The Picture of Dorian Gray

Posted on March 3, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Picture of Dorian Gray
© 1890 Oscar Wilde
180 pages

Dorian Gray is the picture of youthful innocence, but his portrait is one of deathly corruption. After sitting for a painting rendered by his friend Basil, Dorian becomes a source of infatuation for himself.  Awed by his own beauty, Dorian is driven to angst by the sight of his own beauty and confesses that he would do anything, even give his soul, if the figure in the painting would age instead of himself.   Through such a Faustian bargain, the portrait becomes Gray’s hidden self, his conscience  reflecting the ugliness within as he becomes increasingly self-obsessed. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tale of sin and degradation, of a man’s destruction — the fulfillment of the teacher’s exhortation in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity.

Although The Picture of Dorian Gray ends in death, being the literary account of a moral crash-and-burn,  Wilde’s wit makes for numerous fun moments. There is a bitterness to the laughs,  the vicious humor; the many stabs taken at society and middle class morality are strikes rendered by truly vicious men,  individuals who commit murder and abandon themselves to moral chaos. Many witticisms attributed to Wilde are placed in here the mouth of the malicious Lord Henry, like “The only way to get rid of a temptation is yield to it.”  One hopes that few readers look for wisdom from the likes of Henry, who is such a profoundly dismal influence that the painter Basil begs him not to corrupt young Dorian. (Alas for Bas, soon Dorian will be doing the corrupting…and to such an extent that many of his deeds can’t be named directly, but alluded to only by the fact that people leave the room when he arrives.)    During at least two points in the work, Dorian wavers at a moral crossroads, but at both times he only slides further into the pit, unable to free himself from his one fixation: self-adulation.

Gray is a curious accomplishment,  humorful but with a great sadness. Gray’s obsession with himself, his surrounding of himself with trivial amusements, are haunting.  For all his pleasures taken, for all the pursuit given to making himself feel good, Dorian at the end is worse for the wear. The one character who remains interested in his person — Henry again — does so because Dorian is an amusing spectacle.  Even the man who encouraged him on his descend will not accompany him on it, merely watch coldly from above.  Selfishnesss reigns. In a world filled with trivial amusements, and now more than ever obsessed with perpetual youth, Dorian Gray remains a warning.  In both art and substance, Wilde’s sole novel commends itself to the modern reader.

Related:
Mephisto, Klaus Mann

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Equal of the Sun

Posted on February 28, 2016 by smellincoffee

Equal of the Sun
© 2012 Anita Amirrezvani
431 pages

When Javaher came to the Iranian court, he did so with a secret mission: he intended to find out who murdered his father, and then return the favor.  So intent was he on this that he had himself made a eunuch to qualify for court service.  He quickly found himself at the side of an extraordinary woman, the Princess Pari — who, standing in for her aging father, effectively ran the government. But when the shah died without designating a successor,  both the realm and the palace are thrown into chaos. Being a woman,  Pari is not allowed to take the reins herself…but she has no intention of letting her family’s labors go to waste in civil war.   Her intervention makes her a target in the wave of violence that follows her father’s death in the next two years, and eventually ends in tragedy. Equal to the Sun is her faithful servant’s contribution to history; though she will be dismissed by the official histories, penned by scribes bowing to the wishes of far inferior and petty potentates,  hers is a story worth telling.

This is Amirrezvani’s second novel set in historical Iran, and continues her lovely incorporation of oral tradition within the twists and turns of the text.  The novel’s basic plot  is basic court intrigue, albeit with an mesmerizing figure at the center.  Princess Pari was a real personality, though given how little record there is of her life there’s a lot of interpretation at work here. Not lost on the author and her characters is the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who is fighting the same battle in England that Pari fights in Iran, that  a woman can reign as effectively as a man.  Amirrezvani draws a few discrete parallels to Elizabeth’s story, having Pari declare herself married to her country.  Her possession of the royal farr,  the glory and  essence of sovereignty,  is recognized by increasingly more characters as the novel wears on. In a court of men obsessed with tribalism and looting the coffers, she remembers how glorious Iran once was, and can see danger looming in the restive Ottoman empire, now looking at the internecine chaos as opportunity for its own expansion. Pari’s downfall is not jealous men, however, but a jealous woman. Her death is so surprising and abrupt that the reader is almost as horrified as Jahaver.

