May and June Books

May Books

Hello Down There (Michael Parker)

There’s a strong Faulkner influence here, but applied to the Piedmont of North Carolina in the middle of the twentieth century. I picked this up in the LGBT section of the bookstore, but there is no gay content (except for one homophobic joke). It’s more about drug addiction and (hetero) sexual mores. It’s a sad book, early in his career. I hope he has found happier subjects.

Basil (Wilkie Collins)

The story of a young idiot who gets deceived by a family of gold diggers. There’s some looking at the absurdity of marriage laws that prefigures Miss or Mrs?, and this also has what one of my professors described as the most graphically violent scene in Victorian literature, when Basil grinds his rival’s face into a freshly macadamized road. This is during the period when Collins rejects the marriage plot in favor of sibling relationships, but I hope that he’s not actually encouraging incest. The sister in this one is a real Angel in the House, so it’s frustrating – none of the women characters are believable. Collins will eventually get to where he writes complex, interesting women, but he’s not there yet.

Mr Wray’s Cash Box (Wilkie Collins)

This is a little Christmas novella. It’s not great, but it’s cute and heartwarming, though the ending gets a little capitalist for my taste. An aging actor sneaks into the church at Stratford and makes a mold of the bust of Shakespeare, but he’s too afraid to make more than one cast of it. He thinks the police are going to take him away for breaking copyright, but he doesn’t actually know the law. He’s fine.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Bronte)

Anne Bronte was the born-again religious one among the Bronte sisters, so while all of them quote the Bible out of context all the time, she does it with a little more piety than her sisters. She also relies on some of Milton’s ideas, the importance of growing and changing one’s mind and the worthlessness of virtue untested. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was seen as a little too sweet and innocent, especially when it was paired with Wuthering Heights, so this was her edgy follow-up. This book takes a hard look at alcoholism and its consequences. Some of her attitudes are surprisingly modern, as when Huntingdon talks about addiction as a disease and a compulsion rather than simply a habit. Also when Hattersley is helped out of it by strengthening relationships instead of being preached at. Some of the women are a little too Angel-in-the-House for me to appreciate them, and I question the wisdom of Helen’s returning to her husband after she left him for very good reasons, but as a whole it’s actually a really good book. Narrators reveal more of themselves than they intend, which is an effect I always enjoy.

Dangerous Personalities (Joe Navarro)

Navarro used to be a profiler for the FBI, so this book focuses on that sort of quick, targeted classification of people. He discusses four basic toxic personalities: Narcissist, Unstable, Paranoid, and Predator. At the end of each chapter there is a quiz to see if someone you know fits this type. The scoring leads to four divisions: safe, annoying, obstructive, and dangerous. I scored my guy as annoying in both narcissism and paranoia and obstructive in instability. It took me another month to get away from him, but I’m good now. I scored myself as annoying in instability, and it seems accurate. I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to have tried to live with me consistently through the last seven years. Navarro’s examples tend to be serial killers, so he can seem a little over the top (as law enforcement officials tend to do), but if you remember to dilute his intensity, it’s an informative book.

If Nuns Ruled the World (Jo Piazza)

I got unexpectedly excited about this book. It’s not so much a story of faith as it is true stories of amazing women who do fantastic things with their lives. Most of them are activists – whether for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, human trafficking victims – and some of them are just doing extraordinary things in their old age, like the one who didn’t start running until she was older than I am now, but worked herself up to compete in marathons, and continues into her eighties. It is true that these are women from a shared, specific faith community, but the good work they do goes beyond that community. In fact, they sometimes end up in conflict with the male leaders of their church because of the work they’re doing to make things better for everyone. Their stories can inspire anyone who wants to make our world better, Catholic or not, particularly those who are interested in women’s political activism.

The Path of the Green Man: Gay Men, Wicca, and Living a Magical Life (Michael Thomas Ford)

This was a fantastic book. Ford introduces us to the basic concepts of Wicca and a little of their history, with ideas for meditation exercises. Along with the nonfiction, he also writes an allegory where the green man travels through the wheel of the year, hitting the eight celebrations commonly celebrated by modern pagans, and meeting gods from a variety of (mostly European) traditions. I loved this book and it meant a lot to me.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling)

The first time I read this book, I had a hard time staying with it because I couldn’t find the mystery that kept the story together. It’s so long and digresses into so many details, and it’s great that Rowling didn’t stop world-building after the first book (so many fantasy authors do), but at almost nine hundred pages I felt my attention wavering. This was the second time, though, and when you know that Harry’s emotional state is the mystery and not just an obnoxious by-product of being fifteen, the book makes more sense. Rowling really hits the connection between Harry and Voldemort hard in this one, and that focus will grow toward book seven. There’s a lot of conflict between Harry and society as a whole, not just with his friends, which we saw less of in previous books. The atmosphere of conflict extends to the Weasleys, as Percy cuts himself off from the rest of the family. There’s a general sense that everything is getting bad, so it’s easy to assume that Harry being a little bitch all the time is just part of the general malaise and not proof that Voldemort is taking over his mind. It’s a much more complex and abstract problem than we had before, and as the dumb jock, Harry isn’t really equipped to handle it. Oh, and while it’s great that Ernie Macmillan has finally developed a personality, I think it’s a shame that that personality is Pompous Ass. Luna Lovegood makes her first appearance here, and she makes me very happy. I’ve heard people complain about the worthlessness of wizards who never use magic unless it’s dramatically appropriate; the Hogwarts kids learn Cheering Charms in year three, get tested on them in year five, but never use them outside of class. They literally know a spell to make each other happy, and they stubbornly refuse to do it. I do not understand.

 

June Books

Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (ed. Devon W Carbado and Donald Weise)

This was a strange anthology. The writings are grouped thematically rather than chronologically, and the divisions didn’t always make sense. Discussions of the United States government’s attitude toward African nations and toward Americans of African descent seem to me to overlap, so why not put them together? It also seems that the majority of Rustin’s work was in action rather than in writing or speaking. While his command of rhetoric is impressive, even he implies that he is most effective at organizing events and movements rather than speaking at them. Rustin’s style is highly educated, which can alienate his less-educated audience. He’s not as popular today, not only because he didn’t go down in a blaze of glory, but because people today aren’t impressed by erudition. People who seem smarter than others are feared and distrusted, not valued. It was probably the case at his time as well. Because my own education in twentieth-century history is not great, I hadn’t realized how much World War II had done for civil rights. The ground was prepared when all those soldiers were forced to mix together; knowing people of color helped whites to understand their value. Rustin started his work shortly afterward, in the late 1940s. The book focuses on the 1960s, as do the superficial discussions of civil rights movements in United States classrooms; it’s misleading because it ignores the gains of the 1950s as well as the fact that drinking out of the same water fountain doesn’t solve everyone’s problems. We’re still struggling with racism all over the world. The two crosses in the title refer to the fact that Rustin was both black and gay, but while he was an activist who was gay, he was not a gay activist. When Stonewall happened, he did not build on the momentum to organize a movement. His focus was on race, and dealing with that identity took up most of his time. He spoke about being gay some, but by the 1980s people only wanted to hear him talk about Martin Luther King. So yes, his sexuality and the prejudices about it (and the imprisonments because of it) were an obstacle to his visible participation in the civil rights movement, but even after twenty years he didn’t have much to say about it. I’ve been talking about those identities that make him similar to me, a gay man working on a second graduate degree, but I don’t want to minimize the importance of what he did for communities of color in the United States. He worked with the bus boycotts made famous by Rosa Parks, and he organized the March on Washington. He was an amazing person at the forefront of cultural change, and the improvements in our laws and culture toward ethnic differences are due to him and his influence. He didn’t do it alone, but what he did changed the course of history.

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (Isak Dinesen)

Confession time: I don’t remember a whole lot about this book. Dinesen’s stories are slow and beautiful, some are realistic and some are fairy tales, but I’ve had so much upheaval in the last two weeks that it seems like I read this book in another life. The most famous one from this collection is Babette’s Feast, due to the slow film that was made of it. It takes a lot of effort to stretch forty pages to fill that much movie. I watched it a few years ago with a friend who said it was her favorite, and we saw different things in it. The story is about a famous French chef who flees from war-torn Paris and finds shelter in an unusually conservative community of Lutherans in Norway. After several years, she wins a lot of money and spends it all preparing a dinner for her friends like the ones she used to make for the wealthy French. If I remember correctly, my friend saw it as a story of artistry and giving one’s best, even when people don’t appreciate it (or know enough to appreciate it). Reading the story, though, I agree that it has to do with the place of the artist in society, but it’s not about love and gratitude. Babette’s feast is a judgment. When she arrives in town, they teach her to make alebread and fish, like she doesn’t know how, and she is forced to kill her creativity for twelve years making these shitty meals for people that she really does come to care about. Someone who can make a turtle soup that people would die for can certainly make bread and fish a sight better than these unoriginal household cooks, but they don’t want her to. The story is about everyone ignoring and undervaluing her gifts, and her feast is a way of saying, “Look at what I can do! Look at what you’ve missed! Look at the talent that your stupid religion has hidden under a bushel!” It’s a story that condemns society for not giving artists free rein to express themselves. It’s a dumb religion that says, God gave you the ability to make the world vibrantly beautiful, but you have to keep making it greyly small because that’s what makes us comfortable.

Quill Me Now: The ABCs of Spellcraft (Jordan Castillo Price)

This is a short little novella, but I thought it was a lot of fun. In this world, magic requires two parts: a picture painted by a left-handed Seer and a saying written by a right-handed Scrivener. Dixon is from a family of Scriveners, though he isn’t really one himself, and he meets a sensitive Russian hunk with a real gift for painting Seens. I’m attracted to the idea that words have power, and that using them carelessly can have unfortunate consequences. Hurrah for paranormal gay romance. First of a series.

