Halfway down the Danube

Some Stuff I Did Not Know (category: art)

Was out of town over the weekend, and had the chance to spend an hour in a secondhand English-language bookshop.  Picked up a bunch of books, including this one -- a 50+ year old paperback on painting.  (Because, you see, I know very little about painting.  I took an art history course years ago, and I guess I have a layman's knowledge of the major schools, but that's about it.)

Anyway!  This book, out of print for fifty years, turned out to be a little gem.  It's full of all sorts of good discussion, pitched right about at my level -- to the reader who knows who Goya and Giotto are, but who doesn't paint and knows almost nothing about the actualy craft of painting.

Here's one thing I discovered: traditional artists studios faced north, because the artists did not want to paint with different slants of light coming in the window at different times and seasons.  Makes perfect sense, right?

But -- northern light is blue.  So painters would cover the walls of their studios with red and orange hangings and tapestries, in order to warm the light.  So apparently (I have yet to check this), in many paintings up until the middle of the 19th century, the light is somewhat blue but the shadows are somewhat reddish or brownish.

Further.  Up until around 1840, the vast majority of paintings were done indoors, usually in those studios.  Why?  Because portable oil paints didn't exist yet.  Paints were still mixed by hand.  Almost every painter had to be a paintmaker as well, and had to start with lumps and powders and turn them into paints shortly before beginning to work.   (The exception was watercolors, which is why most outdoor scenes before then were watercolors.)  So even when a painter was doing an outdoor scene, he'd often be working from memory, in his studio.  Apparently some painters would go so far as to take rocks or other outdoor items into the studio in order to have them convenient as models.

But around 1840, the first containers of portable oil paint appeared -- the squeezable tubes that we think of today when we think of artists' paint.  And one consequence of that was an explosion of outdoor painting.  And outdoors, the light is often yellow or orange, while the shadows are likely to be bluish. Apparently this took a lot of getting used to.  But it's one of the things that, a bit later, would distinguish the Impressionists: not only were they doing weird stuff with their brushstrokes, but the colors were all different. 

Reading the Hobbit

Back from Uganda! 

Okay, actually I've been back for two weeks.  Just haven't felt like blogging.  And it's been mostly uneventful: hot summer weather (well, hot for Germany), boys in school (German school goes to the end of July).

One thing of interest: I spent about ten days reading The Hobbit to the boys, mostly as a bedtime story.

They loved it.  Totally utterly loved it.  Gollum was almost too scary, but the goblins, the spiders, the dragon, clever resourceful little Bilbo -- pure gold.  I had tried to read it before, a year or two back, and they hadn't liked it.  But now Alan is eight and David is just-turned-seven, and it just clicked.

Some things.  One, the Hobbit doesn't read like a first novel.  Carlos pointed out that's because Tolkein rewrote it about eight times before publication and a couple more times after, which make sense.  Still, it's not just about the quality of the writing.  The plotting and story structure is very... assured.

Reading Kipling in the Congo

That was kind of strange, yes.

Every US Embassy has a lending library.  Typically it's a couple of bookcases along a wall, filled with books that Embassy staff have dropped off.  The rule is pretty loose: take a book, drop one off.  It seems to work. 

The books tend towards thrillers and mysteries, with sometimes a strain of military stuff from the Marines and the defense attache.  You don't find a lot of high-end literary fiction, nor a lot of nonfiction.  I'm not sure whether that's because Embassy people don't read that stuff, or because they don't give it away.

But anyway: I've given a lot of stuff to those libraries over the years, so I'm not shy about grabbing a book or two.  In this case, a volume of short stories by Dorothy Sayers, and Life's Handicap by Kipling.

So,  Kipling.

I am so screwed; or, my books, myself.

People can stop sending me the "It’s Not You, It’s Your Books" essay already. I will say the number of seemingly attractive women who list an Ayn Rand novel as a favorite book online is rather astonishing.

The Pure Product of America: Maybe they all want to be dominated by prickish renegade architects!

Hmm. Yeah, Mary Gaitskill picked up on that a while back. Hmm.

Anyway. I used to read myself to sleep with organic reaction mechanisms. Sometimes I still do. But I'm also the guy who read Anna Karenina straight through one college spring night, not really caring about the position of the sun. I chanted myself hoarse in bad Italian reading the Divine Comedy aloud with a facing translation. I was walked through Oedipus Rex with Aristotle at my side. All of Flannery O'Connor, near everything of Nabokov in English.

If you had to press me what my favorite books were in that period, I might have said Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, and Samuel Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, as well as the more expected Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. A version of me born somewhat later might have included Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, or one of Anne Carson's early books of poetry, or maybe even James Robinson's Starman comic instead. I don't know what a full Generation Awesome version of me would choose. But there's always something. Books that link outward, not inward.

This is sort of a partial answer to a question KW asked in comments a while back.

I am a victim of the science age

I like reading books that show an active mind on the page. I'm not talking about novels of ideas, but books which show an informed, applied intelligence, not artfully arranged combinations of cliches. And though I love detail work, this is separate from getting the details precisely right. It's the difference between enjoying a director and enjoying the set design.

Needless to say, it's why I find so much current fiction not worth my time.

The magazine Cycle World has a circulation of over three hundred thousand. Perhaps ten times as many people read it. It's a motorcycle magazine. It also has perhaps the best technology writer in the business, Kevin Cameron. This is what he serves those subliterate motorheads and gear freaks.

Day 24: Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe

A book review this Saturday, the new Gene Wolfe. It's often hard to summarize Wolfe briefly. On the other hand, I've read a lot of Wolfe. The narrator, a mobbed-up Jersey kid in post-Communist Cuba, is sent back in time to pirate days. Mayhem ensues. The narrator is now a Catholic priest in our time. He's got a plan.

It's smooth, fast, and almost perfectly in control of narrative tone. Doug had a theory Wolfe lost it in The Knight and The Wizard. I disagreed, but neither of us could figure out why the shifts in register were happening when they did. Pirate Freedom favors my side of the question.

