Recent viewings

Wall Street (1985). A well-made morality tale about the moral seduction of a young man, complete with archetypical mentor figures that would make Joseph Campbell and George Lucas scratch their heads and say "that character seems familiar...."

It seems that I am only now catching up with the pop culture of the 1980s, which I studiously avoided when it was new.

The stars are moving toward a fateful alignment

Texans or Oregonians who seek to propitiate the Great Old Ones, take note:

The HPL Film Festival

At the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, TX, on August 19-20, and the Hollywood Theater in Portland, OR, on October 5-6-7.

News noted

The LA Times profiles the science fiction special collection at the University of California at Riverside. The article documents also the hostility that both public libraries and academia have toward any literature of ideas that anybody actually reads.

Dissent 101. The trials and tribulations of unauthorized student publications on campus. (Article by Anna Clark, first published in Bitch; republished in UtneReader.)

Dysfunctional academic job searches, as described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This photo, featured on the current issue of UtneReader, is perhaps the most revealing photo of its subjects I've ever seen. As Knoxview commenter "JaHu" states, "Bush looks like he's ready for the drawdown at the Okay Coral. I don't know if the two pistols on each side will help him though! One is liable to shoot an innocent bystander and the other may misfire." As for me, I'd add only that the fellow on the left looks for all the world like he's auditioning for a role as a live-action Monty Burns.

So you're the president. What happens if the elected Congress, the Constitutionally-authorized legislative or law-making branch of the government, passes a law you don't feel like following? Under the Bush doctrine of the Unitary Executive, you just ignore it. [New York Times] Because you're the Decider [CNN]. The Commander-Guy [Thinkprogress.org]. The dictator [Youtube].

Blake's 7 is back!

... sort of.

Now if only the BBC would get off its butt and finally release it on North American-formatted DVD.

Recent reads

Naomi's Room, by Jonathan Aycliffe. This book was highly recommended on the Fiction-L discussion list recently, so I requested a copy by interlibrary loan.

I can't say I'm disappointed, although I don't feel particularly inclined to lavish the same praise on it that the Fiction-L'ers did. It's a well written, taut and effective chiller, a quick and compelling story of a parent, an abducted child, and a house full of disturbing mysteries that will no doubt keep many readers up all night. But I've been inoculated, I think, against one of the key features of the plot by seeing it in a few too many books that I've read lately.

Steam Trek!

Groundbreaking pop-culture science fiction, as it might have been filmed circa 1918.

Guess the rifle and the rusty machete are good for something, after all.

53%
53%
Thanks to Weezy for the link.

Land of delusion

Paul Krugman has the story on Republican candidate Mitt Romney's disconnection from reality, as evidenced by his nonsensical assertion that the war in Iraq was prompted by a refusal to allow weapons inspectors into the country. (Hans Blix, anyone? Show of hands?)

Now Krugman, being a media type, is disgusted by the way many news folks have ignored this display of geopolitical and historical ignorance in favor of obsessing over minor matters such as misremembering Ronald Reagan's birthday. (It's December 25th, isn't it? ) No doubt Krugman is equally disgusted with fellow New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's silly and fetishistic obsession with the price of John Edwards' haircuts.

But I'm worried about a more basic problem. I'm worried about the fact that no one -- NO ONE -- in the Republican party is willing to call their candidates out on this kind of wilful ignorance. Or, as it may be, deliberate lying to a political "base" of partisan supporters who actually believe the lies and simpleminded propaganda that they are fed on a daily basis.

When Ron Paul, the maverick Texas congressman and onetime Libertarian, made the common sense statement in a recent debate that decades of U.S. and British meddling in the politics of middle-eastern countries had created widespread animosity and thus created a situation ripe for exploitation by fanatical malcontents and terrorists, he was in essence shouted down by a mob. Rudy "9-11! 9-11! 9-11!" Giuliani, assuming the role of scolder-in-chief, denounced Paul for supposedly supporting terrorists. When commenters on RedState.com, a Republican political blog, argued that Paul was factually correct, they were summarily banned by the site's administrators.

Apparently the only myth acceptable to the Republican party is that middle eastern people are inherently evil because God made them that way so that His Warriors from the Righteous Republican Party would have someone to kill. Or, at any rate, to use as boogeymen to scare the voters into voting Republican.