Ombria in Shadow (Patricia A. McKillip)

High fantasy. Ombria is a kingdom full of shadows, where people seem to drift through time. I deeply love Patricia McKillip, but I wasn’t as pleased with the ending of this one. The book starts with the death of the prince and the casting off of his mistress – she finds a way to sneak back into the palace to continue raising the prince’s son, whom she loves as if he were hers. Mistress isn’t a title that is often accorded respect, but she’s effectively the new ruler’s stepmother, and they have a close bond. The dead prince also leaves behind a bastard son, whom many people would like to see seize the throne, but he’d rather spend his time drawing the things about Ombria he doesn’t understand. The third candidate for protagonist is the witch’s foundling, a young woman raised on the idea that the witch made her of wax who is now trying to figure out what it means to be human. These three marginal figures work together to protect each other and the young prince, because getting him to the throne is what’s best for the kingdom. Then there are the two witches – the one who lives in shadow realizes suddenly she’s been a mother for twenty years and is confronted with her own love for her waxling, and the one who lives in the palace is caught up in political maneuvers to consolidate her power over the kingdom. While things are vague the book is mysterious and exciting, but when the mysteries are revealed the book just ends. I prefer the revelation to come at the end of Act II, where characters use their new knowledge to guide the community to a resolution (after some thrilling and climactic confrontation befitting Act III), but this isn’t a Victorian sensation novel. Nor is it a romance, or a Bildungsroman, or any other of the labels we use to simplify the discussions about stories. I don’t think it’s fair to define a book (or anything else) by what it isn’t, but that’s where I end up when I try to explain this one. Perhaps that’s the reason for all the shadow – this is a book that just isn’t.

Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson)

The unnamed narrator tells us about her affairs with married women. This book is deeply and beautifully sensual without being pornographic. She tells these stories in no particular order, as we do when we talk about our past to someone we’ve met only recently. Things can get a bit jumbled up, even though she gives us names for all of these women. There are a couple of men, but they rarely get more than a paragraph. Halfway through, suddenly, this becomes a book about cancer and loss, and while I don’t know if I would make the same choices that these people do, I was really engrossed by their story. This is a fantastic book, where as usual, Winterson probes into the heart of what it means to love.

Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure (Michael G. Munz)

The Greek gods return to earth in a fun comic novel. Apollo tries to solve the mystery of Zeus’s murder with the help of a television producer, a lovesick anti-hero, and the muse of comedy and sci-fi. In the end they have to defeat the Titans, because apparently that’s the part of Greek mythology that captures the imagination of contemporary writers. Can’t we just leave the Titans in peace? In some ways I found the characters frustrating – Ares is a really unkind Southern stereotype with inconsistent dialect markers, and the anti-hero is harshly sarcastic at inconvenient times. I suppose I just get disappointed when characters don’t use their power for the good of others, and none of the gods do.

The Godmakers (Don Pendleton)

Do not confuse this with the Frank Herbert novel that came out a couple of years later, nor with the anti-Mormon film (and novelization) a decade after that. I will be the first to admit that many of the books I have read over the past few months have been a bit insubstantial, or fluffy. Life has been stressful and I’ve needed relaxation more than intellectual stimulation and growth. However, this is the only one that I would actually call trashy. This is shit science fiction at its shittiest, the type of story that makes Barbarella look like high feminist drama. Characters use heterosexual sex to access higher dimensions of psychic energy, resulting in paranormal abilities. It’s very sex-positive, but racist, homophobic, and misogynistic as well. Adolescent wish fulfillment for incels.

Time Must Have a Stop (Aldous Huxley)

A strange book. It sometimes seems a bit like Dorian Grey, the young man learning about life from older, wealthier friends. But while Huxley makes Sebastian the center of the book, he doesn’t seem to find him very interesting. Sebastian’s uncle dies of a heart attack partway through, but his presence lingers on as we see him suffer in the afterlife and experience seances from the ghost’s point of view. Uncle Eustace keeps trying to hold onto an individual identity even when the painfully shining light tries to absorb him into a universal consciousness. This is the part of the story that attracted me, much more than the privileged teenager whining about finding evening clothes (a symbol of respectability denied him by the father who insists on breaking down class boundaries). Women characters are there to support Sebastian, acting as mothers, lovers, or evil crones. One of the fascinating things about this book is the setting, written in 1944 but about 1929. We’re on the cusp of a crash that author and audience know is coming but the characters don’t. Death gives Eustace some prescience, and the epilogue flashes forward to Huxley’s present, but those fifteen years don’t actually change Sebastian all that much. More experience means that he’s a handsome womanizing poet, not a handsome womanizing poet wannabe. I guess Huxley is right; I mean, as I look over my own life, it seems like there’s a lot of change, but the person I am has actually been pretty consistent. There were things that I thought were important that turned out to be superficial, and I have improved dramatically in self-knowledge and self-esteem, but the self in question is still the same. I enjoyed Huxley’s poetry; putting it in the mind of a teenager in the process of thinking through his art gives him a chance to show the revision process and a bunch of half-finished fragments of thought. It might not be as interesting to people who don’t write or study poetry.

Lime Gelatin and Other Monsters (Angel Martinez)

Another short paranormal gay romance novella. I get on a kick sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Kyle Monroe is a police officer in Philadelphia’s paranormal division, and while everyone there has magical abilities, they’re all bad at them, like the guy who accidentally lights things on fire when he’s angry, but only achieves little smolders rather than large conflagrations. They’re kind of like X-Men who haven’t had any training, so they just flail about with their unusual abilities and try not to hurt each other. Kyle absorbs the powers of those around him and controls them even more poorly, kind of like what I do with picking up on other people’s emotions subconsciously and then inventing reasons for me to feel this way. He gets a new partner, a giant beautiful man of southern Asian derivation, so it’s all police procedures and Indian food, with some gay sex thrown in. It was a fun little story.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)

The kids are sixteen, and romantic relationships are starting to take over the plot. They’re also swearing more often. Draco Malfoy and Professors Snape and Dumbledore play larger roles than they have heretofore, with Dumbledore taking a more active role in Harry’s education and the antagonists finally actually plotting to do evil things. We also meet Narcissa Malfoy, who is one of my favorites. There’s a big political storm brewing around her, but all she cares about is keeping her family safe and she will do anything to accomplish that, which makes her a lot more like Molly Weasley than people ever acknowledge. Mrs Weasley, poor dear, spends a lot of time worrying about everyone. Fred and George have become successful businessmen without having finished high school or attempted college, which is great to see, and people start to acknowledge that Ginny might be the most powerful witch of the series. The death at the end of this book always makes me sad, though I have plenty of other reasons for that just now. I’m glad I read it, but I’m also glad it’s over. One of the things that gets me about this series is that while Rowling is fantastic about retconning the Horcruxes and other plot elements, she does not do so well with retconning the school system. We seldom see students doing things that Harry and his friends can’t do yet, like trips to Hogsmeade or Apparating in the earlier books. We see adults doing serious magic, but there’s very little of the intermediate steps between where Harry is as an eleven-year-old and where his teachers are adults. Fred and George seem to represent the zone of proximal development for Harry, but even they are consistently more advanced than he is. It’s like, being raised by Muggles and not that good at academics, Harry isn’t really interested in doing magic, or he thinks that all magic is so far above him that he can’t even try. Finding the old Potions book in this story is the first time that Harry experiences magic as power he can access and not just a symbol of the social acceptance he was denied at his uncle’s house. Looking at Snape’s notes and revisions and experiments, he finally shows some actual interest and passion for something other than sports, so I’m disappointed in Hermione for trying to squash that. But she’s got enough of her own problems in this book, so I don’t judge her too harshly. A lot of people talk about the Slytherin House as being evil, but that’s not their defining trait. Think about Professor Slughorn as Head of that House. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just hyper alert to power and the way it moves. He likes it, he likes its benefits, and he likes being seen as close to people who have it. But he’s not willing to put others in harm’s way to get it, nor does he enjoy the suffering of the powerless. Slytherin isn’t about being evil or serpentine; it’s about understanding relationships of power and staying aware of how social structures affect people. Which is why I identify as Slytherin even a little more strongly than I do as Ravenclaw, the House of learning for its own sake where books are more important than people. This book is definitely building to the series finale/climax of book seven, much more strongly and intentionally than we’ve seen before.

February-ish Books

Once on a Time (A. A. Milne)

This is a fantasy book written for adults (now probably considered YA). Of course, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything inappropriate for children here, merely that they are not the primary audience. There are people who are bad and unhappy because they are miscast, and Milne makes sure we understand that – a good leader can be an underhanded, manipulative follower, and a good swineherd can make a careless, aggressive king. The difficulty in life is to figure out what people’s strengths are, what they are truly well-suited to, and then putting them in those roles. I’m seeing a lot of that in my management class, but it’s true here as well. Magic kingdoms that are somehow excessively small, transformations, foolish men, women who don’t actually need help – it’s a great book.

The Biology of Luck (Jacob M. Appel)

I read this book in unhappy circumstances, sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck, but I don’t think I’d care much for it in the best of contexts. Protagonist writes a book for the woman he loves, recounting the day that he finally gets the courage to ask her to marry him but from her perspective, and then he waits for the day he has the letter from the publisher either accepting or rejecting it to ask the big question. So, we see the day from his side, as he gets his letter and tries to hang onto it during the course of his day as a tour guide. We also read the book he wrote, telling the day from her side, but the two stories keep intertwining, so Protagonist predicted the day accurately, with its deaths and disasters and everything. A better writer would take a little time to speculate on the nature of reality, whether Protagonist is trapped in his own story or whether he is influencing future events in which he is not involved, whether free will exists or we are all pawns in some cosmological plan that he got an accidental glimpse of, but Appel ignores it all. There is no meditation on the fabric of events because Protagonist is completely obsessed with this girl Starshine. She doesn’t think of him at all. He fills the same role in her life as the gay best friend, only without being gay. I’m really confused as to why he would portray the woman he loves as a manipulative bitch, but he does. The common folk would call her a cocktease – she holds the possibility of sex in front of men in order to get them to do what she wants, but she prefers not to actually let them touch her. The boyfriend she meets for lunch is fabulously wealthy and wants to take her away to Europe; the boyfriend she meets after lunch is fabulously sexy and wants to take her away to Europe as well. The first one is young and entitled, the second is older, muscular, and revolutionary. Sleeping with two men is enough; she doesn’t need more sex in her life, but she still presents herself as available to other men so they will donate to the nonprofit she works for or do whatever else she wants. Why does protagonist love her? He digs all into her psyche, but I can’t find anything there to justify his feelings for her.

This book is another example of how New Yorkers think that a book is good, interesting, and important simply because it is set in New York. There’s nothing else to recommend it.

The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)

I first picked this book up in the staff room at my workplace ten years ago. I read through the first chapter, and I knew that this book could completely take me over, so I put it down and decided to leave it alone. Until now. There’s something about Anne Rice’s writing that feels real; it didn’t feel like reading fiction at all. It was a complete experience for me. Which is good, because at over a thousand pages, it took me nearly three weeks to get through it.