Also, after several books with some rather idealized images of the Catholic Church -- nothing wrong with that, but it's not all Bing Crosby and Bernanos -- Wolfe explores a little of J.F. Powers' territory. (Yes, I know the link is to Derbyshire. Blind pigs and acorns.) Doug, you'd like Powers.

A brief excerpt below.

From the 1945 Bookshelf: Mr. Wells' Cheese

The book is Between the Thunder and the Sun (1943) by Vincent Sheean.  It's one of the volumes from the mysterious 1945 bookshelf I mentioned a couple of posts back.

Vincent Sheean was from the second rank of literary-social figures of the 1930s and '40s.  He was friends with Hemingway and John Gunther and Edna St. Vincent Millay; he was in Paris a few days before the Wehrmacht marched in; he was in London for the Blitz, on Guam two weeks before the Japanese attacked, and within arm's reach of Gandhi when he was assassinated.  Hitchcock's movie Foreign Correspondent (1940) was loosely based on his life.  He wrote half a dozen novels and ten or fifteen nonfiction books.  He is almost completely forgotten today.

Day 21: Herodas blogging

Or Herondas, who flourished around 270 BC. He wrote mimiambs: mimes + iambs, which is not helpful. A mime at that time was basically a sitcom, a stereotyped sketch comedy, and not a Gaul in whiteface trapped in an invisible box. An iamb was something very much like rap... but by Herodas's time, the iamb had been a classical form for a few hundred years. In other words, the mimiamb was a typical Hellenistic mashup.

Herodas's mimes were found in an Egyptian scroll dating from the second century AD, and first published in 1891. The British codebreaking eccentric Dillwyn Knox published a bizarre, nearly unreadable translation in 1929, which he felt captured the strangeness of the text. I'll use Cunningham's more recent edition.

They're kind of smutty.

Books

Not a lot of English language bookstores in Armenia.  Bucharest had half a dozen places where you could look for English books, old and new; Armenia... not so many.  And Amazon doesn't deliver here.

Since I'm one of those people who gets dizzy without a regular supply of new books -- even if I have very little time to read just now -- what then do we do? 

Day 20: Mattavilasa blogging

Okay, the Mattavilasa. Lorenzen translates it as 'Drunken Games'. Some context. It's a Sanskrit comedy written slightly after 600 AD, by an artsy king of an upstart dynasty, the Pallavas. It's a religious farce. India is far from timeless: in this period, Buddhism was still big and active on the subcontinent. The religious scene was varied but moderate: Boethius and Plotinus wouldn't have looked out of place here, next to the sky-clad Jains. The full food prohibitions were still developing, and caste had yet to ramify to its full complexity.

On the other hand... there was the sect known as the Kapalikas. That root kapala? Means 'skull'. You know the cognates. They were, hm, transgressive. In imitation of Shiva, who after accidentally on purpose decapitating Brahma, went around begging using Brahma's skull as a bowl -- Brahma had spares -- so too the Kapalikas went around using human skulls as begging bowls. Where did they get them? Cremation grounds! (One hoped.)

They were also believed to break the five basic prohibitions of renunciates: liquor, meat, fish, parched grain, and getting it on. Often.

So the stereotype was of creepy horny drunk carnivorous beggars covered in human ash, accompanied by hott chick acolytes, carrying around someone's skull, asking you for money.

I think they used to squat in Tompkins Square Park.

Day 14: Poetry interlude: Brahma

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this poem a hundred fifty years ago. Somehow I don't think today's cultural conservatives look back to the days when Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., would relax over cider and chat about the Ramayana, you know? (Even the South had Indian influences: Country Captain Chicken, which is clearly a transplanted British Indian curry. And, um, hm.) It's a little spooky how Emerson recreates some very ancient Indo-European effects. Actually the whole poem is spooky.

Three dozen new travel destinations (est.)

   This has got to be the link of the year for bibliophiles.  Oh, the wonders. 

And to think how many times we've driven past Melk and had no idea it has this fabulous library!  Next time, for sure.

Hat tip: Doug Merrill from Fistful.

The random page test

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, page 172:

The Filipino-style Chinese donut, or shtekeleh, is the great contribution of the District of Sitka to the food lovers of the world. In its present form, it cannot be found in the Philippines. No Chinese trencherman would recognize it as the fruit of his native fry kettles. Like the storm god Yahweh of Sumeria, the shtekeleh was not invented by the Jews, but the world would sport neither God nor the shtekeleh without Jews and their desires. A panatela of fried dough not quite sweet, not quite salty, rolled in sugar, crisp-skinned, tender inside, and honeycombed with air pockets. You sink it in your paper cup of milky tea and close your eyes, and for ten fat seconds, you seem to glimpse the possibility of finer things.

The Outcast Book Club

Picture five people voted off a reality TV show. That's pretty much my book club. Three women, two men. We take over a random New York City restaurant and drive out the other patrons with our conversation. (Okay, that probably wasn't Scarlett Johansson eating by herself and giving me the eye and fleeing after eavesdropping. No, who am I kidding. Of course it was.)

First book was Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight. ("Daniel Handler" is Lemony Snicket's pseudonym.) A cross between Nabokov and I Know What You Did Last Summer, You Killed Mr. Griffin!. There are brilliant High Modernist books for young people. This isn't one of them.

Second book was Julia Glass's Three Junes. This won the National Book Award? It's Mary Sue fanfic about the AIDS crisis in New York. Much of it has a supposedly Scottish narrator. I'm no expert on Britistani diction, but I know that wasn't it. Actually, that holds true for the American characters too. I won't even describe ze Frenchwoman. Every single detail I could independently verify was wrong.

Third book was Alison Bechdel's memoir in graphic novel form, Fun Home. That's short for "funeral home".

The Outcast Book Club

Picture five people voted off a reality TV show. That's pretty much my book club. Three women, two men. We take over a random New York City restaurant and drive out the other patrons with our conversation. (Okay, that probably wasn't Scarlett Johansson eating by herself and giving me the eye and fleeing after eavesdropping. No, who am I kidding. Of course it was.) First book was Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight. ("Daniel Handler" is Lemony Snicket's pseudonym.) A cross between Nabokov and I Know What You Did Last Summer, You Killed Mr. Griffin!. There are brilliant High Modernist books for young people. This isn't one of them. Second book was Julia Glass's Three Junes. This won the National Book Award? It's Mary Sue fanfic about the AIDS crisis in New York. Much of it has a supposedly Scottish narrator. I'm no expert on Britistani diction, but I know that wasn't it. Actually, that holds true for the American characters too. I won't even describe ze Frenchwoman. Every single detail I could independently verify was wrong. Third book was Alison Bechdel's memoir in graphic novel form, Fun Home. That's short for "funeral home".

