Scarlet Letter and Ethan Frome

I read both The Scarlet Letter and Ethan Frome in high school, under that obligation. Both have New England as a setting in a dire way. SL’s setting seems primordial, a long distant past. EH sits later in time but far from contemporary. 

SL was a tester for me because the lengthy Custom House section hardly makes clear what the story is about. I recognize it now as a delightful meditation by Hawthorne but I wasn't ready for that in high school. I saw it as a long grey patch of writing, required reading. The story itself lacks action and couldn't compete with the sci-fi I was reading, and certainly not Lord of the Rings. 

I don't remember how either book was taught but reading for pleasure never seemed a priority among the teachers I had nor did I expect assigned reading to offer pleasure. One can think of all the books that one was lucky enough NOT to read in school.

EH is a more normal sort of novel. I believe stolidwas used to describe the New England archetype. This archetype accepts that New Englander’s are tight-lipped and emotionally withdrawn. I have had to consult the internet to remember the plot. The setting is the fictitious town of Starkville, so Edith Wharton was unafraid to push buttons.

EH came to my mind today because it culminates in the protagonist attempting to escape his circumstances for a less stolid life. SL does likewise with Hester and Arthur. I remember hoping for a successful escape of Ethan and Mattie as they try to leave Ethan’s wife behind for a new life together. Wharton presents such hopelessness in the circumstances. The ruinous sled ride that quashes all hope seems ridiculous now with its irony and almost gothic bleakness. 

The escape for Hester and Arthur proves different. Hester, by virtue of her strength and character, had already defeated the Puritanism of 17th century Boston. She had defined herself outside the prevalent moral morass. Arthur, sickly and weak, was never going to escape, but he did manage to uphold his moral code, a sort of redemption for him. EH reads more like a soap opera. I don't remember Wharton's prose stylings but the plot follows a normative course so that the characters become chess pieces in her narrative game. Hawthorne's meditative prose suits the story of SL. Much of his writing resides in a place both historical and fantastical, Hawthorne's playground and battlefield. 

I hadn’t intended a counterpoint between the two books. I took notice of a shared moral climate in both owing, one can posit, to New England’s Puritan foundation. It also occurred to me how students were served these weighty emanations of Puritanism, as if fortifying the regional obligation. SL ends on a high if tragic note whereas EH seems like utter chastisement. I don’t recall either book presented in terms of their artistry or any sort of reading pleasure. They were just dutiful requirements in the school year

One Route

 And there was the time crossing the I-states Beth and I taking Erin to visit his father in a summer exchange. Highway tide rushing thru nondescript Illinois skirting the big Windy City which had a gravitational pull even as we passed then dun-coloured Indiana where rest stops were something crushing and barely relief and excited nearing a bridge over the Mississippi was that ever a challenge to spell and over the great river father so called and found the motel where we would meet on a hillside above. It got to be a good downpour there while I gathered suitcases from the car in rising wind and only after did I learn a siren sounded tornado warning just a mile or so away while I scrambled inside with our luggage. And in the lobby we saw a pen and ink drawing of the North Bridge in Concord by an artist we met at the North Bridge in Concord who drew as he sat by the North Bridge in Concord and sold us some prints of local interest. All interest should become local it just takes a bigger hand. The homely and not so majestic Concord River thereby tied us to the very Father of Waters tho it looked more industrial and smelled a smell but it was history and context and even trumped up riverboats and the map has life and eyes into the world however we want to read it then and now.

The Grungy Henry Miller

 The extended philosophical passages in Henry Miller’s work have little resonance for me. It’s just argle-bargle, written in glib confidence. His use of slurs also exhibits glibness. He sounds enclosed when using slurs. Rather than showing rugged power, as profanity can, his usage deflects towards emptiness and cold hell. I acknowledge that he wrote at a time when profanity and obscenity were synonymous and offensive. Nowadays one hears fuck commonly used as an intensifier. The word becomes more a flimsy noise and distraction than a meaningful stun gun. Miller’s slurs have the same effect. They sound unexamined, and barely give testament. I see Miller’s method as sluice-like where the quantum of writing involves unleashing the stream. He wants to get as much out as he can where much means ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, as Keats lastingly had it. Some of ‘it’ is malarkey and literary tripe. When his acerbic beam is working, as well his sense of the absurd, matters gain a raiment of wonder.

