A few numbers about books (read in 2016)

Huh, these numbers seem pretty low, but they're what I recorded on Goodreads. (Which I'm usually pretty good about keeping updated.

Year / Category	2016	2015	2014
Total	22	58	54
Comic Books	0	32	14
Audio Books	22	7	18
Library Books	20	13	7
My Books	2	7	15

A few numbers about books (read in 2015)

Yes, I know it’s been a long time since I wrote here; and yes, I have notes about various topics to post about in the future, with topics ranging from Star Wars: The Force Awakens to ... well, I can't find my other notes, so I'll just assume it's all Star Wars, all the way down.

But I had a few moments in a coffee shop the other day, after I wrote a quick book review on Goodreads, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do some small-scale data-mining of my reading trends for 2015, vis-a-vis 2014?”

To which the only reasonable answer is, “Yes.”

Year / Category	2015	2014
Total	58	54
Comic Books	32	14
Audio Books	7	18
Library Books	13	7
My Books	7	15

First impressions:

• the totals are pretty close;
• the numbers for library books vs. my own books are swapped, which makes some sense: 
• in 2014, I was mostly in San Angelo, but already planning to head to Austin (prepping for code bootcamp started halfway through 2014), so I tried to read down my collection; 
• in 2015, I was in Austin, 
• (a) exploring the new library, 
• (b) getting new books that I wouldn't have owned before (business, self-help), and 
• (c) not carrying around all the books in my collection that I culled that past year;
• the largest negative shift is in audio books:
• there are so many podcasts to listen to in 2015, from new shows like Serial and old favorites like Planet Money;
• I also am not spending as much time walking the dog or washing dishes, perfect listening activities;
• the largest positive shift is towards comic books:
• and 19 of those were Dungeons & Dragons books that I bought in a Humble Bundle and made a point of reading because I had bought several such bundles (mostly roleplaying books in Bundles of Holding) and not read them;
• many of the others are first volumes that I read to see if I liked those series:
• I mostly did not.
• Except for Ms. Marvel, which really is amazing.

Here's to reading more in 2016!

Expansion, Contraction, Expansion; Or, Keep Breathing; Or, Learn to Say No

Last Saturday, after doing some mind work (Machine Learning is hard, yo), I decided to go through all my physical books and make note of which ones survived the big move from San Angelo to Austin. 

My book collection had already been significantly reduced before this move to Austin. The 2011 move from Chicago to San Angelo included me selling books to used book stores, giving books to friends, and then finally donating a dozen or more shopping bags full of books to a literacy non-profit. More recently, while I was taking the course at MakerSquare, I brought several shopping bags full of books to Austin to sell at Half-Price Books, where I received something closer to one-twentieth their price.

(Also, do you notice that my preferred unit of book measuring is the shopping bag? I'd like to say it's a metaphor for books-as-food, necessary and nutritious, but it's just a lot easier to get shopping bags than boxes.)

And most recently, I cleared out all my books from San Angelo; true to form, this move included dropping off at least six shopping bags full of books to the library. This latest batch of giveaways included a lot of my critical theory--adieu, Adorno! Hasta luego, Lukacs!--and a lot of books I've collected that I wasn't sure I was going to read any time soon.

(This stack of books going back to the library for their book sale included--naturally--several books I picked up at the library book sale years ago.)

While I was in San Angelo, I started using LibraryThing to help catalogue my books, mostly to prevent me from accidentally buying something I already owned. Unfortunately, LibraryThing has doubled and tripled some of my entries, making my count less than precise; but I can now say, roughly speaking, that out of 460 physical books that I had in San Angelo, half survived this most recent contraction.

Naturally, I have thoughts about this. My first thought, while cataloguing my current books:

I probably could have gotten rid of more.

Which is probably shocking to hear for many people who know what I bibliophile--or bibliomaniac--I am. I've always had walls of shelves of books, from my childhood room to my dorm room to my apartments. I used to have Erasmus's quote up, the one about buying books when he had money, and then buying food if he had any left over. All my childhood allowance went towards books of one sort of another.

Yet, I don't feel terrible about getting rid of these books. I wish I could've had the time to read some of them and to find them interesting homes--or at least found them hands to reside in temporarily. (Maybe books, like money, are only really useful when they circulate.)

Saying that I don't feel terrible about getting rid of those books is a long way from saying it was easy to let go of them. A lot of it was hard in the way that self-reflection can be hard--in the way that self-acceptance can be hard. 

Giving away all of my critical theory books was perhaps the most concrete way I could admit to myself that I'm not going back to grad school to finish my degree. Letting go of all 19th-century literature books, with all my careful notes, was a way of letting go part of that old dream of teaching. (Did I ever show you the page at the back of Henry James's The Bostonians where I catalogued every use of the word "press" and words that included it? Since it's a book about impression, repression, oppression, and expression, it's a pretty long catalog.)

But like going to the gym, getting rid of half my library was both hard in the moment and still felt like the right thing to do after.

Or put another way: Letting go of those books that I might have read at some point gives me the mental space to focus on the books in front of me. The "books" in that sentence might be a metaphor. 

Because I've always been interested in a lot of things; I've always had trouble saying "no" to new things; and I've never been all that good about cutting ties and saying goodbye to things that I'm not really interested/involved in any more. So it's not surprising that I would end up with so many books that I needed a system to avoid re-buying the same books. And it's not surprising that I would end up with an Osprey book on British uniforms in World War I, alongside a book on Norwegian folk tales, next to my copy of Barthes S/Z, near...