We seem to have a rogue political party, with imperial pretensions and connections to private mercenary armies wholly unaccountable to the Constitution or the voting public, that stubbornly refuses to recognize any reality that inconveniently contradicts its own internal myths.

What, me worry? La. La. La.

The game plan

Tom Englehardt of www.tomsdispatch.com provides a clear and concise review of the Bush administration's plan for establishing a permanent American imperial presence in Iraq.

This is consistent with the Project for the New American Century's white papers of the 1990s demanding invasion and permanent military domination of the Middle East. You know, like the one in which Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al, stated that --

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor."

Business, Republican style

Blackwater, the corporate right-wing mercenary army to which draft-dodger Bush and his cronies have outsourced much of the Iraq war, is using the threat of a $10 million lawsuit to silence the families of the four mercenaries who were killed in Fallujah in 2004.

Because Blackwater is, like, patriotic and stuff. And supports the troops. Yadda yadda yadda.

Among their lawyers:

Blackwater quickly adapted its battlefield tactics to the courtroom. It initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

No doubt the close nexus between Bush cronies and the legal goon squad attacking the families of these slain mercenaries is just a happy coincidence. Just like it was a pure coincidence that Bush campaign lawyer Ben Ginsberg organized the "Swift Boat" smear campaign against veteran soldier John Kerry.

Torturing children

The Guardian reports that several international agencies, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, want to know what the U.S. has done with 39 detainees who have not been accounted for in Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else. Among them are the sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who were 7 and 9 years old when captured in 2002. Now I don't doubt that their father may be an enemy, a terrorist, a criminal, a murderer. But allow me to repeat: 7 and 9 years old.

The report also expresses concern over the fate of Yusuf al-Khalid and Abed al-Khalid, the sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were taken into custody, aged nine and seven, in September 2002, during an attempt to capture their father. A former detainee says that he saw them in March the following year, around the time their father was captured, in a secret prison where the guards tormented them with insects.

We are apparently now a country that imprisons and torments children.

How would the United States react, I wonder, if Barbara and Jenna Bush were held in captivity for five years, with credible evidence that they were being deliberately tormented in some fashion, and no official accounting for their whereabouts or welfare? (I'd suggest Chelsea Clinton as another example, but, sad to say, Republicans would probably favor torturing anyone with that hated surname. Or even line up for pay-per-view tickets. All in the name of "family values" and the God who is Love, naturally.)

"Why Do They Hate Us", indeed.

Oh, look

It's another great webcomic that I will probably never have time to read. Thanks to Weezy for the link.

Recent reads

Buried in the Bitter Waters : the hidden history of racial cleansing in America, by Elliot Jaspin. Jaspin, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, noticed something strange when he started looking through historical census data while researching an outbreak of racist violence in Forsyth County, Georgia. The census data revealed, to his shock, that there were not just a few, or even a few dozen counties, but hundreds of counties, throughout the nation, in which the recorded black population practically vanished between one census and the next.

Once alerted to this anomaly, he followed up and found that in many such cases, newspaper articles, oral recollections and other sources showed that it was no mere coincidence. As he puts it, somewhat melodramatically but accurately, he had discovered America’s ethnic cleansings. Over and over again he found evidence of white mob violence, sometimes unofficially or even officially sanctioned by governing bodies, forcing blacks to flee for their lives from the town or the county in which they had lived. Jaspin documents, in exhaustive detail, episodes of similar racist mob violence in Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas and Missouri.

Some whites attempted to defend their black neighbors, but more often the evidence unearthed by Jaspin shows a sorry record of brutality, hypocrisy and opportunistic theft of the property left behind. In Forsyth County, for example, county tax rolls show that after black landowners were driven out of the county by white mobs and Klansmen with the collaboration of local and state government, the farms and houses belonging to the former black residents were simply appropriated by white neighbors. Local newspapers and city governments proudly proclaimed themselves “100% white”, “free of mosquitoes and Negroes”, in the aftermath. And, as Jaspin documents, racist attitudes persist in many of the “purged” locales to this day.

Almost as dismaying, if not particularly surprising, is the degree to which local historians and newspapers, including Jaspin’s own employer, seem to have collaborated in a conspiracy of silence about such pogroms.