Kerouac Note

 Neither On The Road or The Dharma Bums give much picture of him as a writer. Both give passing mention to his modest success as a writer, and he speaks of his notebooks here and there. No sense of him banging away at a typewriter. Given his peregrinations, filling notebooks would maybe not be a practical priority. The record of these books falls outside ‘pure facts’.

Miller and Kerouac

 Henry Miller seems like a writer who would resonate with the Beats. Anyway, I have started Tropic of Capricorn for the sake of perspective. I read Tropic of Cancer a couple years ago in a bold attempt to figure things out. Both writers write self-reflectively, in a torrential way. What are the shining rocks in that stream?

Miller is worth reading, thanks for asking, but he is crass and coarse. His philosophical musings favour vitriol, and don’t exactly swing. The forthright determination to lay it all out produces some keen insights and acerbic bite along with pompous detritus. He’s ready to wring it all out.

In contrast, Kerouac seems almost innocent. Kerouac lacks Miller’s world-weariness; he believes the kicks are still there, even as semi-colons appear. Where Kerouac welcomes the choices of the world, Miller infatuates in priapic devastation. I detect no sweetness in Miller’s work, tho brave and chilling,  whereas Kerouac’s sweetness reproves Miller’s taut and clumsy hedgerows.

The connections are interesting: Anaïs Nin, Laurence Durrell, the boho wanderers and dilettantes in the pre post war years, meeting an angry, fluttering, and almost round world. We can only be forgiving as we read. I am just the nobody reader who has chosen this task.

On The Road and Dharma Bums

 Jack Kerouac’s recklessness or carelessness interests me. This attitude manifests in two ways: in his writing, and in his actions and life choices. Both cases lead to a cloudy charisma, simultaneously inspired and loutish.

I am unsure what I knew of Kerouac when I was a teenager, I surely hadn’t read him. I can see the attraction for young minds, the sense of freedom. As a writer, words poured out for him. In sooth, he sometimes wrote awkwardly. That awkwardness was a grace. 

Kerouac trusted the energy of writing and kept the internal editor at bay. He doesn’t just outpour. He carefully reads the Zen script of the moment. He releases into that, not literature, not career. He is stalwart that way. This is important because typing fast supplies no rare glory. The sloppiness and abrupt oddity of his prose offers testament of singular integrity. 

As a naive teen writer, I moved to the typewriter soon after starting to write for myself. I didn’t know how to type but it made the writing act more serious for me. When I eventually learned to use all my fingers, the act of writing quickly (and legibly) became possible. I realized that I needed to outrun the internal editor that pressed me to overthink. I had no idea what to write, only that I wanted to. Kerouac probably had a clearer mission from the start.

T S Eliot’s constructions, for instance, seem very thought out in comparison to Kerouac’s methods. I don’t see Eliot hitchhiking across the country with ten salami sandwiches in his pack thinking this is a good idea. Kerouac committed himself to being on the edge of something happening.

Those passages where Kerouac writes of his travels (and travails) ring with energy. He proceeds with a romantic vision but endures the realities. A compelling wonder instills his words. However literally accurate his accounts are—mayhap his memory is of Proustian order—they proceed with cork-on-water determination. Thru thick and thin. Those long, waiting stretches and nowhere near home, and he just awaits the next and next destination.

Neal Cassady hardly appears in The Dharma Bums, and is hidden by the name Cody Pomeray whereas he stands central to the On The Road narrative. I will continue believing that the pseudonyms Kerouac had to use create a perplexing distance between Kerouac the writer and those of which he writes. My original version of On the Road enjoys greater immediacy of characters as Kerouac writes directly to the real name.