This is really two books. Nestled in the center is an epistolary multigenerational Gothic novel, along the order of Daphne du Maurier, about a family of witches. In seventeenth-century Scotland, a girl named Suzanne was a local healer. She slept with a witch hunter who told her all sorts of stories about witches are supposed to be able to do, so she went outside and called forth a spirit who whipped up a storm. She named him Lasher. He guides, protects, and supports her descendants for the next three hundred years. Lasher picks up various tricks from them over the years. The witch gene doesn’t stick with only female children, though, so he gets the idea to breed them for magical talent the way a puppy mill inbreeds for floppy ears and gentle dispositions. There’s some gay content here, but since the gay men in the family also tend to fuck their sisters/aunts/daughters/mothers/nieces, it’s not as gay-positive as I’d prefer. The Talamasca is a group of scholars who try to learn about the paranormal and protect the Mayfairs from their own witchcraft. They provide some genetic material for the line as well.

The frame story, the second longer book, is about the newest witch, Rowan Mayfair. She’s a neurosurgeon sworn never to see the family in New Orleans, who rescues a hot drowning guy and falls for him. He’s a poor Irish from New Orleans as well, so just her type. He gets some psychic powers after his near-death experience, as well as a driving mission to help the Mayfair witches. Not the ones living now, all the dead ones. Lasher’s in on it too, glad to have finally found a Mayfair who understands enough about anatomy to give him corporeal form. I’ll admit that my attention started to flag sometime around page 850, but I pushed through and things got intense there at the end. It’s a good book, just very long. The other two books in the trilogy are of a reasonable length.

The Consumption of Magic (T. J. Klune)

This is the third in the series about the magically bitchy twinks who gather dragons to put down the Rising of the Darks. When we finished A Destiny of Dragons, Sam hadn’t quite forgiven his mentors for concealing some details from him, but he gets over it here. Things are getting too dangerous for him to pass up allies, and this is a book about reconciliation. Even Gary and Kevin get back together, and we’re all glad we don’t really have to imagine what unicorn-dragon sex looks like. Knight Delicious Face is still dashing and immaculate, though once Sam starts telling his own secrets things change a little. Prince Justin is a bit less of an asshole than he has been, so maybe Sam’s charisma is winning him over at last. As ever, Klune’s writing is a joy and a delight, and if I knew him I would be begging for a beef injection. I love this series so much. This isn’t the end, and this installment finishes on an Empire Strikes Back sort of a note.

 

I know that I usually discuss books in the month that I read them, but it’s the afternoon of March 2 and I’ve already finished two more, so I’m going to go ahead and discuss these as well.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K. Rowling)

I’ve heard people say that this series takes a dark turn in the fourth book, that the death of Cedric Diggory changes the series in less pleasant ways. I’d disagree – things get really dark here in Book Two. I know the movie makes him look like a Pixar chihuahua, but Dobby the Self-Harming House-Elf is really disturbing. Far from being the friendly sidekick, he’s one of the primary antagonists, despite the way he gives himself severe burns and bludgeoning trauma. It’s a miracle he hasn’t had any amputations. Then two fourteen-year-olds steal a car, only to have two twelve-year-olds steal the same car a few chapters on. Fortunately for it, the car goes feral and hides in the Forbidden Forest. Then there’s the giant spider, and the even gianter snake who kills on sight. Hagrid continues to be incredibly irresponsible with the children, even though it’s strongly implied that he’s sixty-three, so I feel like he should be more mature than he is. How long do half-giants live? How long does it take them to grow up? There’s also a great deal of cynicism in relation to celebrity culture and government authority, which will persist throughout the series. Bring on the darkness.

Prater Violet (Christopher Isherwood)

I read this book in about twelve hours, and most of those I was asleep. It’s the fictionalized account of Isherwood’s involvement on a motion picture in 1933 and 1934. The book focuses on his relationship with the Austrian director. There’s a lot of talk about politics, Hitler, and preparing for war – writing in 1945, Isherwood knew where things were going so he makes a big deal out of it, but the character Isherwood doesn’t know that World War II is just around the corner and just tries to keep the peace. The real meat of the book, for me, is in the last ten pages, where Isherwood starts thinking about what the experience means. What are we living for? In the midst of a worldwide economic and psychological depression, why do we bother to keep ourselves alive? It’s an expensive business, stuffing food and water in your mouth so that the cells keep replicating. It’s an interesting and intense burst at the end of the book. It got me thinking – he talks about how he takes lovers to hide from his fear and depression and hopes that eventually he will reach a point where he doesn’t need a man’s body to distract him from his terror and despair. I wonder if that’s what I’m doing. Why am I still with this guy? And if I do shake him off, how long will I stay single? Am I into relationships for the sex, or am I using men to avoid facing who I am and how I feel? Am I so in love with being alive that I really think it’s better than the alternative? Haven’t I always wanted the sort of adventure you never come back from? How aware am I of what’s going on in Venezuela, and to what degree does that make me complicit? Maybe I am just a stupid American, using more resources than an entire village, taking up more space than anyone has a right to, foolishly optimistic about the future and so not working to stop war or climate change. I’m hearing the girl from The Last Five Years, singing “I suck! I suck I suck I suck!”

The Sane Society (Erich Fromm)

Fromm is a social psychologist from the last century, and I’ve been working my way through his works a little at a time. This book attacks the idea that in 1950s America, healthy and normal were interchangeable concepts. Fromm begins by asking the question, are we sane? Is this a sane society? The answer, of course, is no. He determines this by examining the suicide and murder rates, which were already unusually high in the United States.

The next stage could be a bit controversial: determining what a person needs, regardless of culture. Making claims for universality is always a little dodgy, and although a European emigrant to the United States has had experience of several different cultures, his background doesn’t necessarily qualify him to discuss every culture. But since he’s focused on mine, I found his five needs to be relevant.

1. Love. We need other people; not just any people, we need people who are similar to ourselves who welcome us. We need to feel like we belong. The failure of loving others productively is narcissism.
2. Creation. He expresses it as transcendence, but I find that any explanation that uses the word ‘transcend’ becomes excessively numinous. We need to make stuff. I used to make blankets and sweaters, but now I’m making brownies and pies and casseroles. Sometimes I make poems or stories. Sometimes I add color to figurines at work. I like to make music. When we lose faith in our ability to create, we destroy. Later on, Fromm uses this need to explain why laziness is a capitalist construct and only exists when the work-life balance is skewed.
3. Roots. Glancing back at the idea of love, we need to have a sense of our own origins. If we’re successful, we can distill that universal love into a positive feeling for those people we grew up with; if we’re not, then there’s incest to fall back on. Fromm really takes Freud to task here, arguing that his Oedipus complex and incest drives are abnormal, not part of healthy human development. He points out how ridiculous it is to assume that babies and young children have developed the sexual instincts of adults.
4. Identity. We need to know who we are, apart from all the groups we belong to – family, community, nation, fandom, etc. Failure to establish an identity leads to conformity to the group. When we think back on the 1950s, it’s the conformity that seems most prominent in our cultural memory, but trauma has a way of forcing individuality on us, and World War II led to the expression of a lot of things that people didn’t want to face. If there’s repression, there has to be something trying to break free, and little packets of individual identity were breaking free all over the place. Kerouac’s On the Road was published in the 1950s, though most of those journeys took place in the 1940s, right after the war. He served in the US Navy for about a week.
5. Belief. He talks in terms of orientation, which again is a little more abstract than is helpful for me. This is where he talks about reason – some people form beliefs based on observation and rational thought. They might be Christians or Muslims or atheists or Hindus, the thing believed in isn’t important, but the important thing is how they arrive at this belief. Less successful people grab onto superstitions and are guided by imagination rather than reason. Yes, a creative imagination is important; but CS Lewis didn’t believe Narnia really existed and that he could find it by poking around in the wardrobes in his home. A bird that is given food at random times will look for a cause to the random times, and will construct a ritual that it believes will produce the food. If it fluffs its wings just right, or whistles the precise tune, it believes it can cause the food to appear, even if it is still random. Even if the rituals don’t work, the belief persists. People aren’t much different.

 

The rest of the book (most of it) looks at the basis of society and asks whether it can promote these needs in the form it took then. There’s a lot of talk about authoritarianism, as in his previous books, but the thing that sticks out to me here is the commodification of people. Foucault would later write about this more extensively, the way that human beings are quantified and reduced to numbers, abstractions. Fromm takes a lot of time to talk about alienation, the way that we become abstractions to ourselves. It’s all right, even necessary, to work with other people, but when you start seeing yourself as a cog in a machine then something’s wrong. Human life is infinitely more complex and more valuable than the machinery we produce, and ignoring all of the value that people have and caring only for a small part of them is a destructive act.

Fromm also gets into Marxism, and the ways that people have distorted what was essentially a good idea. He really gets excited about socialism, of which I approve. He talks about the Russian attempt and explains how communism isn’t socialism (no matter what they name their republics), and all the ways Stalin got it wrong.

I have to admit that I started losing interest in this later part. I don’t have a strong background in understanding economic or political systems, and that made his arguments a little hard to follow. Also, times have changed, and some of his analyses aren’t relevant sixty years later. Some of it is also just depressing, as we in the United States keep clinging to an extreme form of capitalism that has produced an authoritarian president who is doing everything he can to destroy the country and make himself richer. It’s all quantities and numbers without an attention to the humanity being crushed to make blood wine for him and his fellow one-percenters. Trump’s election is a product of the alienation endemic to capitalism, and I could say some similar things about Bolsonaro. I just hope we can get rid of these bastards soon; I’m not trying to rob them of their human complexity (though some people do), I’m just saying that they are making bad decisions and creating unnecessary suffering for millions of people and I’d like it to stop.

I sometimes talk about being in favor of socialism, but to me that’s really only a second-best system. My ideal would be anarchy, people living quietly in peace without needing to be governed by an external authority. The problem with anarchy is, people are horrible, and left to themselves would rape and kill less aggressive people like me and swipe all our stuff. Because people suck, government is necessary. Because politicians suck, government is most effective on a smaller scale. Trying to govern however many millions of people there are in the United States with a single organization is sort of idiotic. Smaller countries, smaller communities, would work better. Fromm’s suggestions for creating a sane society are a little idealistic and unrealistic, given the nature and temperament of Americans, but maybe we could build a new society somewhere else. If Trump’s supporters get what they want and we’re all expelled to Big Gay Island somewhere, I’d like to think we’d make something better than what we’d be leaving. I like the fact that being gay in America means I’m expected to be in touch with my own feelings and respectful of those of others.