While Blood of Flowers had a more original premise (telling the story of an unknown artisan who creates exquisitely beautiful tapestries),  I welcome the return of Amirrezvani to  storytelling.  If she had only written a novel set in historical Iran, that would be of interest enough, especially given how passionate her characters are towards one another and their goals. But her integration of  oral tradition — folk stories in Blood, epic poetry here — with the text of the novel — is unique. Her characters are inspired and nurtured by stories old, even as they try to figure out their own destiny.   Parts of the book do bear a the too-heavy stamp of modern writing, though, like the intermittent sex scenes.  I tried to skip through them — is there anything more awkward than reading a woman’s version of a eunuch trying to have sex? —   but pillow talk often turned to political intrigue or mystery-solving.   That aside though…if she writes again, I’ll read her again!

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This Just In

Posted on February 24, 2016 by smellincoffee
During the weekend I said in comments here that I would love to see a book about spontaneous or emergent order that crossed disciplines. Well, by golly, now there is one — and it’s by Matt Ridley, who penned The Red Queen and Genome. Turns out he’s a member of the House of Lords, to boot. He appeared on Monday’s EconTalk, which has been the source of some of my favorite reads here in the last few years. They talked about language,  morality,  the history of science, and the reversal of American political parties in the late 19th century, in which the ‘liberal’ party became illiberal.   Their conversation can be enjoyed or read here.
                          
Bill Kauffman recently joined Jim Kunstler on the KunstlerCast to yak about localism, American literature, and a little politics. (Jim’s most recent political post: “Between the Obscene and the Unspeakable.”)     I had the rotten luck to discover this one yesterday right  before going to work, and so had wait for hours and hours until I could listen to two very colorful small-town partisans enjoying one another’s company.  Kunstler, for those who have joined me recently, penned The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. The first was a godsend for me,  articulating  a lot of unease and longing, and the latter has sharply influenced me over the past few years.  Kauffman, of course, is a barrel of fun. Neither of these guys can be put into a political party:  Kunstler claims to be a Democrat, but he has such visceral contempt for virtually everyone involved on both sides that I think it’s a lesser-of-evils decision for him:  more Democrats than Republicans make mouth-sounds about the futility of playing god overseas.  What brings these fellas together, though, is their shared localism. They both believe in the virtue of small-town America over the suburbs and big cities, though in addition to the communal aspects Kunstler holds small towns to be less fragile, economically. Both gentlemen practice what they preach, living in New York  villages…and Kunstler,  patiently awaiting the collapse of globalization,  homesteads. 
So, if you want to listen to some interesting conversations, this week is off to a good start.
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You Still Can’t Call me Inspector Gadget

Posted on February 23, 2016 by smellincoffee

A few years ago I penned a few thoughts  (“Go Go Gadget Literature?”) distancing myself from e-readers and e-books, then exploding in popularity. A recent post by Lori at Should Be Reading made me think of it, and for good reason: I’ve had a Kindle Fire for just about a year now.  “What?” cry you, “Have the mighty fallen?!”