Cassady, Kerouac’s angel, is not quite lovable. Whatever clinical description that might be made, he is an original perplexity. Forces drive him and Kerouac follows in awe. The difference between Ryder/Snyder and Pomeray/Cassady shows in Kerouac’s reaction to each. Snyder offers a calm while Cassady offers ruction, however divine. Kerouac seems envious of Snyder’s determined path. Cassady leaves Kerouac in tantalized delectation.

The women in these two books barely survive scrutiny. They seem mostly tinny voices distracting men from enviable impulse. Kerouac the character remarks that friend and fellow traveler Al Hinkle got married for carfare, which indeed is the gist of it.

I don’t want to read Kerouac as a map to self-destruction tho I gather his latter years were less than glorious. In On The Road his peregrinations seem like a path inchoate. In The Dharma Bums he seems desperate to find the Zen path. But he was guided by a centripetal force from which he could not free himself. The romanticized account overwhelmed the living sparks.

When The Mahabharata Becomes Boring

The Mahabharata goes slightly less a-pace. I slipped off reading other things. The war is over for the Pandava’s, they have their kingdom again. Yudhisthira now feels the weight of kingly responsibility. He goes to his uncle Bhishma for advice. Bhishma fought for the Kaurava’s out of a sense of duty that doesn’t add up for me. Well there you are. His lessons for Yudhisthira bring Confucius to mind, not that I claim any breadth to that statement. Class distinctions stand inviolable. Warriors are warriors, Brahmins are Brahmins. Caste is understood as a sanctity. It is hard to wrap around this from my vantage. It reads like the bland list of advice that Polonius gives. I believe more action awaits, this part drags.

More Mahabharata

More Mahabharata

The battlefield action in the Mahabharata strains belief. Not its fantastical nature, I expect supernatural exploits in mythological tales, but just the difficulty of imagining the events. When we read that thousands died at Arjuna’s hand as he plunges into a fray, we can shrink that figure down to tens or a lot. if we are thinking of historical events. I don’t know what historical event might have inspired the story. Perhaps some Hatfield versus McCoy thing amongst cousins expanded to include a few trillion souls on their karmic journeys including every person dumb enough to be a chariot driver, id est expendable.

A few instances of so-called celestial weapons occur. These offer complete devastation in not quite explained ways, gifts from the gods like nuclear bombs.. Mantras and magic can also be weaponized. Arjuna’s quiver remains always full despite shooting thousands of arrows a second. I can’t even picture that, tho folks at Marvel Studios probably can. The fighting brings Marvel to mind because tho the nameless cannon fodder feed rivers of blood, the upper echelon heroes join in fierce battle but walk away merely wounded. Or pouting.

Heroic speeches prior to engagement with the enemy have a long tradition. But just thinking about all these zapping arrows, strewn bodies, gored elephants and horses, overloads you. Amidst this enormous clutter of human endeavour the valiant knights scurry about seeking chivalrous one on one fights. It wears thin. The Iliad, in comparison, reads like reportage of a real event, even with the similar boasty speeches.

A marked aspect of the Mahabharata is how resplendent the people and gods are. Dressed in splendid colours and bejeweled to the gills, they are visually vivid. The Greek gods seemingly just wear robes, if that. The Norse must be imagined ever in battle gear, men and women both.

So the action on the battlefield goes clearly over the top but amidst that we still have beautiful thoughtful passages. A strong moral and spiritual note holds the story up. It comes to us by oral tradition. You can imagine the originators telling the stories, however solemn, vivacious, or thrilling.

The Mahabharata

 Halfway into The Mahabharata we come to the part that often stands alone, The Bhagavad Gita. This represents a sea change for the epic. Up till now, the work has been mostly narrative with moral and spiritual matters occasionally interpolated. Now we have Krishna explaining duty to the unexpectedly quailing Arjuna. Krishna has always been understood as a god, but in human aspect. In this section he reveals himself in his terrifying god aspect. The imagery seems fit for Revelation—i. e. crazy ass—and the vision of Krishna in full godhead doesn’t exactly calm Arjuna. Eventually Arjuna comes around.

