Librarian and Mule

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

librarianmule — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:27:10 +0000

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010)

There’s a valid point to the statement that is the basic premise for this book, namely that the instant gratification of using the endless resources and distractions of the Internet does something to your attention span. What attracted me to Carr’s book is the fact that he talks about being a literary scholar who suddenly no longer has the patience for reading the bigger tomes. That’s his starting point, but it’s not the whole story.

The Shallows makes the argument that there’s something inherently seductive about the way you have endless, boundless amounts of information at the tips of your fingers when Online but that the cornucopia of connections and information and quick communications actually comes at a price. It’s like the golden rule of mechanics says: whatever you lose in power you gain in displacement. There are other forces at work here, of course, like the illusion the Net can give you of being a part of an endless, immediate now that serves to make you feel a part of the bigger picture.

Carr grounds his reasoning in Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “the medium is the message” – and the important thing about that quote is that it spotlights the often neglected or misunderstood core meaning: it’s not about the content, it’s about the actual medium, in this case the Net itself. Tricky business, since we all get seduced by the content and lose track of what the medium is doing when we’re not looking. Carr points out the bidirectionality of the Net as one of it’s selling points, for instance, and that’s hardly something you can argue, as a user. We like the feeling of being connected and that means that both the immediacy and the bidirectionality adds to the appeal of the medium.

Carr takes the long way around, starting with what cuneiform did for communication and what writing in general does, what the watch did for the industrial paradigm, what the map did for navigation, what the typewriter did for authors like Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot and so on.

The thing about Carr’s argument that makes it so interesting is that he discusses neuroplasticity and how the brain develops habits of concentration or distraction, without promoting one or the other. The brain makes no difference between “good” and “bad” habits, it simply does its thing. There’s still going to be some things that seem quantifiably better, like focus over distraction, but from a neurological point of view it’s just difference, not hierarchy. Deep reading has it’s rewards, but so does the roving gaze.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neurological circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. (p. 75)

There are paradoxes to our use of the Internet, as Carr points out, but one of the sticking points is that the Net is good at grabbing our attention only to scatter it. It is in this scattering that we suddenly hit the point where we become less able to focus on one single thing. We have all the information in the world at our fingertips, but it’s like trying to pour a lake in a thimble, we can’t hold on to any of it because we’re constantly being distracted by something else, something new and shiny.

Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter out thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. (p. 132) Carr states.

The appeal of the The Shallows isn’t that it tells you something you don’t already know, that technology does things to the user, changes habits and behavioural patterns, but rather it shines a spotlight on these things and makes you question your own relationship to technology, and makes you think about your own behaviour. For me the point quite quickly becomes not letting your use of the Net become unreflective, ignoring source criticism and simply surfing the shallows instead of keeping your reflective mind engaged. And that’s something we all need to be reminded of at times.

All in all The Shallows is entertaining, well-written and thought provoking. It also offers some insights into what happens to our grey matter when we use the medium available to us. Knowing these things makes us slightly less likely to be seduced by it to the point where we don’t see the drawbacks.

Mule

Daniel Woodrell “Winter’s Bone” – It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest

librarianmule — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:31:13 +0000

Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone (2006) is one of those terse, perfectly worded and incredibly put together novels that takes a solid hold of you and won’t let go. It speaks in the patios of the Ozarks and introduces its characters with a minimum of fuss and drops you solidly into the haunting beauty of the landscape and the inner workings of an old and too-well established community that lives mostly by its own rules, seeing the world at large as an afterthought.

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly’s crystal meth cooking father Jessup has gone missing. She is left to fend for her two younger brothers and her addled mother. There is no sense in this that that’s anything other than business as usual for Ree, who shoulders the responsibility without any kind of teenage angst or complaint. She simply steps up and does whatever has to be done, weather that means teaching her brothers to gut a squirrel or hunt down the corpse of her father to prove to the authorities that he didn’t show up in court because he is dead, and not because he is skipping bail.

Ree is that rarest of flowers, a female lead protagonist who is not a wilting delicate rose and who is engagingly intelligent and has a core made of solid steel. She is strong in every sense of the word, and stubborn to boot, and determined. It is not a case of her fighting insurmountable odds and coming out a triumphant hero, which she does, and is, but rather a case of her simply doing whatever has to be done with a stoic deep sense of loyalty and necessity.