Now it may be too much of a stretch to say that every county in which a precipitous drop in black population occurred in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century was necessarily host to such crimes. In some cases, significant numbers of blacks may have moved in or out of an area due to changing economic situations, such as the opening and closing of large industries that offered employment. And in some cases, lesser forms of discrimination, such as the refusal to permit black children to attend “white” schools combined with a refusal to supply schools that they could attend, may have accomplished similar results. But Jaspin proves conclusively that there was a pattern of such episodes across the country, and just as importantly, he documents that the local governments frequently supported or collaborated with the racist mobs.

This book serves a valuable purpose in documenting a pattern of systematic and criminal actions. It also provides a more logical basis for arguments in favor of reparations to blacks than any that I have heard before. It’s one thing to argue in the abstract that black people in the 19th century were generically victimized. It’s quite another to document the systematic theft and destruction of millions of dollars worth of land and other property with the collaboration of governmental entities whose duty it was to prevent such abuses. The descendants of those deprived of their legal property through such machinations have a defensible moral claim to compensation from the governments involved. And although individual perpetrators may be dead and gone beyond the reach of human justice, it is a legal characteristic of both governments and corporations that they continue, immortal and impersonal, from one generation to the next. The logistics, legalities, and politics of applying such claims may be very troublesome and impractical. It may even be impossible to document who is in fact descended from such property owners. But, whether or not it is practicable, the moral right and wrong are clear.

Recent reads

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, by Robert Lewis Taylor. I first picked up a dirty, battered secondhand copy of this book after hearing it praised on the Fiction-L discussion list. For several years I hauled it around with me from one apartment to the next as one of those books that I “planned to read someday”. Last weekend, someday finally arrived. It was worth it.

The year is 1850 (give or take a bit). Jaimie McPheeters is 14 years old, living a rather Tom-Sawyerish life in the river-trading town of Louisville, Kentucky, the child of what we would today call a dysfunctional family. His father is a physician, whose financial prospects and idealistically ebullient personality are blighted by a recurring fondness for whiskey and gambling, not to mention the failure of his disreputable customers to pay their bills. His mother disapproves. So do their creditors.

And so a grand scheme is hatched. To pay off the family’s bills and elude their creditors, Dr. Sardius McPheeters and his son Jaimie will emigrate to the great gold fields of California, become wealthy in that great bonanza and thereby redeem their family’s tattered fortunes.

Simple, huh?

Well, as one might suspect, it’s anything but simple. The trip to California turns into an epic adventure, all the more so because we see it through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy to whom a great many things, not just the unfamiliar landscape, are new and strange. Being an adventurous boy in the care of a lovable but careless father, he frequently gets separated from the latter and has to shift for himself. Along the way, Jaimie and his father encounter murderous thugs, stolid farmers, hopeful settlers, thieving scoundrels, and, sometimes, surprising nobility where they least expect it . They encounter human beings of every stripe, and it’s one of the novel’s strengths that no class or type of people is portrayed as being uniformly good or bad. Some Indians are shiftless, filthy, and sadistic; others are fiercely honorable. Some frontiersmen are rough-hewn examples of courage and competence; others are bullying buffoons. Some Mormons are genuinely trying to build the most perfect society they can; others are vicious hypocrites who prey upon “mere Gentiles”.

And, as Jaimie learns, girls are a whole new world of trouble.

Once reached, the West proves to be something less than than the promised El Dorado, forcing the McPheeters and their trailmates to look to other means of survival and prosperity. Many of the scams and deceptions perpetuated on the settlers, such as “salted” mines, extortionately overpriced provisions, etc., are documented parts of western history.

The narrative shifts occasionally from Jaimie’s commentary to entries from his father’s journals, highlighting not only the difference between their perspectives as youth and adult, but the differences in their personalities. Jaimie, plainspoken and colloquial, is naïve at first, but quickly learns to be skeptical about the human potential for deception and skullduggery. His father, full of flowery words and rhetoric, is gradually revealed to be, perhaps, too idealistic for his own good, too prone to lose sight of the main chance at hand while dreaming of a Utopian future.

Some surprising and improbable coincidences occur in the plot, but they are not, perhaps, so surprising if one considers all the characters involved to be part of the same cohort of emigrants making their way across the country in the same year, all heading toward the famous gold fields of California. And besides, documented western history is full of strange coincidences and improbable meetings. Who's to say that fiction can't do the same?