Fromm’s book is a little more connected with literature than the previous ones of his I’ve read – he makes a lot of references to Brave New World and 1984, though he spends a lot more time on Brave New World. We sometimes talk about Huxley’s book as instincts gone wild, but the people are much more mechanized (and hence alienated) than in Orwell. He makes frequent references to Kropotkin without explaining any of them, though he is more careful in examining the works of Marx and Engels. He wrote a book about literature before this one, but somehow I skipped it in my chronological reading of Fromm’s works. I’ll circle back to it soon.

It is always impressive to me that books like this can end in hope. People are shitty and create shitty systems to destroy each other, and it takes a lot of imagination and optimism to believe in the possibility of change. I haven’t been feeling the optimism lately. Apparently I read more books in 2018 than in any of the previous five years, and I think it has less to do with self-care and more to do with the need to escape reality. Reading isn’t always productive – it can be a self-comforting, addictive behavior. But I’m not Fromm, and he found hope that the world could improve, and he gave some specific suggestions on how to make it better. I’ll try to make things a little more beautiful where I can, but large-scale social change is beyond me. But if we’d all make things a little more beautiful where we are, it wouldn’t be beyond all of us.

Bodies are Where You Find Them (Brett Halliday); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (dir Shane Black)

In 1941, the similarities between Brett Halliday and Dashiell Hammett are more pronounced. It’s easy to read Mike Shayne as Humphrey Bogart, though I didn’t cast the rest of the book and he doesn’t have red hair.

Mike Shayne is a private detective with two apartments – one on a higher floor where he lives with his wife Phyllis, and one on a lower floor that he uses as an office. As he and Phyllis are preparing for a vacation in New York, he gets an urgent professional call. Some drugged girl wanders into his office, vaguely connected with an upcoming local election. As he’s getting his wife to the train station without her finding out about the girl, someone sneaks into the office and kills her. He does a decent job of pretending she’s just asleep when the police come with his reporter friend Tim Rourke, but then the body disappears.

The rest is as you’d expect. Menacing thugs, car chases, car wrecks, reappearing corpses, an insane asylum, a maid who desperately wants both to divulge some information and to ride Shayne’s ginger cock, and all the Miami politics that I’m beginning to see as a vital part of the Mike Shayne universe. If it isn’t organized crime and crooked politicians, Halliday doesn’t care.

One of the things that really struck me in this novel is the way Mike Shayne’s peers police his sexuality. It reminded me of Private Romeo, a not-that-great LGBT movie that locates Romeo and Juliet in an all-boys military school. We expect parents to guard their children’s behavior, but when Lord Capulet’s lines are suddenly coming from a seventeen-year-old, it gets sort of weird. Why is this boy acting in loco parentis? Is he homophobic, or is he trying to save Juliet for himself? But here, the police and Rourke aren’t trying to bed Mike Shayne; it’s as if somehow marriage is a fragile concept, and if Shayne has extramarital sex then the whole thing is fake. His infidelity would make their unrelated relationships mean less to them. He got the fairy-tale ending they all wanted in a previous book, and now they need him to live up to the Prince Charming role that they assigned to him. To be clear, Shayne doesn’t want to cheat on his wife with either the drugged girl or the maid – he loves his wife, and really is the white knight everyone needs him to be. But he needs the police to think he’s screwing the dead girl so they don’t look closely enough to realize she’s dead and start an investigation, and he accepts the fact that he might need to give it to the maid to get the information he wants. Of course, Halliday makes the maid disappear so Shayne is freed from temptation, but still. Everyone has an opinion on Mike Shayne’s sex life, and they all act as if their opinion should matter to him.

“It just goes to show,” Rourke went on, “what damn fools we all are when we pretend to be so tough. You and Phyllis were a symbol of some Goddamned thing or other around this man’s town. While you stayed straight it proved to all of us that the love of a decent girl meant something – and that was good for us. Every man needs to believe that down inside.” Rourke was talking to himself now, arguing aloud a premise which his cynicism rejected.

“That’s what distinguishes a man from a beast. It’s what we all cling to. There’s the inward conviction that it isn’t quite real – that it doesn’t mean anything – that we’re marking time until the real thing comes along – like Phyllis came along for you. And when that illusion is shattered before your very eyes – like with you today – it’s ugly, Mike. It’s a shock. It doesn’t laugh off easily.”

It does make me wonder about my relationship, and what I’m doing here. He’s convinced that we’re going to get married and live happily ever after, but I’m not convinced. I love him, and I’ll give him what time I can, but I don’t have that sense of finality. Maybe it’s because I have a hard time believing that anything endures, but I don’t see this as the last relationship I’m ever going to have. I’m getting what good I can out of it, but I’m not expecting forever.

KISS KISS BANG BANG

This movie claims to be based on the Halliday novel, but it’s more homage than picturization. Harry (Robert Downey Jr) is a small-time thief who blunders into an audition and gets shipped to Los Angeles because he can do the part and he looks sort of like Colin Farrell. Gay Perry (Val Kilmer) is hired to give him detective lessons, and they stumble into a plot that also has car chases, car wrecks, disappearing and reappearing corpses, and an insane asylum. Honestly, that part of it is straight out of Victorian sensation novels, especially The Woman in White. Being in Hollywood instead of Miami, the politicians are replaced by movie people, and some other plot points are adjusted to match 2005’s version of gritty (more severe than 1941’s). Also being in Hollywood, there’s an aspiring actress played by Michelle Monaghan. I think she’s pretty great, in this and in her other films. There’s actually a lot of conversation around the ethics of consent in the first part of the movie, RDJ being the good guy of course. But still, despite the occasional naked woman, my favorite sexy bit is when Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr make out in an alley. Gay Perry is my hero.

New Guy has been moving in with me over the last couple of weeks (one more reason to be behind in writing about books – I’m three behind again), so when I watched the movie to remind myself of it before writing here, he was there with me. He started to like it when MM cuts RDJ’s finger off halfway through; so afterward he felt like he had to tell me how boring he thought the first half was. Several times. And when I told him that I had gotten the message and he could stop saying that, he still had to say the word two or three more times. I didn’t feel like I needed to explain this, but apparently I do: when I say that I like this movie and I really want to watch it, a part of me identifies with it. When you insult my favorite movies, you’re telling me that I have bad taste – you’re insulting me. I’m ready to be lovers again, but I’m not quite as peaceful about it as I have been.

Brett Halliday’s novels are turning out to be just what I need in terms of reading during grad school: untaxing, relaxing, exciting. This is one of the first – Halliday (a pseudonym) began writing Mike Shayne novels in 1939, and in 1941 this is the fifth. He continued writing them until 1958, but other writers took over and continued writing the series until 1976. It’s a bit strange to think of Shayne’s career lasting almost forty years; he doesn’t seem to age. In terms of physical fitness and prowess, he’s just as good twenty-five years later as he is here, and his hair is never anything but red. I suppose we don’t like to see characters growing old, even though I think it’s a good thing. We all age, so we need healthy models to learn to do it well. No one learns to be healthy from reading Mike Shayne books.

Orconomics: A Satire (J Zachary Pike)

It’s not always labeled as such, but this is a Dungeons and Dragons story. Well-written fantasy, but in a world that already feels familiar to some of us. I have never studied economics; even in high school, my civics class was all government and no economics. This book puts the basis for some of our economic problems into terms that I can understand.

It’s like this. Hero work ostensibly exists for the improvement of society and making the world a better place, but it really all boils down to money, sort of like the American education system. Heroes go out and kill ‘bad’ guys and take their stuff. Society measures their accomplishments by looking at the tangible results, the loot. Corporations or guilds see the loot coming in and want a piece of it, so they choose a hero and invest in getting him better armor and weapons so that he has a better chance of getting the loot. In exchange, he promises them a percentage of the take. It was all well and good for a while, but then a couple of things happened. First, heroes started running out of ‘bad’ guys to kill. Too many heroes, not enough loot. The competition gets more intense for a lesser reward, so the investors are less interested in putting their money into something that will not pay. Second, the bankers figured out that you can invest in a hero, get him outfitted and all that, but then while he’s gone slaying the dragon or suppressing the orc menace, you sell your share of his loot to someone else. You get your profits faster and without risk, because you’re passing the risk along to someone else. The hero has now become a hot potato, with everyone selling the shares around until he comes back with a wagonload of gold or something. When dealing with actual companies and small business owners, I imagine that the hot potato can be passed around indefinitely, as long as the company stays in business.

The idea of who is bad and who is good opens up a whole can of post-colonial immigration worms. It’s typical to see the player races – humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, etc – as the good guys most of the time, and some other races as being bad all the time – goblins, orcs, trolls, ogres, the less sexy fantasy creatures. Protagonist Gorm Ingerson is a dwarf berserker, and the story begins with him befriending a goblin. They don’t speak the same language, but Gorm recognizes that the only chance the goblin has of not being killed is for him to give him a job and get him properly registered with the government. He’s not necessarily less prejudiced than the people around him, but he does have some compassion for the innocent. Eventually someone starts teaching the goblin the common language, but for most of the book Gorm calls him Gleebek, the goblin word for Hello.

Speaking of post-colonial worms, let’s talk about the Elgin marbles. Once upon a time, Greeks built huge temples to their deities and covered and filled them with statuary and other stone carvings. Among these was the Parthenon, which is still considered a national treasure today, nearly 2500 years later. Around five hundred years ago, Greece and its Parthenon were captured by the Ottoman Empire, who turned it into a Muslim prayer site. Around two hundred years ago, the Earl of Elgin got permission from the Ottomans to haul the statues back to England, pagan statuary not being essential to Muslim worship. Some pieces were fairly simple to haul away, but some had to be cut off the building. Byron (poet, member of the House of Lords, and enthusiast for all things Greek) was especially voluble in condemning Elgin for defacing and looting the pride of an ancient people, but Elgin sold the marble pieces to the British government for placement in the British Museum, so nothing bad ever happened to him. Shortly thereafter, Greece won its independence and now they want their marbles back. The English are refusing to give them back, because they bought them from Elgin fair and square, and Elgin had the proper permits from the Ottomans, and it’s Greece’s own fault for being conquered in the first place. Now, imagine that the English are elves and the Greeks are orcs, and that the Elven Marbles have been stolen in transit. Gorm and his pals are hired by the elves to get the Marbles back, even though they really belong to the orcs. But, you know, orcs are evil and smelly and dangerous (foreign), so can anything really belong to them? I mean, they don’t speak English.

