A great line from In the Woods

I'm down to the last 50 pages and I can't really see not loving this book by the end.

Had to preserve this line, taken from when Ryan is in the bottom ninth of his huge fuckup: his boss found out what he's been hiding, he's been a flaming douche to nearly everyone, he got played by a psychopathic teenager AND Cassie isn't speaking to him. Now restricted to desk duty pending suspension, a detective everyone hates is floating around his desk trying to find out what's going on:

He was like a huge smug albatross waddling around my desk, squawking vacuously and crapping all over my paperwork.

First thoughts on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I despair that I will not finish this before book club next week. However, I am enjoying it after having some trouble getting started. The voice of Bromden takes some getting used to. I think I reach the boundaries of my intellect (or of my Asperger's) when I try to interpret an author's meaning and choices. It's kind of thrilling in a solipsistic way to find a well-defined boundary to such a thing. Anyways, I can see the Ken Kesey is making a specific and conscious artistic choice to narrate the story through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic (?) although one review I read said it did a disservice to Chief Bromden to frame him in psychiatric trappings. What I can't figure is why he made this choice.

It's also impossible to read this without thinking about the movie. At any rate, I'm enjoying the very visual prose. The care Kesey takes to describe the calluses on McMurphy's palms or Bromden's visit to a cotton gin when he was a teenager. Kesey spends a lot of time actually describing hands I notice. It makes me think about the non-fiction writer Richard Preston. In his preface to Panic in Level 4, he says he always asks the person he is writing about if he can see their hands. For a doctor at USAMRID, he was able to visualize and empathize with her story about cutting her hands in the morning in her kitchen, going to work on a Level 4 autopsy, and cutting her glove with a dirty scalpel. She ran through decontamination fearing she had broken the skin and infected herself with an unspecified hemorrhagic fever. It turned out the blood in her internal glove was where her cut had reopened.

Preston said hands were a way he learned about the subject. Not that that's what Kesey is doing, it's just how I'm perceiving it.

I loved this line from McMurphy which is fine advice for life:

"You ever been kneed in the nuts in a brawl, buddy? Stops you cold, don't it? There's nothing worse. It makes you sick, it saps every bit of strength you got. If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, than watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals."

In which the author desperately tries to convince herself she is not a prude

Look, really I am not a prude. I don't think. But I could not take anymore of Ragtime. Ok, the story wasn't really captivating me although it seemed like historical fiction set in turn of the century NYC would be a no brainer literary lurvefest. I also get worried that I'll confuse the fiction with fact. Not really an issue as it turned out when I read the part where Emma Goldman (love her IRL) gives an astringent rubdown to an infamous chippie (already forgot her name) including her breast and "her mons. 'Yes, even this. You must have the courage to live.'" Uhhhh...what the FUCK? The chippie works herself into a...private happy moment which causes the young man who was stalking her to fall out of the closet he was watching her from while masturbating and, oh, dump his spirit all over her "in a ticker tape parade." How is any of this not seriously creepy? (nevermind the part where the same chippie gives a little girl a bath and dwells a wee too long on the details of her bosom. You know, I don't want to think about little girl's bosoms but thanks E.L. Or the part where the explorer Dad watches two Eskimos have sex on the polar expedition and is way too interested in it. And so on.)

Could not take anymore. My new tactic is you don't like the book? Fuck it. You ain't gots to finish it. White Noise I'm happy to call pseudo-intellectual twaddle but lots of people seem to like Ragtime. Goodreads has it on best books ever lists. Dennis liked it. Shit. I wonder what I'm missing? And does that still mean I'll like The Corrections whenever I finally get my reserve?

Oh well. Too many books to read to sweat shit you aren't digging-or that makes your skin crawl. I picked Neon Angel up from the library yesterday and cannot wait to start it. Hello Daddy, hello Mom I'm your ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch Cherry Bomb!

And, I have felt Christopher Hitchens beckoning to me from the shelf (beat that cancer and fucking quit smoking Hitch!) so I just started God Is Not Great. I tend to run out of steam with screed-style books before the end so I'll see how it goes.

Final thoughts on The Monkey House

Just finished Fullerton's The Monkey House and I'm really torn trying to figure out the rating. I loved the descriptions of war and the unforgettable images of the population of Sarajevo, terminally hungry and exhausted and sudden experts on differentiating small arms fire. The last 30-40 pages when Rosso first discovers Tanja is in the hospital, he makes a dash during the night in a flurry of sniper fire and mortar shells, his conversation with poor decent Serbian Dr. Misic who says she will lose her other leg if she remains in Sarajevo and finally his exchanging himself with the journalist Flett to the Serbs so Tanja, Mahmud and Noor could be flown out of the country. He knows the Serbs will almost definitely kill him just for being a Rosso as his father was a Nazi sympathizer and war criminal (the Serbs were targets of Nazi ethnic cleansing.)