Halfway down again

Came across Carlo Porta's translations of Dante's Inferno into Milanese dialect, made around 1801-1805. Wow, they're fun!

A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc
che femm a vun la voeulta al mond da la
me sont trovaa in d'on bosch scur scur affacc,
senza on sentee da pode seguita:
doma a pensagh me senti a vegni scacc,
ne l'e on bosch insci fazzel de retra,
negher, vecc, pien de spin, sass, ingarbij
pesc che ne quell del barillott di strij.

At the halfway point of that great journey
that we each take in turn to the world beyond
I found myself in a dark, dark woods
without a path to follow,
the mere thought of it makes me shiver,
nor is this wood so easy to describe,
old, filled with thorns, rocks, and tangles,
more eerie than a witch dance.

No witches dancing in the original (and am I the only person who pictures a rave here? probably).

Halfway down again

Came across Carlo Porta's translations of Dante's Inferno into Milanese dialect, made around 1801-1805. Wow, they're fun!

A mitaa strada de quell gran viacc che femm a vun la voeulta al mond da la me sont trovaa in d'on bosch scur scur affacc, senza on sentee da pode seguita: doma a pensagh me senti a vegni scacc, ne l'e on bosch insci fazzel de retra, negher, vecc, pien de spin, sass, ingarbij pesc che ne quell del barillott di strij. At the halfway point of that great journey that we each take in turn to the world beyond I found myself in a dark, dark woods without a path to follow, the mere thought of it makes me shiver, nor is this wood so easy to describe, old, filled with thorns, rocks, and tangles, more eerie than a witch dance.

No witches dancing in the original (and am I the only person who pictures a rave here? probably).

Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem.

Biblical literalists are widely recognized as not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But do you know what group is even dumber? Written science fiction is dying demographically anyway. But sometimes, I want to give it that extra push into the rendering truck. Leave the most stupid ideas people have gleaned from science fiction novels in the comments. (Or stories, either.) I'll start it off: "Think of it as evolution in action." (New stuff below the fold.)

Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem.

Biblical literalists are widely recognized as not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But do you know what group is even dumber? Written science fiction is dying demographically anyway. But sometimes, I want to give it that extra push into the rendering truck. Leave the most stupid ideas people have gleaned from science fiction novels in the comments. (Or stories, either.) I'll start it off: "Think of it as evolution in action." (New stuff below the fold.)

Some reading

Random Oscar thought: John Hawkwood : Giovanni Acuto :: Clint Eastwood : Corrado Astuto? His translation for Morricone was very cool. Anyway, I don't actually have a TV, so I know about this through my psychic powers. I do have a lot of books. Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard. One of Wisconsin's finest novelists. A mill won on a bet over a twelve-point buck, the last two mill brothers killing every exotic bird in the aviary because they were making too much racket, but saving the corpses for taxidermy purposes, and getting the new Hmong Turkish guy to help out (who does a better job)? Classic Wisconsin.

The Pure Product of America: Isn't he Austrian? And what about the last hundred pages, the mad prince's monologue on forestry, family, and cognitive despair?

...

The Pure Product of America: Right.

The Emperor of the Sorcerers, volume 1, Budhasvamin. I found a few titles in the Clay Sanskrit Library at the Strand before Methodist Lent, hidden underneath some Arthuriana. They're not bad. This one is pretty good, in fact. It's taken from four Nepalese manuscripts, two from the twelfth century, collected and edited by a French scholar in 1908. One of the plot points involves the construction of an airplane to satisfy a queen's pregnancy cravings. No, really:

All the artisans stood aside and talked at length among themselves before speaking to Rumanvan in voices faltering with fear: 'We know of four types of machine: machines for water, stone, and dust, and those for pressing sugarcane. As for sky-machines, they are apparently known to the Greeks but we have not come across them.'

The Sanskrit word for 'machine' or 'mechanism' is yantra, incidentally. It's best known now as a Tantric geometric design, like a mandala.

Walking, reverb, collapse

One recent headache: one of the holes for one of the pegs of one of the shelves holding my art books decided to split, causing shelf after shelf to pancake downward in a manner immediately familiar to all New Yorkers.

Fortunately, there were no casualties, not even the strange but cute little doll in a glittering rubber dress that a certain commenter gave me, which I had put on one of the shelves, although her handbag was flung for yards in the collapse.

But the aftermath turned my "to read" pile topsy-turvy. And it was an odd thing, how the first two books I read in the rebuilt pile paralleled each other: Patrick Leigh Fermor as a young man walking through Europe, down the Danube valley towards Constantinople in the 1930s; Harry Partch as a composer whose grant ran out, homeless on the open road on the West Coast in the 1930s. Hallelujah I'm a bum.

Fermor's book, A Time of Gifts, is one of the great travel books. It has lauds enough. I'll quote from Partch's Bitter Music, on the comparative musicology of homeless shelters:

Walking, reverb, collapse

One recent headache: one of the holes for one of the pegs of one of the shelves holding my art books decided to split, causing shelf after shelf to pancake downward in a manner immediately familiar to all New Yorkers. Fortunately, there were no casualties, not even the strange but cute little doll in a glittering rubber dress that a certain commenter gave me, which I had put on one of the shelves, although her handbag was flung for yards in the collapse. But the aftermath turned my "to read" pile topsy-turvy. And it was an odd thing, how the first two books I read in the rebuilt pile paralleled each other: Patrick Leigh Fermor as a young man walking through Europe, down the Danube valley towards Constantinople in the 1930s; Harry Partch as a composer whose grant ran out, homeless on the open road on the West Coast in the 1930s. Hallelujah I'm a bum. Fermor's book, A Time of Gifts, is one of the great travel books. It has lauds enough. I'll quote from Partch's Bitter Music, on the comparative musicology of homeless shelters:

Alan's First Eucatastrophe

So, last week, we were reading one of the "Akiko" comic book collections.