Well, Gorm’s pals are not really his pals. The team is assembled Avengers-style, and this party is really questionable. The most important danger in Dungeons and Dragons is not the supposed villains, it’s your own party members. People will get each other killed in a heartbeat, either by wandering off or being spiteful in battle. In time, there are pairs of people who start to work well together, but the group never really coheres. They’re all different levels (as DM, I would not have gone along with this), all fairly independent and belligerent, and none are that friendly. Working out your party dynamic is essential because these are the people who will get you killed. The game is more fun when the players aren’t wasting their energy arguing with each other.

Another social issue is the drug addiction. In a world of magic combat, of course there are healing potions, which means that of course there are people addicted to healing potions. The elf in Gorm’s party tends to sneak off by herself, cut, and then heal. It’s sad and frustrating – the addiction cost her a lot of prestige and skill, but most people don’t know about it. She keeps it secret and somehow manages to function most of the time, and this is how addictions work in the real world as well. We accept the fact that our friends are quirky and if we’re not really that close we don’t look under the surface. I know that I have an addictive personality and a body that creates dependence quickly, so I try to be careful about drinking coffee and alcohol or doing anything else. Those habits are expensive, and easy to form. I’ll have a drink occasionally on the weekends, meaning maybe a couple of drinks once in four to six weeks, but when I feel stress my brain jumps to alcohol as a solution. Even if it’s 6:30 a.m. and I just woke up. A long habit of denying myself anything has kept me from ruining my life with addiction, but not everyone was trained in self-hatred the way that I was.

Of course, the Elven Marble thing is a setup and Gorm realizes too late that there is no right solution and that the banks, guilds, and corporations are all ready to destroy the world to increase their own profits. I’m used to distrusting institutions, so this part of it feels familiar and right to me, even though it’s a big double cross and the friends I play D&D with would not appreciate this kind of plot twist.

So, this is a novel set in a familiar fantasy landscape, but demonstrating the evils of capitalism run amok, sort of like what we have here in the United States today. I enjoyed it, and if you’re into this sort of thing, you probably will too.

Kangaroo (D. H. Lawrence)

In this book, Lawrence finally addresses directly some tendencies I’ve been noticing in his career after World War I. For example, the lack of action:

Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and he falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things.

To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians. But you know as well as I do that Harriet is quite happy rubbing her hair with hair-wash and brushing it over her forehead in the sun and looking at the threads of gold and gun-metal, and the few threads, alas, of silver and tin, with admiration. And Kangaroo has just got a very serious brief, with thousands and thousands of pounds at stake in it. Of course he is fully occupied keeping them at stake, till some of them wander into his pocket. And Jack and Vicky have gone down to her father’s for the week-end, and he’s out fishing, and has already landed a rock-cod, a leather-jacket, a large schnapper, a rainbow-fish, seven black-fish, and a cuttlefish. So what’s wrong with him? While she is trotting over on a pony to have a look at an old sweetheart who is much too young to be neglected. And Jaz is arguing with a man about the freight rates. And all the scattered Australians are just having a bet on something or other. So what’s wrong with Richard’s climbing a mental minaret or two in the interim? Of course there isn’t any interim. But you know that Harriet is brushing her hair in the sun, and Kangaroo looking at huge sums of money on paper, and Jack fishing, and Vicky flirting, and Jaz bargaining, so what more do you want to know? We can’t be at a stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. If the pudding doesn’t please you, leave it, I don’t mind your saucy plate. I know too well that you can bring an ass to water, etc.

So, if you’re not fond of books with a lot of ideas and very little action, Lawrence says that that is not his fault, and you’re welcome to run off and do something else. This very polite Fuck You to his critics comes at the end of a lengthy comparison of himself to a fly in the ointment – he’s somehow gotten himself stuck in the sticky mass of humanity, but being there only highlights how unfit for the location he is, how disagreeable to all of humanity he feels himself to be.

The key to his elitism, as I’ve called it before, is in his treatment during World War I. This section of the book is considered autobiographical, so let’s consider it as such, assuming that his protagonist R. L. Somers is a stand-in for himself, D. H. Lawrence. Before the war began, he married a woman of German parentage, so perhaps the government was already a little distrustful of him. They were living in Cornwall the first time he was called in to the draft board; he was weighed and measured and found wanting. I assume this to mean that they pulled out their calipers and measured his muscles and bones, especially since he spends some time talking about his skinny little legs. In any event, he was rejected by the army as physically unfit. However, they sort of assumed he was a spy, and the local constabulary kept a harrassful eye on him and his friends. After a while the army was getting desperate and called him in again, this time labeling him a C3, which is not quite rejected but still not good enough for active service. The harassment continued, so he left Cornwall and moved to Derbyshire. His examination by the war office here was even more demeaning – one of the doctors literally pulled the conscripts’ cheeks apart to stare into their buttholes. As I consider this action, the only purpose I can come up with is that they were checking for homosexual activity (or at least trying to). I mean, actual health problems almost always have some other, easier means of verification than a visual inspection of the anus. For Somers, though, this is the last straw, especially since this inspection only moves him up to C2, noncombat duty. So, he spent four years being told that he wasn’t good enough for his own country, while at the same time being hounded for alleged spywork for the enemy. It’s a weird stance, because if his own government considers him unfit, why would a foreign government see him any differently?

So, overwhelmed by rejection, he flees humanity. Like Lawrence, Somers spends some time in Europe before going to Australia, to get away from all these people. For Lawrence, World War I was the time when the lower classes upended society and bullied the educated and the wealthy simply because they finally could. He may have had some sympathy for the coalminers he grew up among before the War, but afterward, he has no fellow feeling for anyone. Humanity as a mass is malignant and unpredictable – the only safety is in very small numbers, and even individuals can be shockingly frightening.

The first third of the book is about Somers’ growing friendship with Jack Callcott, a white supremacist. From the moment of Somers’ arrival in Australia, Jack befriends him and grooms him for joining the Diggers’ Club he’s a part of. There’s something very Fight Club about all this, sports clubs as a front for political maneuvering, possibly leading to violent revolution. Somers thinks that the government needs to be run by ‘responsible’ people, which in his British mind originally meant the aristocracy and the educated, but given traveling experience, it now seems to mean white people. As if persons of any other race, African or aboriginal Australian or Indian or Mediterranean or Russian, are incapable of caring sufficiently about government to do it properly. Those of us raised in the American South are probably thinking about the Ku Klux Klan at the moment, and there are strong parallels. There’s a strain of suppressed eroticism in their friendship, as if all this political business is really just a sublimation of their desire to fuck each other. After all, they keep their women out of it.

This scene was too much for Jack Callcott. Somers or no Somers, he must be there. So there he stood, in his best clothes and a cream velour hat and a short pipe, staring with his long, naked, Australian face, impassive. On the field the blues and the reds darted madly about, like strange bird-creatures rather than men. They were mostly blond, with hefty legs, and with prominent round buttocks that worked madly inside the little white cotton shorts. And Jack, with his dark eyes, watched as if it was doomsday. Occasionally the tail-end of a smile would cross his face, occasionally he would take his pipe-stem from his mouth and gave a bright look into vacancy and say, “See that!”

Even watching a football match, maybe especially while watching a football match, the homoerotic desire keeps peeking out, only to be forced back in. Somers even thinks of sleeping with Jack’s wife because he thinks Jack won’t really mind, though I think he would. He might not supervise her every move, but he does seem possessive.

Act One culminates in Somers meeting Kangaroo, the secret leader of all these alt-right revolutionary clubs. He wants Somers to join their cause and write for their publications, but Somers won’t do it. For one thing, Kangaroo is Jewish, and that’s a problem for racist Somers. For another, Kangaroo talks explicitly in terms of love: like many right-wing leaders, he sees political activity as an act of paternal love for the poor innocents who can’t manage their own communities. He’s less explicitly racist than Callcott, but doesn’t correct the racism of others. I guess he recognizes that he’s not as white as the others, and his position is therefore a bit precarious. Another reason for Somers’ resistance is his decision about what his relationship with Callcott ought to be. What kind of mate does he want to be? Is it possible for someone like Somers to have friends, or to belong to groups at all? He feels so far outside of humanity that it’s hard for him to join in, even when he has such a clear invitation.

Act Two deals with Somers’ decisions as to Kangaroo and Callcott, but Callcott has also introduced him to Jaz, an unsocial little Cornish guy. His lack of outward friendliness makes him a better fit for Somers, and he introduces Somers to Kangaroo’s archrival, Willie Struthers. Struthers is trying to lead Australia into Communism (remember, this was the 1920s, and the arguments in favor were very strong. In my opinion, they still are). Somers is just as incapable of joining the far left as he was the far right, even though they seem equally assured that he belongs to their side. I suppose, when you hold yourself aloof from all groups, each group sees you as potentially one of theirs simply because you are clearly not on of their opponents’.

Act Two climaxes with the story about Somers’ life in World War I, explained above. It’s like a Gothic novel, only instead of having a mysterious house and a conspiracy plot, the only mystery is why Somers is so antisocial. Like a good dialectical novel, Act Three shows what happens when the Diggers show up at a Communist rally, with the appropriate explosions and violence. Callcott accuses Somers of being a spy, which is what people seem always to say when you investigate their group and then decide it’s not for you. Some people just don’t understand informed decision-making.

While all of this political stuff creates some intense drama, there are two other important things going on in Somers’s life. The first is his relationship with his wife. Their marriage suffers when he has too much “boy time”, ignoring her to go to political meetings and such. Callcott’s wife doesn’t seem interested, but Harriet Somers has the intellect and the interest to engage in politics, but the misogynistic prejudices of the men keep her from her natural success in that arena. She’s strong and capable, but limited by her society. Lawrence seems fully aware of the restrictions laid on women, but Somers doesn’t fight against them. I guess if you see all society as stupid and unjust, then more specific injustices don’t bother you as much. Or in other words, he identifies himself as a victim and is uninterested in ending the victimization of anyone else. Society doesn’t want him, so he’s not going to solve its problems.

The other strain in the book is travel writing. This is, after all, a book about two people who come to a new country. He portrays the land and sea as congenial (we’re talking about Sydney and its environs), and the people as unusually friendly and informal. That being said, there are occasional storms, so life in Australia is not as safe as it seems.

It was a clear and very starry night. He took the tramcar away from the centre of the town, then walked. As was always the case with him, in this country, the land and the world disappeared as night fell, as if the day had been an illusion, and the sky came bending down. There was the Milky Way, in the clouds of star-fume, bending down right in front of him, right down till it seemed as if he would walk on to it, if he kept going. The pale, fumy drift of the Milky Way drooped down and seemed so near, straight in front, that it seemed the obvious road to take. And one would avoid the strange dark gaps, gulfs, in the way overhead. And one would look across to the floating isles of star-fume, to the south, across the gulfs where the sharp stars flashed like lighthouses, and one would be in a new way denizen of a new plane, walking by oneself. There would be a real new way to take. And the mechanical earth quite obliterated, sunk out.

He also mentions the accent a few times. It’s sometimes hard for me – there are some pieces of dialogue in Strictly Ballroom that it took a few viewings for me to understand, and I actually do better with the Spanish than I do with some of the English. I once had a coworker from Australia, and he was telling me someone’s name that was unfamiliar, and I just couldn’t understand the vowel, not even when he spelled it aloud. It could have been A, E, or I, and I’m still not sure which was correct. Logically, that part should have been easier for me than it was because I grew up in a place that tends to conflate the pronunciation of the same vowels, but my Southern childhood confusions over pin and pen did not prepare me for the Australian confusion between Liz and Les.

In some ways, this is a clearer novel than Aaron’s Rod or The Lost Girl. It’s still a bit elitist, but the elitism is explained in a way that makes sense to me. I know that my experiences in Saudi Arabia and Texas do not really compare with Lawrence’s during the War, but I recognize the PTSD and the inability to join groups from my own experience. I finally understood him, and saw in him a mirror of my own life. Lawrence/Somers doesn’t see healing as an option, but I do. I’d like to be able to walk through a crowd without panicking one day, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable goal to strive for. I hope one day to trust the world like I used to. I believe I can be free from the trauma and fear that holds me back, that keeps me from the full unfolding of my personality. I don’t think it’s necessary to stay on the defensive all the time, and I believe it’s possible to work past it.

 

Weaveworld (Clive Barker)

Clive Barker writes such beautiful horror.

Even this, one of his earliest novel-length stories, moves me to tears.

Nothing ever begins.

There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.

Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden among them is a filigree that will with time become a world.

This book was written a little before The Great and Secret Show, and has a lot of similarities to it. There’s a magical world bordering on ours, which people can access at rare times, but which is normally hidden and forgotten. Instead of existing outside, though, the secret magic is woven into a carpet, hidden in plain sight. And instead of having the two-journey structure, this book is in three volumes, and those volumes are subdivided into thirteen books. It brings to mind the twelve-part epics (plus one, to evoke the number of horror) as well as the Victorian three-deckers. Also like TGSS, there’s this amazingly powerful heroine.

“You’re a strange woman,” he said as they parted, apropos of nothing in particular.

She took the remark as flattery.

Suzanna is a regular person, in this book called Cuckoos, but when she faces a magical antagonist she gets access to the power of the menstruum, and while that word isn’t always associated with power, in this book it is. The menstruum is the source of magic, and when used appropriately, can give a woman so much power she becomes revered as a goddess. She has the task of protecting the Fugue, the magical place hidden in the weave, and the people who live there. She is assisted in this task by a lovable not-quite-hero, a cute boy who seems sort of worthless until he’s inspired by love to do incredible things.

And what lesson could he learn from the mad poet, now that they were fellow spirits? What would Mad Mooney do, were he in Cal’s shoes?

He’d play whatever game was necessary, came the answer, and then, when the world turned its back he’d search, search until he found the place he’d seen, and not care that in doing so he was inviting delirium. He’d find his dream and hold on to it and never let it go.

Cal is sort of like Christopher Moore’s Beta Males, more secondary protagonist than hero, but he loves the Fugue and will do anything to preserve it.

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he’d tasted in his twenty-six years – tasted but always lost – were here redeemed and wed. He’d grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumor of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; seen its consequence in sudden good and sudden laughter; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire.

It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die.

And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.

As with many other novels I love, this one follows the natural cycles: events usually slow down in the winter, as the British retreat to their fireplaces and let the snows rage around them, and then things pick back up in the spring and get really intense in the summer. The Fugue is a place of creation, so it is often allied with the spring.

Of course, there are antagonists. Immacolata wants to unleash the Scourge and destroy the Fugue, and Shadwell her minion wants to take over. I once read that the protagonist is often considered the character who changes the most, and Shadwell changes a lot over the course of the book, so maybe it’s his story and not so much Suzanna’s and Cal’s. In the first part he’s a salesman, in the second he’s a prophet, and in the third he’s a destroyer, but it is sort of implied that the three roles are all the same, really. He has a magic jacket that shows people the thing they want most and gives them the illusion of attaining it – as I reflected on this and the fact that the thing I want most is love and a man to share it with, I wondered what Shadwell’s jacket would show me. After all, the first time we see it, Shadwell just opens his coat and asks Cal, “See something you like?” as if he were displaying his body and inviting Cal to touch him, but with that slightly menacing tone that says that if he takes the bait he’s going to get beat up for it. The Scourge itself is amazingly powerful, like the dragons of ancient stories, and has lost sight of who he is because of those ancient stories. At one point it’s said that he’s been corrupted by loneliness, and I wonder how much loneliness it takes to turn someone’s mind like that. And I wonder how much time I have left, before I decide that romance is unattainable in this life and that I need to get on without it. Like in Moana, the danger has to be healed instead of destroyed, so this is ultimately a hopeful book, despite all the death and destruction and loss that comes before the end. Which you would sort of expect in a book that I feel with enough intensity to cry at the end.

The thing I wasn’t expecting from this book was racism. The term Negress is outdated, but can be read as descriptive and not pejorative, but there are other words for persons of African descent that are unequivocally used to denigrate (a word which means, to make blacker). I know that word was only used by a bad guy, but even when racism is only used to mark unsympathetic characters it still bothers me. There is also a random offensive comment on the Cherokee, in the narrator’s voice and serving no purpose but to dehumanize a nation whose roots extend beyond our human understanding of history. And another thing: what is this thing that British authors have with writing about gay Arabs? (Neil Gaiman, I’m looking at you and your American Gods.) Does this go back to Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, or did T. E. Lawrence depict the Middle East as some sort of nonstop gay sex party? If so, then there’s no reason for Lawrence of Arabia to be such a dull film (I’ve heard; I’ve never actually seen it). In this book, the homosexual desire is acknowledged, but not celebrated – that will come later in Barker’s career, after he comes out publicly.

The other day I drove back through the old neighborhood in Asheville where The Ex and I used to live, and it was strange and different. On a Saturday in December, there should have been endless traffic, but it was just like a Saturday in any other month – I guess the new outlet shops at Biltmore Square have finally succeeded in diverting holiday drivers away from downtown and the mall area. Less traffic is welcome, but the other changes were less so. I lived in the Charlotte Street area for a year, and I heard more angry honking in half an hour in 2017 than in all of 2009. I commented on this to The Ex, and she agreed that Asheville’s energy has gotten really angry in the last few years, so much so that she doesn’t enjoy coming into town as she used to. In my memory, Asheville is preserved as a magical place where people are kind and mindful of the life around them; the city may still recycle, but they’ve lost their attention to each other. It’s become crowded and distressing, the city’s music transformed into noise. Perhaps there are still oases of comfort, but the city itself is not the oasis it once was. I remember people worrying about gentrification and what would happen when artists and the poor could no longer afford to live downtown, and now we’re seeing it. The problem isn’t with public art or community events (Bel Chere is privatized, but not dead) – the problem is with the people. I wonder if it’s all newcomers; I’ve been getting intensely angry with the world lately, and a lot of it has to do with the way the American government is turning the country to shit and how powerless I feel to do anything about it. I would guess that’s a big part of Asheville’s problem right now too.

But, much like the Fugue, my communities can be saved. Suzanna’s grandmother leaves her a book of German fairy tales, with the inscription:

Das, was man sich vorstellt, braucht man nie zu verlieren.

Which Barker translates as:

That which is imagined need never be lost.

But looking back at the German, I appreciate the fact that it uses indefinite pronouns and active verbs, so that a more literal translation could be: That which one imagines, she never needs to lose, or One never need shed what she imagines. Despite all my anger at how very disappointing life in the United States has been the last few years, I still hope for something better. I’m still imagining the life I want, and trusting the stories that tell me that if I can dream it, I need not lose it. Nothing that we imagine can be lost forever.

 “It’s all the same story.”

“What story?” Cal said.

“We live it and they live it,” she said, looking at de Bono. “It’s about being born, and being afraid of dying, and how love saves us.” This she said with great certainty, as though it had taken her a good time to reach this conclusion and she was unshakeable on it.

It silenced the opposition awhile. All three walked on without further word for two minutes or more, until de Bono said, “I agree.”

She looked up at him.

“You do?” she said, plainly surprised.

He nodded. “One story?” he said. “Yes, that makes sense to me. Finally, it’s the same for you as it is for us, raptures or no raptures. Like you say. Being born, dying: and love between.”

 

The Lost Girl (D. H. Lawrence)

Sometimes I wish I were dark and uneducated so that D. H. Lawrence would think I was sexy. But then I remind myself that he’s been dead for eighty-seven years and so I really shouldn’t give his preferences much weight.

I first read this book a few years ago, as part of the D. H. Lawrence Omnibus I bought for my e-reader. But I didn’t remember that when I saw it in the used bookshop and picked it up. I was looking back at some of the old blog entries from that time, but I couldn’t find any thoughts on it. Instead, I saw just how unhappy I was. I saw some handwritten journal entries from the same time a few weeks ago, and I’m amazed that I survived. I was so suicidal then. Things are dramatically better now, but I’m feeling the seasonal depression coming on, and starting to feel some anxiety about going back to the dark, uneven places in my mind. I know that I’ll come through and that spring will give me new life as it always does, but I’m not looking forward to the next two months.

You live and learn and lose.

This book tells the story of Alvina Houghton, and as an American I immediately pronounced it completely wrong in my head. This is a book with several different accents – RP and Midlands, of course, but then there’s RP warped by American, as well as French, Italian, French-Swiss, and German-Swiss – so Lawrence shifts his spellings to match the characters’ pronunciations. Alvina should be pronounced with a long I sound rather than the long E, so that it rhymes with vagina. Houghton does not have the sound of ought; the first syllable rhymes with rough.

But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside.

When I read this, my first reaction was to reject it as elitist. In essence, I don’t see anything that far out of the common way in Alvina; she has a good education and lives in a town with few opportunities, and most people in that situation end up leaving their town to build a new life elsewhere. Or at least, most people now. Perhaps in the 1910s it was extraordinary. But I think that Lawrence was likely thinking of himself at this point. The Lost Girl was written while he was trying to find a publisher for Women in Love, which was a complicated task because of its overt sexuality and references to homosexuality (it has always struck me as strange that a book about two men who are almost a gay couple should be titled after the women they fuck). WL’s predecessor, The Rainbow, had trouble getting published too, so Lawrence’s insistence on his specialness is a logical response. He was feeling rejected, so he found ways to comfort himself.

