an ancient scroll painting. As a means of illustrating, perhaps, the transitory states of being of the protagonist, Gao never settles on a defining pronoun, which makes for some head-scratching until one gets into the flow of the narrative. Even the term “narrative” is somewhat misleading, in my mind, at least, for one could well shuffle and rearrange the 81 chapters with little discernable impact to the novel.

In addition to being an inward examination of the protagonist, Soul Mountain is also a book about the spatial and temporal immensity of China itself. It is replete with secret Daoist rituals, ancient ruins, folk songs and tales seemingly passed down from time immemorial. Bronze artifacts and stamped bricks seem to litter the landscape, and every abandoned bandit camp seems haunted by the ghosts of China’s deep past. There are abducted maidens and corpses of lovesick girls washed down the mountain streams, and at times the stories might well be updates from the classic anthology of weird tales, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The protagonist muses on his fate and that of his family, he seeks tales of the legendary Wild Men of the mountains and collects folk songs and artifacts. Amongst it all, the specter of the Cultural Revolution – that forced agrarianism that decimated the intelligentsia – looms large.

There is a certain self-conscious indulgence in some of the writing, especially in the chapter where the author defends the fluid use of pronouns in the novel, in the end telling the reader that there is no point in even reading the chapter he has just finished. There is also an underlying misogyny in the work: many of the chapters alternate with encounters between a man and a woman (or multiple women – that ambiguity again). The women come across as frivolous, needy, or naïve, and the author seems preoccupied with describing their positive and negative physical attributes, and one of the later chapters is a long complaint of having to listen to an uninteresting narrative spoken by an “ugly” crone whom the narrator finds particularly repulsive.

The curious thing about this novel of personal pilgrimage and discovery is that, despite flashes of awareness, there seems to be no fundamental shift in the mind of the protagonist, no summit to the mountain except the pessimistic reinforcement of the idea of the transitory futility of human life, and the awareness that, despite his attempts to break away, he is not ready to abandon human society. Anyone approaching Soul Mountain in search of spiritual uplift would likely come away, assuming they have gotten through the 500+ pages, seriously disappointed. Still, the writing is lyrical and compelling in places, enough for a serious reader to stay engaged. For its faults, it remains a fascinating document of a man’s restless and troubled inner life. It is, on its own terms, a masterful book.

Gao Xingjian received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. He lives in Paris, working as a novelist, playwright, critic, and painter.

Pale Fire

2008-10-21T21:14:00.001-07:00

From the archives, some old notes on a classic. Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite authors.

A poem with commentary, the telling of a man's ordinary life and thoughts, interpreted by a exiled king, who sees in every word a reflection of lost Zembla. Or, alternatively, a lost king invented by a poet and interpreted by a madman, or someone's dream world, inhabited by shades.

An ultimately perfect work, and a book that can be read many times in many different ways, Pale Fire is by turns touching and overwhelmingly comic, the rage against tyrants and cruelty and the forces of mediocrity is always just below the surface. One suspects that the deepest compassion of the author (the true author) is particularly evident in this work, portions of which are some of the most clearly spiritual (I use the term loosely) that I've come across in Nabokov's work. Speaking of sins, John Shade states: "I can name only two: murder and the deliberate infliction of pain." Despite his biting criticism and strong opinions, Nabokov never comes across in his works as particularly judgemental.

Nabokov's calm assurance regarding the sort of afterlife he envisions is eloquent, as is, as usual, his precise and exhilarating style of writing. Kinbote, for his insufferability, is a masterful creation of pathos and hedonism, a dim cousin of Humbert Humbert. The poet Shade is less well envisioned, in the commentary, at least (which forms the bulk of the book), but he is a warm enough figure as seen through "his" poem, and the canto dealing with his daughter's death is heart-wrenching. But in the shifting mirror of this complex book, neither identity nor reality is fixed, yet a sense of loss and distance comes through in every word. 09/01

The Next President of the United States

2008-10-16T14:08:00.004-07:00

Future revision to the Debater's Handbook: Try not to look like you're: a) having a seizure, or; b) grabbing your opponent's butt.