The community is archaically patriarchal and the rules by which all these Dollys are supposed to live adhere more to that than to the outside polite laws of society. This is a poor, working class gone outlaw bunch and they all drink, do drugs and carry on their lives more by tribe rule than anything else. Family matters here in a way it never could in a big city. Which last name you carry and who you know is more important than anything else, both when it comes to taking care of your own and when it comes to who you can afford to piss off.

Ree has some people in her corner, like the crank addicted uncle Teardrop and her best friend Gail, but every character in this story has their own sorrows and their own troubles and even when they want to help, they still have their own concerns.

The language mirrors the characters perfectly. It is poetic and literary, but underscored with bleak practicality as is well illustrated in this passage where Ree is teaching her brothers to hunt.

The needed skill was silence. Along the dangle of knotted branches gray squirrels crouched utterly still as the day roused. They were alarmed by every sound but not long alarmed by any. The dawn air held the cold of night but there was no breeze and squirrels soon lost their fear of the new day and moved out along the branches. Easy meat for the table with naught but silence and a small bullet required. (Winter’s Bone, 102).

The whole narrative has this dual quality of depth and perception shot through with a kind of bare bones necessity for survival and continuation that makes it an exceedingly pleasant read. There’s substance, very clear characterisation and a story arc that keeps a spanking pace. The sense that forbearance and the fact that Ree is tough as old boot leather simply because she does not know any other way to be, makes this one of the best novels I’ve read in a while.

Daniel Woodrell is from this neck of the woods and has the ability to capture it succinctly without any kind of romanticism. He describes the slow decay and oddly delicate poverty of the region with an understanding that makes it simply a depiction of these characters lives and not in any way exploitative or sentimental. It is in that lack of sentimentality that this particular novel shines.

Mule

One Day by David Nicholls – Two Characters, Twenty Years, One Day, No Ninjas

librarianmule — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 09:08:56 +0000

For twenty years the reader gets to see where the two main characters, Emma and Dexter, are on the 15 July, St. Swithin’s Day, hence the title of the novel One Day (2009) by David Nicholls. The story begins on their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988 and the following night. There is a definite purpose to this particular way of dealing with the passage of time and giving the reader a compact glimpse of each year.

There is a see-sawing feeling between the two characters. When one of them is up the other one is down, when one of them is successful the other one is working just to survive. It doesn’t really apply to their happiness, because I honestly don’t know if either of them can be described as happy, rather they are comfortable or uncomfortable.

Emma is a clearly intelligent working-class girl and Dexter is well off, their families and backgrounds are different, their tastes and general outlook on life is different and their way of handling life is different. Despite all that they manage to remain friends, with some spectacular lapses when Dexter becomes too addicted to drugs and overly focused on the shallow party-life he’s leading in London as his career as a TV-presenter reaches its highpoint. While Dexter does well professionally, his personal life is more or less in shambles. Emma lives a more sedate and sensible life, first working as a server in a Tex-Mex restaurant, then as a teacher. Emma eventually achieves success as a children’s book author, while Dexter gets relegated to the churchyard of programming and eventually loses even that tenuous hold on celebrity and starts a shop selling high end food and wine.

They do eventually wind up together when Dexter’s marriage has failed and Emma has gone to Paris to live the myth of the author and write in her little garret, a cliché so trite I personally can’t see how any one could pull that off without an inward cringe, or at least a more necessary irony. Once they get together, wed and set up house I, for one, am starting to look around for the zombies. No, seriously. This is five sixths into the novel an I am starting to need zombies. Or possibly ninjas. It’s not only because I have a dark streak, but also because there is something smug about the unfolding of events. There is a big “surprise” shortly after that, a peripeteia that kind of fizzles out, irrespective of the huge, big lead-in it is given.

The problem for me is that I can see what the author is doing, trying to depict the inevitable loneliness of the human condition, the casual cruelty of fate, the way youthful aspiration most always disintegrates as we grow older and start making compromises. All the witty banter and astute observations makes this an easy read, but despite all that there is a certain lack of depth at the core of things that has little to do with the themes of the novel.

