Revenge, violence, fear and risk

From the New Yorker

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.

See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.

I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.

takashi murakami, tadanori yokoo and mishima yukio

Takashi Murakami. This is not my usual type of stuff but I kind of like it. Slate.com has a decent little slide show of his work here. They title it Japan’s Andy Warhol or is it Walt Disney? Two artists I’ve never much liked but…

I’m happy enough that looking at this stuff reminded me of another Japanese artist, not similar at all, though also described as an Andy Warhol. Tadinori Yokoo.

Tadinori Yokoo initially attracted me simply because the print above featured Mishima Yukio. I went through a phase where I read about ten of his novels (many of them very good like Forbidden Colours where a man’s revenge on womankind takes the form of his paying a beautiful gay man to entrance and then leave women forlorn) and his bodybuilding autobiography Sun and Steel as well as the biography of this right wing militaristic prize winning novelist who eventually committed ritual suicide.

Soon I came to appreciate Tadinori’s works on their merits, the juxtapostion of traditional Japanese elements with contemporary styles.

Westerns worth a read

I am reading my first good western novel in some time.

There appears to be a kind of western where you have a main character who either rambles on through a series of far fetched though somewhat historically accurate landscape and narrative, encountering entertaining characters and as often as not picking them up like tumbleweeds and evolving into an outlandish travelling caravan jostling from one near call to the next. The one I’m reading right now is Edwin Shrake’s first novel, Custer’s Brother’s Horse. An unwieldly title but an enthralling tale.

Rather a real central character we have a few that cross paths and end up on the run. Set in the days just after the Civil War when some discontented still roamed the land causing grief, we have one near sociopathic Confederate officer making his way back to his mother, who in her previous life was a noted actress back in London. After nearly being strung up due to running into an old enemy, a product of a generational family feud, and in the process bonding with a British world wise novelist, who has just been accused of stealing Custer’s brother’s horse (hence the title), who of course had the hots for his mother back home, the two find themselves released by a scenery chewing judge but then on the run after a young mulatto woman from New Orleans ends up killing one of the guards meant to escort them to the county line, the now cold guard having been set on rape. They end up running from Custer’s maniacal brother and the grudge holding Leatherwood family, eventually adding a Spanish lady to their company, etc. etc.etc.

As blurbed on the book “this is a western like Cold Mountain is a western”. All I know is I cannot stop reading this book.

Other standout westerns for me have been, yes, Cold Mountain, Little Big Man, the Berrybender Narratives by Larry McMurtry, and Ron Hansen’s Assassination of Jesse James and Desperados. And of course, the Cormac McCarthy Hemingway westerns, as well as his earlier works.

BookPage: Book Bibliography: Articles

All the articles about books and/or authors and/or writing:

All My Friends are Superheroes
Appreciating appreciation

Bayard, he blows, or further notes on an academic buccaneer
Bayard: Just when you thought it was safe to read again
Ben Marcus in Harpers
Best books of 2007: 9 lists
Book of Lost Things
Books, happiness, learning Spanish and bad haircuts
Books, reading, memory and worth
Bunch o stuff

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Don’t like books

End of Mr. Y

Fantasy fiction for those who don’t generally swing that way
Finding a good opening
Fonts, voices and flipping to the good stuff

Gender and reading
Great line from a nonexistent book

Hard boiled wonderland

In my newspaper this morning
In offence of writing
Irish crime novels

Letters from Chuck
Literary high wire acts
Literary high wire acts 2
Literary high wire acts 3

Magical realism: The bridge from childhood
Making the cut
Mark Helprin: Character description
Marketing novels
Mirrormask
My culture ravaged: My culture was ravaged

Ottawa thoughts

Peter Robinson: Friend of the Devil
Picture is worth a thousand words
Pierre Bayard: Reading between the lines
Popular books I found unreadable

Reading past the disappointment

Starting out
Suffering witches and arabian nightmares

Terry Pratchett
There’s a killer on the road, his mind is squirming like a toad
Thomas Berger: Author Rex

Unmusical Russian, bloody carpenter

Wednesday smatterings
Westerns worth a read
Window Across the River
Wish I’d written this one
Without a net 3 or 3s a crowd

You were so poor? We were so poor that…

Irish Crime Novels

Some time ago I ran off a short note regarding the superlative Color of Blood by Declan Hughes and flippantly suggested “potato noir” as a term for Irish crime fiction. This was noticed and commented on by Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, and following the links I discovered not only his blog, the intriguing sound of his novel still unavailable in North America, and a heady discussion of mostly Irish mysteries and thrillers with some forays afield as well. And it is Declan I must thank for alerting me to Philip Davison’s Crooked Man and Gene Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir.