What I didn't like was Fullerton takes too much for granted of his reader. I expected and of course didn't mind researching for this book but I wasn't clear on so many things. I still don't think I understood everything at the end. I realize it's a stupid hangup of mine but I think the author should have mentioned what year this takes place as clearly that is significant. The back of the book says 1996 but the Dayton Agreement was signed in December 1995. As I said before I am assuming this is taking place in late 1995 as it seems the war is over in Croatia. Also, as locations are key to the story I think the book could at minimum really have used a map of Sarajevo, if not the Bosnian coast (since that plays a key in the drug smuggling story.)

Maps and dates just tend to be weird peeves of mine. A more general complaint is the story felt a little too insider. I really had trouble understanding some characters' actions, particularly why was Tanja in that cemetary where she got her leg blown off in the first place? It was fairly nonsensical.

Fullerton apparently has done a lot of war reporting and lived in Peshawar (can you imagine after covering the Bosnian War he consented to live in Pakistan?) He has since written 3 other novels. If I were him, I'd be snuggling up to a fire in jolly old England with some biscuits and a cricket match.


Some words he used at the end that I didn't understand:

Roulement is a term used the the British Army for major combat units deployed on short-term duty (usually less than six months)

When Rosso is talking to the Minister after he has arrested Luka (as per their plan as it turns out), he says to him "Hvala" (thank you) to which the Minister replies "Nema na cemu" (you're welcome.) Fullerton prints the English next to the Bosnian but since that's redundant, I thought it must have meant something else.

I like the touch that Anil drives poor, doomed Rosso to the place where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in June, 1914 for the hostage exchange. Because of the mosques, churches and temples, apparently Sarajevo is referred to as the European Jerusalem. No wonder it has such a sad history.

Finally, I liked Tanja and Rosso's final conversation where she asks him to forgive himself for being his father's son. The end clearly shows that he couldn't.

First thoughts on The Monkey House

So I'm a little over halfway through John Fullerton's The Monkey House. The book was a little slow in the beginning although I can't say why. It certainly should have been exciting with Detective Rosso flying from Zagreb into Sarajevo and the plane having to bank sharply to avoid Serb artillery. Maybe I just have so much I want to read I'm distracted.

What I don't like is the book is not precise about the time period. It's just Sarajevo during the war. It appears to be wintertime. It's a pet-peeve that I think was fanned into a fire by Dennis that I have to know when exactly a book is taking place (assuming it's not just a novel that is presumed to be contemporary.)

Fullerton says that Rosso flew in from Zagreb which is the capital of Croatia. He also says Zagreb is safe. So I am guessing this is in 1995 as the Croatian War was from 1991-August 1995. As late as May of 1995, the Serbs were firing rockets into Zagreb. I dunno, this conflict, or really a series of them,  is so frakking complicated its reminiscent of the Middle East. All anyone can agree on is that no one particularly likes the Bosnians as they are a Muslim majority and, hence, apostates.

The war spilled over into Bosnia (as Rosso's wife and others predicted it would) soon enough in April 1992 and lasted until December 1995. It and the war in Croatia ended officially with the Dayton Agreement. Hard to imagine this crazy multi-national conflict being resolved in little Dayton, Oh. Poor Bosnia was unprepared for war. In 1991, Croatia and Serbia were attempting to partition it between each other.

Anyways, enough about the history. Clearly I need to read some books about this. I'm ashamed to say I was aware of all of this going on in the early 90's but I didn't pay much attention.

My interest in the book has grown as I've kept reading and slowly fallen into the rhythm of life in Sarajevo. Everyone is slowly starving. Rosso's wife is an alcoholic who sold most of their belongings for booze. The mental hospitals can no longer tackle problems like alkies as they have to keep the schizos and manics from walking into firefights. His goddaughter Tanja is having an affair with the local crime lord, Luka. She is a paramedic and saves a woman who was shot in the street by a sniper when no one else would help. She also resents to woman for getting shot.