If you have kids under ten or so, give Akiko a look. Akiko is a fourth grade girl (though she gets to fifth, then sixth grade in the course of the series) who is whisked off to another galaxy, where she has adventures with a collection of odd characters. There's Mr. Beeba, a timid academic; Spuckler Boach, a Han Solo-like space cowboy; Gax, Spuckler's dilapidated robot; and Poog, a mysterious floating purple blob thing. The whole thing has been compared to "The Wizard of Oz meets Star Wars', and that's probably fair. There are books as well as comics.

Anyway. We'd reached the point in Volume Three where the evil Loza Throck has captured Akiko and her companions and thrown them into... The Hole.

Alan's First Eucatastrophe

So, last week, we were reading one of the "Akiko" comic book collections. If you have kids under ten or so, give Akiko a look. Akiko is a fourth grade girl (though she gets to fifth, then sixth grade in the course of the series) who is whisked off to another galaxy, where she has adventures with a collection of odd characters. There's Mr. Beeba, a timid academic; Spuckler Boach, a Han Solo-like space cowboy; Gax, Spuckler's dilapidated robot; and Poog, a mysterious floating purple blob thing. The whole thing has been compared to "The Wizard of Oz meets Star Wars', and that's probably fair. There are books as well as comics. Anyway. We'd reached the point in Volume Three where the evil Loza Throck has captured Akiko and her companions and thrown them into... The Hole.

What is the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years? No, really!

I spotted this on John Crowley's LiveJournal, because who reads the New York Times anymore? (John Crowley has a LiveJournal?? Yes he does.)

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Following are the results.

THE WINNER: Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987) Okay, a legitimate choice. Sometimes, as with Tar Baby, I've wondered if Morrison wasn't an accomplished writer of beach romance who got very lucky indeed. But Beloved is a strong ghost story and a strong race story. ('Race story'? Yes. I'm reclaiming the adjective. Why not? Race is the not-so-secret engine which drives American culture.) THE RUNNERS-UP: Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997) So you're twelve years old, and you're watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the very first time. That opening sequence in the Amazon, wow! You're blown away. And then, for no good reason at all, Spielberg hands over direction to Robert Altman, who shifts forwards thirty years, exploring Professor Jones' life in academia among the hippies. Every once in a while there's a cool Nazi-stomping flashback, but then the movie switches back to pointless character motion, what they call 'churning' on Wall Street. And it's four hours long. Underworld is like that.

What is the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years? No, really!

I spotted this on John Crowley's LiveJournal, because who reads the New York Times anymore? (John Crowley has a LiveJournal?? Yes he does.)

Early this year, the Book Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Following are the results.

THE WINNER:

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

Okay, a legitimate choice. Sometimes, as with Tar Baby, I've wondered if Morrison wasn't an accomplished writer of beach romance who got very lucky indeed. But Beloved is a strong ghost story and a strong race story. ('Race story'? Yes. I'm reclaiming the adjective. Why not? Race is the not-so-secret engine which drives American culture.)

THE RUNNERS-UP:

Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)

So you're twelve years old, and you're watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the very first time. That opening sequence in the Amazon, wow! You're blown away. And then, for no good reason at all, Spielberg hands over direction to Robert Altman, who shifts forwards thirty years, exploring Professor Jones' life in academia among the hippies. Every once in a while there's a cool Nazi-stomping flashback, but then the movie switches back to pointless character motion, what they call 'churning' on Wall Street. And it's four hours long.

Underworld is like that.

Meat's meat, the Lithuanian edition

Made an odd book find at the Strand the other day: Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle, by Giedrius Subacius. Y'all know about The Jungle, right? Muckraking fiction exposing the incredible foulness of the old Chicago stockyards? Everyone remembers the gross parts:

As for the other men, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting -- sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Although as someone who grew up in one sausage-making town and went to college in another, my own view is more like this passage:

He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him.

Subacius's book deals with Upton Sinclair's use of the Lithuanian language in The Jungle. Background: a fair number of Lithuanians immigrated to the U.S., to work in the stockyards and mills, and the generations that followed provided the gridiron with some of its greatest names, like Butkus and Unitas. By pure chance, Sinclair happened on a Lithuanian wedding reception near the stockyards in Chicago one afternoon in 1904, and fell in love with the folk there; the first chapter of The Jungle is a fictional recollection of that party. Subacius analyzes it in detail.

Meat's meat, the Lithuanian edition

Made an odd book find at the Strand the other day: Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle, by Giedrius Subacius. Y'all know about The Jungle, right? Muckraking fiction exposing the incredible foulness of the old Chicago stockyards? Everyone remembers the gross parts:

As for the other men, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting -- sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Although as someone who grew up in one sausage-making town and went to college in another, my own view is more like this passage:

He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him.

Subacius's book deals with Upton Sinclair's use of the Lithuanian language in The Jungle. Background: a fair number of Lithuanians immigrated to the U.S., to work in the stockyards and mills, and the generations that followed provided the gridiron with some of its greatest names, like Butkus and Unitas.

By pure chance, Sinclair happened on a Lithuanian wedding reception near the stockyards in Chicago one afternoon in 1904, and fell in love with the folk there; the first chapter of The Jungle is a fictional recollection of that party. Subacius analyzes it in detail.

Read me once, shame on you

First, an observation: sometimes the seemingly random order which one reads books can reveal connections that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. With that in mind, here's James Ellroy, author of the superlative crime novel L.A. Confidential:

I read Dashiell Hammett at the downtown library. I read Ross Macdonald by flashlight in the parks. I read meretricious crime writers all over L.A. I read Jolting Joe Wambaugh in jail and out. The New Centurions/The Blue Knight/The Onion Field/The Choirboys -- visionary work by a cop. L.A. revised. Authoritarianism dissected. Authority sanely lauded over chaos. A counter-counterculture view of 1960 up. Absurdism sans leftist drill. A horrible compassion and indictment of moral default. Wambaugh burned through me. Wambaugh made me dredge abstractions and spin epigrams. Wambaugh made me think what it all meant. Wambaugh sang me a swan song. Wambaugh changed me forever. Here's how I know that: He made me ashamed of my life.