The book won a Pulitzer prize in 1959, so I’m not exactly the first to notice it. But it seems to have become difficult to find in some libraries lately, so I’ll put in a plug for it. If you enjoyed Mark Twain’s tales of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, if you enjoy picaresque tales, if you enjoy realistic historical fiction with both grit and humor, check it out.

Recent reads

God Head, by Leonard Cline. This 1925 book and its author seem to be completely forgotten. I've searched every bookselling venue I know of, and can't find a single copy available for sale. I hope that someone reprints it one of these days, since it's an extraordinary book.

We first meet our protagonist and narrator, one Paulus Kempf, as he flees in terror from a vigilantes' raid on a union-organizing meeting in Ironwood, Michigan. Cline's prose is very unusual, almost like a ritual incantation or the driving rythym of medieval alliterative poetry:

Phantasmal night. Terrors and shapes pursued me, loomed suddenly before me, menaced me with upraised fists; stealthy footfalls I imagined cracklign in the brush on all sides of me. And across the black sky moved slow columns of ghastly bluish light, monstrous fingers they were that pointed along the hills and the roads and poked into every coign [sic] and hiding-place. They were searchlights set up at the various mines and on top the shafts, sweeping the highways in search of suspicious travelers ... sweeping the hills in search of me. Later I learned that barriers were strung across every road on all the Gogebic, and men armed with shotguns lay in wait behind them; that word had circulated I was seeking to escape and must be captured. What hue and fever wracked the range that night I did not know, but nevertheless surmised; and I pressed on ecstatic with fear beneath the screening trees. The darkness and the loneliness of the woods terrified me too, but not so much as did the thought of noose and gallows-fire and pouring of bullets behind me.

His nightmarish flight ends in peaceful refuge with a small Finnish family at their isolated farmstead on the shore of Lake Superior, deep among the trackless forests and rocky hills of the western upper peninsula. As he recuperates, Paulus slowly gets to know his rescuers. Karl, the towering man-mountain who carried him out of the woods, proves to be a steadfast, if somewhat stolid, sympathizer with his own political views. But Paulus himself is more sympathetically drawn to Karl's wife, Aino, an intelligent and spirited young woman of "lusty peasant beauty".

As he slowly recovers, she tells him the stories of the Kalevala, a cycle of mythic tales central to Finnish culture. At first he finds himself identifying with Kullervo, the tragic hero whose efforts, no matter how heroic or well-intentioned, always end in disaster. But then, as his attraction to Aino grows, she relates the tales of Lemminkainen, the amoral trickster who always wins, always escapes, always triumphs, though at terrible cost to everyone around him. And Paulus begins to adopt, more and more, the persona of just such a trickster.

I won't give away the ending of the book. Suffice to say that it's powerful, it's extraordinarily well written, and it's a superbly effective portrayal of the subtle power that myth can exercise over the human mind. One could debate whether Paulus is influenced by the tales of the Kalevala, by his own intellectual tendencies, or even that he is in some sense possessed by a supernatural agency. But the power of the book is beyond debate, and it does not deserve the near-oblivion to which our publishing industry and perpetual-copyright regime have consigned it.

Recent reads

Railroads of Colorado : your guide to Colorado's historic trains and railway sites, by Claude Watrowski. At first glance, this looks like one of those generic, cheaply produced coffee table books that feature lots of pretty pictures with vague and occasionally inaccurate text and captions.

However, on closer examination, it's more than that. The author -- a railroad enthusiast and videographer, according to the publisher's blurb on the book jacket -- briefly but accurately surveys the history of most of the legendary railroads of Colorado's Rocky Mountains. (The more profitable but less glamorous railroads of the flatter eastern half of the state are largely ignored.) All of the well-known Colorado mountain lines are addressed in short chapters: the famous Colorado Central with its spectacular Georgetown Loop; the picturesque but traffic-starved South Park line; the Rio Grande's mountain-vaulting lines to Cumbres and Silverton; the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific with its quixotic assault on the Front Range directly west of Denver; the scenic but perpetually-impoverished Rio Grande Southern; the impossibly convoluted railroads of the Cripple Creek mining district, and the standard-gauge Colorado Midland and its ludicrously difficult route through the sheer cliffs and brutal blizzards of Hagerman Pass. The author also briefly addresses lesser-known operations such as the quarry lines of the Crystal River valley and the mining shortlines of the Silverton area, as well as a couple of streetcar lines and small but popular tourist operations like the Pike's Peak cog railway. Two concluding chapters describe the Colorado Railroad Museum and the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, a preserved remnant of the state's narrow gauge network which was featured the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The descriptions are short but accurate, and do a good job of pointing out the most noteworthy features of each line. The photographic coverage will leave dedicated fans wanting more, but the photos present are a well-chosen mix of historical and contemporary images that serve to convey the distinctive style of each railroad described. Sidebar articles explain basic railroading concepts and present amusing anecdotes about the difficulties of mountain railroading.