NYT: Finger-pointing in Financial Crisis is Directed at Bush

2008-09-20T09:52:00.004-07:00

I won't even pretend to know much about economics or finance, but I recall that one thing George Bush used to really push was the concept of the "ownership society", wherein anyone could experience the joys and stability of home ownership.

Now, to what extent this philosophy played a part in the current financial crisis, I don't know. When the history is written, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Bush Administration greased the way for sub-prime mortgages and the increased financial risk that went along with them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/business/20prexy.html?hp

(Sorry, for whatever reason, I can't get the link to work.)

Accumulated Wisdom

2008-09-15T09:48:00.003-07:00

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

-Bertrand Russell, quoted in a letter to the editor of NYT Magazine (9/14/2008)

Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss

2008-09-06T21:19:00.003-07:00

I revisited this book in 2004 after 20+ years (a boarding pass bookmark is dated June 1982). Rereading a book after a number of years, especially if it is a good one, rewards one with new insights and perspectives. At times, one is disappointed. I believe that in rereading Levi-Strauss, with his sense of sorrow and the futility of the human race, his sense of the human and environmental catastrophe we have wrought upon the earth these last several hundred years (and accelerated in the 20th century), one must see the truth in his dire perspectives.

Written in 1955, this account, primarily of Levi-Strauss's researches among Brazilian/Mato Grosso tribes in the 1930's*, contained a damning enough account of the miseries of disease, deforestation, and cultural collapse which, true to his prediction, has had a devastating effect on native Brazilians. Other meditations on the miseries of Calcutta; the wasteful cycle of land use in the Americas; the authoritarian, frozen in time deficiencies of Islam; and the transcendent truths of Buddhism tie into the author's narrative.

Finally, this memoir is an excellent exposition of the mental makeup and the cultural rootlessness which characterize the anthropologist. The last few pages, which I have revisited many times over the years, are a beautiful, lyrical (in a book characterized by its lyricism) exposition of man's beginnings and his ultimate significance in the universe. An anthropological classic. 3/04

*Levi-Strauss was the editor of the Tropical Forest volume of the Handbook of South American Indians.

The Black Spider

2008-08-28T12:36:00.008-07:00

Jeremias Gotthelf's The Black Spider is an overlooked masterpiece of horror, a novella telling the story of a Faustian pact made in the Middle Ages, with repercussions through the centuries.

A Teutonic Knight makes cruel and impossible demands upon his subjects, involving the transplantation of one hundred full grown beech trees across a mountain to serve as landscaping for his newly constructed castle. While the peasants are driven to despair by this order, one brave and foolhardly woman makes a pact with a mysterious huntsman, dressed in green with a red beard and devilish eyes. He will see that the task is accomplished, but his price is the unbaptised soul of a newborn infant. The woman, Christine, believes that she can reneg on her end of the bargain with the careful connivance of the peasants and the local priest, but with each child withheld, dire afflictions and death overtake the peasants.

At the conclusion of their deal, the Huntsman had given Christine a peck on the cheek, which immediately burned as if she were being pierced by a red hot poker. Over time, the black spot grew and took on the appearance of a large venomous spider. At one point it bursts, sending forth innumerable spiderlings to plague the valley. Eventually, Christine is subsumed into the spider, which goes on an apocalyptic rampage. In the midst of the carnage, one brave soul finds the inner strength and resolve to trap the spider and cheat the Huntsman, but like the Satan of Revelations, the creature is bound for only a certain number of years, until the morals of the mountain folk degenerate again and the creature is again briefly let loose.

The tale is framed in the context of a 19th century baptismal celebration, and is told by the old grandfather to a group of fat and ruddy faced villagers, who listen with growing terror. The tale is a warning of the necessity of staying on the narrow Christian path, for the spider and it's master, while temporarily defeated, are ever present, ever ready to strike.

The horrors of the arachnid, so well described, contrast vividly with the sunny vitality of the prosperous villagers at the feast. Gotthelf was a "militantly conservative" Christian who wrote this allegory as a cautionary tale. The slow growth of the spider on Christine's cheek, and her growing sense of despair bear unavoidable comparison to Kafka, and although the narrative in summary sounds like something from a B movie, the writing is effective in inducing the sense of terror that grips the valley. The Black Spider is an excellent example of early horror writing.