It’s a very ambitious project to undertake, telling the tale of two separate characters and their whole entire spheres in such condensed form and making it an authentic depiction of the times as well, and all that is achieved with a lightness of hand that starts looking more like sleight of hand after a while. There’s an overt cleverness to the text that has to do with its formal structure that is very seductive, but the question is ultimately always if it has any real depth, and that’s where I, as a reader, have my doubts. There is never any doubt about the writer’s technical prowess, or his intent. The question is rather to do with purpose.

I am not the target audience for this, but then there’s a lot of things I’m not the target audience for. And I’m fine with that. If I am to read five hundred pages of someone’s trivial mundane life I prefer it to have a different literary sensibility. Or possibly ninjas.

The distance the text keeps to its main characters inevitably translates into a certain distance to the reader as well. I find I don’t sympathize with either of them and that I don’t particularity care what happens to them, which, again, has to do with me not being the target audience. The basic notion that we struggle with loneliness and the occasional random cruelty of life isn’t exactly a surprise, or even something that could vaguely resemble an insight, to me personally. I’m left with little more than an occasional question mark, the odd raised eyebrow or snicker and the feeling that given time I won’t remember a single word of any of this.

Mule

Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh – Scottish Southern Gothic

librarianmule — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:52:04 +0000

Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) by Irvine Welsh is a curious jumble of various states of consciousness, memory, nightmare, coma and near wakefulness. The protagonist is Roy Strang, born in Leith in Scotland where he grew up in the scheme, a low rent housing project, basically the slums of town. His father is a happily prejudiced drunkard, his mother about the same. He also has three brothers: Tony, a handsome womanizer, Bernard, the flamboyant poetry-writing gay and Elgin, who is not all the way with it. Kim, his sister is described as whiney, promiscuous and not too bright. To say that the Strang family is dysfunctional is putting it mildly. There’s violence, drugs, mental illness, drinking and incest, just to mention a few minor details. There’s also the beloved family dog, Winston, who has attacked and maimed Roy when he was a boy, but who is still doted on by the rest of the family.
That’s one level of the story, told mostly in reminiscences and in a Scottish dialect, which takes some getting used to, for me at least. It’s very consistent, though, and you find yourself getting along with it just fine after a while.

The second level of the story takes place in Roy’s “deeper”, a place he runs to in his subconscious when he comes too close to the surface of waking up out of his coma. This fantasy world is a kind of Africa filtered through wishful thinking, at least initially, where Roy and his companion Sandy hunt the evil Marabou Stork. The stork itself has almost demonic qualities and certainly mythical ones, but it is a myth created out of Roy’s experiences in the actual, real South Africa where his family relocates in the hope of turning their lives around. In Africa they live with Roy’s uncle who repeatedly molests the young Roy and bribes him into silence with gifts and threats.

The lead character is in a coma here, and that makes the narrator so unreliable you have to really be careful where you put your trust, as you see in the very last chapters. It is also evident that Roy has done something to wind up in a coma. Every time he starts to surface he deliberately turns away from the waking world and dives back down deeper, something that’s shown typographically in the text. It’s never difficult to tell where we are, which level of reality we are dealing with. It is, however, sometimes difficult to make any kind of sound judgement of what’s really going on, because it’s obvious some of the tension created for Roy is between lies and truths and secrets he’s keeping and that spills over into the text.

Everything about this story is grim and dark and tastes like Scottish Southern Gothic the whole way through. It’s close enough to horror in the more original sense that the pure joy of the telling is sometimes the only thing that carries the reader. Roy is not a very likeable character, and it does not really matter that he is shaped by his circumstance, which he agrees with himself. He is aware of his own darkness, flaunts it at times and talks of how violence is sometimes preferable to sex. He perpetuates the cycle of vicious denigrating violence himself, takes to football hooliganism like an answer, sticks a blade in a classmate when he’s just a kid and in an act of coolly calculated menace kills the family dog in retribution for the injuries he suffered as a child.
The main stumbling block is however, sexual violence, but I’m not giving away the whole game here by telling how and why that plays such a pivotal role in Roy’s current state. Suffice to say that as the novel progresses, things get increasingly more disturbing and in the end all the levels of narrative are infused with this undercurrent of disintegration and violence until finally Roy gets to the end of the tale.

There is always this yearning for redemption in this kind of literature, both from the characters themselves and from the reader. There is no way there could be a happy ending to a tale as sordid as this one, but redemption is something else altogether. This thing, however, just has to run its course and redemption is not really an option.