Read me once, shame on you

First, an observation: sometimes the seemingly random order which one reads books can reveal connections that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. With that in mind, here's James Ellroy, author of the superlative crime novel L.A. Confidential:

I read Dashiell Hammett at the downtown library. I read Ross Macdonald by flashlight in the parks. I read meretricious crime writers all over L.A. I read Jolting Joe Wambaugh in jail and out.

The New Centurions/The Blue Knight/The Onion Field/The Choirboys -- visionary work by a cop. L.A. revised. Authoritarianism dissected. Authority sanely lauded over chaos. A counter-counterculture view of 1960 up. Absurdism sans leftist drill. A horrible compassion and indictment of moral default.

Wambaugh burned through me. Wambaugh made me dredge abstractions and spin epigrams. Wambaugh made me think what it all meant.

Wambaugh sang me a swan song. Wambaugh changed me forever. Here's how I know that:

He made me ashamed of my life.

James Joyce, a poet and a prophet

From Finnegans Wake, page 620 of the Penguin edition:

One chap googling the holyboy's thingabib and this lad wetting his widdle.

Yup, that's pretty much the Internet right there.

James Joyce, a poet and a prophet

From Finnegans Wake, page 620 of the Penguin edition:

One chap googling the holyboy's thingabib and this lad wetting his widdle.

Yup, that's pretty much the Internet right there.

I have a tropism

I took a brief break Wednesday from America's First Empire: The Quickening to see Diablo Cody read at Coliseum Books, literally across the street from the famous central building of the New York Public Library. (Diablo Cody is a charter member of my frightening blogroll, all tucked away at the bottom left-hand corner of this blog <-- that way.) I was the second least non-threatening guy in the audience, which was OK, since there were only two guys there. (Phrasing update: as opposed to the remarkable assemblage of interesting women present.) Of course (needless to say) I was smitten by Ms. Cody's smart and smutty style. We briefly bonded about being from the northern Midwest -- "I'm from Wisconsin." "So you know." -- she went off to celebrate her upcoming Letterman appearance, and I went home to write more about Ferdinand Marcos. What?! Read her book. It's fun and appallingly accurate.

Carlos's non-fiction best of 2005

Another year bites the dust! Woo-hoo! And so it's time for another end of the year round-up reading list. It's a shorter list than last year's, partly because of my move (from Brooklyn to Brooklyn, by way of Brooklyn), and partly because journal articles have cut into my book reading. Still, some good stuff out there. (Here's last year's list, if you're at all interested.) Bloggy goodness Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, Julie Powell Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody Fellow New Yorker Julie Powell decided to work her way through Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking in a year while writing about it on the Internet. Fellow Midwesterner Diablo Cody decided to work as a stripper and peep-show girl for a year while writing about it on the Internet. Both women cuss a lot. A lot a lot. Both, alas, are married. And both have written extremely entertaining books. (Yes, the Diablo Cody just came out. I got mine early. I heart NYC.) Food Mythology & Meatballs: A Greek Island Diary/Cookbook, Daniel Spoerri A Mediterranean Feast, Clifford Wright Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000, James C. McCann Daniel Spoerri, the Romanian-born artist now resident in Italy, wrote about his year on the Greek island of Symi. The Internet not having been invented yet, his diary was first published in French, then in English as part of an avant-garde art project in 1970. But today it reads like a charming and digressive weblog, right down to Spoerri's anecdotes about cats and his insane landlord.

And the Sevagram goes to...

... occasional HDTD commenter Charlie Stross, who just won the Prix Hugo for his novella, The Concrete Jungle. Congratulations Charlie!

Some Douglas Oliver

I have been on a poetry kick lately. One great thing about poetry is, it's portable! Here's the conclusion of Douglas Oliver's "The Jains and the Boxer".

The boxer's sounds interrupt plosively, while the Jaina vibrate, so repetitive in consonant that all is almost vowel, a continuous voicing. We wish for that passivity, the single vowel of wonder, unchanging reverence for the sacred. But we fall into Frenchified voodoo sacrifice: the clean blow, sudden slice at a cockerel neck. It's disgusting to gain erotic victory at such a price. The Jains know the flow of time free of harm. The boxer knows its beat: destruction and renewal. Poetic music flows, undulates, hits beats.

Some Lorine Niedecker

The great Wisconsin poet. We're not usually thought of as a poetic people. Well, we aren't. But the impulse is still there. From the New Goose:

On Columbus Day he set out for the north to inspect his forty acres, brought back a plaster of Paris deer-head and food from the grocers and bakers, a wall-thermometer to tell if he's cold, a new kind of paring knife, and painted in red, a bluebottle gentian for the queen, his wife.

Dante's Singularity

From the Paradiso, Canto I, verses 64 to 72:

Beatrice tutta ne l'etterne rote fissa con li occhi stava; e io en lei le luci fissi, di l sù rimote. Ne suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei, qual si f Glauco nel gustar de l'erba che 'l f consorto in mar de li altri di. Transumanar significar per verba non si poria; per l'essemplo basti a cui esperenza grazia serba.

And Charles Singleton's prose translation:

Beatrice was standing with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels, and I fixed mine upon her, withdrawn from there above. Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made him sea-fellow of the other gods. The passing beyond humanity may not be set forth in words: therefore let the example suffice any for whom grace reserves that experience.

I believe this is the first use of the word "transhuman", in any variation, recorded.

Tag! you're it.

Charlie Stross has book-tagged me! Ow. This is like a chain-letter in blog form. Should be self-explanatory. 1: Total number of books I own: oh, goodness. The vast majority is still in storage. I got fifty or so with me. Call it two thousand. I sold about three hundred in the recent cull, which put a noticeable dent into the collection. 2: The last book I bought: Whispering Nickel Idols, Glen Cook; Trash Sex Magic, Jennifer Stevenson; What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank. 3: The last book I read: The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley. Working on: Alabi's World, Richard Price; The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki; and (still) Henry, King of France, Heinrich Mann. (Hank does not have his brother Tom's skill.) Professional books I am reading in chunks: The Politics of Property Rights: political stability, credible commitments, and economic growth in Mexico, 1876-1929, by Haber, Razo, and some guy named Noel Maurer. 4: Five books that mean a lot to me: probably best to go in chronological order.