Eh. It’s not so dramatic.  I bought it as a tablet, really. Perhaps I was already on the slippery slope, for a few months prior to that I’d downloaded Kindle for PC so that I could read the occasional supremely cheap or free ebook on my computer.  It was an easy step, really, to buy the gadget and since it was my 30th birthday…why not?   In the year since, the Kindle and I have gotten along tolerably well:  last year, I read no less than eleven titles on it. (The first? Kindle Fire HD for Dummies, naturally.)  That’s something on the order of 7% of my reading from last year, though, so my pursuit of real books hasn’t been diminished in the least. On the contrary, the ability to zap previews of books to the Kindle has led to my buying the real deal.  The kindle allowed me to plow through the entire Narnia series within a couple of weeks despite some rascal having later books in the series checked out. So far, I have used my Kindle only for exceptionally cheap e-books, books received for free via the kindle lending library or my own, or (as is the case this year) NetGalleys.  I don’t carry my Kindle about with me, for fear the thing will drop or be stolen. I don’t have that problem with real books; those I own are subject to all manner of abuse, riding with me in cars and taking hits from the slings and arrows of everyday life. I have so far avoided the biggest peril of e-books, distraction. If I get an itch to check my email, I make it wait until I hit the end of a chapter.  Some genres lend themselves well toward the e-reader; I thought Spam Nation an appropriate e-book read, but I try to avoid reading ‘real’ literature on it (classics, for instance). Literature should have the same weight in the hand as it does in the mind, and it’s best to take it with a drink. Tea, perhaps, or my favorite vice, coffee.

 So, while I have embraced the new, the old is in no wise threatened. At least…not by me, but then I do call myself a young fogey.

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The Wild Weird World of Biology

Posted on February 22, 2016 by smellincoffee
So, it turns out The Lives of a Cell has little to do with cells.  I checked it out figuring to learn something about how cells work, since I’m a ways removed from fifth-grade life science, or even freshman bio.  I wasn’t just judging the book by its cover — when I peeked in, there was a paragraph about mitochondria!  As it turns out, though, Lives is a collection of essays sharing the theme of sociobiology. As our cells are a collection of organisms working together for mutual benefit, and our cells themselves work together with other cells again for mutual benefit, and bacteria within us work with us for our mutual benefit, the author attempts to apply this to the human race as as a whole, likening language and other constructs to the vast structures that insects build together. No insect is conscious of what it is doing, but it does it, and it creates something wondrous and vast.  I enjoyed the author’s voice enormously, but the actual science is probably dated. It has a seventies charm about it, though,  bringing to mind the fanciful idea that the Earth is one big organism.

(This cover is…fun.)

That was polished off on Friday, and over the weekend I roared through the utterly eye-opening book Unnatural Selection, on how medicine, pesticides, and such are forcing rapid evolutionary change all around us.  Expect a review for it in the next couple of days. I’ll be following that up with E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, and after that..golly, I might just give biology a slight break.   There are all sorts of rabbits I might chase next, though I’m laying off new purchases for a little while, so I’ll mostly be working from my little stack of unread nonfiction or from my monthly bag-o-books from the uni library.

Here’s to wrapping up February with a bang!

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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Posted on February 21, 2016 by smellincoffee
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
© 1966 Robert Heinlein
382 pages

So you say you want a revolution? Bozhemoi! The Moon is a Harsh Mistress combines politics and science fiction to follow a colonial rebellion…in space. In the year 2076,   the residents of a Lunar penal colony tire of Earth’s   mercantilist policies, which keep the “Loonies” impoverished. After a political rally is brutally crushed by the Lunar Authority, a few souls decide to homebrew a little regime change.  The resulting story follows a conspiracy of three as it ripens into a popular revolt, defending itself against the indignant government of Earth.

The lunar settlements began as collections of Earth’s combined political and criminal refuse, but have since become full-fledged communities, with homesteading families and unique customs.  Save for the authority invested in a man called the Warden, there is little overtly penal about the various settlements scattered about the lunar landscape. There are no walls, no chains – only the fact that long-term lunar residency makes a return trip to Earth virtually unthinkable, given the weakening of the body.   The adjustments needed to operate on the moon are an important plot point later on,  when earth-lubbing troops attempt an invasion.  More interesting is a figure central to the plot and the revolution: the supercomputer used by the Lunar Authority to manage various systems. Unbeknowst to virtually everyone save the computer engineer (Manny) who serves as the main character, the central computer has been expanded so much that he has become both self-aware and mischievous; assisting in a revolt against the Lunar Authority is a joke right up his alley.   Another area of interest are the social arrangements on Luna; because women are greatly outnumbered by men, polyandry is common.