And then, as I’ve been thinking on it, I think that while Alvina is an average woman, she makes different choices than her friends and neighbors make, and people hate and fear what is different. I was talking about this with a friend this week, complaining about the elitism, and he said, What makes people extraordinary is not in the ego. Which makes sense to me – Lawrence may not have fit the mold his coal-mining society offered him, but that fact doesn’t make him better than they are. In terms of human worth, he’s not better, which our current connotation for the word Extraordinary implies. But I find his writing abnormally beautiful; his stories touch me in a way that runs deeper than the constructs I use to interact with the world. The place inside him where his stories come from seems very similar to the place inside me where my stories come from.

I’ve been talking with some friends about joining a shared storytelling experience, but this week when I gave my first attempt it was rejected as being too dark. I’m trying not to take it personally, but it feels like they rejected something essential inside of me, like they don’t want to be exposed to the world as I see it. One even described me as a broken hippie, and while I don’t take offense to that the way some others did, it is who I am. My brokenness comes from feeling rejected by society at large, and it is too close to my identity to be fixed by someone else. There’s an awful lot of anger inside me, stemming from several different events over the last six years (and childhood stuff too), and I haven’t always let myself feel it so that I can release it. When we write stories, the caged-up bits of our lives find their way out. Maybe I need to write some really angry stories to let the rage monster calm down, but if that’s what I need, this group is not the proper setting for it.

God bless you for a good wench. A’ open ‘eart’s worth all your bum-righteousness. It is for me. An’ a sight more.

So Alvina learns to live and be herself in a society that is inimical to her. The first third, Act I if you will, deals with her parentage and upbringing. This is necessary to a writer as interested in psychoanalysis as Lawrence is, but this quantity of exposition makes the story seem long, and readers who aren’t accustomed to the ponderous, heavy beauty of Lawrence’s prose will likely give up long before anything interesting happens. Alvina is the product of an effeminate father and an invalid mother who happily take up separate bedrooms after the first year of their marriage. He hires a governess to look after the child, and she is mostly raised by Miss Frost. But when she becomes an adult and is ready to face the world, there is no world to face. Her family wants her to keep going as she has done, caught in a perpetual childhood. So she goes off to a different city to get trained as a maternity nurse. It’s exciting to be away from the town she grew up in, surrounded by new friends and young men, but when she gets back home she can’t find much use for her skills, so she goes back to helping her father and Miss Frost. There are a couple of suitors, but she isn’t as attracted to them as she is to the plumber, a married man with a “tight body,” which I assume to mean muscular and lean with an ass worth staring at (which she does, when he checks under the sink). She becomes so desperate for a change that she considers profligacy, but her personality isn’t right for the job.

But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you haven’t got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn’t in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then you can’t be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since willing won’t do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement.

By the time we work our way around to Act II, she’s past thirty and playing the piano for her father’s theatre, a blend of vaudeville and silent pictures. People already prefer the pictures (this is somewhere between 1911 and 1913), so the skilled performers are already in a vanishing profession. Enter the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, who do a show based on Native American interactions with white Americans on the frontier. To make this as weird as possible, none of them are actually American – they’re all from the Continent. Madame, who runs the show, is French, and her boys mostly speak in French. Max and Louis are a Swiss gay couple who speak their love in French (thus eluding censorship), and sometimes I think that Francesco and Geoffrey are a couple too, but then Cicio falls in love with Alvina and Gigi encourages him, so maybe not. At one point, Cicio tells Gigi that there’s room in the bed for all three of them (again in French), but Geoffrey declines the invitation. I think it’s because he prefers Cicio’s attention to be undivided. Or perhaps I’m projecting. Alvina falls for Cicio too, though she’s never quite sure why. When she gives him her virginity, she spends the next few days being really weird and uncomfortable around all of them. I don’t know if she gets the pun behind her ‘Indian’ nickname, Allaye – Geoffrey and Cicio were talking about her vagina as l’allée, an alley, and Madame overheard and named Alvina after her sex organ. It’s only after Alvina’s second time with Cicio, when she learns to enjoy it, that people start calling her the lost girl of the title. I think that it’s a misnomer, because a woman her age is clearly no longer a girl, and I don’t see the problem with having sex with a handsome, consenting Italian.

There comes a moment when fate sweeps us away. Now Alvina felt herself swept – she knew not whither – but into a dusky region where men had dark faces and translucent yellow eyes, where all speech was foreign, and life was not her life. It was as if she had fallen from her own world on to another, darker star, where meanings were all changed. She was alone, and she did not mind being alone. It was what she wanted. In all the passion of her lover she had found a loneliness, beautiful, cool, like a shadow she wrapped round herself and which gave her a sweetness of perfection. It was a moment of stillness and completeness.

In Act III I start to see the lostness, but that’s because I think of being lost in economic terms. After her father’s death she sells everything to settle his debts, and then Madame finds out how little money she has and things cool off between Alvina and the Natchas, to the point that she moves to Lancaster to become a nurse again. Then World War I breaks out and one of the doctors nearly strong-arms her into marriage, but then Cicio shows up again, the theatrical company having broken up with Geoffrey’s return to France to enlist. Cicio gets the girl (not the boy), they marry, and take a harrowing train trip across France in the middle of the war. They end up back in Cicio’s ancestral village in Italy, though ‘end’ is another misnomer – the book doesn’t have a strong finish, just a drifting off as Italy enters the war and Cicio gets called up, promising Alvina that he’ll return from the war and they can move to the United States, and Alvina asking if he is sure.

I spent a great deal of this book being confused by the central relationship. What do they see in each other, beyond a boy who’s attractive and a girl who’s willing? We seldom see anything through Cicio’s eyes – he’s an enigma right to the end – but when his uncle meets Alvina, there is something in the way she looks at people and things, a slowness, that stirs in him all his ancestral pagan traditions. Alvina makes men feel like men, in an ancient sense, like an aging artist’s model turned farmer has all the qualities that allowed his ancestors to imagine Jove and Apollo. Without seeming weak, she can make them feel strong. Cicio puts her into a confusion, a constant state of being unsettled, which I don’t associate with love but which apparently she does. My goal for love now is to find someone with whom I can relax and be myself, all of myself, without fear of rejection; Alvina is looking for something else, someone exciting who will help her liberate her energies and get away from the mental straitjackets of her childhood home.

I can’t find the passage that I want to right now, but there was a moment toward the end of the book when Alvina talks about Italy as an overwhelmingly beautiful place populated by people she can’t stand, and this seems to sum up my own view of the world lately. That darkness I alluded to up there – after being rejected by several branches of Christianity and living in places where I can be fired from my job, kicked out of my apartment, and even beheaded for being gay, something inside of me has lost its faith in humanity. I’ve been living as a hermit for the last few years, and it’s not just out of natural shyness; it’s that I’ve been rejected so many times and so thoroughly that it’s hard for me to trust people anymore. Yes, there are some friends that I hold very close to my heart, but the mass of people around me, the ones who voted in an incompetent bent on the destruction of our country and the rest of the world as well, I don’t care to know. I’ve been reconnecting with friends I haven’t seen in five or six years, and trusting them is more difficult than I’d like to admit. A couple of people that I really wanted to spend time with when I moved here have started new relationships and don’t have much space for me in their lives. I want to engage with the world more frequently, but my experiences of humanity in general have left me so angry and distrustful that it’s hard for me to meet new people. And I’ve been shoving this anger down and not letting myself feel it, so the rage from being different in a society that values conformity forces its way out as depression and social anxiety.

When I first started with WordPress six years ago, I called my online identity Angry Ricky, but after a few years I felt that the anger had passed and I was ready to let that name go, so I became this, The Occasional Man with a Beard. But I wonder if I didn’t let that first alias go too quickly. Maybe the repressed anger runs deeper than the feelings themselves, to the way that I form feelings. My instinctive response to the world I live in, which is full of injustice and betrayal and rejection and beauty and stillness and love and so many contradictions that I feels as if I’m being ripped apart by feeling too many things at once, as if my heart is pulled and twisted by love and pain and constant tension between the two. I don’t want to be this complex. I don’t want to be Lawrence’s Lost Girl, caught forever in a moment of suspense, in a life that plods on and on with never a sense of resolution.

This is not a book for people who are new to D. H. Lawrence, or who seldom read books. It has random phrases in German and Italian, and entire conversations in French. It’s slow and massive and heavy and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and then it stops out of nowhere, a bit like life itself. But for all that, it is one of the books that makes me feel with Lawrence, that makes me wish I had had a chance to meet him, to kiss him, to hold him tightly until not everything, but something feels okay again. I think that if he felt safe in the world, I would too.

Mythologies (Roland Barthes)

I’ve been working in a library for the last few weeks, and I’m finding it quite agreeable. It allows me to use both my retail warehouse experience and my academic experience. I’m enjoying it so much I’m considering going back to school next year to qualify for a full-time job. One of the benefits is getting a close look at the collection, which is really very interesting. As is essential with small libraries, the collection is highly idiosyncratic; big sections on medicine and sociology, not as much in languages or the hard sciences. I sometimes think that we must have had an amazing collection forty years ago, but then I realize that these books that were cutting edge in the 1970s probably weren’t acquired until the late 1980s or 1990s.

This is from work rather than from my personal collection; I’m the first person to check it out, but now that there’s a stamp from 2017 it’s likely to have a spot reserved on our shelf for some time to come. This is a book of essays about French pop culture in the 1950s, translated to English in the 1970s, but Barthes’s observations seem oddly congruent with American society of the 2010s. Far from being a dispassionate observer, Barthes seems to get quite angry about things, and the things that make him angry are the same things making my friends angry now.