Two characters in search of an author

It has recently come to my attention that I have been "tuckerized" as a significant character in Lois McMaster Bujold's new book, The Hallowed Hunt, as the warrior-poet Jokol Skullsplitter! Woo-hoo! Ahem. Grr. Sigh. And so has my pet bear, Ted, who in the book is named Fafa. Fafa! Yes! And now cute girls will come over and feed you honey! Yes! Um. I don't think it works that way, Teddy. Yes! And they will tuck you in and tell you stories and comb your fur longingly! Yes! Ummm... this is getting a little disturbing, bear. Grrrrr. Okay okay. They might. I guess it could happen. Okay? Okay? Grrr. Okay. Go to sleep, bear. Grrr. Okay.

Lazy geek sm bleg

Retired machinist Lloyd Schumner is looking for space opera with an Alan Furst feel. You know, cramped paranoid interwar Europe in SPACE. I suspect, in a pinch, Eric Ambler in space would do as well, but *not* Ian Fleming. (Sorry, Charlie.) Little people keeping their heads down as great powers go to war. Lloyd doesn't care if the orbital mechanics are finagled, as long as they get the details on small engine repair right. (I admit it. He stumped me with this one.)

Now, Muse, let's sing of

... books! Ah, the book pile. Mine has been weirdly truncated lately, causing all sorts of free-floating angst to manifest itself like Marley's ghost. "CARLOOOS." But I have managed to get a few reads in, here and there. Perhaps by posting about them, I can placate the unhappy book spirits here floating about -- and I am so tempted to call them 'agents' -- and get on with my day.

Heinrich Mann, Young Henry of Navarre. Damn, there was a lot of fly-specked romantic treacle here. I don't know how much of it was his translator's fault. Certainly his bro Thomas has had his share of mistranslation oopsies and arghs. But I kinda fear a lot of this was due to Heinrich. Some comments about Fascism and Leaders as applied to the Duke of Guise. The most successful parts were probably the scenes of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, written several years before Kristallnacht, and in fact much like recent descriptions of events in Rwanda. But I'm not looking forward to starting the sequel. Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Applied theology in action in Mississippi. Not just the good side, either. The most harrowing chapter concerns the theology of former Imperial Wizard of the KKK, Sam Bowers. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Church burnings, bombings, shootings, people buried in a dam. Michael Tenzer, Gamelan Gong Kebyar. Wow, this is a dense book, filled with insight into the Balinese gamelan, and stereoscopically, Western musical traditions. I am a tyro musicologist, but I find Tenzer's comparisons exhilarating. Best footnote: Tenzer played Steve Reich's Drumming to his Balinese teacher, who listened to it with mild disdain, and asked, "Why doesn't it go anywhere?" Thank you Claudia and Doug! Gordon Lish, Extravaganza. Borscht Belt comedy routines given the Gertrude Stein treatment. It's very much a "What the hell? Oh, I see!" sort of book; and after reading it, you too will be able to construct Borscht Belt comedy routines, and skew them at will. On the other hand, if you don't like this sort of thing, you'll be glad it's short. John T. Noonan, Bribes: the intellectual history of a moral idea. Still only halfway through, but it's hard for me to resist someone who will dive deep into canon law for the apt citation, and then translate Jan Hus as 'John Goose'. I'm very much looking forward to the sections on the history of bribery in America. Andrew Reeves, this book is made for you. Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews and Anderson & Rosenfeld, Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks. I'm pairing these two together, since they're about two great postwar, mainly American, intellectual achievements: jazz and classical neurocomputing. In both cases, you have controversy (Ornette Coleman, perceptrons), you have years in the wilderness, you have geniuses dying young (Parker, Pitts) or starving in pursuit of their art (Werbos ended up writing the checks at the National Science Foundation, most starving jazz people were not so lucky). I nearly wrote 'jazzmen', and that's another point of similarity: the gender ratios are 90:10 male to female. But mainly, these books serve as teasers, for the music and for the research.

And a thank you to Dennis for his suggestion of Popular Music from Vittula, back in December. Cheerful long winters, crazed religious fanatics, random alcoholism, sultry fickle Finnish women, and the best one-line description of losing one's (male) virginity I have ever encountered. [1] It was like going home.

Structuralism and science fiction 2: the quickening

Wow. I've created a monster! I'm going to bring up some points that might have been lost in that Holbonically long comment thread. The basic idea, so far, is that there might -- or might not! -- be a Levi-Straussian "structure" in many otherwise unconnected science fiction novels. To wit:

There exists a lone bisexual world conqueror; if moral, he has a romance with a woman but has difficulties siring children with her; if immoral, he rapes and restricts the fertility of others in his conquest.

Syd Webb proposes functionalist reasons for parts of this. We want our heroes to have feet (or other organs) of clay. David Allen on one hand sees a connection to Jung's idea of the archetype, specifically the Fisher King, and on the other suggests that the well-known phenomenon of sexually active characters being the first to die in American horror movies and crime dramas is related. James B. brings up the possibility that Alexander is the vir classicus of this motif, so to speak. Mitch H. compares Saul, the failed king, to David, the hero king, and suggests that the flawed conqueror stands in the same relation to Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces". Doug is not entirely convinced. Specifically, he dislikes the lack of rigor this type of analysis can be subjected to. Is 'bigendered' the same as 'bisexual'? Noel Maurer is confused, even though he is a long-time heavy reader of science fiction. Do structures even exist? Many people suggested other historical figures in addition to Alexander. (I will bring up a few that weren't mentioned: George Washington, the childless "Father of His Country"; Elizabeth I of England, with "the heart and stomach of a king"; and Lord Byron, the bisexual clubfooted model of the Romantic anti-hero.) Doug also wonders if such a pattern would exist in non-Western science fiction. Specifically, wouldn't the world conqueror be extremely fertile? (No word from Claudia, even though she's read just as much SF as either Doug or I have.) I think that does justice to the main line of the discussion.

