”His literature grew less and less, and his life more and more.” William Dean Howells
In the twilight of his career, Twain was making visual what his f”His literature grew less and less, and his life more and more.” William Dean Howells
In the twilight of his career, Twain was making visual what his friends had long accepted as factual — that he was one of a kind, an American original who would be talked about long after he was gone.
Millions of words have been written about Mark Twain’s life. He penned many of them himself. There is his posthumously published Autobiography, as well as all the memoir he scattered throughout various essays and books (Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, etc.) To write a Mark Twain book that actually adds something to this remarkably well covered life is a major challenge. Michael Shelden was up to that challenge.
Mark Twain: Man In White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years achieves its relevance by tightly focusing on Mark Twain’s last years — his final forty months to be exact. It opens with his dramatic appearance in the Senate Reading Room of the Library of Congress in December 1906 where he addressed a hearing about proposed new copyright legislation. This occasion marked the first appearance of his strikingly outrageous white suit, a sartorial choice carefully calculated for dramatic effect. Sheldon highlights that while this is the look that survives as the visual component of our Mark Twain legend, that it wasn’t until this late stage of his life that he debuted it.
Part of his satisfaction in wearing the white suit was knowing that it was a joke against himself — a whited sepulcher that concealed a heart with darker moods and a character that was far from spotless.
And that leads into one of Shelden’s main theses — that during the last years of Mark Twain’s life, with most of his major and memorable work already behind him, he was consciously creating his legacy. Taking to constantly wearing dramatically fashion-defying white suits is the visual proof. Working to secure changes in the copyright laws to preserve his literary legacy is another aspect. This was also the time when he was simultaneously dictating his Autobiography and working with Albert Bigelow Paine, his hand-picked biographer, to shape the way posterity would remember him. (Twain gave Paine extraordinary access to his papers, correspondence, and friends. He allowed him to sit in while he dictated his Autobiography, and gave permission to use anything he heard there. Paine wrote of the experience:
”We were watching one of the great, literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture. We constituted about the most select audience in the world, enjoying what was, likely enough, its most remarkable entertainment.”)
Shelden had another important point to make with this biography — a sort of rebalancing of the historical scales. The common wisdom on Mark Twain’s final years after the death of his wife is that they were sad, lonely, and embittering. Shelden wrote to show a more complex story. He tells a tale of triumphs and frolic beside the litany of loss and heartbreak that marked Twain’s last days. His trip to Oxford to receive an honorary degree from that august institution was a dream fulfilled — a triumphant acknowledgment of his merit as a great writer, not just a mere humorist. Time spent in the company of his best friend, H.H. Rogers, Standard Oil tycoon, Robber Baron, and in Twain’s words, Pirate, allowed him escape almost back into the joyful days of boyhood. Even planning for his new home, Stormfield, a place where he could bring his surviving family back together to try to recreate a past happiness, was at least a temporary triumph, before ultimately falling apart. He was resilient, joking his way through solemn memorials for a friend (and making it work), and turning a serious armed burglary of his home that ended in a shootout into more humorous copy for the papers. Sure, it all went wrong in the end, everything slipped away from him, his losses were great, and then he died, but all of us have losses at the end of a long life, and none of us get out alive.
He was a cigar store angel come to life with a mischievous eye on this world and a curious one on the next. Such a figure furnished a spectacle that was both comic and tragic, a spirited celebration of life’s rewards, and a clown’s lament of his own mortality....more
”As an amusement it is too fleeting. As an occupation it is too wearing. As a public exhibition there is no money in it.”
Sam Clemens was a rascal, and”As an amusement it is too fleeting. As an occupation it is too wearing. As a public exhibition there is no money in it.”
Sam Clemens was a rascal, and a rough one at that. His sensibilities were honed on Mississippi riverboats and Western mining camps. Through his prodigious talent and the softening (and censoring) influence of his wife he was able to gain entrance to the Eastern establishment, but he never ceased being a savage Westerner at heart, and could never resist poking at the prim conventions of his culture. His favorite dish would always be barbecued sacred cow.
This speech, given at the Stomach Club in Paris in 1879, was a chance for Clemens’s inner scamp to burst free. An all male gathering, well fed and deep in their cups, were the perfect audience for his audacity. His speech was a masterpiece of burlesque, with manufactured supporting quotes from figures both historical and anonymous — Homer, Franklin, Michelangelo (an Old Master, which is, of course, an abbreviation). An experienced observer has said, “There are times when I prefer it to sodomy.” Clemens undoubtedly delighted his audience as much as he shocked them. Most of the rest of the world would have to wait the better part of a century before they too could laugh at Clemens’s risqué oration.
”There have been daring people in the world who have claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.”
James Fenimore Cooper is best”There have been daring people in the world who have claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.”
James Fenimore Cooper is best known today as the author of The Last of the Mohicans, though I’ll wager that far more living people have seen the 1992 movie with Daniel Day Lewis than have read the book. That book was one of five historical novels Cooper wrote, collectively known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Once, these novels were among the highest regarded in American literature. Alas, that is no longer the case. Mark Twain’s scathing, satirical criticism of Cooper’s writing may well have marked the beginning of the end of Cooper’s prominence in American letters.
Let’s be clear — Twain made no attempt to be fair to Cooper. He attacked him with extreme prejudice with the sole purpose of extracting mocking laughter from his audience. Nor was it anything like a fair fight. Cooper, who wrote Leatherstocking Tales between 1823 and 1841, was already old fashioned and a bit dated in Mark Twain’s time. Cooper’s Romantic tradition was already giving way to an American Realism that Twain pioneered. And, Cooper was dead — had been for over forty years when this piece was written. Given all of that, Mark Twain’s brutally witty criticism was as nakedly unfair as it was brilliantly funny.
Mark Twain wasn’t a serious critic. In fact, this essay is as much a satire on the art of literary criticism as it is one on the literary value of Fenimore Cooper. Remember that if you happen to be one of the half dozen living people who still read and admire Cooper’s work.
Below are a few samples of Twain’s roasting of Cooper:
”When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven dollar friendships offering in the beginning of a paragraph he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and dance upon in the Deerslayer tale.”
”Bless your heart, Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse, and I don’t mean a high class horse either, I mean a clothes horse.”
”In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and an Indian that stands in front of the cigar shop is not spacious.”
”In truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens.”
”Its humor is pathetic, its pathos is funny, its conversations are, oh, indescribable! Its love scenes odious, its English a crime against the language.”...more
This is my first reread of The Time Machine since my mid teens, over four decades ago. Back then, I was just beginning to explore science fiction, andThis is my first reread of The Time Machine since my mid teens, over four decades ago. Back then, I was just beginning to explore science fiction, and responded to it simply as a pretty cool SciFi tale. Rereading it now, I’m able to appreciate it on so many more levels. Wells was doing a lot with this short book, and he did it elegantly.
Not only is The Time Machine among the earliest examples of science fiction literature, but it is the granddaddy of all modern time travel tales. Wells made the mold, right down to the devise of the use of a machine to travel in time, which has become ubiquitous. This by itself makes the work significant.
Yet The Time Machine is much more. It is a powerful political parable of the consequences of the stark economic inequities between the capital class and the working class. The Eloi and the Morlocks of Wells’s far future represent the grim endgame of the propertied class’s callous disregard for the well-being of the working class that Wells observed in Victorian Britain. His socialist conscience was on full display in this short novel, so much so that it can almost be considered a work of political philosophy as much as an Ur-SciFi novel.
Wells constructed his tale with such skill that, despite its heavy moral, it never comes across preachy or didactic. Its framing story puts us at a bourgeois, Victorian dinner party, where several men, identified only by their occupations, are discussing new scientific theory. It is here that the time traveler introduces first his theory, and then his model of a time machine. The following week, at another dinner party, the time traveler enters gaunt and disheveled, claiming to have just returned from travel in time. He regales the incredulous table with the fantastic tale of his journey, little caring that his companions obviously do not believe him. Every detail of this framing story, and story told within it works elegantly, down to the detail of leaving all the men, including the time traveler, anonymous, thus focusing all on the story being told. It is not by accident that this early science fiction tale from the Victorian Age has become a classic, and is still read on its own merit today.
George Sterling is a now obscure American poet, but had some renowned in the first decades of the 20th century as a poet of the West Coast Romantics sGeorge Sterling is a now obscure American poet, but had some renowned in the first decades of the 20th century as a poet of the West Coast Romantics school. I had never heard of him until reading a biography of Jack London, who was Sterling’s close friend and companion. London called Sterling, “the greatest living poet in the United States,” and used him as the model for Russ Brissenden, the sickly poet in his novel Martin Eden. I was intrigued enough to seek out Sterling’s most famous work and read it.
Wow! I was not expecting this! The title poem of this volume is a long, fantastic fantasy poem written in a purple-prosed style that readers of H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany will immediately recognize. My first thought upon reading it was that it was now obvious to me why Sterling is obscure and forgotten. No one outside of the small subset of horror/fantasy readers who appreciate H.P. Lovecraft read stuff like this anymore. It’s certainly beneath the notice of the University Literati who are now the sacred keepers of poetry. But at the time of its publication the poem was praised. Ambrose Bierce said of it, ”And the poem! I hardly know how to speak of it. No poem in English of equal length has so bewildering a wealth of imagination.”
“Bewildering” was an apt word. Check out these excerpts below:
But Fancy still is fugitive, and turns To caverns where a demon alter burns, And Satan, yawning on his brazen seat, Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed, Ere Lilith come his indolence to greet, Who leads from Hell his whitest queens, ar- rayed In chains so heated at their master’s fire That one new-damned had thought their bright attire Indeed were coral, till the daz- zling dance So terrible that brilliance shall enhance.
Seek by the glow-worm’s lantern cold and dull A crimson spider hidden in a skull, Or search for mottled vines with berries white, Where waters mutter to the gibbous moon. There, clothed in cerements of malig-nant light, A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse, Beside a cauldron vex’d with harlot’s blood, The stars of that red sign which spells her doom.
A Wine of Wizardry is the most notable poem in this volume. The remaining poems are just as obsolete to the modern ear without having the bewitching charm and eeriness of the title poem.
Sterling was a character equal to his eldritch poetry. A member of the famed San Francisco Bohemian Club, and the leading light of an artists colony in Carmel-By-the-Sea, he lived and died by his own poetic lights. He carried a vial of cyanide on his person constantly for years, and eventually used it to end his own life in his room at the Bohemian Club.
How to rate this? Two and a half stars just for historic interest, seeing how a poet who was widely praised by the likes of Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dresden, and Sinclair Lewis has fallen into utter obscurity. If you enjoy the purple-prosed works of H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and their ilk, (as I do) rate it three stars and make sure to check out at least the title poem. The work is in the public domain, and you can listen to it free here:
Assembling a complete collection of Mark Twain’s short stories begs for quotation marks around that word “complete.” The man was always telling storieAssembling a complete collection of Mark Twain’s short stories begs for quotation marks around that word “complete.” The man was always telling stories. He composed some pieces distinctly as short stories; such tales as The £1,000,000 Bank-Note, The Stolen White Elephant, and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg come to mind. But he also wrote essays and personal sketches where he expanded on the facts with enough humorous hyperbole that whether to call it short story or essay remains a judgement call, and not an easy one. Then there are his speeches, where, of course, he often couldn’t forbear including some whoppers that could make them eligible for a collection of short stories. Even within his non-fiction travel books and posthumously published autobiography he reeled off many tongue in cheek tall tales that easily merit inclusion in a “complete” collection. There are fragments and unfinished documents published decades after his death that could qualify. And all that’s before you even get to whether you classify a longish shorter work like The Mysterious Stranger as a longish short story or a shortish novel.
So, no, this isn’t really a “complete” collection of Mark Twain’s stories — too many judgment calls involved for that to even be possible. But it is a large collection. I count 156 stories, ranging from The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County at the front of Mark Twain’s career, to The War Prayer, published posthumously because he feared public reaction to its bitter honesty. Not everyone of these stories is a peach, but with Mark Twain, even his rotten apples make good cider.
Listing all the stories in this volume would be tedious, so below are ones I enjoyed the most:
*General Washington’s Negro Body Servant *A Burlesque Autobiography *My Watch *Political Economy *Journalism in Tennessee *Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup *The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract *A Medieval Romance *The Siamese Twins *How I Edited an Agricultural Paper *Cannibalism in the Cars *The Killing of Julius Caesar *The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connect *Punch Brothers Punch *Conversation as it was the Fireside in the Time of the Tudors *The Stolen White Elephant *The £1,000,000 Bank-Note *The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg *A Double-Barreled Detective Story *The Private History of a Campaign that failed *A Dog’s Tale *Extracts from Adam’s Diary *Eve’s Diary *The War Prayer *Was it Heaven? or Hell? *The Five Boons of Life *A Burlesque Biography *How To Tell A Story *An Entertaining Article *Advise to Little Girls *The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm ...more
”The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs everyday.”
(I reviewed each of the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time”The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs everyday.”
(I reviewed each of the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time separately as I finished them. Here I am collecting my thoughts on how I was affected by the work as a whole.)
There are hundreds of reviews here of this sublime book. Many of these are nearly as elegant, as verbose, as detailed, and as highbrow as the book itself. They are well thought out, elegant even. This is not one of those reviews.
At first I was baffled as to why I enjoyed this book at all. It has no more of a plot than does my life or yours. It ambles from memory to memory, scene to scene, theme to theme at a wordy, lackadaisical pace. These are not descriptions of a book I would generally enjoy. Neither the pampered and protected narrator nor the mannered and class conscious world he describes in such detail would usually hold my interest. The characters are people whose company I would never seek out — self-absorbed bores intent on trivialities. And Nothing Really Happens — long dinner party here, a social call there, nothing to call a plot.
Yet something about all this was so familiar…
Take away the amazingly crafted, hypnotic sentence that go on for paragraphs. Remove the elegance of the Belle Epoque setting and transform the story a continent away and one hundred years in the future, say, 1990s New York City, and what you have is...Seinfeld. Yep. Self absorbed people, obsessed with trivialities, while nothing actually happens. Yada, yada, yada. Just as Proust’s masterpiece seems to go on forever, stretching its trivial nothingness into seven volumes, Seinfeld filled nine seasons with a show about nothing, peopled with vapid, unsympathetic characters. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Of course, my tongue is firmly in cheek as I write that (though at some level the comparison is apt). Because, of course, it is for the languorous magic of his prose, those impossible, page long sentences dissecting as they contemplate the vast storeroom of Proust’s memory, that I loved this work. Within its exhaustive recreation of the minutiae of memory of a seemingly superficial life, it has moments of profound realization of the significance of the mundane, rendered in the exquisitely detailed ebb and flow of beautiful language. This elegant recreation of sense memory, the recalling of a lifetime in all its trivial detail — necessitates experiencing it to fully comprehend.
Never before have I had a literary experience quite like this. Along the way Proust dazzled me, bored me, frustrated me, hypnotized me, amazed me, made me laugh, and made me think. He took nearly 4000 pages to tell me a story with no plot to speak of, about people who generally would not interest me, mostly doing things that I do not care about. And he made me love it. I didn’t understand what he was doing to me until I found the key in his own words. Proust said,
”The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
What Proust did for me in In Search of Lost Time was to lend me new eyes to see through. That is real literary magic. When I began reading it, I saw reviews noting having read through it multiple times. At the time that seemed like madness. I couldn’t imagine why. Now, I can’t imagine not revisiting this amazing work again....more
One of Jack London’s lesser known works, The Game is a novella of love and boxing. About half the length of the story covers a boxing match in detail One of Jack London’s lesser known works, The Game is a novella of love and boxing. About half the length of the story covers a boxing match in detail — the strategy, the thoughts of the combatants, the reactions of the boxer’s fiancée who has been snuck into to an all male venue to watch the match —the boxing is written exquisitely well. Jack London knew the game, and he knew how to write about it effectively. This section of the story is pure five star material.
London contrasted the brutality of boxing to the innocence and gentleness of his characters. Joe, the young boxer is a sweet boy. He works hard and sends his money to his mother and siblings. He’s soft spoken and shy, and treats his girl, Genevieve well, even to promising her to give up boxing. Genevieve is a innocent girl, deeply in love with her fellow, who allowed him to convince her to watch his final match before their wedding. The way London has the match transform these two as a brutal game calls to an inner brute in all is the genius of his story.
The first half of the tale that introduces the characters and sets up their romance isn’t of the same quality. London was always incredibly circumspect when writing about men and women. He had no problem writing brutally realistic violence, but never dared to treat sexuality the same. Genevieve, like most of London’s females, is a complete innocent, and her boy Joe the perfect gentleman. When she first sees Joe in the ring, stripped to his shorts, she blushes with shame and excitement, having never before even imagined a man without his clothes on. London’s shrinking away from realism in sexuality was his one great flaw, and it detracted from this otherwise excellent tale.
”There’s no place like home!” said a voice close by, and I thought, “There damn sure isn’t.”
A Black, American singer living in Paris for twelve years”There’s no place like home!” said a voice close by, and I thought, “There damn sure isn’t.”
A Black, American singer living in Paris for twelve years prepares to go home to America with his Swedish wife and four year old son. He contemplates what this will mean to them and how it will affect his family, as he already begins to miss Paris. This long tale, beautifully told, examines the complexities of the meaning of personal identity and racism on an international level.
As with all Baldwin’s fiction, autobiography is close to the surface in This Morning, This Evening, So Soon. He had found refuge in France from the overt and overwhelming racism of his American home. This story reflects his own anxiety, his ambiguity, and his sadness connected with his return from voluntary exile abroad.
”After departure, only invisible things are left. Perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory, and loss, and love. So many things, so many people depart, and we can only reposes them in our minds.”...more
**spoiler alert** The coming of the Civil War ended Sam Clemens’ career as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and launched him into the American West, whe**spoiler alert** The coming of the Civil War ended Sam Clemens’ career as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and launched him into the American West, where he reinvented himself as Mark Twain — journalist, humorist, and writer. But before he fled Missouri and the war, perhaps he had a brief interlude where he tried and failed at soldiering. This sketch tells the tale of a brief stint with a Confederate Missouri militia, the Marion Rangers, as green, undisciplined, and feather-head a bunch as ever went to war. It is almost certainly more fiction than fact, but it does capture the feel of the the war’s earliest days.
”For a time, life was idly delicious. It was perfect. There was no war to mar it”
In this humorous sketch, Twain captured the unreality of war’s beginning. Young men, their heads full of romance and chivalry, set out to war as on a lark. It seems a grand adventure to these boys, up until they encounter their first minor difficulties and inconveniences, bumbling about as they fled from mere rumor of the enemy.
”It was rumored that the enemy were advancing in our direction. The rumor was but a rumor; nothing definite about it. So in the confusion, we did not know which way to retreat.”
They continued in this vein, running from one camp to another, eating up the provisions of local farmers, with no order, no military discipline, no enemy sighted, and no clue among them. That is, until a stranger perceived as the enemy, rode toward their encampment one night, and in a panicked volley they shot him down.
”The thought shot through me that I was a murderer — that I had killed a man — a man who had never done me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my marrow.”
Here the sketch turned from humorous farce into something close to tragedy. The would be soldiers are sobered by the cold finality of the deed. Soon thereafter, they meet up with more serious troops, and many of them, including the author, simply melt away, leaving soldiering and the war behind.
Mark Twain notes that there were many such raw and inept bands at war’s beginning, some of whom actually seasoned into competent warriors. As for himself, he writes,
”I could have become a soldier myself if I had waited. I had got part of it learned — I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.”...more
Bret Harte was once one of America’s most famous and respected writers. Today, he is remembered chiefly for just two of his stories — The Luck of RoarBret Harte was once one of America’s most famous and respected writers. Today, he is remembered chiefly for just two of his stories — The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat — tales of California’s wild gold camps and their denizens. He fell from grace in the literary world because his stories were seen as sentimental and romantic, out of fashion by the end of the 19th century.
Harte’s writing was never quite that simple, though, a fact that is evident in these two stories that are still read. True, his plots were sentimental, his characters romantic (he created tropes used for a century — shifty prospector, cool, gentlemanly gambler, hooker with a heart of gold), and his dialect, according to Mark Twain, never existed outside Harte’s imagination. But when you read these two, skillfully written tales, you see that much of Harte’s technique subverts the surface romanticism.
Harte used an ironic, detached narration that served to keep the reader at arm’s length from his characters. It also allowed him to inject subtle cynicism and ironic humor that subverted the easily visible romanticism of the surface plot.
In The Luck of Roaring Camp, Harte tells the story of an orphaned infant adopted by the rough men of the camp, and how this softened and refined them, brought to the surface the better natures of these hard men. Yet when you look closely, you see first that the men of the camp still rejected both traditional, religious morality and the rigid family values of the times. They voted to keep women out of the camp, relying on a nursing she-ass as the babe’s mother rather than risking their male fraternity, and there is no inkling of any spiritual repentance. If you pay attention, you will notice broad clues (including the name they gave the orphaned babe — Thomas Luck) that their primary interest in the child was as a lucky talisman to be closely guarded against outsiders — a good luck charm that changed the fortunes of the camp. The seeming romanticism of the story is clearly trumped by its cynicism.
The Outcasts of Poker Flat is less humorous, and its cynicism more clearly visible than its companion story. Though it initiated two of the most enduring tropes of American Western mythos — gentleman gambler hero and hooker with a heart of gold — it lead from the start with cynicism about traditional morality. The vigilance committee that drove the pathetic group of immoral outcast from their midst is clearly shown to be acting out of self interest and undeserved self righteousness. The gambler, John Oakhurst, has won a great deal of their money. The two prostitutes could not have plied their trade without the participation of the good men of Poker Flat.
But Harte went well beyond his surface cynicism in this story. He subverted the very tropes that he created. He revealed in his tragic ending not so much that a fallen woman can have good in her, but that the people judging her are wholly unable to adequately access their own standards of judgment. (The innocent young girl Piney, found with the prostitute Duchess, was strongly implied to be pregnant out of wedlock.) And John Oakhurst, the gambler hero, cool and collected, is revealed to be dependent on the energy of others, staying with the weaker outcasts not so much out of altruism, but from his own need:
”The thought of deserting the weaker and more pitiable companions never, perhaps, occurred to him, yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement that singularity enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious.”
With his last line of the story, Harte called Oakhurst “the strongest, and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.” Here he subverted his trope in plain sight.
These skillfully crafted tales capture hearts with their sentimental romanticism, while engaging minds with their complex, subversive cynicism. Perhaps that’s why they endure among the quintessentially great American stories. ...more
**spoiler alert** ”But there’s a jug on the table and a case in hand, and I never left a jug or a case half finished in my life.”
The Devil and Daniel **spoiler alert** ”But there’s a jug on the table and a case in hand, and I never left a jug or a case half finished in my life.”
The Devil and Daniel Webster tells a tale in the folk tradition of clever men challenging the devil in contest. Here, the historical figure of Senator Daniel Webster is portrayed as a bigger than life, nails-tough New England folk hero, a canny lawyer with a preternatural talent for oratory. He takes on the devil in a courtroom challenge to save the soul of his neighbor, a hard luck farmer who made a deal with the devil and requested the great man’s help to break his contract.
The story is both humorous and patriotic, though, unlike some patriotic tales, it acknowledges national faults. The devil claims American citizenship, saying:
”When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck…Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South claims me for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself.”
The devil conjures up a court of the damned — twelve men and a judge from among the most infamous figures of American history — Simon Girty and Walter Butler (notorious loyalists during the Revolution) Teech the bloody pirate, King Philip, Indian chief from the original Indian war, etc. And as judge, Justice Hawthorne, the unrepentant hanging judge from the Salem witch trials. Yet all, as Webster demanded, Americans.
Against this judge and jury, Webster was unable to prevail on the facts of the case, so resorted to his oratory to move the jury, waxing eloquent on the meaning of being an independent man:
”There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing, too, and he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn’t help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man you’d know it. And he wasn’t pleading for any one person anymore, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures, and the endless journey of mankind.”
And, of course, as this is an outsmart the devil tale, Webster moved the hearts even of the damned of the jury. Walter Butler speaks for them saying:
”Perhaps tis not strictly in accordance with the evidence, but even the damned may salute the eloquence of Mr. Webster.”
This short tale is a classic of its type, and in addition to the tropes already mentioned, piles on a lot of New Hampshire Yankee flavor. I rate it 3 1/2 stars, rounded up for both its fame and the sentiment that I hold for it from my youth....more
”But if you want a serious political movie, have a long look at Caligula, which a lot of people will tell you is the best. Caligula is a genuine monst”But if you want a serious political movie, have a long look at Caligula, which a lot of people will tell you is the best. Caligula is a genuine monstrosity, a saga of greed, corruption, and failure that makes Nixon seem like an amateur, and Charles Manson a punk. Caligula was serious, and he had no use for journalists.”
The final volume of The Gonzo Papers, Better than Sex is but a pale shadow of the original collection, The Great Shark Hunt. Mostly covering the 1992 Presidential campaign of Clinton/Bush/Perot, it also has call backs to Thompson’s early ‘70s political adventures — his Freak Power campaign running for Pitkin County, Colorado sherif, and covering the 1972 Nixon/McGovern campaign. It’s full of Thompson’s signature rantings, embellishments, and ravings, so if you’re a HST fan, you may enjoy it. What it lacks is any fresh or valuable insight, or even any real behind the scenes stories to bring that ‘92 campaign to life. This one is all gonzo and zero journalism....more
The adaptation of this Kipling story into the 1975 film of the same name was brilliant. The combination of legendary director John Huston and the perfThe adaptation of this Kipling story into the 1975 film of the same name was brilliant. The combination of legendary director John Huston and the perfect casting of Sean Connery and Michael Caine made this tale of colonial high jinx in a remote corner of Afghanistan a classic to remember.
Unfortunately, the original story doesn’t measure up to its film adaptation. The story of a couple of rough soldiers of fortune gambling all on a wild adventuring scheme had promise, but Kipling used an awkward, indirect narration to tell the tale. He inserted himself as a character in the story, and he relates the wild tale to us, as told to him by one of the adventurers. This method saps the tale of much of the excitement and interest it should have had. Add to that his use of period slang that is all but unintelligible, and pretty much everything but the premise is ruined.
The Man Who Would Be King is one of those rare occasions when you should ignore the book and watch the movie.
**spoiler alert** ”Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong.”
First read this heart pumping adventure t**spoiler alert** ”Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong.”
First read this heart pumping adventure tale nearly 50 years ago as a middle schooler. It’s a story that sticks with you. At the time I’m pretty sure my sympathies were likely with big game hunter Sanger Rainsford, if for no other reason than, as the prey, he was the underdog of the story.
Turns out, being the underdog is the only thing Rainsford has to recommend him. He’s arrogant, and lacks the imagination to see that his game might feel anything, even fear: ”Bah! They’ve no understanding!” “Even so, I rather think they understand one thing — fear — the fear of pain and the fear of death.” “Nonsense!” laughed Rainsford. On top of that, he is sorta stupid. When he hears gunshots coming from out in the fog, he stands on the yacht rail to try to hear better, and falls overboard when he drops his pipe. Sure he’s resourceful once General Zaroff makes him his prey, but perhaps only marginally better than the lesser men that the General hunted. Rainsford, after all, didn’t win the game, Zaroff lost it through his own hubris. (Zaroff actually tracked Rainsford down that very first night, but decided to extend the game by not finishing him then.)
General Zaroff is a far more interesting character. A suave, refined Russian aristocrat living in gothic splendor on an isolated tropical isle with his pack of hounds and giant, deaf-mute Cossack manservant, his manners, his table, and his wine are all impeccable. Sure, he’s a psychopath and absolutely obsessed with hunting his human prey, but he’s far more engaging and honest than the strong but dull Rainsford.