What is most interesting is the moral/pragmatic counterweights of Rosso and Luka. Rosso hates that he is involved with Tanja but his interest in Luka for now is his involvement in a particularly nasty murder of a Serbian dentist who was also a police informant (Fullerton is playing that novelistic game of not handing out all the facts that the protagonist knows to sustain the mystery. That normally annoys me as it seems like cheating but he throws in so much other detail that you almost don't notice.) She was beaten and possibly stabbed and then choked to death in her own bathtub where she was left face down in a puddle of bloody shit. Yes, nasty. A nearly blind little girl was in the apartment scavenging, hid and tells Rosso she recognized Luka's voice.

So, he's a bad man. But why is Rosso even still trying to do his job at this point which has that deck chair on the Titanic feel? The government is practically non-existent. There isn't enough food. Rape and murder by the Serbs are commonplace. Plus, as Luka points out, his smuggling of booze and cigarettes which he trades for weapons are what is keeping the Serbs out of the city. The people love Luka. And it makes sense. Who would you side with in such a situation?

Fullerton (he's a British journalist, btw) has some lovely descriptive passages. I always appreciate effortless yet lovely prose. Here he describes the amorphous front:

Trenches and foxholes ran along a line of apple trees, zigzagging across the far side of the orchard. The trees themselves were mostly bare, the branches grey, the trunks slick and black, their roots emerging from the ground that was soft, wet and uneven...Rosso heard sporadic firing; the double crack of a single Kalashnikov, the vicious thump of an RPG, the fast ripple of a light machine-gun in quick short bursts like the sound of tearing cloth, only louder, more abrupt. Brrp. Brrp. .. Torn trees, churned soil, boots sucking in the mud. The drip, drip of snowmelt. Splashes of weak, watery sunshine. So this is the battlefield, Rosso thought. This is what it is like, for us and them. 

...The ground  was uninviting. It was too wet to hug with any enthusiasm and too flat do to much good if he did; the worst of both worlds. I don't mind getting wet if I'm still alive afterwards. It was bocage country; short murderous rushes, infantry charging in terror against other infantry lying in wait, waiting in terror. ..You could hear a man breathing behind the one just ahead, lying in his scrape, friend or foe, wondering too, index curling around the trigger, waiting for you to cough or sneeze...No front, no rear. Just murder. 

How can you not read that and picture everything now? The mundane winter landscape. Barren trees, snowy muddy ground that can suck your boots right off, the drip of melting ice. Interspersed with vivid and varied gunfire and musing about the flat ground that provides no cover from it. I won't be able to decide how much I like the book overall until I finish but this passage? Amazing.

Ok, what the hell is bocage you are asking? Unless you are British because then you probably already know. It is Norman in origin and referred originally to a landscape of mixed woodland and pasture. During WWII, British soldiers referred to the countryside of Normandy this way and the gently rolling hills and hedgerows that made visibility difficult and gaining territory on the Germans notoriously difficult.

Final thoughts on The Moon is Down

Loved. It. So powerful and knowing the history of it just makes it more so. People were living the things Steinbeck wrote about. I can't believe people in this country (like you Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber) could be so clueless about its beauty and power.

Some of my favorite lines:

(on the introduction of Dr. Winter): "He watched in amazement while his thumbs rolled over and over in his lap. Doctor Winter was a man so simple only a profound man would know him as profound."

(the Mayor on being told by Colonel Lanser that the people were orderly and would cooperate with the new regime): "They are orderly under their own government. I do not know how they would be under yours."

(Lanser to the traitor Correll on how conquered people are not peaceful. God I wish Steinbeck would have chosen to kill Correll off in some gruesome fashion): "I am tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it. I remember an old woman in Brussels-sweet face, white hair; she was only four feet eleven; delicate old hands...We didn't know her son had been executed. When we finally shot her, she had killed twelve men with a long, black hatpin." 

(Winter on why they are bothering having a show trial for poor Alex Morden): "I would guess it is for the show. There's an idea about it: if you go through the form of a thing, you have it, and sometimes people are satisfied with the form of a thing...The invaders will have a trial and hope to convince the people that there is justice involved."

(the Mayor to Lanser on why he would not condemn Alex Morden to death):

"I'll tell you what I'll do. How many men were on the machine guns which killed our soldiers?"
"Oh, not more than twenty, I guess," said Lanser.
"Very well. If you will shoot them, I will condemn Morden."

(the Mayor's final words to Alex Morden): "Alex these men are invaders. They have taken our country by surprise and treachery and force....When they came, the people were confused and I was confused. We did not know what to do or think. Yours was the first clear act. Your private anger was the beginning of a public anger. I know it is said in town that I am acting with these men. I can show the town, but you-you are going to die. I want you to know....Alex, go, knowing that these men will have no rest, no rest at all until they are gone, or dead. You will make the people one. It's a sad knowledge and little enough gift to you, but it is so. No rest at all. Good-by, Alex."