I must say that after reading these two, and on contemplating the fierce wealth of stories from that quarter, that thank christ I am not an Irish mystery writer. The talents there are enough to strike terror into the heart of any budding scribe of even modest ambitions. I suppose I should not be surprised that the country so known for writing in general should also be successful in this genre too. After all I already find Flann O’Brian at the top of my list, as well as liking Joyce (not the two great last works so much but the earlier stuff), Samuel Beckett’s novels, John Banville’s Shroud (but I do not like his Benjamin Blacks at all), and Colum McCann’s short stories and Ken Bruen. And now these.

Philip Davison’s Harry Fielding is an uncommonly pragmatic sort, an MI5 freelancer, who for the most part has little difficulty looking the other way. His minder is a right bastard, and the sweepings under the carpet are forming unsightly mountains the size of which even our suffering but stalwart operative finds near impossible to ignore.

Fielding is not quite as nasty as let’s say Michael Caine’s Carter but give him a couple of years and if he’s still breathing he’ll get there. He’s the sort of man who witnesses a woman beating a man insensible, stuffing him in a trunk, driving him into a clearing in the woods, dragging him out of the trunk, driving back and forth over him a few times, then burying him, and then shows up at her door a few hours later with a bottle of whiskey and the assumption of a woman in need of company.

And though he is a tough, he’s not quite as tough as those who lean on him, and he does have friends of a sort who get hurt by association.

I’ll be looking for more from this man. He’s not what you’d call a fancy writer; he’s plain and straight and its what best suits this narrative.

Midnight Choir (named for the Leonard Cohen song) is a police procedural. Detective Inspector Harry Synott is a good cop, too good, good in the way that other cops hate him. He doesn’t like graft and he’s informed on his fellows. Though this begins as the beleagured but gifted detective making his way through cases, it all comes apart in the worst way possible.

This one’s a bit more of an extended novel than the Davison, dense in comparison, dense in characters and crimes and plot.

The question foremost on my mind now is, are there bad Irish crime novels? Perhaps the ocean is a fairly effective filter to a literature no better than any other but somehow I doubt it. Most national literatures I have dipped into have eventually given forth more than a few frogs but so far Ireland seems mostly princes.

Literary High Wire Acts 3

James Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand.

Prose is not the same as jazz but if it was, this might be what its like. Ellroy is all about rhythm and punch; you can hear the beat and it never stops. It takes you like music more than most fiction, a particular song, working the set of keys, opening some place new.

It opens with:

(Dallas, 11/22/63)

They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn’t sure he could do it. The Casino Operator’s Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold.

Nobody said it.

Kill that coon. Do it good. Take our hit fee.

The flight ran smooth. A stew served drinks. She saw his gun. She played up. She asked dumb questions.

He said he worked Vegas PD. He ran the intell squad. He build files and loggged information.

She loved it. She swooned.

“Hon, what you doin’ in Dallas?”

He told her.

A Negro shivved a twenty-one dealer. The dealer lost an eye. The Negro booked to Big D. She loved it. She bought him highballs. He omitted details.

The dealer provoked the attack. The council issued the contract - death for ADW Two.

The preflight prep talk. Lieutnant Buddy Fritsch:

“I don’t have to tell you what we expect, son. And I don’t have to add that your father expects it, too.”

The stew played geisha girl. The stew fluffed her beehive.

And so it goes for over 700 pages, some sort of bastard cousin to hard boiled Hemingway crossed with bebop. Its all about the Kennedy assassination as an American plot, all dirty deals and dirty men, no morals and a lot of death, and its still music to read.

I don’t think there is anything around quite like this. There are quite a few writers with discernible patterns but this is in another league altogether.