In the end, even Rainsford’s moral high ground of valuing human life is proven a hypocrisy, as he ends up doing to Zaroff exactly what he accused the General of doing to others. Only being put into Rainsford’s perspective and our natural inclination to favor the underdog will have you pulling for the dull Rainsford over the fascinating Zaroff....more
Stephen King is an old guy now, in his late seventies. And this collection is an old man’s book of tales. It takes its time. It meanders. Many of the Stephen King is an old guy now, in his late seventies. And this collection is an old man’s book of tales. It takes its time. It meanders. Many of the protagonist and some of the villains in these stories are also old men. He writes them well, and why not? They say, “write what you know.” Rate this collection 3.5 stars, rounded up on the strength of its two novellas.
Two Talented Bastids: ”The daydreams of men and women of a certain age are always sad, I think, because they run so counter to the plain vanilla futures we have to look forward to.” This is a long story, heavy on King’s Mainer characters and atmosphere. Two salt of the earth Maine guys, friends from the same nowhere hick town, in mid life suddenly blossom into outstanding, famous novelist and artist respectively. The novelist’s son explores the mystery of this coincidence after the death of his aged father, and makes a startling discovery. It doesn’t matter what it is though — it could have been anything. Because what the story is really about is aging, and dreams, and handling life’s disappointments. 3 ⭐️
The Fifth Step: This one sneaks up on you. It moves along like a human interest story, kinda slow, an AA member telling his story to a stranger to fulfill the fifth step of the program. Then out of nowhere, BAM! Chilling ending. 4 ⭐️
Willie the Weirdo: Details aside, this story about a kid whose dying grandfather lives with him is the same concept as a story King did all the way back in his 1980s collection, Skeleton Crew, (Gramma), but not as scary. Recycled. Inferior. Disappointing. 1 ⭐️
Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream: This novella length story is the throbbing heart of this collection. It begins with a nightmare from which nice guy Danny Coughlin wakes screaming. That too vivid vision proceeds to turn his life into a bad dream. King takes his time building the tension as Coughlin is hounded for a murder he did not commit. Danny is a great, sympathetic character, the type of decent but flawed Everyman that King does so well, and the duo of the obsessed cop and his conflicted partner determined to nail him are developed in fascinating ways as well. King does his best work with novella length stories, and here he proves that once again. 4 1/2 ⭐️
Finn: A hard luck guy is mistakenly kidnapped by a mysterious nefarious operation that mistakes his identity. Finn’s situation devolves as he’s tortured for information he can’t know, and his captor seems to be going bonkers. The ending is interesting and redeemed an otherwise meh story a little bit. 3 ⭐️
On Slide Inn Road: As this story unfolded I was struck by how much like Flannery O’Conner’s A Good Man is Hard to Find it was. As I read on it became clear that this story was a homage, and King was putting his own, unique mark on it. Best of all, he acknowledged O’Conner at the end of the tale. 4 ⭐️
Red Screen: Cop interviews a wife killer who calmly claims his wife had been replaced with alien, and that he’s discovered this is happening to many. Short, predictable, but well done. 3 ⭐️
The Turbulence Expert: A frequent flyer with a unique job helping keep planes in the not so friendly skies. 3 ⭐️
Laurie: Old man and new pup — a grieving widower is given a pup to care for and keep him company, and dog and master share a grim adventure. King has a way with dog stories. 3 ⭐️
Rattlesnake: Another novella length story, this one the much anticipated sequel to Cujo. It starts out turtle slow, but builds into a darkly creepy haunting tale. Vic Trenton retreats to Florida to grieve the death of his wife, but meets a woman still mourning her long dead toddlers, and inherits her ghosts. One of the few stories here that lives up to the collection’s title. 4 ⭐️
The Dreamers: ”All I can say to you is beware of dreams. They’re dangerous. I found out.” In each of his collections that I’ve read, King has at least one Lovecraftian style story that hints at unspeakable horrors beyond our world and understanding. In this one, a young Vietnam vet, emotionally deadened by the war, takes a job with a self proclaimed gentleman scientist who is attempting to acquire evidence of what lies beyond the veil of sleep. This one is dark. 3 1/2 ⭐️
The Answer Man: The story of a life, from young manhood until the end, with its ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies. The enigmatic, prophetic Answer Man adds color, but is really just a hook to hang one man’s lifetime on. Bittersweet, like most of our lives. 3 1/2 ⭐️...more
Wow! The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School is a top tier YA novel. Sixteen-year-old Yamilet Flores is a dynamic and relatable first person narrator Wow! The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School is a top tier YA novel. Sixteen-year-old Yamilet Flores is a dynamic and relatable first person narrator who you will be rooting for from page one. As she copes with her new Catholic school, the absence of her deported father, the responsibility of protecting her brother, all as she tries to work out how to deal with her sexuality, betrayal, homophobia, and racism, you will be enthralled with her story. Despite dealing with difficult and heavy material, the book keeps things snappy and never feels too dark.