(on the people's sabotage efforts): The jolly lights did not shine out on the snow, for by law every window must be black against the bombers. And yet when the English bombers came over, some light always appeared near the coal mine. Sometimes the sentries shot a man with a lantern and once a girl with a flashlight. And it did no good. Nothing was cured by the shooting.



(on the way the town treated their occupiers): Now it was that the conqueror was surrounded, the men of the battalion alone among silent enemies, and no man might relax his guard for even a moment. If he did, he disappeared, and some snowdrift received his body. If he went alone to a woman, he disappeared and some snowdrift received his body. If he drank, he disappeared.....And the soldiers, smelling warm food from the little restaurant, went in and ordered the warm food and found that it was oversalted and overpeppered.

(I must include Molly's scene where she kills lovesick Lieutenant Tonder, the man who carried out the execution orders against her husband): She looked at the table, and she saw the big scissors lying beside her knitting. She picked them up wonderingly by the blades...until she was holding them like a knife, and her eyes were horrified....Slowly she raised the shears and placed them inside her dress. The tapping continued on the door. She heard the voice calling to her. She leaned over the lamp for a moment and then suddenly she blew out the light. The room was dark except for a spot of red that came from the coal stove. She opened the door. Her voice was strained and sweet. She called, "I'm coming, Lieutenant. I'm coming!"

(Doctor Winter's reaction to Lanser saying he would lie to the people and tell them Orden had begged for his life): "They would know. You do not keep secrets. One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper {emphasis mine}, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it....You do not keep secrets, Colonel."

(the Mayor to his wife when she says they can't arrest the Mayor): Orden smiled at her. "No," he said, "they can't arrest the Mayor. The Mayor is an idea conceived by free men. It will escape arrest."

Those scenes and the Mayor's final scene where he quotes from the Trial of Socrates are the sort of writing that sticks in your throat and won't let you go. I can see why it inspired the resistance. I want to say that it's a shame we were occupying a country ourselves 20 years later but that situation is a bit more complicated. The North Vietnamese regime followed the particularly brutal model of the Chinese Communist Party and certainly their people were the worse off for it. And look at what happened in Cambodia. WWII had easy answers and clear villains but most wars do not.

First thoughts on The Moon is Down

The introduction by Donald Coers (who has written some Steinbeck books I may need to check out IF they aren't too academic) says that Steinbeck approached the OSS about writing this book after he got the idea while filming "The Forgotten Village" in Mexico (this was also the film that produced one of the few if only real arguments between him and Ricketts due to their conflicting views about indigenous populations.) Steinbeck felt the fascists were outpacing us in the propaganda race. When this book came out, a lot of critics didn't understand it and felt Steinbeck was too sympathetic in the treatment of the Nazis (interestingly, never called that explicitly in the book although it's pretty clear when one character's fantasy is to die on the battlefield to the strains of Wagner.) The book was majorly misunderstood and underappreciated in its time in this country. Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber no less criticized it.

However, in Europe it was a huge success. The book was published in March, 1942, a very bleak time during the war. In occupied Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Norway people risked their lives to print and clandestinely distribute it as a pamphlet. It came to France in 1944  6 months before the liberation and was a hit there as well. Sartre in his essay "What is Literature?" defended a similar work called The Silence of the Sea by Jean Bruller, saying to understand literature one must first understand the audience it was written for. An occupied people would have found a story about goose-stepping, monacle-clad villains laughable. What was disturbing about the occupation and the crimes of the Nazis was how normal they could appear.

My favorite story from the intro tells the story of the man who translated and published it in Holland, an actor and underground publisher named Ferdinand Sterneberg. He ran a press called De Bezige Bij ("The Busy Bee.") He used to also perform scenes from it clandestinely for select audiences, warning them beforehand they could at any time be raided by the Gestapo. He eventually stopped because he was hiding two Jewish friends in his home. His neighbors were "untrustworthy" so his friends could not walk about, run water or use the bathroom when he wasn't home for fear of alerting snooping ears. Sterneberg felt it was too cruel to leave them in such a state for hours. He and his friends survived the war.

The publishing royalties from this pamphlet funded the resistance in all of the above countries. How amazing is that? It's really tragic this story isn't more widely known here. Steinbeck continues to not receive what is due to him.