Literary High Wire Acts 2

I remember reading one of Oliver Sacks‘ books about the curious things the mind can do, and often these bits of strange would be visual disturbances such as suddenly reverting to black and white vision, or having the whole break into parts, but the oddest of all, was the story of a man who was blind but didn’t think he was. I just could not imagine how that could be, how someone could keep that fiction going with all the evidence to the contrary. But Rupert Thompson took that condition and made it work.

Rupert Thompson’s The Insult.

James Hynes, one of my favourite authors has a fairly comprensive look at the novels of Thompson. He doesn’t seem to like this one quite as much as I did. And it is quite possible that I was so enthralled with finding the solution to an old question that I wasn’t as attentive to what else was going on. Nonetheless, it is one of those works that I could not have imagined if I had not read it.

As far as these experiments go, this is a success. Many people like to talk about Georges Perec’s A Void, the mystery written in French without ever using the letter e, and then translated into English also without the e. Its clever, and remarkable but as a mystery it fails; it is just not that good a book. I think that Life: A User’s Manual is genius. Its really a compendium of stories, one after the other within the context of the lives of the tenants of an apartment building.

Yet, and though the brilliance of Life caused me to read everything else by him that I could get my hands on, none matched it. Too many were tricks of the light; he belonged to a writing group that would set each other ludicrous challenges such as the writing without using a particular vowel, hence A Void.

One of the stories I liked the most in the book was where a man plans out the next few decades of his life. He studies watercolours for a year, then randomly travels the world with his servant for a year, at each place painting one watercolour which his servant packs up and ships back to someone who makes intricate jigsaw puzzles out of them, but just as he returns, looking forward to the puzzles, he goes blind.

Next James Ellroy and Dan Simmons

Literary High Wire Acts

Sometimes you run across a book that seems to do the impossible, that seems to either describe or explain a state of mind that you hadn’t till then quite understood, or that uses language in a unique yet accessible manner, or brings together disparate elements in a way that doesn’t appear to break the rules even though it really should.

1. Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

Above is the hotter newer cover and below the one I encountered, the Picador cover which matched the other Hobans I had already run across (my once a year reread Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, and Turtle Diary). I have little memory of Kleinzeit but Turtle Diary has one of my favourite lines of all time where a person is rebuffing an acquaintance who wants to take the relationship to a more intimate level by maintaining that “a friendly presence scarcely known can be a wonderful thing”.

Mr. Hoban’s writing space from a Guardian series on author’s rooms:

Kind of a much cleaner version of Bacon’s studio.

Some time after reading this book I was able to use it for a psycholinguistics paper. The book is written in a postapocalyptic English, the sort of English that might be spoken a thousand years from now after civilization is still crawling back after near the end of the world. What’s really interesting is that though you have trouble reading the first little while, in a chapter or two it becomes quite easy, and eventually as transparent as regular language; you read without noticing any differences at all. And looking at it now for the first time in years, I see an interesting parallel with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

There come a man and a woman and a chyld out of a berning town they sheltert in the woodlings and foraging the bes they cud. Starveling wer what they wer doing. Dint haveno weapons nor dint know how to make a snare nor nothing. Snow on the groun and a grey sky overing and the black trees running ther branches in the wind. Crows calling 1 to a nother waiting for the 3 of them to drop. The man the woman and the chyld digging thru the snow they wer eating maws and dead leaves which they vomitit them up agen. Freezing col they wer nor dint have nothing to make a fire with to get warm. Starveling they wer and near come to the end of ther strength.

From a linguistic or language processing vantage this is quite intriguing because it ilustrates the malleability and adaptability of our processor or parser. We already know that having somewhat fuzzy filters allows us to decipher the speech of the drunk, the sleepy, the impedimented not to mention just all the differences that come with gender, age and cultural variation. And we know that people vary in how adaptable they are to the speech of others. Its not a yes or no proposition like sight.

With Riddley, we are first of all at sea with the new words and unusual constructions, messed up grammar and all but our remarkable general problem solver goes to work, and because the new pattern is both closely related to what we already know, and because it is quite consistent, we shift in such a way as to match the new flow.

The other example from writing that I used in the paper was Louisiana cook Justin Wilson’s cajun patter. I was particularly caught by his going against what I thought was a fairly concrete rule when he said “eight or seven things” or “three or two crawfish” -always the higher number coming first.