This book is destined to become a YA classic. It’s the kind of book kids will read and remember decades later....more
With Nietzsche philosophy becomes dangerous again, this time with a difference. In previous centuries philosophy had been dangerous for philosophers. With Nietzsche philosophy becomes dangerous again, this time with a difference. In previous centuries philosophy had been dangerous for philosophers. With Nietzsche it becomes dangerous for everyone.
In Nietzsche In 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern takes an ironical, almost playful tone that effectively conveys Nietzsche’s contradictions. He gives a sense of the power and usefulness of Nietzsche’s work, even when he clearly regards much of it to be little better than nonsensical:
”The Superman made his appearance in Thus Spake Zarathustra, a long poem of almost unbearable bombast and earnestness whose utter humorlessness was unrelieved by its author’s attempt at irony. Like Dostoevsky and Hesse, it’s unreadable, unless you’re a teenager. But the experience of this work at such an age can often “change your life,” and not always for the worse.”
”The stupid ideas are easily spottable, and the rest make a challenging antidote to many accepted notions requiring one to think deeply for one’s self. The philosophy as such is almost negligible, but the exhortations to philosophy, to think for one’s self are powerful, as are the characterizations of our condition.”
Strathern explains that Nietzsche’s philosophy was unsystematic, and written mainly in aphorisms. He notes that this both made it widely accessible, but also uniquely susceptible to misunderstanding and abuse, as short aphorism could be read out of context of Nietzsche’s greater philosophical position. He also largely clears the philosopher from culpability with how the Nazis abused his philosophy, attributing that mainly to how his sister abused his work after he went mad. Strathern writes:
”He had nothing but contempt for the proto-fascist of his era, antisemitism disgusted him, and the idea of a nation of racially pure Germans becoming a master race would certainly have exercised his sense of humor to the full.”
Finally, a note about this “In 90 Minutes” series. I’ve now read a dozen of them, and find that they effectively do exactly what a series of short introductions should do. They introduce their subject, usually in a pithy, witty fashion, give a ballpark idea of what they and their work were about, and give you some sense of whether or not you want to go on and learn more about them. (In the case of this volume, it has inspired me to seek out a good Nietzsche biography.) Many of the reviews of these books are written by humorless people who seem to be utterly clueless as to the purpose of a series of 90 minute introductions — please keep that in mind....more
”They’ve carried over the attitudes of the arms race into the age of the brain race.”
”This continent is littered coast to coast with people who are co”They’ve carried over the attitudes of the arms race into the age of the brain race.”
”This continent is littered coast to coast with people who are compelled to study business administration when they should have been painting murals or practicing the fiddle, or digging a truck garden, and finally got their chance when it was twenty years too late to lead them anywhere.”
John Brunner wrote smart books for smart people. He examined complex themes that he elucidated with erudite dialogue. He told his tales in challenging ways, using shifting points of view and frequent time shifts. Similar to Philip K. Dick, his best work is idea driven, memorable not so much for his characters and plots, but for the power of his ideas and the creative structure of his world building.
In The Shockwave Rider, Brunner starts the story in its middle, filling out necessary plot points through frequent time shifts. This technique is disorienting, and contributes to the pervading sense of anxiety that is a hallmark of this near future dystopian America. What Brunner unfolds for us is a world where advances in information technology that should have made life easier and more pleasant for all has instead been subverted by a stealth authoritarian state that uses it to control citizens’ lives.
The technologies at this novel’s core are startling in their prescience. There is a vast, information Network that can be accessed from devices in work stations, in homes, or even from mobile phones, a network that Nick Haflinger, our protagonist, is skilled at manipulating (hacking) as he shifts identities trying to hide from and subvert the government. This book, published in 1975, nine years before William Gibson’s sub-genre creating novel Neuromancer, had a far more accurate vision of our modern information superhighway and how it might actually function than did Gibson. For this, as well as other reasons, consider The Shockwave Rider to be the proto-cyberpunk novel....more
No Exit is Sartre’s acclaimed existential play about hell. One locked room, three people (right bastards, all) no sleep, no eyelids, no light switchesNo Exit is Sartre’s acclaimed existential play about hell. One locked room, three people (right bastards, all) no sleep, no eyelids, no light switches, and of course, no exit. The famous line, Hell is other people, found here, is likely one of the most misquoted in all of literature, but if you get Sartre’s philosophy you should get the quote too.
I enjoyed this play much more when I was 21 and Existentialism was a brand new discovery. But it still works surprisingly well even if you’re not paying particular attention to its philosophy. Not a bad introduction to Sartre....more
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