There are several anthologies which include The Black Spider. The translation I read was in German Novellas of Realism, Volume One in the excellent series The German Library, published by Continuum. The old Anchor editon of Nineteenth Century German Tales, edited by Angel Flores in the 1950's, includes this story in a different translation and, as an added bonus, has a fantastic Edward Gorey cover.

Much more information can be found at a journey round my skull (see favorite links).

...but Barack Obama is Elitist.

2008-08-21T10:07:00.003-07:00

Once again, John McCain shows that he feels your pain. In the face of massive foreclosures, McCain blows off a question about how many homes he owns. He'll just have one of the little people get back to you on that...

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/obama-counts-mccains-houses/

Accumulated Wisdom

2008-08-19T07:53:00.005-07:00

From Michael Lind's NYT review of Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (8/17/08):

Frank's analysis of why there are so many libertarian think tanks in a country with so few libertarians is dead on: "The reason that we have so many well-funded libertarians in America these days is not because libertarianism suddenly acquired an enormous grass-roots following, but because it appeals to those who are able to fund ideas...Libertarianism is a politics born to be subsidized."

Letter to a Christian Nation

2008-08-18T13:03:00.003-07:00

Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation is an unvarnished polemic against religious belief in the modern world, occasioned by the voluminous hate mail from Christians that Harris received following the publication of his previous book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. While particularly addressed to the Christian Right in the United States, reference is also made to the Islamic fundamentalist worldview, in itself a Judeo-Christian offshoot.

Some of the most basic assumptions of Judeo-Christian religion are taken to task, particularly the absurd role of the Bible (a deeply self-contradictory text) as a book of moral instruction. Hot button issues in the United States, such as abortion and the evolution/creationism
“debate ”are also discussed and dismissed as being based on emotionalism born of religion-based ignorance and wishful thinking, rather than on one iota of common sense or scientific fact. This book also effectively dismisses the bogus “atheism is a religion, too!” argument, and the bizarre assumption that atheism and immorality are equivalent.

At 96 pages, Harris blows through a lot of issues at hurricane force. While there are not pages and pages of point-counterpoint, the simple common sense of Harris’s rebuttals show the absurdity of viewpoints based on supernatural prejudice and provincial bigotry rather than on observable and logically conceived facts.

Please take note that your humble reviewer does not lay all hope on rationalism. Particularly in the realm of human creativity, the irrational is invaluable. But as a matter of public policy, the irrational is dangerous. This is a verity that we in the United States must come to terms with. Religious fundamentalists can no longer be stereotyped as backwoods kooks, handling snakes and singing about “that ol’ time religion”. They are now policy makers with sophisticated tools and plenty of money at their disposal, and they have no compunction about establishing policies which diminish the rights of nonbelievers while leading the United States down a path of scientific ignorance and apocalyptic longing which will have real repercussions for the country, if not for the entire planet.

Good luck to Harris. Separating people from their tightly held delusions is, practically speaking, an impossible task. As so many other reviewers have noted, the people who most need to read this book will be those most resistant to it. Harris doesn’t sugarcoat his approach to the religious right. He is acerbic and mocking, but the simple fact is that one sometimes must come to the stark realization that what is invisible is invisible precisely because it does not exist. The future of humanity depends upon our liberation from these harmful paradigms.

People of the Abyss (New Links)

2008-08-16T08:14:00.003-07:00

I have added a couple of new items to my blogroll: David X and A Journey Round My Skull. Both are denizens of the Chapel of the Abyss, a LibraryThing group dedicated to decadent literature and other such obsessions. Decadent Literature is a genre that I enjoy, but my expertise pales in comparison to these gentlemen. (The Grand Master of the Order is the redoubtable Ben Waugh, who puts us all to shame.)

Another new listing is Honey, Where You Been So Long?, a site dedicated to those intoxicating pre-war blues. Currently, one can find well over 100 different recordings of the morbid masterpiece of New Orleans classic, "St. James Infirmary."

I hope you discover something new via these links!

Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

2008-08-14T23:03:00.004-07:00

I don't usually read anthologies from cover to cover, but Robert Irwin’s Night and Horses and the Desert is the exception.