Although I assumed from the start that the revolution would be a success, these various elements ensured that the novel remained thoroughly interesting. Kudos to Heinlein for borrowing from both American and Russian revolutionary mythology to inspire his conspiracy. Frankly, given that this book was written during the Cold War, I was surprised at the abundance of Russian names and slang; Heinlein wasn’t exactly a fellow traveler, referring to the Soviets as the ‘butchers of Budapest’.  Welcome were the  forays into political philosophy, as the conspirators argued over what the root problems facing them were, and how they should avoid them if a new government was created. (“If” because overt laws were unknown on the moon, replaced by rigorously-enforced customs.)   One character describes himself as a rational anarchist, maintaining that – regardless of abstractions like “the state” – every man alone is responsible for the choices he makes.  Nothing can be sloughed off onto the state, nothing excused.    Moon is an overt expression of libertarianism, in both insisting that every man bears his own moral responsibility, and in denouncing those who attempt to claim control over another’s life.  Still, Mannie observes with a sigh, there seems to be some instinct within us to want to meddle.

Fifty years after publication, the political philosophy isn’t the only relevant portion. Although modern readers will find the notion of one computer controlling the entire planet as rendered here (and in much of Asimov’s early fiction), fanciful, Heinlein is closer to the mark than is obvious. The sorts of mischief that Mike employs to aid the rebellion – providing information entrusted to him by the warden,  spying via telephone hookups, providing secure channels of communication, disrupting services – are the same kinds of havoc cyberwarfare can wreck today. We do entrust the planet’s care to a machine: a network comprised of millions of computers, with more connection every day.

In Moon we have a novel with all manner of notable subjects which is at the same time an fun  story in its own right. Oh, the ending is more or less foretold, but  the author intrigues from the start by delivering the story in a pidgin English heavily flavored with Russian expressions.  It seems odd on the first page, but seems natural within a few sentences.  Heinlein provides a fair amount of humor, as when Manny receives a massive smooch from a lady rebel upon his induction into the nascent conspiracy and says “I’m glad I joined! What have I joined?” Most of it comes from Manny’s own narration however, as when he is commenting on the mess that is being human.  This will remain a favorite, I think, and one so brimming with argument that it merits frequent re-reading.

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An Economist Gets Lunch

Posted on February 17, 2016 by smellincoffee

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
© 2012 Tyler Cowen
293 pages

Imagine going out to eat with someone who really likes to talk about food, and imagine that this person is also an economist. That’s An Economist Gets Lunch, three hundred pages of very excited chatter about food culture and markets across the world.  There’s no argument to be had, just sheer enthusiasm for the subject at hand, one that I had to be wary about reading because it kept giving me the munchies.   Cowan’s concoction is a weird mix of  culinary discussion, economics, world travel, and history.  He doesn’t produce a set of rules: there’s a principle guideline, followed by many little bits of advice. The key principle is this:  food is a product of supply and demand, so look for options where the supplies are fresh, suppliers are creative, and the customers are demanding. The implications of this are broader than “avoid fast food”.   Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean bad;  most of Cowan’s favorite culinary experiences happen while traveling in less-industrialized areas of Mexico,  Nicaragua, Sicily, Thailand (he’s very well traveled, this fellow) and other places. Because food markets are predominately local there, supplies tend to be fresh and the creators specialists in their region’s offerings. The price is dirt cheap, compared to the cities.  A high price tag doesn’t indicate that the food is exquisite, either: often it carries with it the money sunk into creating a luxurious restaurant environment, complete with superfluous staff like valets, or the high rents.Cowan especially disdains the city centers of touristy areas like Paris and Rome. You want good Italian food, hop on a train and head for the back country, he urges. And French? Try Japan.   
Cowan makes for an interesting dinner companion, going from this to that topic. He starts off with a discussion of why American fine dining is largely inferior to Europe’s, blaming it on Prohibition, television, and parents who cater to their kids’ bland palates.  Later on he devotes an entire chapter to the majestic enterprise that is barbeque, and defends agribusiness. Don’t blame agribusiness networks because they produces crappy fast food, says Cowan, any more than you would blame the printing press for producing pulp fiction.  Curiously for someone who is generally aware of the impact politics have on markets, he assumes the entire reason people rally against GMOs is because they’re scary. It’s not a question of the products being proven safe, but of power and corruption: the companies producing these things are the ones with commanding market shares and accompanying political influence, supposedly regulated by their former coworkers. No sooner has he written on this, however, has he returned to an apparently favorite topic: the ins and outs of good Chinese food. 
This is a book of interest, but it goes back and forth so much I have no idea who the target audience is. There’s definitely more information about food than economics, for what it’s worth. 
Related:
  • EconTalk interview with Cowen on the book. You can scroll down for a transcript of the conversation and get a lengthier feel for the author’s many food interests.

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SCIENCE! ..and other stuff

Posted on February 17, 2016 by smellincoffee

Dear readers:

 I am still scratching an itch for science and science fiction, both in books and on the screen.  Over the weekend I read A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age,  on inculcating scientific habits of mind.  It’s rather like The Demon-Haunted World, in presenting the virtues of the scientific method and skepticism, but is much more detailed. The author hails from a technical profession, astronomy, and in addition to teaching the reader to think critically about numbers and fault-check claims,  he attempts to guide readers through interpreting statistics and reading graphs.  It thus combines more general practices (scrutinizing a claim to see how it might be falsifiable) with training in more detailed analysis. The skills involved have much broader use than just in  thinking critically about science journalism; they apply just as well to evaluating economic charts. I am not nearly as optimistic as the author that people can be prompted to start giving news reports more scrutiny, but even learning that million, billion, and trillion are not synonyms for “a lot” would be a help.  He ends the book with an argument for a scientific claim that uses the mental ‘apps’ taught prior.  His passionate for science will carry over well, even if readers don’t respond to the challenge of breaking out paper and pencil to break down every graph for what the data really means.

The weeks to come will see more science and science fiction, though I’ll throw in other material as well –as I did this weekend, with Lost to the West, a  brief survey of the eastern Roman empire. I just received The Asimov Chronicles in the mail; it’s an anthology of Asimov’s first fifty years of storytelling, one story for each year. Surely there’s one in this 832 pg book I haven’t read.

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Reads to Reels: The Time Machine

Posted on February 17, 2016 by smellincoffee

Showing up late for a dinner is bad enough, but when a man is the host? Still worse, he stumbles in looking like he’s been run down by a carriage, and with a wild tale of having traveled through time to boot. That’s the start of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, the story of a scientist-inventor who creates a way to move through the “fourth dimension”, time.   This 1960 dramatization is fairly faithful to the original, though the tenor of the story is delivered differently.  It’s an old enough book that most readers will know the plot: a man is thrown forward in time and discovers the descendants of man, a race of dim but happy Barbie people lolling about and eating fruit by day….and being occasionally dragged underground by hairy industrial Morlocks by night.  After many scenes of wonder and peril, the unnamed Time Traveler escapes to the future, where he watches the sun die before returning home, in dire need of mutton.  Here,  any travel past the age of Eloi and Morlocks is dropped, and “George’s” entire story becomes one about fleeing man’s penchant for fratricidal wars.