On a technical level this is really brilliant work. It surfs between the heavy Scottish accent and the more refined speech of Roy and Sandy, which is comically precise in it’s elocution and very much The Queen’s English. Roy is not by any means stupid, or an oaf, or unaware of what he himself is doing and that only serves to drive the point home.

This is overall a very interesting read, consistent and true to the narrative parameters it sets up. It’s not for the shiny, happy crowd, but if you like your stories dark, gothic, smart and intriguing – then this is a good choice.

Mule

Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge – or, as true as it gets, anyway…

librarianmule — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:07:15 +0000

Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge (1998) by Jim Schutze is a “true crime” book. That in and of itself is a strange genre, but it has its merits.
The basic case is as follows: Bobby Kent was murdered in Hollywood in South Florida by a group of seven of his friends led by his best friend Marty Puccio. Bobby and Marty had known each other since third grade and described each other as “best friends”, though the friendship was fraught with tension. Bobby seems to have been perceived by adults and teachers as a good kid, but his peers have another story to tell.
If you look at Marty’s description the relationship had clear sadistic overtones and Bobby got increasingly aggressive as time went on. There’s a clear sado-sexual element to it, downplayed to become ridicule only. Bobby beats on Marty, sics his dog on him, verbally abuses him and so on and so forth. It’s hard to understand why Marty didn’t walk away from Bobby long before things got this out of hand. But he never does, despite begging his parents to move several times. Bobby’s already volatile temper was probably exacerbated by the fact that he used steroids.
Those involved in the killings are described as wayward sons and daughters of the relatively well-off white middle class. They are Ali Willis, Donald Semenec, Heather Swallers, Lisa Connelly, Derek Dzvirko and Derek Kaufman. There’s copious drug-use, mentions of prior arrests for prostitution and much slacking. Bobby is actually one of the few of the gang that manages to maintain a decent grade average in school despite all this. He and Marty also have jobs at a local sandwich place.
This is a “true story” – whatever that might mean. I have issues with any blatant statement of objective truth in such a subjective setting. Lisa Connelly falls in love with Marty. She sees how Bobby treats Marty and her friend Ali and decides that the only solution is to kill Bobby. The way this is rendered there is never any real objections to the actual murder, even though all involved have long discussions on the topic of how and when and with what tools they are supposed to take Bobby’s life.
The murder is brutal, violent and bloody. All of the antagonists have an active part in it – from the planning to the execution. Some are more active than others, and Marty probably deals the killing blow, if we are to believe the evidence. That doesn’t mean that this is in any way a cold-blooded affair. The reader gets to follow the winding and meandering path to the actual murder scene and then the aftermath, which is in many ways even more disturbing. Once Bobby is dead various cover-up activity and psychological reactions amongst the group are rendered in graphic detail. These are not exactly slick killers, and they tell friends and family what has been done. All of them try to downplay their own role in the murder, as you might expect.
This is where things get really interesting to me. Not only do the kids themselves think that they’ve done nothing to merit the punishments that the court means to meter out, but the parents don’t seem to understand either. They keep saying things like “but they’re just kids” and they “fell in with the wrong crowd” and “they made a bad decision”.
The bottom line is still that these kid wilfully and with premeditation took a life. And they show very little regret or remorse. Instead they seem to think that they are the victims for being punished within the limits of the law. At one point Lisa, who has been in custody for something like three months, says she has “done the prison thing”. She simply can not understand what a life sentence means, or that she may actually deserve life in prison.
Schutze gives a good account of the mindset of the group, the strange callousness in the way they comport themselves. He also gives a good rendition of the dialogue that feels pretty much verbatim at times. There’s a tone that reminds you of alienation literature like Camus’ The Stranger. It’s certainly is nihilistic enough. Whatever moral lesson you might learn from this you are not going to find it in the kids view of the world, or that of their parents, but rather the seasoned lawyers and police officers involved. The way this is written, though, it veers into sensationalism and near-hack writing at times. There are some strange concessions regarding things like curse words and descriptions of the sexual activities of these kids, but I guess I can understand that. It just gets a little incongruous when the dialogue and such-like is given in naturalistic style. There’s something to the descriptions of setting and scenes that feels reminiscent of gritty detective stories in the hard boiled genre, but that’s fine, that works.
At the end of the day we are left with a true account of a real crime. And the crux, the final point, is actually the complete lack of ability to take responsibility for what has occurred, both from the kids and from their parents.
Never mind that Bobby Kent was a bully and a generally unpleasant character – that doesn’t mean that it’s okay to kill him. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you can “do the prison thing” for three months and then walk away with a clear conscience.