Wait a minute, am I confessing or bragging? A little bit of both. I mean, it's nice to have lots of interests and be well-rounded, blah blah blah. But it's also good--at least, it feels good for me right now--to be able to let go of some things and be able to focus on the other things.

Let's be clear: I'm not saying y'all should throw out your books and not buy any new ones. (I am saying support your local library, though.) And I'm not saying that I'm not buying any new books now. Maybe some day I will have built-in shelves and I will dedicate myself to rebuilding all my library. After all, this contraction may be just a phase...

But I can't help seeing it like a form of breath exercise. Maybe books and money, are both like air: useful when circulating, useful when taken in, useful when pushed out. Which reminds me of a text conversation I had with a friend once:

Right: in, out, repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Three Men in a Boat: Favorite Jokes Project, part 4

Some last overall notes: Jerome K. Jerome fits with the tradition of comic low-stakes. We can laugh about the bumbling adventures of three twits because they don't have their hands on the levers of power. We could compare this to something like Dr. Strangelove, where the stakes are nuclear war, or Catch-22, where we're in the middle of World War II. It's a little more complex to make high-stakes comedy, I think, though in both these examples, a lot of the comedy comes from the nervous laughter of pushing high-stakes stories together with banal bureaucratic humor. In other words: twits are great for comedy.

So it's no surprise that a lot of Jerome K. Jerome's sense of humor often revolves around human incompetence. What's curious to me--and what calls up some of the humor of Douglas Adams--is how, in this book, to coin a phrase, hell is other people. People try to row together and end up fouling each other, making a worse mess together than they would have apart, even though they're both incompetent twits. It's not always a cheerful view of the world, even if the stakes are just bragging rights for who caught the biggest fish.

Chapter 15:

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.  

You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.  

And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.

I'm a sucker for this sort of joke: taking a common phrase or idea and twisting it. Instead of "I like work" as "I like doing things," we have the opposite: "I like work" meaning "I'm a collector of work." And then, just for fun, he runs the joke out: work fills up his house, he keeps his work close by, he preserves his work in mint condition.

Chapter 16:

The very short chapter 16 is likewise very short of jokes, though there is this one aside:

Anyhow, she had sinned—some of us do now and then—...

But I should add that this aside occurs in a story about a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock and committed suicide. So, not really a ha-ha moment.

Chapter 17:

After finding a dead body in the river in the last chapter, this chapter focuses on the ridiculousness of fishing and fisherman. (There is also one fun joke about the dirtiness of the river, wherein they try to wash their clothes and end up getting them dirtier.) Fisherman stories include: how often they lie about what they catch; a guy who started out committed to tell mostly the truth; a joke about how fishing is great if you don't want to catch fish.

My favorite joke is too long to quote, but it's a scenario where our twits see a nice fish up on a wall and a succession of natives claim to have caught that fish--and then the fish turns out to be ceramic.

Chapter 18:

In describing the effects of Time in destroying the ruins, J goes on to note

But Time, though he halted at Roman walls, soon crumbled Romans to dust; and on the ground, in later years, fought savage Saxons and huge Danes, until the Normans came.

Which I probably like more than you because I love when British people poke fun at British history as something pure and simple. It reminds me of Defoe's "True-Born Englishman" poem, which goes on to note how "Englishman" are really heterogeneous mongrels born of war, invasion, and--horrors!--immigration.

Chapter 19:

And so, at long last, we come to the end of our boat voyage, largely due to a lot of rain and the sudden remembrance that the city is full of good food and entertainment, whereas the boat has neither and is wet. First, thought, we get a section describing what bad condition the boats to rent are in, which leads J to offer this advice:

To those who do contemplate making Oxford their starting-place, I would say, take your own boat—unless, of course, you can take someone else’s without any possible danger of being found out.

Which could be Wilde on a middling fair day.

Three Men in a Boat: Favorite Jokes Project, part 3

Chapter 10:

Remember what I said about how inanimate objects are against these three men? Chapter 10 gives us two shining examples of that, with the tent attachment to the boat viciously counter-attacking during their attempt to set it up; and the curious case of a tea kettle that will never boil if it knows that you want hot water for tea.

It is a good plan, too, if you are in a great hurry, to talk very loudly to each other about how you don’t need any tea, and are not going to have any. You get near the kettle, so that it can overhear you, and then you shout out, “I don’t want any tea; do you, George?” to which George shouts back, “Oh, no, I don’t like tea; we’ll have lemonade instead—tea’s so indigestible.” Upon which the kettle boils over, and puts the stove out.

Though I should add that there are quite a few times in this book where the humor departs for a very 19th-century style of sentimentality: beauty of nature, salve of sorrow, etc. Today, that seems a slightly odd mix, since so often Jerome punctures his sentimentality with some humor, and sometimes lets it stand.

Chapter 11:

Similarly, there are moments--or at least one moment in chapter 11--where the humor departs for a little history lesson on the signing of the Magna Carta. There's one joke in the title of the chapters, which list all the major actions of the chapter, since this part is called out as being "specially inserted for the use of schools." Still, not quite enough of a joke to explain why this chunk is there.

But my favorite two related jokes are probably (1) when the three think that the river looks too cold to swim; but then J falls in and tries to trick his friends into swimming with him. (Is there a certain sense of meanness to humor? Or British humor?) And then (2) there's the realization that J is wearing George's shirt and getting it soaked, which instantly turns George's good-humor to annoyance.