After the war when Steinbeck was travelling in Italy, he was approached by an Italian who told him mere possession of the book was grounds for execution. Proof Steinbeck did something write no matter what those ass kettles Fadiman and (I'm sorry) Thurber say.

BTW, I see the further reading section that Harold Bloom edited a book about Steinbeck. I wonder if he changed his mind about him. I just found it in Google Books and nope, Bloom writes a petty intro saying Steinbeck is overly sentimental in Of Mice and Men, East of Eden is not worth re-reading, In Dubious Battle is a period piece only useful to historians and The Grapes of Wrath is "a problematic work that....lacks invention." He says Steinbeck suffers in comparison to Hemingway. I don't know what is up Harold Bloom's ass but since he said fucking Cormac McCarthy wrote the greatest novel of the century, he clearly has issues.

I'd like to give the last word to my beloved Steinbeck. When discussing the criticism of this book in his essay  "My Short Novels" written 10 years later, Steinbeck said:

"It was said I didn't know anything about war and this was perfectly true, though how Park Avenue commandos found me out I can't conceive." 

Oh, I love this man.

I was going to write about specifics of the book thus far but I'll save that for later now.

Final thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer

Just finished this book. I has a sad that Inspector Chen and Catherine Rohn couldn't be together but it really would be impossible politically. It would ruin his party career to marry an American and as Yu said, given his background he could never go far in a law enforcement career in the US. As if he could leave anyways.

Even worse, they find poor Wen and she has to leave Liu (the guy who has loved her for 20 odd years in secret and united at last) to go to the States to be with her shitstain abusive older husband. It really sucks to be a woman in most of the world. If she stayed in China, the gangs were after her. The big mystery was the gangs had coerced her into poisoning her husband.

I really like the poem Liu wrote about her which is too long to copy here. He was a reporter with the Wenhui Daily (a real paper, btw, founded in Shanghai in 1938) and went to Fujian to write a story about the factories there. There in Changle (or ChangLe, also a real place in east Fujian) he unexpectedly sees Wen and writes a poem where the factory manager describes her as "as a grinder, but a revolutionary one, polishing up the spirit of our society." Which sounds beautiful for a split second. Then you think about how tragic and wasteful the Cultural Revolution was and you want to vomit.

I love Detective Yu. For one example, where in the scene where he interrogates a prostitute and she mentions two triad members forced her into a threesome he tells her she had better cooperate now as group sex is illegal. Uhm, what? WTF was going on with China. Defiantly Atheist and yet as prudish as an old Church organist. I wonder if any of this has changed (I mean, not that I'm like give me group sex or give me death but how or why would you make that illegal?) He and Pequin finally get their own place at the end of this book instead of sharing a converted Shikuman house dining room with their son.

If I ever get the urge to learn more about Chinese poetry, look up Su Dongpu.

Thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer and some alphabet trivia

The title of the book refers to a woman named Wen who is married to a guy that is generally a shit. He is 15 years older than her. She probably married him because he knocked her up when she was an Educated Youth working at his factory in Fujian during the Cultural Revolution. The only type of dancing allowed during the cultural revolution was character dancing. There were pictures of her dancing with the Chinese character for loyalty (which also I presume is the character on the book's cover and at the top of each page.)

BTW, according to the Senor Google, the character is loyalty. Behold:

The Chinese "alphabet" is really made up of logograms, where a character indicates a word or a morpheme rather than a phoneme (the Latin alphabet, in contrast, is made up of phonograms.) To refer to the Chinese alphabet, you say Hanzi (the name of the alphabet changes with the language, e.g. Kanji for Japanese.) Wikipedia says Chinese characters are the longest continually used writing system in the world. Really? And not Hebrew? I followed one of the links cited in the article which said the same thing but didn't give dates. It did say there is now a museum of Chinese writing in Henan Province. On a website called Kwintessential (some British translation company), I found this:

According to the Kangxi dictionary the total number of Chinese characters is a staggering 47,035. The bulk of these writing symbols are not used today but nonetheless they make up the historical collection of Chinese writing symbols that exist as an extensive library.

Still no dates.

Also, the book mentions the concept of guanxi which also was mentioned extensively in Spider Eaters in reference to the author trying to get a passport to get out of China. Guanxi is a personalized network of influence and mutual favors. It literally means "relationships."

First thoughts on A Loyal Character Dancer

So far I'm enjoying this book, the 2nd in the Inspector Chen series, as much as the first one. Like the first one, lots of detail on the Chinese mindset. I like the way that Chen tries to get out of escorting the female US Marshall as he doesn't want to get sucked into a political task and then keeps thinking about the party and how things will look with an eye to potential accusations of Western corruption and impropriety. For that reason, he refuses a room at the Peace Hotel to avoid any trouble even though he'd love to stay there and invite Inspector Yu's family so they could use the hot water. Funny that atheist Communism Chinese style is so Southern Baptist about sex.

I also like the little educational asides. Detective Yu (I love him!) is sent to Fujian to investigate the disappearance of the wife of a refugee who has agreed to testify in a human smuggling case in exchange for Witness Protection (and also, he might be kind of shady.) Yu tells a local cop who is unhappy about Shanghai's interference that he'll need a translator. It turns out that Fujian province is one of the most linguistically diverse provinces per Wikipedia. The Han Chinese are a minority.

Final thoughts on Beyond the Outer Shores

I just finished this book which I feared at one time I was stuck in a low reading gear with. Wow. Just loved it in the end. Although parts of it were tedious to read at the time, I now understand what Tamm's intention was when he wrote it-namely, to take the charming Doc from Steinbeck's novels and turn him into the rounded and much more complex Ed Ricketts. He did like to drink and he did like women (although some speculate the Steinbeck exaggerated-he said when going through Ricketts journals after his death he tore out many "blackmail material" pages on Ricketts' daliances with local women and yet only two pages were missing.) He was also a devoted stepfather to his second wife's daughter who died of brain cancer. The illness put him deeply in debt. He was an ecologist ahead of his time who predicted the collapse of the sardine trade in Monterey-killed by greed and overfishing for the war effort. He wrote essays decrying the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The greatest ecologist of the time, Dr. TA Stephenson, was a fan of his work and visited Ricketts, telling him he quoted Between Pacific Tides to his wife until she was sick of hearing about it.

I learned many random brilliant things from this book; hence, I will list them in a random fashion:

• Darwin did not apply his theory of evolution to mankind in The Origin of the Species. He thought church types would freak out. He posited it 20 years later in The Descent of Man. He even suggested religion was proof of man's evolution.
• Steinbeck called his first novel  an "abortion" and he was embarrassed by it.
• Joseph Campbell was very impressed by Steinbeck's ideas in To a God Unknown and said he hoped people would discover his work
• Campbell and Steinbeck, alas, never really became friends because of a brief unconsumated romance between Campbell and Steinbeck's first wife, Carol.
• Ricketts was a HUGE influence on Steinbeck's writing. He died in 1948. Steinbeck only wrote one book considered great after that (East of Eden) and he had started work on it before Ricketts died although not sure if he actually was writing it in earnest. He planned it as his magnum opus.
• Sweet Thursday may have been the Cannery Row sequel but people plainly saw more Steinbeck than Ricketts in the Doc character. Ricketts died in May, 1948 and was full of optimism about his planned trip to BC where he would meet up with Steinbeck and complete his Pacific ecological trilogy with The Outer Shores (ahh, that's the meaning of this books title.) The Doc in Thursday had writer's block, couldn't find pleasure in anything, and was annoyed that people were trying to find him a wife. This all-especially the last-applied to Steinbeck. He even describes Doc as staring at a yellow legal pad and being unable to write. It was Steinbeck, not Ricketts, who wrote on yellow legal pads.
• Steinbeck burned most of his correspondence with Ricketts after his death. Some friends of Ricketts (not all of whom liked Steinbeck) said it was because he didn't want people to know how responsible Ricketts really was for Steinbeck's output. I don't know why Steinbeck did it. Grief makes you do funny things. Ricketts was obviously a huge influence but he repeatedly referred to Steinbeck's gift for words and asked Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell to polish his work sometimes so I don't think it's fair to say Ricketts is the reason Steinbeck could write. 
• A lot of critics didn't like Cannery Row and found it not deep. Steinbeck said he wrote it in 4 layers. I of course am stuck in first gear with my literal Asperger's mind and loved the book. Ricketts' wife at the time wrote about it in the local paper and called the book a "poison cream puff" in response to some critic's review. Really? I thought it was sweet. WTF am I missing? I need a skeleton key.
• Steinbeck's first post-Ricketts work was the experimental novella/play Burning Bright. It was described as moribund by audiences.
• There was a real Mack, a real Lee chong, a real Dora Flood. Her story is interesting and rather tragic. She was indeed a madam and a large woman. She was also big hearted and a pillar of the community who contributed to local charities and quietly gave food to local families. The agents of decency descended on Monterey, alas, like a plague of locusts with hard hearts and small minds towing their offended messiah on a bier behind them and put her out of business. She died penniless a few months after Ricketts accident.
• Steinbeck thought Le Morte d'Arthur was one of the best books ever. His clique loved Robinson Jeffers' poem, The Roan Stallion.
• Steinbeck writing about the mourners following Ricketts funeral as they walked out of the Chapel and walked separately and alone on the shore "We were lost and could not find ourselves."
• Speaking of the funeral, Ricketts new wife (who was in her mid 20's) fell apart at his death and asked a friend to make the arrangements. He opted for a small invite only affair which angered Ricketts sister who said Ricketts was the kind of guy who was friends with everyone and wouldn't have excluded people.
• While going thru his things at the lab after his death, Steinbeck and a friend had Ricketts safe pried open. It was the only thing that survived the lab fire in 1936 (where he lost his books and records.) In the safe was a bottle of scotch and a note "What the hell do you expect to find in here? Here's a drink for your trouble." 
• One more happy story to end on: Ricketts was terminally perturbed with the treatment he got from Stanford University Press. They were supposed to be coming out with a second edition of his book but again, kept delaying it. He and Steinbeck got drunk one night and wrote a note to the publisher saying they looked forward to the Press' forthcoming opus "The Internal Combustion Engine-Will it Work?" Ricketts contacted them a few days later to apologize but he publisher actually said the note shamed him and he would work to get the second edition finally released. Alas, it was published posthumously. But, it did contain a touching prologue saying the author "Dr. Ricketts" died tragically before he could review the final copy. After all the delays and snubs from peers for his lack of a degree, recognition at last.

Ok that's enough. The book is just too fresh in my head. I really could sit and cry for Ricketts, Steinbeck and the sardines if I let myself.

More Ricketts and other random tidbits

Gack, just when Beyond the Outer Shores starts to pick up steam with a tidbit about Steinbeck or Joseph Campbell, Tamm goes back to giving discourses on what Ricketts did day by day while he was in the Queen Charlotte Islands (the Galapagos of the North they say.) Starfish collecting on this day, eating crabs with the natives on this day. I do want to finish the book and not skim so as not to miss the entertaining morsels. And it has a The Monster at the End of This Book feel since I know Rickett's death in a freak accident is awaiting me.

Interesting rejoinder to thoughts about religion and how it's bad and how science is making it obsolete: Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces observed the destruction of native cultures and how the death of their religion broke their spirit essentially. He said Western man was undergoing the same with the ascendancy of science. Specifically how the "rapidly rising incidences of neuroticism, mental disorders, suicides, dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder and despair in modern society" could be consequences of the death of literal belief in the Bible. Interesting. I don't totally buy it as certainly all of those things exist in a religious society, but interesting.

Listened to AstronomyCast this morning on the subject of antimatter. When you convert energy into matter, you necessarily create matter and antimatter. Likewise, combining matter and antimatter begets energy. About 50% of the output will be lost as neutrinos but it is still a comparatively efficient reaction.

And, so why didn't all matter and antimatter react and destroy each other in the early days of the universe? This question used to confound astronomers as it seemed to violate the laws of physics. The answer is CP Invariance which basically in certain decay processes, the universe prefers to go one way or the other. Where C is charge symmetry and P is parity symmetry. The guys who discovered it eventually won the Nobel Prize (it sure is tough for theoretical physicists. They can't win until their conjecture is proven in a lab. When/if the Higgs-Boson is eventually discovered, Peter Higgs will have a Nobel waiting.)

There is no anti-energy as energy is zero point. There is no anti-time as time cannot run backwards. There is no anti-gravity. If there were an antimatter star, it's mass would cause objects to rotate around it in the same way as regular stars.

We have managed to create (briefly) anti-hydrogen and anti-helium.

This is one of the reasons why nuclear decay is bad. Beta decay emits positrons which if they hit a strand of your DNA, say, they damage it. But they use positrons in PET scans so I don't really understand too well why that is ok.

Speaking of history (or not), I also listened to a show about Tecumseh. The treaty he objected to was the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. He felt Indian lands were owned communally and couldn't be handed over by certain parties in a treaty. The Battle of Tippecanoe was in 1811. Tecumseh died two years later. William Henry Harrison was rather a shit and "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" was nothing to brag about.  The Battle of Tippecanoe was one of the catalysts for the War of 1812 since the Brits collaborated with the natives (although they also stabbed them in the back.) I'd like to visit this site in Indiana. It's near Lafayette. I dunno though if there is much there besides the memorial obelisk.

Some more random Ricketts info

After being sick this weekend and spending way too much time laying on the couch cleaning off the DVR (savor that season finale of L&O: Criminal Intent--Jeff Goldblum is leaving), I am finally back to Beyond the Outer Shores. Parts of it are slow going. I know a LOT about the Western coast of Vancouver Island, from Victoria-right across the Juan de Fuca Strait from Washington-to the northern inlet factory town of Port Alice. I know a little too much. The author is from the village of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island so he is doubtless thrilled about his local connection to Ricketts. I understand and I think it's sweet. But pages and pages of Ricketts hopping on and off of freighters in every village on the island's coast and collecting sea slugs............zzz. I nodded off.  I appreciate the history of Pacific ecology (although I wonder if Tamm is so enamored of Ricketts that he overstates his role) but that is not the attraction of the book for me. Obviously, it's Ricketts and Steinbeck and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Campbell.

I did learn that Ricketts gave his bemused approval to Cannery Row before it was published but its success was a small disaster for him. He wasn't a celebrity. He was a modest thoughtful sort concerned with making the world a better place. In fact, he fretted over it. Having people drive by and gawk at him and, in one instance, having a stranger oafishly trespass into his living quarters and demand a tour and have to be forced out was hard on him and his by that point rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Toni. Even when on his collecting tours to remote Vancouver in 1945 and 46, he still found people who had read the book and were elated to meet the real Doc.

Completely unrelated but I learned that butterflies were once (at least in Restoration England) considered symbols of witchcraft. Whenever anyone tries to defend religion as this inerrant well of positivity, I think of goofy ass shit like this.

BTW, the Juan de Fuca Strait was named for a Greek navigator who supposedly found it on a Spanish expedition in the 16th century. Yeah, the name doesn't sound Greek. That is the Spanished up version of it. He named the Strait of Anian. It's questionable that he actually explored it. It marks the international boundary between the US and Canada and is the Pacific outlet for both the Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia.

Some more thoughts on Red Square

Martin Cruz Smith knows how to create a compelling female character. He even says in the interview in the back that Polina, the forensic specialist, nearly takes over the novel like the woman in Polar Star did (like in life, I don't remember character's names in books once I've finished.) I also really like the German cop Peter and the Russian emigre Stas.

Poor Jaak, Renko's murdered partner, was Estonian. Estonia declared Soviet occupation illegal on March 30, 1990. Lithuania declared its independence earlier that month. Latvia would do so in May. Lithuania was blockaded by the Soviets and some of its citizens were killed in protests. Not sure about Estonia. I need to read Lenin's Tomb after this book. Jaak comments that Estonians are treated the best in the Union and complain the most.

Red Square takes place in August 1991. Not a coincidence of timing since the Soviet Union was breaking up around Renko's ears. Actually Smith published this in 1992 so it was breaking up around his ears as he wrote it.

Peter refers to an East German as an Ossie. Apparently this is a Wall-era term used to described GDR residents. Osten is the German word for east, appropriately. Further Googling tells me this term can be perceived as rude and is best avoided.

I like how at the art show Irina compares smuggled art relics like to emigres "with the unlikely stories that survivors have of being stuffed in false bottoms or hidden behind wallpaper."

There is indeed a Malevich painting called "Red Square" (full title: "Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions.") It was painted in 1915. I can't say I get the hoopla but the guy sure had a hard life. About all I know is that he founded Suprematism. The Wikipedia page has the self portrait mentioned in the book. He also was Ukranian.

Beyond the outer shores part the first

So far I am loving this book about Ed Ricketts and his friendship with John Steinbeck (and to a lesser but also important extent, Joseph Campbell.) Some things I have learned thus far:

• Steinbeck was very traumatized by the success and controversy surrounding The Grapes of Wrath. 
• He and Joseph Campbell never became friends due to an attraction between Steinbeck's wife at the time (Carol) and Campbell. They never had an affair exactly but they did make out. Campbell, btw, was quite the look evidently back in his day. 
• Ricketts' book Between Pacific Tides was looked down upon by the academic mainstream and it took years for him to get published. It was one of the first biology books (for the Pacific anyways) that grouped fauna according to ecosystem instead of taxonomy. It is one of Stanford U Press's best selling titles.
• In regard to the success of Grapes and the War, Steinbeck wrote in a letter to a friend "There is so much confusion now-emotional hysteria which passes for thought and blind faith which passes for analysis." Relevant? And totally worth stealing? Affirmative times two.