The Riddley cover in my collection.

Still to come: Rupert Thompson’s The Insult, James Ellroy’s Cold 6000 and Dan Simmon’s Ilium and Olympus.

Marketing novels

One of my favourite books of last year was Joshua Ferris‘ Then We Came to the End. An incredibly funny story and for anyone who has worked in an office building, well, its kind of like a Dilbert for those of us who’ve had the pleasure. Like Dilbert, the characters are both typical and yet unique. The setting is an ad agency and lately I just finished a related book, also humourous, but even more about marketing.

Syrup by Maxx Berry

Berry is an Australian but down there must not be all that different than up here because he nails this. Scat, our man, has the brilliant idea of marketing Fukk Cola with which he approaches 6, who is a marketing executive at Coca Cola. She attempts to steal the concept but ends up partners with him but the idea gets stolen anyway by his layabout roommate Sneaky Pete, who upon hearing the idea, and knowing Scat’s innattention to details runs out at gets the patent and ergo the three million dollars to sign it over to Coke.

Pete ends up high placed in Coke and the rest of the book is a back and forth competition between the two shaftees and the sleasy oily shafter who has passed himself off as the new golden boy.

Jennifer Government by Maxx Berry

Though I just read Syrup it was written in 1999, whereas Jennifer which I read a few years ago is more recent. Berry has taken marketing intrigue to the next level. In this near future, employees take the last name of the companies they work for, for instance John Nike. In this book, Nike develops a new very expensive line of sneakers, restricts the supply, and lets loose but knowing they will need something special to keep the sales up, they contract out to have ten early purchasers killed by sniper. The sniper worried about ending up in trouble, checks with the police, and they offer for a hefty fee, to do the job for him. And so forth.

Savage Girl by Alex Shakar

In this one, a destitute and absolutely savage girl, found crouching in an alley and literally gnawing on a bone, is taken in by a marketer looking for fresh content and in a kind of reverse marketing, takes the fashion world by storm. Also a perfectly ironic and biting comment on taste.

Market Forces by Richard Morgan

Morgan has taken the form and turned out the distilled pure Red Bull acid version where employees kill for a spot in the executive. (His other books are all worth a read though quite different). This is now firmly in the hard science fiction genre, and as such becomes less of an original idea.

Its an old theme in scifi, corporations becoming the powers, whether you just think of William Gibson where these interests weave themselves into the most intimate of places, or further back with Blade Runner, or John Sladek, or many more. In more mainstream fiction its a little less common though Douglas Coupland has been all over it in his books. In general this viewpoint seems to come more from the colonies than from the States.

Terry Pratchett

I don’t know exactly where this places me on the Kevin Bacon scale but I once finished the bottle of Silent Sam vodka that Terry Pratchett started. And though I consider myself a fan, I suppose if I was a real one, the half drunk hootch would still be sitting in some place of honour in my domicile. But apparently, I am thirstier than I am sentimental.

What made me the fan I am of the man comes more from that night than his books. I did read the first two, Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic, and at the time I thought, here is someone who can actually write fantasy humour. For some reason, though little fantasy humour deserves to be published, a lot of it is. Pratchett is one of the few who can actually manage the delicate balance of comedy and the fanciful. I never did continue on to the rest of the 33 Discworld books but I remember those early ones fondly.

But it was the man that night that impressed me most. First of all, he took the stage like the most accomplished stand-up comedian and raconteur, speaking of living, of writing, and my friend of the soup, who had not read a word of his, found herself enraptured and in an almost unbroken state of helpless laughter. And second, though I have been around many authors, renowned and not, none have been quite as gracious with misfits, with the awkward ones who desire, such as the few I saw sporting remarkably bad theatrical English accents and costumes, which he seemed to both ignore and appreciate, posing for pictures with any and all, and with seemingly boundless genuine warmth.

And now at the age of 59 this good and creative man has been diagnosed with Alzheimers and is feeling the first symptoms. There is a good recent article in The Guardian about his situation and his reaction to it. He says, regarding the sorry state of research in the area and of his prospects, “Personally I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.” When I forwarded the article to a dear friend who I knew was a big fan of his work, she said she’d be happy to do the same if it did any good.