The interesting thing about this book is that the real meat of it is Irwin's commentary. The author of the modern classic The Arabian Nightmare (as well as a companion guide to the Arabian Nights), he's a very astute guide to this world, and I looked forward every night to reading something that gave me a smile. This is to say, there is just enough humor in the commentary without being precious or silly. Perhaps due to Irwin’s interests, there is an emphasis in the anthology on the gothic (for want of a better word) and the fantastic. There are minimal religious texts, but plenty of texts relating to wine and debauchery.

The breadth of Irwin's knowledge is amazing. There might be room for quibbles about what has been put in or left out, and some readers may lament that the book is rather light on actual texts, but as a crash course in Arabic literature from pre-Islamic times to the rise of the Ottomans, it is a fascinating read. Highly recommended.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Resentful Old Crank

2008-08-01T13:56:00.003-07:00

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/01/mccain-ad-on-obama-they-will-call-him-the-one/

Apparently, the McCain camp has had just about as much as they can take from this uppity nigra. Chomping the sourest of sour grapes, their latest ad is another attempt to put this “rock star” in his place by force of sheer mockery. The geezers have gotten together and concocted a juvenile ad mocking McCain’s opponent on what they seem to feel is his vulnerable spot – his well-spoken likeability. And, for shame, they do it with clips of Moses himself, which will undoubtedly cause anyone under 50 to cry “Who the hell is Charleton Heston?!”

As I commented on the CNN story (God knows when they will be finished “vetting” it), the McCain campaign is clearly going for the "sour grapes" vote. Not to say that this won't attract a few Hillary supporters to the "Straight Talk Express".

Oh for the days when these folks knew their proper place! Time to take this high-strutter down a notch…

I hope to see an Obama commercial in the future, with clips of the "Maverick" sucking up to George Bush (whose minions spread the most despicable lies about McCain in 2000), Jerry Falwell, John Hagee and anyone else who can help his campaign limp along. (Seriously, how many “mavericks” do you know who travel with a set of knee-pads?)

Or maybe Obama’s supporters can hit YouTube with a video called called "The OLD One", playing off that sure-fire Charlton Heston imagery. Sample narration: "Senator, I knew Moses. Moses was a friend of mine. Senator…you're no Moses!"

Does McCain really want to play this game?

Lavoisier in the Year One

2008-07-22T21:12:00.005-07:00

Antoine Lavoisier, the "discoverer" of oxygen, had the money, talent, and intellectual curiosity to be a shining star in the new science of chemistry, and the ill luck to have a position in the General Farm, a private taxing entity leased out by the French monarchy in the years before the French Revolution and the Terror.

Lavoisier was not born into the nobility, but his family had gradually improved their position in French society over the course of the previous century, ultimately giving Antoine the opportunity to establish himself in its highest circles. In the golden years of scientific discovery after Newton, during which chemistry blossomed forth from the shadow of alchemy, young Lavoisier was drawn to science and chemical experimentation. He quickly began to make a name for himself, and ultimately disproved a predominant theory of heat called phlogiston, or "matter of fire" - the idea that a particular type of "sulfurous earth" was responsible for combustion. (He would also prepare a sort of precursor to the Periodic Table of the elements, and devise the metric system which most of the world uses today.)

In keeping with the other titles in Norton's "Great Discoveries" series, Madison Smartt Bell, the author of this volume, is a novelist. One would expect a novelist's flair for narrative, but, sadly, this is largely absent. The large middle section of this book is taken up with rather dull descriptions of the experiments which ultimately laid to rest the idea of phlogiston. The promising narrative which begins the book with Lavoisier's detention under the Terror is only really taken up again in the final pages. Lavoisier's role in the Farm, including his role in the creation of a wall around Paris to control the entry of contraband into the city, as well as his earlier snub of the radical Jean-Paul Marat, who once had pretensions of scientific accomplishment, did not sit well with the Revolutionary crowd. A later misunderstanding in which Lavoisier appears to have been facilitating a suspicious removal of explosives from the Arsenal, where his laboratory was located, didn't help either.