Mule

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll – Sex and Drugs and … Basketball

librarianmule — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:30:52 +0000

The Basketball Diaries (1978) by Jim Carroll is one of those interesting little oddities that you stumble on occasionally.
Jim Carroll was a basketball player, a poet, an author, a musician… just an all around talented guy. He was also a heroin addict supporting his habit through theft and prostitution and any other available means. And the thing is, in this diary of his he describes the way he was living his life as a young tough deeply involved in the drug culture of New York. This is not exactly a bildungsroman because it doesn’t focus on the psychological and moral growth of the young protagonist.
At one point Carroll makes an offhand remark about getting things backwards. He was already smoking pot and started using heroin because he thought that was less addictive. That is certainly not something you should get mixed up, but it just goes to show that when it comes to information you should always consider the source.
What strikes me about the whole diary is the unapologetic narrative voice, the complete and total lack of apologetic excuses. Whatever the influences, whatever the choices, there seems to have been no point at which Carroll felt the need to blame society, his mother, his friends. I have to say I like that. As far as accountability goes, Carroll takes his share and seem to be smart enough to know that he has really very little to gain from telling a woeful tale. There’s a lack of sentimentality to all this that makes it interesting. He talks about the other basketball players that have gone astray in similar ways and wound up dead or in prison, but these are just tales of people he knows, people who made their own choices for whatever reasons.
The other thing about this diary that makes it interesting is the literary quality of it. For someone who scans through a lot of text it is obvious that there is real talent here, displayed at a very young age. I’ve read diaries before, some written by authors as a kind of autobiographical reconstruction of their private history and there is always pretense, a sense that much has been revised and edited, or at least cleaned up for consumption. The diary becomes a device that way, a vehicle for the author, something to perpetuate the image they want to project, constructing a persona. Of course there is no such as objective truth in a diary, either, though it is a popular conceit.
The second an author decides to let others into what should theoretically be private musings and starts thinking of a potential audience the basic premise for the text written alters. It may be self-censorship, it may be fear, but it is still a subtle tweaking of the text that can go either way. Carroll manages to sound sincere and doesn’t try to make himself look better than he is. He tells stories of theft and drug dealing, prostitution and deception as ways and means. He talks about how he and other players rob the locker rooms of the basketball teams they play and – amazingly – he writes about playing, and winning, while high on every drug known to man. That part really confounds me. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs here, but all sorts. And they still manage to win.
It is actually even more interesting to read something like this in this day of blogging. There’s a an awful lot of private musings spread publicly these days and not a lot of it considers that you should try to entertain, if nothing else.
Carroll is interesting, entertaining and deceptively charming in all his callous revelry. That does not mean you would have wanted to live next to the guy, or that he is in any way a model citizen. The Basketball Diaries is also a document of sorts, of a specific time and a specific place, and as such it is well worth reading.

Mule

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs

librarianmule — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:54:50 +0000

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (2008) written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs was actually written in 1945 before the authors even became famous as Beat Generation writers.
The novel is a dramatization of the events in 1944 when Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart with his boy scout knife. The murder is fictionalized and all the characters are given aliases, but at its core that’s what this somewhat peculiarly named novel is about.
The narrative voices alternate chapter by chapter between Will Dennison (Burroughs) and Mike Ryko (Kerouac). The style is mostly descriptive, and it keeps a certain distance to the persons and events in a classic hard-boiled tradition. It is interesting to see that the oddities in both authors individual styles are not all the way developed yet, but the embryos are there.
The two voices dovetail nicely, which means they also describe each other and give variations on the same events from two distinctly different perspectives. Other than that there’s plenty of the Beat Generation staples, drugs and alcohol and promiscuity (sometimes with a twist) and literature, talk of literature, art and philosophy. There’s also the distinct feeling that these young bucks were travelling in packs, moving in a little society their own. Money is always tight and nobody seems to have any kind of stable income.
The complicated relationship between Phillip Tourian and Ramsay Allen is given a lot of play. Tourian (Carr’s alter ego) is described by Dennison like this:
“This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad…’“(p. 3) whereas Allen “is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody.” (p.3).
The thing is that Tourian is still a young man in his later teens when this takes place, and Allen was his teacher at some point. There’s a weird echo of Rimbaud and Verlaine about them, literary pursuits aside. Tourian is aware of Allen’s attraction and in this narrative he doesn’t return any of Allen’s affections, though in real life they probably had a slightly less PG 13 interaction. Tourian plans on leaving the city and Allen’s increasingly stifling attentions by taking hire on a ship headed for France along with Mike Ryko, who has worked on a ship before.
If you know a little about the Beat Generation you will have come across this story before. It influenced everyone connected to it. Burroughs is rumoured to have drifted into morphine addiction because of it, and Lucien Carr himself did his time (two years for first-degree manslaughter) and then went on to have a successful career as an editor for UPI. Carr was also instrumental in introducing Allen Ginsberg to Burroughs and Kammerer, so he was a force at the nexus of the Beats.
This novel, apart from being an interesting read with a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, or poetry as the case might be, is also one of those hard-boiled murder stories that get undermined by the fact that there is some kind of reality at the base of it. The bohemian lifestyle of the protagonists in World War II New York is depicted with a surprising lack of sentimentality.
It took sixty years between the writing and the publishing of this novel and that means that in the meanwhile the Beats became famous, infamous and some even posthumous. The modern reader comes to this story knowing them and knowing about their literary production. That adds another layer to this, creating a kind of liquid modernity drop-off point where you can’t help asking what is real in any of this. At the end of the day we have Carr’s description of what happened, the way it was presented at court and then the literary variations of the same event. It’s fascinating for more reasons than just the sensationalism of the murder itself or as a curio involving two writers who were on the verge of becoming seminal voices of their generation.

Dexter in the Dark – No Peace for the Wicked…

librarianmule — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:59:11 +0000

Dexter in the Dark (2007) by Jeff Lindsay is the third in the series about Dexter Morgan, a Miami PD blood spatter analyst and serial killer.

Me, personally, I am a huge fan of the TV-series Dexter, starring the talented Michael C. Hall. It’s easy to hear the sinister voice-over so prevalent in the show while reading Lindsay’s prose. There’s a cheerful callousness to the narrative voice that really appeals to me, if for no other reason than the fact that it is unique in its consistency.

I picked up my copy more by accident than by design at a thrift shop for next to nothing, idly passing my time scanning the bins of books, as any good bibliophile would. I remember what I thought of the first novel, so I don’t think I would have gone out of my way to buy this one had not circumstance been conducive. But, it’s like that sometimes.

It’s a good read, fast paced and easy and darkly funny. My sense of humour is certainly dark enough to enjoy the inner monologue of the unrepentant and cheerfully psychopathic Dexter Morgan, a man who is essentially not a man, which he confidently points out frequently enough to remind the reader that is sort of the running theme.

Dexter is certainly the master of the art of camouflage. To the casual observer he is a successful blood-spatter analyst, a member of the police, an upstanding citizen about to get married to his long-term girlfriend Rita and be a father to her two children, Astor and Cody, from a previous marriage. All that is just hiding in plain sight. In reality he is a serial killer, a psychopath and more than a little dangerous.

The thing is, Dexter has this second inner voice he calls The Dark Passenger, supposedly brought on by the bloody trauma he suffered as a young boy. I have no problems thinking of the lust for blood like a second voice, a sort of guiding personification of his own fucked-up psyche, but Lindsay has chosen to make it literal. By the end of this novel Dexter’s Dark Passenger is a demon, and his adversary in this novel is a demon of higher rank and power. It is given voice in third person passages where IT speaks directly to the reader.

Again, you can wrangle yourself around the idea that Dexter has reified his bloodlust, given it a name, made it a constant companion, all that. It even makes sense to me, knowing a little about sociopathy and psychopathy. But when there is suddenly demons in the works, real actual King Solomon demons… I get a little disappointed. Everything I like about this particular narrative voice loses from that, in my humble opinion. And again I am struck by that same thought that I had when I read the first novel.

It’s stylish and funny and briskly dark and the main character is so intriguing in his own right that I am disappointed that the story doesn’t go somewhere more interesting. I like Dexter. I know that’s not entirely healthy, but then, this is fiction and that’s the premise. Lindsay does a good job with it, that unapologetic and completely solipsistic way of viewing the world is skewed enough that it will keep you interested through the 375 pages. But the story, the actual narrative arc itself, is surprisingly trite, mundane and requires more of a willing suspension of disbelief than I can give.

Why did they have to be demons? I’ve read my share… probably more than my share, of gothic and horror. I have no problem with monsters. I know many of them very well. It is the other side of Dexter, the lack of humanity, that interests me more. When Dexter searches for the proper human response to a situation things get really fascinating.

“It was difficult to think of anything clever or even socially acceptable to say to that. I had never read anywhere what to say to someone speaking of having feeling in his amputated hand. Chutsky seemed to feel the awkwardness, because he gave me a small dry snort of non-humorous amusement. “Hey, well”, he said, “there’s still a couple of kicks left in the old mule.” It seemed to me an unfortunate choice of words, since he was also missing his left foot, and any kicking at all seemed out of the question. Still, I was pleased to see him coming out of his depression, so it seemed like a good thing to agree with him.” (341-342)

See what I mean? That’s where things about Dexter are the most intriguing to me. I guess I’m just a little twisted that way.

Still, it’s funny if you like your humour dark. And it’s different. And that makes it worth the while to read it.

MULE

Flight to Arras – The philosophical view of the fighter pilot Saint-Exupéry

librarianmule — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:40:16 +0000

Flight to Arras (Pilote de guerre) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was first published in early 1942. It was promptly banned by the Vichy government, which won’t surprise the informed reader the least little bit.

There are first hand accounts of war that slide effortlessly into the territory of action and suspense. Those are interesting in their own specific way. And then there are these kinds of narratives, the ones that bypass all the blood and honour and go straight for the more philosophical heart of the matter. Saint-Exupéry does that.

In 1940 Saint-Exupéry and his crew are sent on a reconnaissance mission over Nazi-occupied France from Orly to Arras. It is very clear that they are not expected to survive. Somehow, the aircraft managed to slip through, though, evading ground to air fire and being chased by enemy planes and being shot at by his own. Saint-Exupéry gives this deeply passionate and philosophical account of the action, but more than that, it is a meditation on the nature of morality and duty, the human condition and the conditions of war.

He tells of his childhood in France, of a thousand connecting thoughts, the meditation on his plane, his circumstance, the reasons why and it isn’t an action hero’s telling. It is however something like a glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of a man who has basically been sent on a suicide-mission that is utterly futile. How does one handle that? How do you justify following orders in those circumstance? And what does that mean?

“I have gone to war to preserve the quality of a glowing light, even more than to save the food of our bodies. I have gone to war for the distinctive radiance into which bread is transfigured in the homes of my countrymen. What moves me above all as I gaze at this discreet child is the insubstantial cortex around her. The ineffable structure within the features of her face. The poem read upon the page, and not the page itself.” (Saint-Exupéry, p. 106)

It seems incongruous that a soldier can write about his experience of war like this, but there is something so deeply and tangibly human about it that much of what Saint-Exupéry writes becomes meditations on humanity, and the human condition, rather than just our warlike qualities.

He never forgets that no matter how war tries to lump all individuals together into faceless crowds and masses, at the heart of it all is each individual and each individual’s choice of action. In that respect this is a good example of a subtle dissertation on the illusion of free will.

All that not withstanding, you have to be in the right mood for a book like this, no matter how short it is. If it catches you on an off day it’s easily too dense and textured to seduce you into wanting to take that road, the inland overland philosophical and half-in-the-clouds road. The author has a deep mortality salience that permeates every line.

“I understand the meaning of humility. It is not self-denigration. It is the very principle of action. If, intending to absolve myself, I use fate as an excuse for my misfortunes, I subject myself to fate. If I excuse them by treason, I subject myself to treason. But if I accept responsibility for the offence, I affirm my power as a man. I can act to influence that of which I am a part. I am a constitutional element of the community of mankind.” (Saint-Exupéry, 113)

What a curious way to talk about war. And that is why this book is so utterly fascinating.

MULE

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy at his terse best

librarianmule — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:58:41 +0000

No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.

When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.

There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.

Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.

There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.

I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.

“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).

Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.

Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).

These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.

I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.

The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.

Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.

Mule