Structuralism and science fiction; or, who is the true alpha geek of this blog?

So I have been bingeing on Claude Levi-Strauss lately. CLS is an excellent memoirist in his own right, and despite the subject's reputation for obscurity, his expositions on structuralism can be quite engaging. I personally think that the Native American subject matter of Mythologiques has contributed to this reputation. Let's face it, the Bororo and the Kwakiutl aren't exactly household names in most places.

The Pure Product of America: But Carlos, isn't this French theory? Of no relevance to anything other than itself? I know you, you like reading about epicycles too. What can you use this for?

Well. Hm. I'd say that structuralism can be an interesting organizing principle that can sometimes lead to new insights. I wouldn't call it the Holy Grail of human thought or anything, but here's an example. I recently read Kate Elliott's novel Jaran. It's a culture clash anthropological romance, which means it's science fiction. A female offworlder and a complex yet fundamentally moral nomadic warlord fall in love; wackiness, as is said, ensues. The set-up is formulaic, but there are unusual incidental details. The warlord, a fellow named Ilya Bakhtiian, is poised to conquer his world; and he and the heroine have difficult fertility issues. Now, Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor -- which I will take a wild guess is somewhat familiar to certain readers of this blog -- is also a culture clash anthropological romance, where a female offworlder and a complex yet fundamentally moral warlord fall in love. We later learn that Aral Vorkosigan has already conquered a world, and the fertility issues in his marriage drive every subsequent book. (Whew, no spoilers.) The specific internal explanation of these common elements differs markedly: there's an immunological incompatibility (somewhat like the Rh factor) between Ilya Bakhtiian and Tess Soerensen; on the other hand, Cordelia Naismith is exposed to a teratogenic chemical weapon while pregnant. And these differences flow from deep within the author's backstory. Of course, the publication dates for these two books are 1994 and 1986 respectively, so it's possible that Shards of Honor influenced the basic plot of Jaran. This is where structuralism comes in. Are there other novels that contain this structure, which pairs infertility with conquering the world? And if so, how do they develop it? The first one that came to mind was M.J. Engh's Arslan. In this one, a Turkmeni general during the Cold War manages to use the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction to take over the world, and then renders the world's population infertile for crackpot ecological reasons. There are commonalities in unusual incidental details. All three conquerors have strong affinities to Russia and central Asia: Ilya Bakhtiian (the nomads in Jaran nearly all have Russian names, although their language seems to be more Altaic); Aral Vorkosigan, with the Aral Sea referenced in his given name, and his last name derived from Vor + Kosigan ~ Kosygin; and General Arslan of Turkmenistan. But, instead of being a romance, Arslan is a dystopia. The United States is conquered, and the novel begins with Arslan brutally raping two Illinois high school students as a show of his power. (Incidentally, one of the students raped is male; and all three world conquerors are bisexual.) So the romance is reversed, inverted. Instead of the moral conqueror, we have an amoral one; instead of love, rape; and instead of the conqueror's personal fertility being diminished, the world's fertility is diminished instead. It's a classical structuralist inversion. Arslan was first published in 1976. I don't think it influenced Shards of Honor much. Moving further afield, I think Orson Scott Card's early Ender novels might also fit this pattern.

Desert apartment picks

My limited carrying capacity during the recent move pared down the garbage apartment library in an interesting way. Here's what I deliberately kept with me:

The Princeton Bollingen edition of Dante's Divine Comedy (six volumes) Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870, C.A. Bayly Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit Mother Nature: Maternal instincts and how they shape the human species, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy The collected works of Lorine Niedecker The Horse Has Six Legs: an anthology of Serbian poetry, edited by Charles Simic

And the CDs:

Chopin: Favorite piano works, Vladimir Ashkenazy Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Moanin' Alex Skolnick Trio, Transformation Dizzy Gillespie y Machito, Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods Mary Lou Williams, Black Christ of the Andes Fela Kuti, Coffin for Head of State / Unknown Soldier

I ain't complaining.

Sit on the bridge I'm trying to hit

I've been reading the memoirs of one of my favorite contemporary American poets, Charles Simic. Readers of Halfway Down the Danube with Balkan-dar may have noticed his last name; yes, he was born in Belgrade. But hey, being from somewhere else is the American condition; and even before I knew he once lived in Chicago, I thought his poetry had a very Chicago feel. Anyway, here's an extended passage from his A Fly in the Soup. Enjoy!

In 1972 I met one of the men who bombed me in 1944. I had just made my first trip back to Belgrade after almost twenty years. Upon my return to the States, I went to a literary gathering in San Francisco, where I ran into the poet Richard Hugo in a restaurant. We chatted, he asked me how I spent my summer, and I told him that I had just returned from Belgrade. "Oh yes," he said, "I can see that city well." Without knowing my background, he proceeded to draw on the tablecloth, among the breadcrumbs and wine stains, the location on the main post office, the bridges over the Danube and Sava, and a few other important landmarks. Without a clue as to what this all meant, supposing that he had visited the city as a tourist at one time, I inquired how much time he had spent in Belgrade. "I was never there," he replied. "I only bombed it a few times." When absolutely astonished, I blurted out that I was there at the time and that it was me he was bombing, Hugo became very upset. In fact, he was deeply shaken. After he stopped apologizing and calmed down a little, I hurried to assure him that I bore no grudges and asked him how is it that they never hit Gestapo headquarters or any other bulding where the Germans were holed up. Hugo explained that they made their bombing runs from Italy, going first after the Romanian oil fields, which had tremendous strategic importance for the Nazis and were heavily defended. They lost a plane or two on every raid, and with all that, on the way back, they were supposed to unload the rest of the bombs over Belgrade. Well, they didn't take any chances. They flew high and dropped the remaining payloads any way they could, anticipating already being back in Italy, spending the rest of the day on the beach in the company of some local girls. I assured Hugo that this is exactly what I would have done myself, but he continued to plead for forgiveness and explain himself. He grew up in a tough neighborhood in Seattle, came from poor, working-class folk. His mother, a teenager, had to abandon him after his birth. We were two befuddled bit players in events beyond our control. He at least took responsibility for his acts, which of course is unheard of in today's risk-free war, where the fashion is to blame one's mistakes on technology. Hugo was a man of integrity, one of the finest poets of his generation, and, strange as it may appear, it did not occur to me to blame him for what he had done. I probably would have spat in the face of the dimwit whose decision it was to go along with Tito's request and have the Allies bomb a city on Easter full of its own allies. Still, when Hugo later wrote a poem about what he did and dedicated it to me, I was surprised. How complicated it all was, how inadequate our joint attempt to make some sense of it in the face of the unspoken suspicion that none of it made a hell of a lot of sense.