Which might be a way of saying that chapter 11 causes smiles, but not too many guffaws. (Not that I'm the guffawing sort.)

Chapter 12:

Like chapter 11, chapter 12 has a chunk of history, which may be explained, if we believe the Wikipedia page on Three Men, by the fact that this book started as a non-humorous travel guide (much in the same way as Dr. Strangelove began as a serious Cold War thriller).

But chapter 12 also has what may be the funniest and most famous episode in the whole book, when these three valiantly struggle with a can (tin) of pineapple:

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.  

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.  

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.  

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down. 

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.  

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

Damn, that's worth stealing, from the tiny detail of irony (unhurt tin rolls over and breaks a teacup) to the build-and-skip of that final joke where we don't hear how George's straw hat saved him.

Chapter 13:

As a dog person--half man, half dog--I greatly appreciate most jokes about dogs and their people; and this chapter has a bunch of recognizable issues. There's the dog who seems innocent to its owner but causes great discomfort to other dogs and people--just go to any dog park and find the person who acts like their dog jumping on other dogs is great fun for every one involved; and there's the dog who finds his match in the unmovable cat. But I'm going to stick with Connie Willis, who highlights this line:

I never see a steam launch but I feel I should like to lure it to a lonely part of the river, and there, in the silence and the solitude, strangle it.

Chapter 14:

It may be common, but a joke about someone playing an annoying instrument badly often works:

George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like. 

Harris said he would rather have the headache.

Three Men in a Boat: Favorite Jokes Project, part 2

Chapter 5:

Chapter 5 finally introduces us to, you know, the boat. But before we get there, our three heroes have to struggle through the city to the river, exposing themselves to the jibes of the common people.

“They ain’t a-going to starve, are they?” said the gentleman from the boot-shop.
“Ah! you’d want to take a thing or two with you,” retorted “The Blue Posts,” “if you was a-going to cross the Atlantic in a small boat.”
“They ain’t a-going to cross the Atlantic,” struck in Biggs’s boy; “they’re a-going to find Stanley.”
By this time, quite a small crowd had collected, and people were asking each other what was the matter. One party (the young and giddy portion of the crowd) held that it was a wedding, and pointed out Harris as the bridegroom; while the elder and more thoughtful among the populace inclined to the idea that it was a funeral, and that I was probably the corpse’s brother.

With a book that focuses on three nincompoops, the outside view can be very helpful in showing us what these people really look like. So here we get a crowd noticing that the three men, with all their luggage and food, look like a cross between an exploring party, a wedding, and a funeral--all sorts of things except what they actually see themselves as, a group of holiday-makers.

Chapter 6:

There's a bunch to choose from in this chapter, and I was very close to putting as my favorite joke the idea that, if Harris ever became famous, it would be too hard to put up "Harris drank here" signs because he drank everywhere, so perhaps they would put up "Harris didn't drink here" signs; then there's the lesson on human nature that people never have what they want, which is demonstrated in the story of the boy who wanted to do great at school but got sick, whereas all the other boys would rather be sick than go do great at school; and then there's the Indiana Jones-esque joke about how a terrible china dog might be very valuable and honored in the future.

But my favorite joke here is probably the maze story: Harris had looked at a map and thought the maze was simple, so he went in, and got terribly lost, but with such a sense of confidence that he has a trail of people behind him. They, of course, find the center of the maze after they've given up and try to find the exit. They get so confused that when one of the groundskeepers comes to help them get out, he gets lost too. Eventually, with the help of an experienced groundskeeper, they all get out, much later than they expected.

Which leads us to the final line of the chapter:

Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge; and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way back.

Because no matter how bad things are, there's nothing quite as satisfying as making your friends go through it.

Chapter 7:

My favorite bit of chapter 7 is probably the narrator reflecting on how mis-begotten he must be to take no pleasure in the grand old British tradition of looking at old tombstones:

I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself. I know that the proper thing to do, when you get to a village or town, is to rush off to the churchyard, and enjoy the graves; but it is a recreation that I always deny myself. I take no interest in creeping round dim and chilly churches behind wheezy old men, and reading epitaphs. Not even the sight of a bit of cracked brass let into a stone affords me what I call real happiness.

Of course, when you put it like that--dim and chilly rooms, wheezy guides--it's more a wonder that anyone likes this sort of activity. (And they really did, it seems; and for all I know, still do. But I've done my share of tombstone rubbings in the past, so I can't really point fingers here.)

Chapter 8:

Next to people not understanding themselves, a classic bit of comedy is the person who takes things too far. So, when the three boaters stop for a picnic and are told they are trespassing, we get a discussion of how annoying it is to be told that some places are off limits for a pleasure picnic. J says that he would like to kill the person who put up the signs, and then Harris goes on:

He said he not only felt he wanted to kill the man who caused the board to be put up, but that he should like to slaughter the whole of his family and all his friends and relations, and then burn down his house. This seemed to me to be going too far, and I said so to Harris; but he answered:
“Not a bit of it. Serve ’em all jolly well right, and I’d go and sing comic songs on the ruins.” 

Which is both an example of someone taking things too far and a segue into another bit, where J describes how Harris is not as good as he thinks he is at singing comic songs.

Chapter 9:

One almost infallible source of comedy is to impute to inanimate objects an ability and a willingness to make your life difficult. In Jerome's account, there are so many material things that go into a boating trip--and each of those things secretly wants to make your life difficult. That's doubly true for any inanimate object that involves more than one person. When two people put up a tent, they discover that the tent wants them dead. And here, similarly, when people are involved in towing a boat, they discover the fiendish intelligence of a tow-line:

I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again.

I especially like how Jerome both targets the tow-line and then brings us back to the person's response to it, which involves a lot of swearing.

Three Men in a Boat: Favorite Jokes Project, part 1

After re-reading Connie Willis's essay on comedy, which holds up Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889) as a model of prose comedy, I was seized by the desire to re-read this book again. But the only way I could convince myself that this was a good way to spend my time was to make a project out of it. So...

Welcome to my Favorite Jokes Project!

Which will last at least as long as my reading of Three Men, though possibly not much after. Now, if this were an academic study of the humor in this book, I would go through, categorize each bit of comedy--"this is irony, that is over-statement," etc. But since it's not, I'm just going to go chapter-by-chapter--over a few posts--and highlight one of my favorite moments in each chapter.

Bonus: Since Jerome's book is long out of copy-right, I can quote at length.

If you never read Three Men in a Boat, a) you should consider it, though you should know b) there's so little plot here, since this is basically a collection of episodes of what happened to these three guys on the River Thames. If you're interested in cultural history (ho-hum), this is about the time that the Thames lost its industrial character and became a recreation spot--which was both cause and effect of this book.

Before getting into this, you should also know... well, actually, I can't think of much else you should know about this book: it's about three people, on a boat, with a dog. The dog is fictional; the people involved are based on real people, but, hopefully, fictionalized.

And no, Jerome K. Jerome was not the name he was born with--that was Jerome C. Jerome.

Chapter 1: Desire for a disease
Chapter 1 introduces us to narrator J. and all of his friends, who need a change of pace. In particular, J notes that he's terribly sick: he looked through a book of diseases and realized that he had all of them! This is WebMD before the internet. He lists some of the disease he has and goes on to note specifically:

Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation?

First, how great is it that J.'s issue is still with us. Second, I love that triplicate form for those three diseases--Bright's disease in modified form, Cholera with complications, and Diphtheria since he was born. Third, the transformation of the single disease you don't have into something you want. What makes you so special, housemaid's knee?

Chapter 2: "How about when it rained?"

After three paragraphs extolling the beauty of nature and camping out at night, the poetry-free Harris bursts that bubble with that simple line: "How about when it rained?" This is reason enough for the story to stop and for us to hear about how Harris has a very practical turn of mind--that usually turns toward getting a drink. But this introduction to him is a perfect puncture of the romantic balloon. And so we fall down to reality. (For your academic paper on Jerome's humor: that fall from the romantic to the real is one of the big sources of comedy.)

Chapter 3: Boss who thinks he does the work

One classic source of comedy is a lack of self-awareness; and chapter three focuses on this with a long aside about the narrator's Uncle Podger (what a name!). We get this aside because Harris reminds the narrator of this uncle, a man who is "so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people."

You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job. A picture would have come home from the frame-maker’s, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say:  

“Oh, you leave that to me. Don’t you, any of you, worry yourselves about that. I’ll do all that.”  

And then he would take off his coat, and begin. He would send the girl out for sixpen’orth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and start the whole house.

It goes on like that for several more paragraphs, with Podger dropping nails, putting the hammer through the wall, bloodying his nose, sitting on his jacket while making everyone look for it, etc. And then at the end, Podger looks at the disaster around him and only sees a job well done.

Chapter 4:

Chapter four covers a lot of ground:

• food for a trip (overpacked, squashed, and scattered); 
• the terrible smell of cheeses (an old topic made fresh with some fun details and images, like a man on an empty train carriage by himself while the rest of the train becomes stuffed; and an undertaker comparing the smell to that of a dead baby); 
• the difficulty of packing (particularly the difficulty of keeping track of one's toothbrush);
• more packing follies; and
• dogs and their inveterate love for being underfoot.

This is a prize chapter for me, with almost every episode being funny--probably because they are so relatable. Have you ever been uncertain of whether or not you packed something to the point of having to unpack everything? Have you ever tried to pack food so as not to crush something? Have you ever met a dog? After reading Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, you know you're not alone!

But my favorite parts here are narrator J.'s consideration of grown men packing as a sort of show:

They began in a light-hearted spirit, evidently intending to show me how to do it. I made no comment; I only waited. When George is hanged, Harris will be the worst packer in this world; and I looked at the piles of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies, and stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon become exciting. 

It did. They started with breaking a cup. That was the first thing they did. They did that just to show you what they could do, and to get you interested.

Naturally, it goes on from there, getting bigger and messier.

And as a dog owner (or depending on your point of view, owned by a dog), I have to love the description of Montmorency, a fox terrier:

Montmorency was in it all, of course. Montmorency’s ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at. If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted.

We should all be so lucky.

The Furies vs. Silvertip: Westerns and Ambiguity

I recently finished Max Brand's 1933/1941 Silvertip, a pulp Western book, and Anthony Mann's 1950 The Furies, a non-pulp Western movie; and I'm trying to close that circle. How are these both Westerns when they feel so different?

What it is: Silvertip:
Silvertip tells the story of a larger-than-life, badass, oath-bound rambler; after mistakenly gunning down a young Mexican man, Silvertip promises to replace him; this leads him to a land-war between an evil white clan, the Drummons, and the vengeance-obsessed Mexican family, the Montereys. He fights, he wins, he continues to ramble.

It's very straight forward and the only bit of ambiguity is when Silvertip seems to recognize that the Monterey quest for vengeance is soul-eroding and family-destroying. E.g., Papa Monterey is devastated to lose his son--because he trained his son to enact his vengeance. Then, when Silvertip starts fulfilling those quests, Monterey doesn't seem too bothered by losing his original son. But even with that drop of ambiguity, Silvertip goes on, does the violence thing, and moves on.

What it is: The Furies:
The Furies... is a little more confusing: old rancher T.C. Jeffords is a king on his land (The Furies), so powerful that he issues his own money. He's obsessed with his late wife, uninterested in his son, and very VERY close to his daughter Vance. (She's the only one who matters--T.C.'s son is barely in the story, almost as if he's only here to give us exposition.)

Vance is very friendly but not romantic with Mexican squatter Juan Herrera; Vance even helps to protect the Herreras when the other squatters are being evicted. Vance isn't interested in Juan because she's interested in oily gambler Rip Darrow, who thinks he has a claim to the Darrow Strip, a strip of land belonging to Jeffords/The Furies. But when T.C. offers Rip money to leave his daughter alone, Rip takes the money, leaving Vance to become virgin queen of the Furies.

Into this stable situation, T.C. brings a beautiful older woman, Flo Burnett, who makes it clear to Vance that she's a gold-digger who wants to get rid of Vance (by sending her to Europe). Vance throws scissors at Burnett and runs away to the Herreras. T.C. hunts her down and burns out the Herreras, even hanging Juan for stealing a horse. Vance vows vengeance on her father and goes out to buy up all of the money he issued at pennies on the dollar.

T.C. desperately needs money, even going to his now-scarred wife Flo to ask for the money he gave her. She explains that she can't give him the money, because then he'll leave her, a rejection that T.C. takes in stride, expressing affection and respect for this scarred gold-digger. Even T.C.'s accountant reveals that he's been stealing money from T.C., but is willing to give it back to help out; T.C. refuses the offer, laughing at the betrayal.

Then T.C. gets an offer to buy his cattle, and he rides out, to prove that he's still king of his land. His men sing songs about how great he is.

Then Vance reveals her double-cross to her dad, buying his cattle with his own (worthless) money. T.C takes even this in stride, saying that he was always happiest when building an empire, not holding it. Rip and Vance plan to marry. Then Juan's mom kills T.C.

So?
So... yeah. Silvertip is easy to summarize because it hews close to standard Western tropes--land-war, wandering gun-slinger, the beloved daughter as romantic object--and it keeps pretty far from ambiguity or other genre tropes.

By contrast The Furies has a Western setting, with some traditional Western tropes--cattle baron, the round-up, dealing with a (crooked-ish) bank, squatters/land-war. It also has a noir-ish touch, with its ambiguities, especially around love and loyalty. (Director Mann started in noir, so you can make that connection.) You can even see a certain Shakespearean family drama--King Lear, if you like this essay. Maybe there's even a bit of the women's weepy genre with the daughter caught between two-three men (Juan, Rip, T.C.).

And, of course, let's nod towards the mythological aspect of The Furies: the punishers who are especially vicious towards those who betray their family.

It is, in other words, a perfect film to write a paper about. (Sample: Freudian: Vance uses her mother's GIANT scissors to castrate her father's sexual interest in the other woman by scarring her.)

I repeat: So?
Well, The Furies is a bit of a mess at the end: T.C.'s vicious hanging of Juan is all but forgotten except as pretext for tragic murder; asshole Rip Darrow gets sentimentalized as soon-to-be proper husband; even Vance gets a little tamed, accepting her father as a third member in the family/ownership of the Furies.

So to make a happy ending, so many of the ambiguities get washed away in a way that feels artificial, which isn't really a problem for Silvertip: he starts out as a larger-than-life, cardboardy figure, he exits as same.

I can't help but feel like there's a warning here about tonal shifts: in its own way, Silvertip is more successful, while being less ambitious. At the same time, a little mix of genre gives The Furies a lot more interest in its characters and plot.

Negative reviews for books, not people

Recently I read (listened to) Mur Lafferty's The Shambling Guide to New York City and then I reviewed it on Goodreads, as usual. Then, somewhat unusually, I returned to that review to make sure I had been as fair as possible. Why did I do that?

I like a lot of the set-up of Shambling Guide: woman learning that there's this whole magical underworld all around her in the city, learning that she's an important part of it--which is a sort of epic fantasy plot with a semi-chosen one, but gender-swapped (girl editor rather than farm-boy), in a paranormal romance/urban fantasy setting.

And I also like Mur Lafferty, whose podcast I Should Be Writing features a lot of straight talk about the costs and emotional rollercoaster of writing. Lafferty has something of a name within the podcasting world (she used to be an editor of one of the Escape Artist podcasts and has podcasted a few of her novels), but Shambling Guide is her first traditionally published novel. In short: I want good things for this book because she's a good person.

Yet, though I like the set-up of the book and I like Mur Lafferty, there were several issues I had with the book. Enough so that my overall review probably reads neutral-to-negative. And that had been bothering me a little bit--just a little, somewhere between day-old paper-cut and "I have to remember to take the garbage out before those yogurt containers start to smell." Was I too mean to her as a person? Was I too nice to the book because I like her as a person?

Finally, today I went back to re-read my review and, luckily, I found that it was pretty fair. I pinpointed the points I had issues with, while making it clear what I thought the strengths were, both of the book and of the writer.

This probably only interests me, but I feel like a lot of academic criticism--and a lot of regular criticism--elides that distance between the person and the work: for the extreme example, I once heard a professor express distaste for someone else's theory by saying that he was surprised she had enough brain power to keep on living. As I said, that's the extreme, but there is that type of criticism: bad book probably means bad person. It's an ungenerous and often unhelpful me vs. you type of review that is rarely warranted.

Mosaic novels and short story cycles: Doris Manners-Sutton's Black God and the space between novel and short story collection

Sometimes I plan out what I'm going to say in these posts, detailing the nuance of the opening line; but after typing that whopper of a blogpost title, all other thoughts have leapt clean out of my mind. Here's the only thing that has remained: Doris Manners-Sutton's 1934 Black God is something that sits in the space between a traditional novel and a short story collection. That's the same space where Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Good Squad and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio sit; and it's got me interested in that weird space.

So let's play my favorite game: Categorize! That! Interstice!

In one corner, we have the novel, that 800-pound gorilla that goes back to, I don't know, Homer or Gilgamesh. It's the sort of story that follows a single or related set of protagonists over the length of an entire work. In the other corner, weighing all of, let's say, less than 15k words, is the short story, which can join together into a Voltron-like monster in a few ways. Let us pull petals and count the ways (and note the major differences):

1. the short story collection: here, the stories are linked by some connection, such as
1. author (George Saunders's Pastoralia);
2. topic/focus/theme/setting (John Joseph Adams's By Blood We Live, a vampire anthology; various Best Of collections organized by venue or genre);
• Note: the stories here are easy to remove and print elsewhere;
2. the mosaic novel and the short story cycle (Egan's Goon Squad, some of the Wild Cards books);
• Note: while these stories could be removed and reprinted, many of them impact each other and deepen the experience; stories in this sort of collection usually swirl around a set of themes/motifs and/or characters/settings/events;
3. the "dispersed novel": well, I just invented that term and I haven't been sleeping enough, so take it with a grain of salt; but this is a book like Black God and (maybe) Tristram Shandy, where the main thrust of the story and characters is used as a thread from which to hang several anecdotes or other stories;
• Note: the individual stories here are generally fragmentary, but not exactly incomplete; for instance, Tristram gives us some complete stories or moments, but they aren't all that significant except when put into the whole. Yet, the book's reluctance to engage in a single protagonist (or protagonist group) keeps the book from following in the mainline tradition of the novel. (See also postmodern novel and anti-novel.)

So that gives us a protocol for categorizing different books: the main question is fungibility--whether the story can be removed or exchanged without massively upsetting the structure of the book itself. But does it tell us how to write one of these dispersed novels? What secrets can we gain? Or, to put another way, what's really pushing the reader forward in the dispersed novel?

How does a book shape a country?; Or, Why can't you read?

This is late news, but then again, this is a semi-moribund blog, so it fits.

Starting in late June, the Library of Congress put on a display of Books That Shaped America, which is the kind of title that demands to be shouted from the rooftops. It's a collection of 88 books by American authors that "have had a profound effect on American life." 

There are numerous problems with a list like this. For instance, presentism: we read the development of America from a particular point in time, so certain things will seem more or less important now than they once were. 

Case in point: Moby Dick, which has been around for roughly 150 years but pretty much only read for 100. So if you organizing this exhibit in 1900 and wanted to include Moby Dick, there's a chance you would've been locked up as incurably crazy. It's true that it's shaped reading lists in schools for the past century, but how has that really shaped America? Here's a counterfactual thought experiment: Imagine a US where Moby Dick was never written--what's different from our world?

Case in point (2): I would've included some Jonathan Edwards, an important theologian, author of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and intellectual forebear of the Great Awakening--even though he's not all that important to America today in a direct way.

Another problem--though it's probably a self-conscious strategy on the part of the LoC--is that the concept of "shaping" is inherently vague. So the exhibition can say that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a best-seller (in England), but that's a far cry from saying that it started a tradition of American supernatural folk-tales or somehow shaped America in some way besides making money.

So the list has problems, sure, but it also has a built-in argument that these are some of the books that shaped America. This isn't an exclusive list; and it isn't even presenting itself as a list of the books that most shaped America. This is simply an exhibition to start a conversation. If you don't like this list, make up your own to add the books that you think should be added to this category.

That said, there's a lot of predictable boo-hooing about how mean this list is to religious-Americans or otherwise fails--complaints that tend to cast more light on the writer's ignorance or perversity than on the list's failure. 

For instance, professor of religion Stephen Prothero complains that there's not enough religion on the list; we could call this the "Where's the Bible?" problem, as I've seen that question asked around the internet in comments. Except the list is clearly restricted to American authors and people would know that if they bothered to read the info. Prothero knows this, but oddly calls the restriction "a technicality," making it sound as if it's a quibbling little detail instead of the organizing principle of the whole exhibit. He probably means that it's "arbitrary," which is fair, but then most organizing principles are. It's especially telling that his list (in a book you can buy now!) includes several non-book items, like a memorial, which shows how non-conventional his thinking is--or how he refuses to obey the rules of the game.

On the more materialistic end of the spectrum, Reason magazine blogger Tim Cavanaugh complains that there aren't enough best-sellers (because, for a Libertarian, the market is always right). I agree in parts with Cavanaugh's argument about presentism, though it pains me to be on the same side as someone who can't bother to look up how to spell Edgar Allan Poe's name. But Cavanaugh's organizing principle ("Who made the most money?") is so blinkered and narrow that it comes out self-parodizing: "to shape America" is the same thing for this crowd as "to make money." Cavanaugh's entry ends on the perfect note, with a complaint that the LoC has too many librarians. Because who needs librarians when you have best-seller lists?

Start Here: William Gibson

I’m entering Book Riot’s START HERE Write-In Giveaway.

Three Possible Dialogues

1) 

You: I’ve never heard of William Gibson—isn’t he the guy who wrote that Helen Keller play, The Miracle Worker? 

Me: No. Well, yes, that was a William Gibson, but not the William Gibson we’re talking about here. The Gibson I want to talk about is the science fiction author.

2)

You: I’ve heard of him—isn’t he that science fiction writer who coined the term “cyberspace”? He must be super-nerdy, with lots of technobabble and no real characters.

Me: No, he’s not just a hardware guy. He’s very literary, with serious themes and lyrical prose.

3)

You: I’ve heard of him—isn’t he the guy who writes about computers but whose first novel was written on a typewriter? He must be one of those New Wave jackasses who made science fiction unreadable by making it all about prose style.

Me: Wow, you have issues. But let me just say that Gibson is not just about style. If you care about technology, you might be interested in him since he’s very interested in how technology affects people

The Only Possible Conclusion

You: OK, you’ve convinced me to read William Gibson. Where should I start?

Me: I’m glad you asked.

“The Gernsback Continuum” (1981)

Gibson only has a handful of published short stories, and he generally seems more comfortable with novel-length works. As evidence: Most of his short fiction is conveniently collected in one single book, Burning Chrome (1986). But among his short fiction is one of the most important short stories in science fiction: “The Gernsback Continuum.” 

The Gernsback in the title is Hugo Gernsback, one of the fathers of science fiction, the guy who pioneered the gee-whiz aesthetic and morals of early sf; and this story doesn’t want anything to do with him. It’s a dream-like story about a photographer sent out to find elements of that gee-whiz architecture that still exists—old gas stations with “raygun emplacements in white stucco” and “central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges.” But when he gets too close to the future as portrayed by Gernsback’s brand of science fiction, he finds the dark side: we may have dreamed of rockets and splitting the atom, but look where it got us. This is short story as genre-rebellion: We need a new science fiction.

Neuromancer (1984)

In his short stories, Gibson laid the groundwork for this new genre of science fiction, a fiction that looked at how computer and bio-technologies would interact with human experience down here, in the muck, not up there among the stars. Gibson didn’t invent the term “cyberpunk”; and if you’re interested in the cyberpunk style—chrome, leather, mirrorshades, hackers, soldiers of fortune, urban derelicts—there’s plenty of places to get that, as the genre spread through, well, everything. (Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk, anyone? Anyone?)

But Gibson’s Neuromancer is one of the foundational works of the genre, and like most foundational works, it’s a lot richer and weirder than its descendants and rip-offs. With Gibson, the point isn’t the cool clothes or the body augmentations or the computer hacking. (It’s true that Gibson wrote this on a typewriter.) The point in Neuromancer is what happens to the individual when confronted by the modern world in all its traumatizing glory—whether the world (technology, corporation, conspiracy) will reduce you to a memory on a hard drive or whether there’s way to become whole.

Pattern Recognition (2003)

We’re going to jump over the two sequels to Neuromancer (collectively: the Sprawl Trilogy); the Bridge Trilogy; and Gibson’s steampunk-avant-la-lettre collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine; and we’re going to land firmly on Gibson’s most recent trilogy. (Are you getting the pattern? Not only does he mostly write novels, Gibson mostly writes trilogies of novels. But don’t get the impression that he’s logorrheic—his work is spare and exact.) Pattern Recognition revisits a lot of themes (and characters) of his previous novels: the pattern observer; the repeated phrase “Observe the protocol”; a mysterious artist; rich people with mysterious motives. So, for the true believer, Pattern Recognition is a brilliant reconstruction of Gibson’s collective work.

But let’s say you’re not yet a true believer—(oh, but you will be)—what’s here for you? Pattern Recognition takes place in a post-9/11 world, but very recently post, as the main character tries to deal with her twin traumas: invisible corporate war and the tides of history. There’s less chrome here than in Neuromancer, but the themes remain the same: how do individuals function in modernity, with the flattening of the globe and the erasure of alternative histories? Gibson doesn’t always answer these questions, but he always writes so we recognize them as our questions.

Andrew Sullivan's favorite novels (are a good measure of his political failures)

I'm taking a break from thinking about comedy right now because, thousands of miles away, my sketch comedy revue is going on. So, let's talk about Andrew Sullivan's favorite novels. And let's take this bird by bird:

Bird A) I talk about Andrew Sullivan a lot because he's a model blogger at times--he talks about a lot of different issues, he continues conversations, he likes dogs; but I also talk about him a lot because I find him so infuriating.

Bird B) For instance, I think art and popular culture are important for political life. (Which is why maybe my real favorite blogging beat is Alyssa Rosenberg over at ThinkProgress.) However, Sullivan doesn't really seem to put a lot of work into culture blogging outside of his particular narrow interests (like pot).

If you're interested, here's Sullivan talking about his favorite novel. And here we have a mix of why I like Sullivan--he's pretty clear about his failings (he doesn't much care for novels, his favorites are pretty nakedly didactic)--and why I don't like him--he's got some failings that he isn't aware of (he doesn't understand the relation between the particular and the general).

I can't help but feel that Sullivan would be a better political commenter if he learned how to empathize with individuals through reading about characters in novels.

Bird C) Along those lines, I can't say that I'm surprised that Sullivan recently watched Ken Burns's Civil War. I wonder if Sullivan ever watched The Wire?

Does the government work (in fiction)?

I don't have an answer for this one.

I just finished Justin Cronin's The Passage (my negative review here), which hits a bunch of "government bad" tropes: the US government surveils intrusively; can't prevent terrorism; can't rebuild storm-ravaged New Orleans; funds secret experiments; kidnaps children; unwittingly unleashes a plague of vampires on the world. And then, in the post-vampire apocalypse, the fictional government we see has a much smaller scope (a colony of a hundred people), but hardly inspires trust.

Actually, how many fictional apocalypses do you think have government roots? Probably more than the apocalypses that are rooted in private action. (Off the top of my head, I can only think of one privately-caused apocalypse: Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think. There's got to be more, though, right?)

But what about non-apocalyptic situations in fiction: does government work in a day-to-day capacity? Or is it too hopelessly corrupt and too baroquely complex to do any work?

(Although here's a thought: once we include "police" as a category of government, does the rate of successful work go up?)

Are magicians made or born?

This idea has popped up a few times at all my favorite web hangouts, so I think it's time someone burst this particular bubble. Let me sharpen my needle.

On the science fiction (and occasional fantasy) blog io9, author David Liss makes the claim that our idea about magic has changed: it used to be that anyone could be a magician--all you needed was the right book or the right pact with the devil (or whomever); but sometime in the last century, our idea of magic has become more elitist--only those who are born with the right spark can become magicians. Without any claim to certainty, Liss pegs this change to around the time of Bewitched, which wins him points, because I used to love that show.

Pretty soon, Alyssa Rosenberg was making some interesting connections between this idea (magic is only for special people) and a sense of powerlessness that we might feel in the face of powerful forces--dynastic, corporate, or what-have-you. (I'd want to connect that to Carl Freedman's comments in 2004 on the transition in GOP politicians from Reagan--the everyman--to Schwarzenegger--the inhuman. But just because I like this idea of Rosenberg's doesn't mean it's true.) And then Andrew Sullivan thought this idea was worth linking to.

But it's not. And here's why:

(1) Liss doesn't really provide any evidence demonstrating that there was this shift from the everyman magician (everymage?) to the elite born magician.

He mentions Faust, which I'll give him: anyone can pact with the Devil and become a magician or witch. He also could have mentioned the magical scientists/mathematicians, like Pythagoras or Paracelsus--anyone can be an alchemist or magical-scientist, since all you need in those cases is to be smart enough to understand the formula/read Enochian/run the numbers. And let's add Shakespeare's Prospero as a significant figure of the "being a magician is a choice" school of thought. (After all, Prospero could quit being a wizard because being a wizard wasn't an intrinsic part of him.)

(Actually, "read Enochian" is an interesting example, since Enochian was the work of two people--the everyman John Dee and the special medium Edward Kelley. Gosh, it's hard to come up with examples to support Liss.)

Against those examples, we have Merlin, often a half-demon; Tolkien's inhuman wizards; Leiber's inhuman Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face; Ursula K. Le Guin's Ged (born of a smith, but born special); and pretty much every other case of a chosen hero having a special destiny--and most of those are clearly before Bewitched. 

(Sidenote hypothesis: It's no surprise that the everyman using magic often occurs in horror--c.f., any Lovecraftean story--whereas the innate magician often appears in more epic genres, like fantasy.)

So, before I could give Liss this point, I'd really like to see more examples proving the switch from everymage to elite mage.

(2) Further, Liss's argument slips between the idea of inherited power and innate power--both of which may be undemocratic and elitist, but which aren't the same sort of undemocratic elitism.

That is, if anyone can be a magician, you've got a wide degree of social mobility: for example, the village smith can become a wizard if only he finds the right book or makes the right pact or etc.--this is the scenario that Liss wants (everymage). This is the radically democratic model.

But if magical power is inherited, you have no social mobility at all: in that case, only wizards can become wizards (tautology intended)--and this is the scenario that Liss fears is dominant today (the elite mage). This is the radically undemocratic elitist model.

But if power is innate--but not inherited--then you've got a wide degree of generational social mobility: the smith can't become a wizard, but his son can become a wizard. (Cf. Ged in Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.)

The perfect example of this is the most popular contemporary wizarding world, Harry Potter: one's parental magic ability is not an absolute predictor of your magical ability. Magical parents have unmagical children and vice versa; for example, Hermione Granger may face social stigma for her unmagical family, but she could still be the most powerful wizard in the world.

That model is undemocratic and elitist--but not radically so (which is kind of the scenario that Liss paints).

(3) Liss ends his post with this impassioned and rather touching comment:

From Aladdin to the Golden Ass to Faust, in the past we told stories about people who acquire the ability to do magic--and sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer. That could be us. Now we tell ourselves stories about magical people who struggle to deal with their special gifts. Those people are not us...

And yet, we used to tell stories about Greek gods and demi-gods and mythic heroes--figures who were innately what they were, who were categorically different from us. We could all aspire to be heroic, but we didn't need to identify ourselves completely with these figures to do so. It seems crazy to claim that we used to tell stories only about people we could identify with. This is a touching comment, and I think Liss might not be totally wrong (see my above comment on the transition from everyman Reagan to inhuman Schwarzenegger as political model).

But the brush he paints with is too broad. This is a bubble that practically pops itself.

So, Liss's essay is thought-provoking, but doesn't work since (1) it lacks evidence of the shift he posits; (2) slips between two forms of elite notions that aren't the same; and (3) misrepresents our narrative legacy of caring about--identifying with--characters who are different from us.