It's a good basic introduction to a popular subject among railfans and modelers.

Imprisoned



For the record, she's been there for the past hour and seems perfectly content.

My first and probably only posting about Paris Hilton

At this point, her little melodrama is officially a farce.

Business, Republican style

Ordinarily I don't link to every single news story that illustrates the rampant corruption of the U.S. government, and particularly the blatant corruption of the one-party rule that the Republican Party has inflicted on it for the past few years. But this one is just too revealing to ignore.

It's from the New York Times, of course, which means that the thirty-percenters who still support Bush will automatically reject it as "liberal propaganda", since it didn't come from the Fox "News" that carefully tells them what it wants them to hear, carefully packaged in terms of what they want to hear. But for those who believe that reality still exists and should be consulted from time to time, it's very revealing.

Campaign Funds for Alaskan; Road Aid for Florida.

Selected quotes:

The road, a stretch of pavement near Fort Myers, Fla., that touches five golf clubs on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, is the target of a $10 million earmark that appeared mysteriously in a 2006 transportation bill written by Representative Don Young, Republican of Alaska.

Mr. Young, who last year steered more than $200 million to a so-called bridge to nowhere reaching 80 people on Gravina Island, Alaska, has no constituents in Florida.

The Republican congressman whose district does include Coconut Road says he did not seek the money. County authorities have twice voted not to use it, until Mr. Young and the district congressman wrote letters warning that a refusal could jeopardize future federal money for the county.

The Coconut Road money is a boon, however, to Daniel J. Aronoff, a real estate developer who helped raise $40,000 for Mr. Young at the nearby Hyatt Coconut Point hotel days before he introduced the measure.

Mr. Aronoff owns as much as 4,000 acres along Coconut Road. The $10 million in federal money would pay for the first steps to connect the road to Interstate 75, multiplying the value of Mr. Aronoff’s land.

He did not return phone calls seeking comment....

When he was approached near the House floor by a reporter, Mr. Young responded with an obscene gesture.

So, just to reiterate the key points: the locals don't want the interchange. The Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Federal Highway Administration advise against it. The local Congressional representative doesn't want it.

But a real-estate developer with money wants it, and he bribed a senior Republican committee member, so nothing else matters. And as for the rest of us, the authors of this cute little "business plan" feel no need to answer any questions or provide any comment other than a middle finger.

Meanwhile, the current Democratic House majority, although far from ideal on ethical issues, is at least willing to take some steps toward investigating and getting rid of its most blatantly corrupt members, something which the Republican Party refused to do during the years that it held power. For those of you who wonder why I've shifted from marginally preferring the Republican Party to anathematizing them and preferring anyone else, there's one clue.

Why do so many literature collections Go To Texas?

The New Yorker explains.

A revolutionary new reality game

Tired of Second Life or Sims? Try First Life!

Recent reads

The Aldrich Saga, by Charles Dickerson. Anecdotes of a boyhood in a small Missouri town. This book came to my attention because Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature highlighted some textual references to the name of a railroad that I’m researching. The book does indeed include some information about the railroad’s operations through the town, including descriptions of the hobos that rode in and out of town on the freight cars, the author’s father’s sometime assignments as “boomer” telegrapher up and down the line, and a rare instance – in this part of the country – of a passenger train being stranded in a blizzard. (Could the events in this last instance be related to an Oct. 1952 reminiscence in Railroad Magazine stating that the line’s engines “had a hard time keeping up steam in cold weather”?)