Antoine Lavoisier was guillotined on 7 May 1794. In recognition of his achievements, his friend Joseph-Louis Lagrange boldly stated "It took them no more than a moment to make that head fall, and a hundred years may not be enough to produce another one like it."

One assumes that Bell's idea was to juxtapose Lavoisier's role in a scientific revolution with the political revolution that he ignored until it was too late. Despite the author's best efforts, Lavoisier passes through this book as little more than an enigma. A true sense of the man is missing.

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution
by Madison Smartt Bell

The Library at Night

2008-07-16T15:02:00.003-07:00

For the bibliophile, one’s library, even if it is just a corner nook, is the most comfortable spot in the house. Some of us let our enthusiasms get out of hand, and have to endure that impossible question – “have you read all these books?” (my stock answer is that I’ve read some of them twice). Books, even those that sit unread for years, are powerful objects. I find it almost magical that a book picked up by a young man in 1981 can be rediscovered and read, with no diminishment of enjoyment, by a middle-aged man a quarter of a century later. A book is infinitely patient.

I have had a library in every house I have lived in as an adult. One of the first, in a house I occupied alone for almost ten years, was perhaps the most organic, growing slowly over time, acquiring new limbs and patinas, overtaking shelves and taking over the floor before ultimately growing out of the room with tentacles reaching throughout the house. When I finally moved to cohabitate with my own true love, it seems to have been a bit of a shock to the library, now uncomfortably crammed into a spare bedroom of a small apartment before finally being able to spread out again in the large basement level of a Maryland townhouse. There have been a couple of moves since then, and now a good number of the books are neat and tidy in a converted dining room, with a big table for convivial conversation as the books politely look on, perhaps slightly pitying their second-string cousins in exile in the garage.

My relationship with my library is like something from a Bunuel film. I can make a resolution to go into it and read at any time during the day, but inevitably events conspire to prevent me from doing any more than a cursory browse of a text, a quick fact check, or a dreamy running of the eyes over the spines. My library never allows me to read in it until late in the evening, when the house is quiet and I can give it the undivided attention it deserves. A library is a selfish mistress, and it begins to stir only after night falls.

Being interested in books about books and reading, I tend to devour them as soon as I get them, without letting them age on the shelf. Alberto Manguel’s most recent book, The Library at Night, reaffirms his place as a kinsman in the family of bibliophiles. This volume is a meditative series of 15 essays on libraries private and public. As in his previous book, A History of Reading, Manguel looks back to the ancient libraries of Babylon and Alexandria, the latter of which has attained mythic proportions in the minds of serious booklovers, and enumerates modern tragedies, such as the destruction of Jewish archives in occupied Europe and the looting of the National Library of Baghdad after Iraq’s “liberation”.

A disciple of Borges, Manguel seems to look at books through his master’s eyes. The joys of night reading run through these essays – those leisurely hours of reading and reverie, surrounded by a circle of light with the books dimly visible in the gloom. Manguel’s library is a rebuilt stone barn in the French countryside, overlooking the Loire Valley, and for that he deserves our envy. The essays brim with anecdotes, book lore, and biographical sketches. The obligatory bows to the virtual library are made, but the book mostly revels in the joys of the physical object and its dwelling place. Nicholas Basbanes’ books, while pleasing in their own right, tend to overly dwell on the collectors, the pride of possession, and the pecuniary issues around the hunt for rare books. Manguel tends to view books from a more metaphysical perspective. He dwells on what books (the Bible and some Portuguese volumes, most likely including the Lusiads) Crusoe might have had with him on that imagined island, rather than what the monetary value of those books might be today. Alberto Manguel is a man who easily gets lost in the labyrinth of books. He’s a reader after my own heart.

Devilry Afoot

2008-07-10T09:38:00.008-07:00

I have recently viewed two silent films, both of which were interesting (among other reasons) for their demonic/occult imagery.