Earlier the Pandava brothers finished out their exile by hiring themselves incognito to one of the million kings in the area. Arjuna, greatest warrior in the world, chooses to be a eunuch dancing master in the ladies quarters. Bhima huge and Hulk-like becomes the king’s cook. He also teaches wrestling. At one point the brothers come upon their enemies the Kauravas. Bhima immediately wants to find a tree he can tear from the ground to wield as a weapon. “Bhima smash,” you can imagine him saying. Wise Yudhisthira convinces him of more diplomatic measures.

The account of the battle itself lacks the precision of the Iliad. Millions seem gathered on the field of Kurukshetra. In the Iliad Homer tallies the number of ships each Greek brought to Troy, supplying thereby a plausible guess at the size of the battle. The Pandavas and Kauravas each gathered allies to help supply requisite cannon fodder. It was quite the gathering.

When I first read the Gita, I was taken aback that Krishna scolded Arjuna for not wanting to kill these his cousins. Being of the warrior class, he has a duty to fight. That duty tangled with such pointless devastation doesn’t reconcile easily for me. The terms within the epic keep death fluid. The five Pandava brothers were earlier killed by Vishnu, I think. It was just a lesson, they were returned to life. All is foretold anyway.

Broken Theory by Alan Sondheim

  

Alan Sondheim has just published a new book, *Broken Theory*. Internet denizens with literary interests may know Sondheim’s name. He posts to numerous lists daily, I mean daily. This work comes in all shapes and sizes. It represents an unbelievably vast effort to mine the maelstrom of experience. *Broken Theory* seems like both a culmination of that effort, tho without a sense of finishing it, and perhaps a re-envisioning.

I have only just begun reading this book but twenty plus years of familiarity with Sondheim’s work gives me traces to follow. His is a work in which philosophy, psychology, literature, science, history, politics, and more collide and intercept within his experiencing mind. Does that even sound like anything? I declare that it idles.

What caught me as I began to read is that Sondheim has tempered the boundlessness of his writing so that the book can be a book. Think of how a tiny portion of The Mahabharata, The Bhagavad Gita, spun out with centripetal force as a singular work. In the same way *Broken Theory* has its own separated identity. I feel, as I read, a sense of the book as a whole while recognizing that it is but a portion of Sondheim’s enormous task.

Now, I admit that I have not read much of the book. I may not *finish* it. I think linearity doesn’t parse here, just as time seems far less linear than a calendar might suggest. Treat the book like an oracle—I doubt Sondheim has such an intention—and see what wildness, what mystery, what glint appears.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

 Finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I have mixed feelings about it. He presents a wonderfully troubling vision of the future, with humanity clearly having screwed the pooch. The intertwined narratives move a-pace but I’m pretty sure a good portion of Simmons’ intention dashed precipitously past my register. Rereading would be worthwhile if I had the energy.

Six main characters tell, in their own narratives, why they joined this pilgrimage to the so-called God of Pain. We only see this figure, known as The Shrike, in glints. It seems like The Shrike represents the natural endgame to humanity’s hubris. The Earth, centuries prior, has been destroyed. A hegira from the planet of origin spread restlessly across the universe in a seeming de-evolutionary scramble. War is constant, and massive.

Each narrative explains how the character joined this pilgrimage, which only one of their number is expected to survive. The narratives run to goodly length. Supposedly the pilgrims are telling their stories to the others. Okay, Canterbury Tales, The Decameron. These narratives, however compelling, resemble (not so) short stories rather than après dinerperformances intended to show each pilgrim’s motivations. Simmons did not try to replicate how the characters might regale the others. Perhaps that would have been unwieldy. I found it jarring to expect characters to be so narratively skilled in a literary way.

Although the narratives supply plenty back story, they also overwhelm with superfluities. I tended to lose track of the greater narrative amidst the details of the personal stories.

The book seemed overlong tho not in a dragging sort of way. It ended quietly, and for me without satisfaction. For all the apocalypso of humanity’s seeming last gasp, the books end with the characters singing “We’re off to see the Wizard”. I discerned no denouement, just coasting to a stop. The story seems unfinished but admittedly I raced to finish.