Most of the book is an account of everyday life in this particular small town. Idyllic summer fishing, economic struggles, family tragedies both great and small are recounted alongside descriptions of the sometimes playful, sometimes raunchy, sometimes cruel tales and practical jokes with which the “loafers” of the town amused themselves.

The author’s commentary on contemporary politics, appended at the end of the book, seems out of place, although no one can dispute that since it’s his book, he certainly has the right to put it there.

Recent viewings

American Psycho (2000). One of the most fundamentally repellent and unrewarding movies I’ve ever sat through.

Patrick Bateman, as he informs us in portentous voiceover narration at the beginning of the film, feels nothing. No emotions, no sympathy for others. He’s nothing but an expertly presented, studiously maintained, well buffed façade. So he informs us as we watch him go through his morning routine of exercises and fetishistic application of skin and hair care products.

We are then introduced to Mr. Bateman’s world. He’s a vice president of something or other at a company full of other aspiring cookie-cutter yuppie-droids with personalities about as deep as the makeup on their faces. They obsess over each other’s tailor made suits and, comically, over the preciously-designed business cards that they whisk in each others faces and compare as if they were comparing penises.

Up to this point, the movie had some promise as a deadpan satire on the slick but shallow yuppie pretensions of young would-be alpha males in the corporate world. But, of course, that’s not what American Psycho is notorious for.

It turns out that our boy Bateman gets his jollies by picking up hookers, drunk co-workers, and an occasional actual date, taking them back to his gleamingly sterile apartment, and massacring them in various ways, many of which are displayed in full, blood-spurting color.

Or…. DOES HE??? (More on this later.)

There are some amusingly black-humored bits, as when Our AntiHero brings a couple of hookers to his apartment for a threesome and then spends most of the time narcissistically grinning at his own reflection in the mirror while reciting inanely pretentious reviews of – so help us – Phil Collins albums. Or when he repeatedly blurts out revealing Freudian slips, such as quoting notorious serial killers or saying that his job is in “murders and executions”. It becomes a mildly amusing running gag that no matter how many times he says things like this, his co-workers and dates blithely ignore them or misinterpret them. “Oh, mergers and acquisitions….”

But the movie goes down hill from this point. Some of the methods by which Bateman dispatches his victims are simply not credible. (Trust me, no one can throw chainsaws that accurately.)

Now if the movie had gone full throttle all the way with its depiction of a completely soulless creature who fit in perfectly to the corporate world – murders and all! – I might have accepted the utter blackness of the satire on its own terms. But the filmmaker evidently backed off from this possibility, and the end of the movie simply falls apart as Bateman starts seeing things that are plainly nonsensical, such as an ATM machine that demands “Feed Me a Stray Cat!”, and gets involved in one of those ludicrously improbable movie gunfights in which an amateur shooter not only bests multiple trained, professional police officers, but ALSO causes their patrol cars to explode in gigantic mushroom clouds of flame for good measure. Then he tries to confess his crimes again, wanders into a party of some kind, tries to confess yet again. Once again, no one believes him. And the audience, having seen both Bateman’s alleged horrific acts in full color and equally convincing evidence that he is having schizophrenic hallucinations, is left with no clue whether they have watched the story of a soulless killer or the violent fantasies of a deranged madman. “My confession means nothing”, he informs us portentiously.

And for once, he’s right.

Recent reads

Shakespeare and Company, by Sylvia Beach. A very entertaining memoir of the famous bookshop in Paris, spiced with anecdotes of the famous and not-so-famous writers who seem to have used it as a kind of home-away-from home for English-speaking expatriates. Ernest Hemingway makes a few appearances, as does F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the most entertaining stories are about James Joyce and the epic struggles that he and the bookstore proprietors went through when they decided to publish his book Ulysses themselves. The book, of course, was legally deemed obscene by certain countries including the United States and England. Meanwhile, Joyce proved to be an impossibly fussy writer, driving the printers and binders mad with his constant revisions and insistence on minute details of the book's physical appearance. Meanwhile, copies bound for subscribers in the U.S. were being confiscated at the border. Fortunately, the Canadians were more reasonable, allowing Ernest Hemingway to come to the rescue by arranging for an acquaintance, who frequently crossed the US-Canadian border by ferryboat, to smuggle them into the country one at a time hidden in his pants.

Thanks to Carlos for sending this to me.