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself. In the petit-bourgeois universe, all the experiences of confrontation are reverberating, any otherness is reduced to sameness. The spectacle or the tribunal, which are both places where the Other threatens to appear in full view, become mirrors. This is because the Other is a scandal which threatens his essence. Dominici cannot have access to social existence unless he is previously reduced to the state of a small simulacrum of the President of the Assizes or the Public Prosecutor: this is the price one must pay in order to condemn him justly, since Justice is a weighing operation and since scales can only weigh like against like. There are, in any petit-bourgeois consciousness, small simulacra of the hooligan, the parricide, the homosexual, etc., which periodically the judiciary extracts from its brain, puts in the dock, admonishes and condemns: one never tries anybody but analogues who have gone astray: it is a question of direction, not of nature, for that’s how men are. Sometimes – rarely – the Other is revealed as irreducible: not because of a sudden scruple, but because common sense rebels: a man does not have a white skin, but a black one, another drinks pear juice, not Pernod. How can one assimilate the Negro, the Russian? There is here a figure for emergencies: exoticism. The Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle, a clown. Relegated to the confines of humanity, he no longer threatens the security of the home. This figure is chiefly petit-bourgeois. For, even if he is unable to experience the Other in himself, the bourgeois can at least imagine the place where he fits in: this is what is known as liberalism, which is a sort of intellectual equilibrium based on recognized places. The petit-bourgeois class is not liberal (it produces Fascism, whereas the bourgeoisie uses it): it follows the same route as the bourgeoisie, but lags behind. [Barthes’s italics]

Barthes’s main point can be summarized pretty quickly, actually. One of the most important problems with people (specifically, the bourgeois, or we might say conservatives or Trump supporters) is that they confuse Nature with History. They look at the injustice in the world and they assume it is the natural order of humanity instead of a culturally specific situation determined by social, political, and economic forces (what he calls History). Nowadays we call it being blind to privilege and it’s the fashionable complaint against our political opponents, but it’s the same concept. The consequence of this confusion is what I call The Myth of Human Powerlessness, the idea that no one can do anything about things. People don’t fight against injustice because they think that they can’t (powerless) and that they shouldn’t (it’s natural, so no one is responsible for it, least of all me).

The first part of the book is a set of short pieces, each three or four pages long and inspired by something happening around him. Some of the pieces come from performances, like a wrestling match or a striptease, but others come from reading the sort of magazines that these days are found in the supermarket checkout line – Elle, Paris-Match, and L’Express. These pieces are focused on concrete facts and events, which makes them fairly simple to understand.

The second part is a fifty-page essay of post-structuralist theory, which is highly abstract and less simple to understand. He refers to Saussure and Freud and seems to prefigure Derrida, whose first major essay was written around the same time, but most of whose work came later. Barthes defines mythology as a second order of signification: a concept is represented by a symbol, and the relationship between the two is considered a sign, which is a simple dialectic that I can understand. I saw Bell, Book, and Candle for the first time recently, so let’s talk about it. Most of the main characters are witches, but if they fall in love with the opposite sex they lose all their power, so they are constantly fighting against heterosexuality. So in this film, it seems like witchcraft is a symbol for gay sexual orientation; homosexuality is the signified, witchcraft the signifier, and our connection between them (which includes them) is the sign.

The trick with Barthes’s definition of mythology is that it’s a second-order sign: the sign itself can become a symbol for another concept, and the relationship between the two can be considered a myth. Or in other words, what does the fact that we equate witchcraft with homosexuality mean? The narrative surrounding homosexuality in 1958 told the story of anti-American sexual deviants who had no place in proper society; these witches lead similar lives of secrecy and hold similarly dismissive attitudes about the people who demean their community and deny their right to exist. For Barthes, this is the sticking point: modern mythologies point us to injustices in our society, and for someone who understands that Human Powerlessness is a myth, injustice can and should be corrected. When I was in school people talked about how post-structural linguistic arguments were politically motivated, but I think I’m just beginning to understand that now.

Barthes includes a section on left-wing myth, but he points out that mythology is primarily a conservative drive. It’s the people on the right who have a vested interest in keeping things the same (hence the name conservative), so they invent complicated mythologies to maintain their privileged position. The examples of this are too numerous and too painful for me to pursue right now, and besides, the internet is full of people pointing out the injustices. I sometimes feel like my facebook friends are expecting me to fix all of the injustices right now (ALL OF THE INJUSTICES!!!!!!!), and while I don’t believe myself to be powerless, I don’t see how I can do more than I’m doing already, teaching my students to spot their own prejudices by guiding their reading of essays used as rhetorical models. Because I don’t think it’s enough to spread articles on facebook to raise awareness; I think awareness has to be coupled with a concrete plan of action to remedy the injustice. For example, people raised my awareness about the tragic hurricane in Puerto Rico, and then they included several links to pages where I could donate money to support the relief agencies traveling to the island to help the people. This one is good, but most of the others don’t tell me what I can do to relieve the pain. Hence my frustration with the MeToo hashtag, which seems to tell me not to sexually harass or assault women, but I’m already exhibiting that behavior. How much of this awareness-raising is being targeted at people who are already demonstrating the target behavior? How many of the people using that hashtag are actually friends with someone who would assault them or denigrate them because of their gender? And for men, the limit of what people seem to expect of us is that we won’t assault women. I can’t volunteer in a facility for women who have become victims because the mere fact of my maleness could be a trigger for them. My presence would make them relive their trauma, so I stay away. But I feel like there ought to be something I can do other than feel the weight of suffering of hundreds of people and carry it on my shoulders like Atlas.

The world is a beautiful place where good people live. But there are still problems, and Barthes’s strategies can help us elucidate those problems and work toward solutions. He doesn’t reach any solutions in this book (other than something like “treat people with more respect”), but he raises questions and models thinking that will push us in the direction of solutions. He’s raising awareness. And if it takes us another sixty years to find solutions, then at least we’re moving in the right direction.

Nights of Love and Laughter (Henry Miller)

Henry Miller has such a reputation, I was rather expecting something racy and exciting, and then again, there’s the title. In that respect, this one was a bit of a disappointment. It’s like reading Jack Kerouac all over again, but with more of a message.

When peace comes it descends upon a world too exhausted to show any reaction except a dumb feeling of relief. The men at the helm, who were spared the horrors of combat, now play their ignominious role in which greed and hatred rival one another for mastery. The men who bore the brunt of the struggle are too sickened and disgusted to show any desire to participate in the rearrangement of the world. All they ask is to be left alone to enjoy the luxury of the petty, workaday rhythm which once seemed so dull and barren. How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician! But logic has it that we ordain innocent millions to slaughter one another, and when the sacrifice is completed, we authorize a handful of bigoted, ambitious men who have never known what it is to suffer to rearrange our lives. What chance has a lone individual to dissent when he has nothing to sanction his protest except his wounds? Who cares about wounds when the war is over? Get them out of sight, all these wounded and maimed and mutilated! Resume work! Take up life where you left off, those of you who are strong and able! The dead will be given monuments; the mutilated will be pensioned off. Let’s get on – business as usual and no feeble sentimentality about the horrors of war. When the next war comes we’ll be ready for them! Und so weiter . . . .

This makes me think about the veterans I’ve taught – for example, a twenty-one-year-old Marine with brain damage from an IED in Fallujah, which prevents him from operating a motor vehicle, and yet he can’t get any sympathy or slack from college professors in terms of attendance policies or length of assignments. Yes, war is bad, but my protest of the Iraq War does not consist of limiting opportunities for success for the kids who fought in it. They’re just filling a need – it’s the politicians who create the need, and they are the ones responsible. But they sometimes have no military experience of their own, or they felt the experience to have built their character or some such nonsense, so they don’t let themselves think of the thousands of lives they put at risk every day. One of the things I really liked about Obama was the fact that he worked with veterans, so he had seen the effects of war and its impact on the daily lives of the young people we send into the world. When he talked about finishing our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had specific faces in mind, people he knew who had been there. I didn’t get excited about all of his military decisions, but I respect the position from which he made those decisions.

Miller also addresses the immigrant experience.

But the real reason, as I soon discovered, was that I wanted to be among English-speaking people; I wanted to hear English spoken twenty-four hours of the day, and nothing but English. In my weak condition that was like falling back on the bosom of the Lord.

Yes. Leaving Saudi Arabia to vacation in Paris was amazing and fantastic and all of that, but sometimes we need to be surrounded by our native language. Language is an essential part of identity, and it is overwhelming to spend a few years being constantly reminded of what isolates you from the people around you. The irony is that Miller leaves Paris for London, but his writing is riddled with late-1930s, early-1940s American slang. He makes it across and talks with the border guards, but they speak a different English than he does, and they reject his visa application and send him back across the Channel. Speaking English does not make us all brothers.

My favorite story of the collection is the longest, “Astrological Fricassee.” It is about Miller’s meeting with a gay Hollywood astrologer, after which he goes to a huge party the astrologer is hosting. Miller fakes an interest in the zodiac to get in, apparently to drink free liquor and meet girls. The feigning becomes pretty obvious, though, so he’s not as successful as he would like with the ladies, but he’s very successful with the drinking. It becomes clear that Miller is not the sort of guest one wants to have, because he’s still there hours after everyone else has left, after the host’s boyfriend comes around and starts acting affectionately (after the party, remember what year this is), after the host has stopped being polite and has started asking him pointblank to leave. Eventually Miller and the two other obnoxious guests who won’t leave make enough noise that someone calls the police, and the gay couple disappears into the night. I guess alcohol gave people some leeway, or they gave themselves permission to be what they truly were when everyone else was elevated. It’s a world that I have a hard time understanding, because for me proximity to alcoholic beverages was a result of coming out of the closet, not being inside it.

I didn’t have much love or laughter from this book, and toward the end it just gets weird. If you’re on a Henry Miller kick this won’t hurt you, but if you want a good introduction to him, I’d choose one of the more celebrated works, like Tropic of Cancer. I may not have read it, but it must be a better sample of the goodness of his writing.

Those of you who read this blog to keep up with the developments in my life will be pleased to know that I’m going to publish a number of posts that I wrote without putting online. Back at the end of May, I was losing my patience with my relationship, and that frustration sort of exploded one day while I was writing. I wasn’t sure if he was monitoring my online activity, so I kept it on my hard drive, along with the next few months of posts where I worked out what to do. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have worried so much – after the first few months with him, I wrote a letter about the frustrations I had then, and he said that I was just blowing off steam, so he gave himself permission to disregard the honest expression of my feelings. Shortly thereafter he asked me to stop verbalizing everything I was feeling because I was too up-and-down for him. Well, I never stopped being a volcano of turbulent emotion, I just stopped sharing with him who I am. With thirty years in the closet, I have a lot of experience in hiding inconvenient feelings. But I’ve moved back to North Carolina, and he didn’t break up with me, but he didn’t come with me either. A wise friend suggested that he’s going for a slow fadeaway instead of an immediate breakup, and that seems right, and one more example of how I feel he’s not fair to me and doesn’t respect or understand my emotions. He once accused me of being a coward because I dislike conflict so intensely, and while that may be true, I’m not the one who’s afraid of being single.