L'Inferno (1911) is hailed as the first Italian feature film, and fittingly uses the Dante epic, via close parallels to Gustave Dore's inspired imagery, for the poet's excursion through Hell. While the actors playing Dante and Virgil have all the finesse of a high school drama club, the visual settings are interesting. We don't necessarily get the wide vistas of Dore - huge lakes of the damned writhing in agony - but each circle is a set piece showing the agonies of heretics, usurers, gluttons, and other medieval ne'er-do-wells. The torturing demons, with their large strap-on wings listlessly flapping, are a hoot, and the special effects are state-of-the-art (for 1911). An acquaintance with Dante's poem, or a copy of the Dore illustrations on your lap so that you can follow along, are recommended. The modern soundtrack by the electronica band Tangerine Dream is forgettable.

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), a Swedish film, is a more satisfying production, replete with little old ladies riding brooms through the air and kissing the Devil's buttocks. An attractive young woman is tortured, with the filmmaker dwelling lovingly on the torture devices, and there are also lecherous monks. Particularly giggle-inducing is the seducing Devil, with his perpetually wiggling tongue. The film takes the form of a rational essay on how witch hysteria during the Middle Ages arose from psychological disorders and persecution of social misfits. Several vingettes tell the story, which, after the introductory "chapters", moves a bit faster than most silent films. The end of the film provides "modern" examples of hysterical activity. *

Watching silent films, especially if you haven't been exposed to them before, can be an exercise in patience. My son and I have made a game of reading the story cards as many times as we can before we get back to the action. Apparently, people in the early 20th century read veeeerrrryyy ssssloooowwwwlyyyy. But once you get into it, it can be a satisfying experience, especially for anyone interested in history of the cinema.

*Addendum: I neglected to mention that the Haxan disc also includes a 1968 reissue of the film with narration by everyone's scariest uncle, William S. Burroughs. He supplies a suitably spooky incantation at the beginning, but, as I didn't discover this version until I had already sat through the original, I didn't watch much of it. A soundtrack featuring Jean-Luc Ponty on violin, among others, is also featured.

Both films are available from Nexflix and Amazon.

Little Men

2008-07-06T10:47:00.007-07:00

Sven Delblanc (1931-1992) was a well-regarded Swedish author who, according to the sources I've seen, often used fantastic themes in his fiction. Homunculus: A Magic Tale (1965) was a product of its time, a lampoon of Soviet and American military fanaticism during the Cold War. The object of their military/industrial interests is Sebastian, an unpleasant and unemployed chemist who, having discovered the elusive "Essence", creates a homunculus (literally, "little man") named Bechos in his bathtub.

Now, the homunculus is an interesting concept in alchemical and scientific tradition: the famed Golem of Prague was a kind of man-made man (but more monstrous than a true homunculus), and renaissance alchemists/charlatans could proudly display their little humanoid creations cavorting in glass beakers like some tiny detail in a Hieronymus Bosch painting as evidence of their chemical prowess (see also the menagerie of the campy Dr. Praetorius in the film "Bride of Frankenstein"). In science, early physiologists posited that each sperm contained within its head a very tiny yet well-formed homunculus, obviating the need for the mother's genetic influence and, apropos of that paternalistic era, making her essentially a simple vessel for the maturation of the wee nipper. Any resemblance of the mother to the child must, I suppose, have been shrugged off as coincidence.

But I digress. Our hero Sebastian lives in a mental world all his own, derived from mythological and alchemical tradition and alternating between paranoid states and episodes of mental and physical abuse of the various women making up the furniture of the novel. As the story is set during the Cold War, Sebastian's experiments are closely monitored by operatives of both sides, broadly caricatured in the best Strangelovian style as psychopaths and sexual fetishists. Each wants Sebastian's secret in order to create armies of homunculi, although why that would be necessary, since each side already bristles with arsenals of nuclear weapons, is unclear. It is essential to the story that these same nuclear weapons have foolishly been left in the hands of ideologically fanatical perverts for use at their own discretion. Both sides have in mind the vaporization of Stockholm, rather than allow Sebastian's secret to fall into the wrong hands.

I will cut the synopsis short in the unlikely even that you wish to search out a copy of this book for yourself. The book was passably enjoyable, but rather dated. I was perhaps too uninspired to puzzle out all the mythological/Jungian references, although the Sibyl who encounters Sebastian and the Prime Minister in the park was all too obvious. In the corpus of Delblanc's work, it does not seem to rank too high, so I wouldn't wish to pass judgement on the man based on this early work.

Particle Physics

2008-06-17T22:49:00.002-07:00

My seven year old begged to stay up late tonight so that he could watch "The Ghost Particle", a Nova program on PBS about neutrinos. Despite being very tired, he watched the whole thing intently.

Some (well, a lot) of the concepts were pretty arcane. My wife asked him during the show if he was following it. I interjected that the show gave a good portrayal of the scientific method. He interrupted - "Yes, I got that...."

I'm proud of that boy.

Vacation Bible School

2008-05-24T15:46:00.003-07:00

And don't forget to join us for our annual
"Running of the Semites"!

Right-Wing Debate Techniques, #1

2008-05-21T10:12:00.004-07:00

If you don't know what the hell you're talking about, just turn up the volume!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK0d8ENS__c

This idiot reminds me of the "interviews" they show on Pro Wrestling, except that the wrestlers tend to have more cogent arguments.

The Holy Mountain

2008-05-21T07:52:00.007-07:00

Some of the themes and imagery of Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" are reminiscent of Bunuel, run through a Roger Corman meat grinder. Excremental, absurdly sexual, violent (with blood supplied by Sherwin Williams), this is the cinematic equivalent of a Butthole Surfer concert. Grotesquely compelling, image piles upon image - I reached satiety just shy of the halfway mark, but stayed with it until the end.

The story, such as it is, involves an alchemist who assembles 9 archetypal characters for a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, with the intention of gaining power and immortality by displacing the old gods. The journey is both physical and mystical, a rite of initiation. The central figure, from the viewer's perspective, is a thief - a Christ figure who carries around as his spiritual/psychological double a deformed figure with truncated limbs. He is followed by a prostitute and a chimp. In one of many sacrilegious images, the alchemist's assistant, with long stiletto nails, washes the thief's anus. If you are anxiously awaiting the next Indiana Jones movie, this film probably isn't for you.

I found the end to be a bit of a cop-out, but it was perhaps the logical (logical?) conclusion. All in all, if you enjoy surreal imagery and aren't afraid of the grotesque and disgusting (please take note of these caveats), this film is a must-see.

"The Holy Mountain" is available through Netfix, or from Amazon if you wish to add to your permanent collection of extreme cinema.

Conversation with My 3 Year Old

2008-05-06T12:29:00.004-07:00

Me: I need you to eat the food I make for you. You just can't eat donuts and cookies.

3 Yr Old: Why?

Me: Because they aren't good for you. You need to eat healthy food...

3 Yr Old (interrupting): Why can't I shoot fire out of my toes?

The Old Man of the Mountain

2008-05-05T20:19:00.007-07:00

Alamut is the story, told in a style of oriental romanticism, of the origins of the Assassins, an 11th century Ismaili sect of Islam specializing in what today would be called terrorism and political assassination. As described in Bernard Lewis's The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, the reputation of the Ismailis as masters of deception and violence reached Crusader Europe quite quickly, although the primary target of the Ismailis (itself a sect of Shi'ism) was the dominant Sunni heirarchy in the Middle East.

Vladimir Bartol was a Slovinian writer with no particular expertise in Islamic studies. Published in 1938, the obvious analogues to Hasan ibn Sabbah, the fabled "Old Man of the Mountain", were Hitler and Stalin, pressing on Yugoslavia from west and east. But thinking of this novel in such terms is limiting: the subject is universal and relevant even today, the question of how one creates an ideology for which one's followers will be ready, without hesitation, to kill and/or be killed.

To persuade one to die for an abstraction, be it "freedom" or "paradise" is apparently not that difficult, given the bloody trail of human history. For Hasan, the key to the abstraction was to make it real, down to the last details. In the temperate valley behind the fortress of Alamut, Hasan created a pleasure garden, a paradise on earth with dark-eyed Houris (the most beautiful girls from far-flung slave markets), exotic fruits and delicacies, marble pavilions and tamed leopards, guarded over by muscle-bound Nubian eunuchs and administered by two women from Hasan's past.

As warriors, Hasan collects the cream of Ismaili youth, including ibn Tahir, whose grandfather was an early martyr for the cause, and who abandons his life and family to serve Hasan in Alamut. Doctrinal training and the arts of war are pressed upon these isolated youth. Ultimately, the best of them gain access to the holy of holies, the living prophet on earth, Hasan, who assures them that Allah has given him the key to Paradise. After some wine with hashish, the youths are quietly carried into the pleasure gardens, where they awaken to all their dreams fulfilled. After a night of revelry, the hashish is secretly re-administered and they awaken back with Hasan, astonished at their memories of a visit to an unworldly paradise, and willing to do anything Hasan commands for the opportunity to die in the Ismaili cause and return to their eternal reward.

As the novel progresses, Hasan's nihilistic philosophy is revealed to the upper echelon of his command. The supreme Ismaili motto is "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." By this motto, Hasan has freed himself to manipulate his followers towards his own end. He places himself as a prophet above even Muhammed, and his word is law, even to the point where he is able to coolly condemn his own recalcitrant son to death.

Bartol's Alamut is full of the violence, sex and oriental splendor one would expect from a Western fantasy of the East. I began the novel fully expecting it to be a story of star-crossed lovers who find each other in the sham pleasure garden, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sentimentality of the story has definite limits. Without giving away too much of the plot, there is no such romantic denoument. Hasan is a complex psychological being, a kind of Iranian ubermensch who has set the wheels of history in motion, and whose legacy survived, inspiring fear, for generations.

Bush's War

2008-03-26T09:27:00.004-07:00

The following is crossposted from a LibraryThing comment thread, responding to a European's comment regarding American support of George Bush and the idea of Obama as a "savior".

For the record, I distrusted George Bush way back when he was the Governor of Texas, my place of residence at that time. I high-tailed it for D.C. soon afterwards, with a vague (and prescient) dread that he would soon follow.

It is a terrible mess, I agree. Believe me, there are a lot of Americans, including those foolish enough to vote for Bush a second time, who also agree. He certainly made the mess, but I'm sorry to say that he had a lot of enablers. As for who can clean it up, all I can say is that I wouldn't want to be Bush's successor. It will be a tough slog, and I doubt there is a shovel big enough. He has set our country back in the eyes of the world immeasurably, squandering with cynical abandon the worldwide empathy that came after 9/11, with a breathtaking arrogance. I think of him as the anti-Midas: everything he touches seems to turn to cr@p. Watching "Bush's War" last night brought a lot of the abated anger back to the surface. What a stupid and arrogant war - what untold misery for Americans and Iraqis alike. For what? Absolutely nothing.

Being "saved" is a religious metaphor. I don't look at things with those lenses, although, again, I will agree that many Americans have a Millennialist mindset, seeing this country as the pinnacle of civilization. That's why the last 7 years hurts so bad. I would probably elicit swarms of anger if I were to say we brought it upon ourselves. The Iraq War fed right into this tragic view we have of ourselves as the Shining City on a Hill. We are so wonderful, we can't help wanting to bring this "wonderfullness" to the rest of the world.

Yes, naive.

I take some comfort that many Americans feel as I do - that we have witnessed a long slow-motion train wreck, an incomprehensible incompetency that we could scarcely have imagined. Right now, a lot of us would rather have a trained collie in the oval office. Maybe Obama represents a hope to reset the odometer, to show the world that we aren't as narrow in our thinking as it has appeared. As for Clinton, I could live with a b!tch after 8 years of an @sshole.

For as long as I can remember, the Presidency has been a personality cult: the most intellectually savvy, emotionally honest candidate, if he is not to some degree telegenic, has no chance of success (distrust and resentment towards intellectuals also runs deep in this country).

As for McCain, I don't trust him. But I am somewhat heartened that the Right has repudiated the Limbaughs et al. by choosing someone who at least seems to step back from the extremes in social thought that have characterized most of the Republican players over the past few years. Ric Santorum as presidential candidate? Now THAT would be scary.

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I go into a voting booth, it's usually with the hope that I'm choosing the lesser of two evils. I have no illusions at all that I'm voting for a savior. Like an addict, the Republic sometimes seems to jerks along at 4/8 year fixes, with periodic regime changes that take us, alternately, one step forward and two steps back. As the late Mr. Vonnegut used to say: "And so it goes."