Although the  movie’s general theme changes from scientific wonder to bemoaning war, in truth the viewer loses nothing in the dropped scenes or the added message.  Had the original novel been filmed scene for scene, we would have seen at best a rude model of a swollen sun, one that would surely appear dated now. In contrast, the time-lapse videography that so astounds George —  the sight of flowers blooming and folding, of the sun roaring across the sky in seconds – these still have power to amaze, even in an age of Planet-Earth-type visuals.  There is almost some humor in George’s misfortune at the outset: his first forays take him first to England amid the Great War, then World War 2, and then – so help me – the beginning of World War 3.  His arrival among the Eloi is the result of attempting to escape a nuclear bomb, the resulting fallout, and geologic upheaval.  George is a man of H.G. Well’s sensibility, who believed that scientific progress would be not only material, but societal as well, leading to global peace and prosperity. Seeing material progress still plagued by war – and then destroyed by it – makes George an unhappy camper, especially when he sees that humans have become docile vegetables, happy to bake in the sun and then be eaten.  He injects some much-needed spirit  in their little lives to resist the Morlocks, before returning home to fulfill his dinner obligation (a very polite gentleman is George) and then going back for the girl he left behind.

You can almost hear the ST TOS fight music.

There are dated elements, especially the other visual effects: the Morlocks’ costumes, Weena’s classic fifties hair, and odd shots like the ‘recording discs’ that are played by being spun like a top.  Altogether, though, it ages tolerably well, and is a delightful, old-fashioned story…quite a nice change of pace from today’s ‘gritty reboots’.  (Speaking of: Wells fans may like Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells builds his time machine and promptly loses it to Jack the Ripper.  Horrified at the idea of a beast running around in the utopia that will be The Future, Wells pursues him only to arrive in 1979 San Francisco.  Paradise, it ain’t.)

There’s a fun little joke on one of the props: the machine bears a plate that identifies it as having been manufactured by one H. George Wells. And so it was!

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Reads to Reels: 2001 A Space Odyssey

Posted on February 16, 2016 by smellincoffee

 “You can tell who read the book (2001) before they watched the movie”, said a friend of mine, because they’re the only ones in the theater who aren’t asking, ‘What was THAT?'” at its end.   2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the two strangest films I’ve seen, but one of the most impressive technically. My first hint of the strangeness came in watching a ship from Earth travel to an orbiting space station, docking with it at the speed of tectonic drift and then later slowly cruising to the Moon to settle in there.  Reflecting on the year it was created, however, I realized this may have been one of the very first times human actions in space was ever modeled before cameras.  No doubt they wanted to savor the accomplishment, especially considering that this was filmed during the Apollo program, when man’s foot had yet to step down upon the moon.  As a piece of craftsmanship, it’s impressive in many other ways; the ships and stations do not scream “obvious model”, and some of the video effects were stunners.  In the last section of the film, for instance, the lead character is taken into a hyperspace tunnel, both he and the reader bombarded with a light show that makes one think of acid trips. What sells the experience are interspersed shots of the astronaut’s face in increasing flashes of wrenching terror and panic.
These accomplishments withstanding,  2001 does present some issues.  There is virtually no exposition, for instance, so when another mysterious light show accompanied by wailing ends with a cock-eyed giant baby hovering around Earth,  and the credits roll, the only people who have any idea what was happening are those who read the book. (The rest, presumably, look a bit like the man in the hyperspace tunnel.)  This is  problem that dogs the entire film,  because without that narrative it seems to consist of four completely different sequences with little connection to one another,  all of which consist of preposterously long tracking shots. These feature ten minutes of an astronaut drifting in space and breathing, as well as many scenes with spacecraft moving seemingly in real time.  Even the hyperspace scene was marred by this, because terror loses its edge if it is prolonged. I commented afterward that half the film seemed to be tracking visuals and music, with a spoken script that might have fit on a pocket notebook.  It is if nothing else  a unique film, one that left me wondering what on earth the producers were on while they created it.  Its classic status is well merited. 

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