The PA system is broken

I recently sold off most of my Poul Anderson collection. Some background: Poul Anderson was a Danish-American writer, mainly of science fiction and fantasy, although there were mysteries, historicals and even a psychological novel in his oeuvre. I enjoyed him in my teens and twenties because he was moody and Danish, well-read in the world's literatures and engaged with modern science: things I happened to be or aspired to become. He died recently, and I feel badly that I never got to meet him, or even correspond with him via e-mail. Unfortunately, his books kept on failing the re-read test. Instead of becoming comfort reading, as familiar books often do, his stylistic quirks, turns of phrase -- turns of mind -- became obtrusive, engrained enough to the point where I suspected I could write a Poul Anderson generative grammar from scratch. Yonder perforce must needs must. Look, listen, smell, touch, taste, list of verbs. Abstraction active-verbed. And at the end, a touchstone image. Judas priest. Last year, my co-blogger Doug mentioned to someone that I could write Anderson pastiche. (True enough. Pastiche is a good skill to learn.) My response snowballed, as such things do. I decided to analyze a thirty-two page Anderson short story, "Hunter's Moon", from the anthology Medea: Harlan's World, a festschrift for writer and media gadfly Harlan Ellison, using the above list of quirks. It's incomplete, but I think it's illustrative.

Kleiman, Jünger, endives

Like Diogenes looking for an honest man, Mark Kleiman has been looking for a modern non-genre pro-war novel of high literary merit. He has had a surprisingly difficult time. Because I am nuts, I suggested Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel. Most people don't think of World War One as a positive transformative experience. Jünger had no such doubts:

"Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored."

Jünger was born in 1895, and lived nearly to his one hundred and third birthday. He had, um, an interesting life. Recently the New York City Math Teacher (Now Past the Cusp of Matrimony) and I went to Zum Stammtisch Restaurant, somewhere off the Long Island Expressway. Even though my German ancestors left around 1848, and NYCMT's some ninety years later, the food still calls to us at a primeval, almost genetic level. And so over sauerbraten and smoked trout and rye bread and dark beer (all delicious) we fell to talking about the vagaries of German history; and for some reason, I brought up Jünger. "Ah, Jünger," said NYCMT. "The lich." 'Lich' is rather an uncommon word in English. I'd only ever heard the word spoken before in two contexts: among people familiar with the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, as a kind of dead man walking; and to refer to then living nonagenarian senator Strom Thurmond. It derives from an Old English word meaning 'corpse'. Cognates are wonderful things. So Jünger has been a little difficult to rehabilitate. In any case, he's not very well known in English (as Kleiman notes), although he's been championed by figures as diverse as the British aesthete and travel writer Bruce Chatwin and the Texan cyber-guru Bruce Sterling. For the Jünger neophyte, here's a short piece taken from the 1937 edition of his Adventurous Heart, called "Violet Endives".

Schott's Delight

It's one of those books that you don't really need. It contains nothing but obscure facts. Thus, it's sheer delight.

Schott's Original Miscellany is a unique collection of essential trivia, uncommon knowledge and vital irreverence. Where else can you find, packed on to one page, some famous lefthanders, the structure of military hierarchy, all of the clothing care symbols, a list of the countries that drive on the left, and a nursery rhyme about sneezing? Where else but Schott's Original Miscellany will you stumble across John Lennon's cat, the supplier of bagpipes to the Queen, the twelve labours of Hercules, and the brutal methods of murder encountered by Mrs Marple?

A man of wealth and taste

Romania sure gets a bad press in American popular fiction. Vampires, orphans, war crimes, vampires. The horror writer Dan Simmons once managed to work all three together in one of his books, with added vampire content (this is not a recommendation). But Romania might now be best known among American readers as the home of the Antichrist. Yes, that's right. Just when you thought Romania's PR couldn't get any better. The Left Behind series of books is immensely popular in the US. Tens of millions of copies have been sold here. Basically, it's a series of disaster thrillers where the disaster is a fringe Protestant interpretation of prophecies regarding the Christian Apocalypse. The story begins with all the good Christians vanishing -- the Rapture -- and the people left behind (get it?) scrambling in their wake. It's religious fiction with a viewpoint from deep within the paranoid tradition of the American psyche. About the only concession these books make to modern ecumenical sensibilities is including Old Red Socks the Pope in the general disappearances. (This is a big step forward, believe it or not. Remember where Ian Paisley got his doctorate.) I'm not sure if there's a parallel European genre to this type of fiction. Holy Blood, Holy Grail? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Kind of sort of? Gentle European readers, you tell me. The authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, aren't exactly subtle. I'm an extremely lapsed Methodist myself, but I am familiar with Protestant traditions even more paranoid and esoteric than theirs, so when I skimmed these books I kept on expecting the obvious Jesus guy also to be a minion of the Devil -- those false prophets, don't you know -- and his followers cast into the Lake of Fire to burn forever and ever, mwahahahaha! No such luck. Anyway, the real Antichrist in the series is a fellow named Nicolae Carpathia. See what I mean about subtle? At the beginning of the first book, he's an obscure politician from the lower house of the Romanian parliament, I dunno, maybe from Brasov, but due to his extraordinary, nay, vampiric charm... well, you know. Fred Clark at Slacktivist is doing a page by page commentary of the Left Behind series, all of which is worth reading, and the rest of his blog is pretty good too. But this comment in particular caught my eye: