Sep 20 2014

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Walker Percy’s foreword to the book cannot be bettered:

Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown from me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained — that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.

Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of — slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one — who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective. …

 

I hesitate to use the word comedy — though comedy it is — because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.

It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from — from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.

The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author — his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.

 

I was asked whether the book was canonical for Louisiana, and I am not sure that it was when I first read it not too many years after its publication, but surely it is now. It is a note-perfect rendition of aspects of New Orleans, and much more than that.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/20/a-confederacy-of-dunces-by-john-kennedy-toole/

Sep 17 2014

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story by Ben Carson

No one can say that Ben Carson grew up in privileged circumstances, but from a young age he seems to have had an uncanny knack for making the right choices. I’m not sure the Ben Carson story can be a model for all young people, but it does reinforce my belief that parents rather than teachers are the critical component in a child’s educational success. This is a highly inspiring story, almost an unbroken record of success and achievement in the face of tremendous adversity. Dr. Carson’s writing is not nearly as eloquent as Obama’s, and I’m not sure I’m ready to vote for him for president, but this is definitely the kind of story that makes you examine yourself, both to see where you went wrong and to take heart that you can still change the course of your life. A fine effort by a fine man.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/gifted-hands-the-ben-carson-story-by-ben-carson/

Sep 17 2014

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre

This was a fascinating story of a cat and mouse game in which it is never quite clear who is the cat and who is the mouse. It blows to bits the James Bond mythology of what spying is about: it is a dirty, dirty business, and the people who engage in it are hardly the kind of people you would want to have over for tea. I was a bit put off by Le Carre’s introduction of the protagonist, the misanthropic drunk Leamis, crusty, surly, and actually quite stupid, hardly the kind of man to put his life on the line for King and Country. When an East German spy asks him what his philosophy is, what motivates him to carry on the fight that he has dedicated his life to, it is clear that he has never seriously thought about this. It makes the ending all the more tragic and at the same time all the more just. There are layers upon layers of deception and conspiracy that keep peeling away until you’re left dumbfounded at how you, like the main characters, have been taken for a ride. A masterpiece of the genre.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/17/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-by-john-le-carre/

Sep 14 2014

Lock In by John Scalzi

“Lock In,” while still well within the realm of Science Fiction, struck me as being a little bit off the beaten path for John Scalzi. In addition to the SF elements there was also some direct discussion of physical disability and how society deals with it, and a refreshing dollop of police procedural to make it all hang together.

The physical disability is that of the phenomenon known as Locked-In Syndrome. It generally occurs when someone has a very particular type of stroke that leaves all of the voluntary muscles completely paralyzed, but the mind unaffected. To get an idea of what life is like for these people, an excellent book to read is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was written by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby after he suffered such a stroke, and then Locked-In Syndrome.

Here’s where the Science Fiction bit of the book enters. A disease strikes the world that leaves a multitude of people with Locked-In Syndrome (called Haden’s Syndrome in the book), and some very interesting ways of getting these people active again in the outside world. There’s the ability to ride someone’s mind in a way, seeing through their eyes, and using their body, and there are also metal bodies that can be controlled with the mind alone, allowing the sufferer of Haden’s Syndrome to have complete control of themselves. (Mecha! my mind gleefully exclaimed, but no, not quite.) Scalzi glides a bit over how all this works so well, with neural networks and major brain modifications and such, but then this isn’t hard Science Fiction and I’m fine with that. It wasn’t egregiously unbelievable by any means; my suspension of disbelief worked perfectly well while I read the book.

The political and police procedural bit comes in with a character named Chris Shane who has Haden’s Syndrome and is also a newly minted FBI agent. Add a change to the Federal laws about how people with Haden’s Syndrome are to be treated and assisted by the government, and a truly unscrupulous business tycoon, and you suddenly have an action-packed story.

I enjoyed Lock In. I always enjoy John Scalzi’s books. He writes entertaining Science Fiction that occasionally forays into the thought-provoking but mostly stays solidly in the that-was-a-well-spent-two-hours category. Was Lock In the kind of book where I end up saving off all sorts of quotes and pondering something new to me for a while? Nah. But it was time well-spent for reading before bed and enjoying myself.

I did come away with one quote that I had marked, and I’ll place it here before ending this review.

“Making people change because you can’t deal with who they are isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses.”

Indeed, Mr. Scalzi, indeed.

4-stars

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/14/lock-in-by-john-scalzi/

Sep 12 2014

The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glenn Cook

“The Chronicles of the Black Company ” is a dark epic fantasy by Glenn Cook. It depicts the travels of the Black Company a band of ruthless mercenaries as they switch from side to side. It is told in the voice of the Company’s surgeon and chronicler who’s fantasies about the ruling lady take him and the company on a wild ride.

While initially disappointing that the character development did not include any back stories, it became clear that this was intentional to force you to see these mercenaries as who they are and who they become.

What was most enjoyable was it showcased fantasy from the perspective of the soldier on the ground. As with most epic fantasies the perspective is from the ruling class, however the Chronicles showcase the grunt point of view which is a refreshing change.

“The Chronicles of The Black Company” is a recommend read if you want to get your gritty fantasy fix while waiting for the next installment of “A Song of Fire and Ice”

One side note is this series has a companion series called the “Books of the South” while a good read it lost some of rawness of the original.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/12/the-chronicles-of-the-black-company-by-glenn-cook/

Sep 12 2014

Face in the Crowd

Just over a year ago now, I made my first trip to the United States of America. As I was heading to the East Coast, I had the ‘joy’ of an eight hour layover at LAX. As I wandered around the airport, looking at the shops, grabbing some food I noticed there was a lot of people of colour moving around me, doing the same ‘wasting time at an airport’ type of things. There seemed to be a higher ratio of black faces than I had expected. I assumed they were African American, but at the same time it’s a busy international airport so there could have been a vast diversity in country of origin. I momentarily wondered where everyone was heading, and then focused back on not getting lost. A few days later, I came to realise that the ratio wasn’t skewered by it being an international airport. American society was far more ethnically diverse than I had pictured.

Before this trip my understanding of American society had mostly come from media portrayals. News reports, television programmes, and the occasional movie was my main access to what the country looked like, the cultures, the cities, the structures. As someone who works and studies in areas of social justice and constructions of knowledge, I have always made an effort to consider the ways we represent people and ideas. How media (re)produces constructions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc. Do we only ever see black men portrayed as angry, violent criminals? Is the homosexual man only ever seen as effeminate and promiscuous? And while I work, both professional and personally to challenge the dominant constructions and open up a greater range of possibilities, this trip to America made me realise a big part of the picture I had no previous awareness of.

There have been shows I’ve watched and loved that have had no black characters. Some shows may include a character of colour but then the ratio of often very high. Criminal Minds for example has one African American character and six European American characters. I had heard of the term ‘token black’ before, but always thought of it more in terms of identity construction, rather than a simply numbers game. And often this one character of colour is supposed to stand in for all non-Caucasian people. The one African-American actor is there to show diversity, as if his face will be a representation, a connection for everyone else, for the African-American women, for the Asian men and women, for the Hispanic women and men, those from South Asia, from Western Asia, for those Indigenous to the land. How can you complain you aren’t represented, see we have one face that is of colour.

Hiring actors that bring a diversity of ethnicities to the programme is good. Writing characters that explore those ethnicities would be even better.   But on an even simpler level, require the extras, the people you hire to fill the background, to have that range. I have watched a show set in DC, a city with a diverse population, and yet never once saw anything but a Caucasian face, not one of the actors, nor one person in the background was anything but Western European looking.

As a foreigner coming for a holiday, the lack of diverse representation was interesting and noteworthy. It stayed with me for months. But I can only imagine what it must be like to never see a reflection of yourself in shows set in your city, in your country. I imagine spending my free time watching television and never seeing a female face. How limiting that would feel, how separate I would feel from the world’s portrayed in my entertainment, in my media. If the only time I saw a female face was when there was a report of some violent crime, what would I see as my future.

There is an insidious nature to this. The lack of representation becomes common, expected. Damn media, and shrugged off. But eventually common comes to mean normal and true. The lack of representation becomes an accurate portrayal. I recently watched a couple of seasons of Arrow. In the first season roughly half the characters were of colour. These were regular characters, either in main roles or recurring supportive ones. And much to my chagrin, my first reaction was to be surprised they used so many non-Europeans. In the year that I had left America and once again only been immersed in television programmes, I had forgotten that there is a higher ratio of ethnic diversity that portrayed. I had returned to believing one or two people that didn’t look like me was the norm. And I do wonder why in season two, that diversity in Arrow was cut back. Is it blatant racism that restricts the diversity, or a pervasive insidious version that unless challenged is constantly creating a world where all but a few look Caucasian.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/12/face-in-the-crowd/

Sep 11 2014

Rome and Italy by Livy

Mostly this is a record of Rome’s interminable wars with the Samnites. War is hardly a trivial event, but Rome fought so many wars during this period that reading about one battle after another becomes wearying. The most interesting and unusual thing that happened during this period was that a Vestal Virgin violated her vow of chastity and was buried alive as a punishment. Other than that and a few plagues, this was mostly an endless catalogue of battles and was rather boring.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/11/rome-and-italy-by-livy/

Sep 11 2014

White Paper Review – Pew Research Center: Younger Americans and Public Libraries

The Pew Research Center has released an interesting white paper named Younger Americans and Public Libraries: How those under 30 engage with libraries and think about libraries’ role in their lives and communities, concerning Millennials and their reading habits. Contrary to what some might expect, the results are not all doom and gloom.

The researchers ended up dividing Millennials into three distinct age groups:

There are actually three different “generations” of younger Americans with distinct book reading habits, library usage patterns, and attitudes about libraries. One “generation” is comprised of high schoolers (ages 16-17); another is college-aged (18-24), though many do not attend college; and a third generation is 25-29.

I won’t fully quote all of the interesting tidbits that the researchers came across, but I will put a few of the finding headings here to pique your interest.

  • Millennials’ lives are full of technology, but they are more likely than their elders to say that important information is not available on the internet.


  • Millennials are quite similar to their elders when it comes to the amount of book reading they do, but young adults are more likely to have read a book in the past 12 months.


  • As a group, Millennials are as likely as older adults to have used a library in the past 12 months, and more likely to have used a library website.

    • It’s not a long read, and if you enjoy books and think reading is important, then it’s something you’ll want to take the time to check out. No pun intended.

    Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/11/white-paper-review-pew-research-center-younger-americans-and-public-libraries/

    Sep 02 2014

    The Spanish Civil War by Stanley Payne

    All civil wars and revolutions are confused in their narrative accounts, but the Spanish Civil War is even more confusing than the French Revolution. Who, exactly, was rebelling against whom? The Leftists were supposedly the “revolutionaries,” but they actually supported the Republic. Franco’s Nationalists were the “counterrevolutionaries,” but they were dedicated to overthrowing the Republic. Throw in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and George Orwell, and you have quite a cauldron of conflicting parties. This books was heavy on facts and details but failed to give a coherent narrative rendering of this chaotic event. The significance of the war is still debated: was it the opening salvo of World War II? Was it the beginning of the Cold War? Was it the merely the culmination of the long festering tension between the forces of progress and reaction in Western Europe? And how does the war’s legacy play out in Spanish society today? This book is an introduction only.

    Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/02/the-spanish-civil-war-by-stanley-payne/

    Sep 02 2014

    The Mission Song by John Le Carre

    In this book Le Carre succeeds in doing what he failed to do in Tinker Tailor: creating characters that the reader actually cares about, as a well as a plot involving a covert operation whose outcome is not merely a an academic move in a geopolitical chess game. I identify in some ways with the protagonist: he is biracial, good at languages, looking to make a difference, and concerned about his soul. The ending is pretty much what had to happen given that the arena for the covert operation is Africa and not Europe, but it still shocks one’s sensibilities and even provokes a bit of moral outrage. This book was a pleasure to read from beginning to end; Le Carre seems to have saved his best material for the post-Cold War era.

    Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/02/the-mission-song-by-john-le-carre/