Not to worry, I guess. Three more books fulfill the series. I am on record about franchises. I don’t expect to press on. 

Simmons refers and alludes to a number of literary figures and works. Most notably John Keats. The poet even appears in AI form. One character, a hard boiled detective, carries the name Brawne Lamia. She and the Keats AI splice romantically. I don’t actually get what Simmons is up to but I appreciate Keats’ presence.

“The Call of Cthuhlu”

 I just read The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft. I’ve read a number of his stories, and find them compelling. This is my first meeting with Cthulhu. I’m a bit dissatisfied.

Of course I have absorbed some understanding of Cthulhu because the, er, character has cultural currency. The name resonates. Lovecraft’s mythos seems rather mushy when you look but carries weight for some. I mean people ‘take it seriously’, beyond the parameters of storytelling. I guess one could.

The story shows Lovecraft’s ability to create mood. The narration edges towards breathless. It runs on a similar hurried foreboding as some of the Sherlock Holmes tales display. Both writers were writing for lucre. This story, however, disappoints. It did not satisfy my anticipation.

The story suffers because of POV. The narrator isn’t really involved in the action, he merely pieces the story together from the narratives of other characters. This drives immediacy from the story. Poe’s story Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has the benefit of the narrator being involved in the action. In the almost apocalyptic ending, the narrator essentially disappears in the frantic rush of the (unfinished?) conclusion. It is as if the writer could not sustain his distance from the narrative.

Here, the narrator recites the stories of other people. He even loses interest in Cthulhu after a chapter ends. That was weird.

For all the mythos of the Ancient Ones, their arrival on Earth from space reminded me no more than of cheesy 50s horror and sci-fi movies. I mean cheap costumes and poor special effects. And it’s not like that must kill the story. The Thing (50s version) was a vegetable from space—a murdering carrot—and convincingly scary.

Cthulhu may look like a kraken, which struck me as unimaginative, but the threat offered seems more about strangeness and foreignness. I glean no point to the malevolence beyond the usual Monster versus Us. And monster is just Other. The Ancient Ones are illegal immigrants on a cosmic scale, screwing with our paradise. Cthulhu personifies that terrible One that ain’t us. Lovecraft’s sense of the world’s decay sets on that foundation. Which may sound familiar because the GOP has been feverishly pressing that button. You have probably noticed.

So I do admire Lovecraft’s narrative gift and the relentlessness of his vision. In the end, tho, he seems more fussy than visionary in this story. He was a racist Bozo, you know. That’s inevitably part of the judgment.

The Fu Manchu of Our Lives

 I am reading The Insidious Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. I have read several Fu Manchu stories over the years. I think. Rohmer wrote many books about this nefarious Oriental’s clash against Sir Denis Nayland Smith and all that is good. It doesn’t matter what title you select, tho, the books are all the same.

Racism shows thick in these stories. They express a solid, nay impenetrable, demarcation between races, and a surety that races exist in so clear cut and confining fashion, that I find obnoxious in their bland acceptance. And it is all wholly instituted by a lack of inwit. The contractual racism of good British life somehow fulfills the otherwise squalid meanness of colonial empire.

Fu Manchu’s aim never comes clear to me. Sure, world domination, like any good master criminal desires, but specifically what that entails never fully forms for me. Years ago while misspending my youth, a wrestling body featured a narrative concerning The Fourth Reich. The beat of this was that a goose stepping German wrestler and his cronies would conquer the wrestling entity (not one belonging to Vince McMahon). Having accomplished that, the free world would be a piece of cake. Against this dismal prospect stood some All American boy, I don’t remember who. Hooray for our side. Professional wrestling has played that key to a fare thee well, stoking the unexamined fears. Rohmer, I expect, merely saw readership nodding at the implicit horror of Other.

I read past the racism because in the end the stories propel themselves with nervy excitement. If any prose bristles, Rohmer’s does, mystery and foreboding on every page. His language sizzles.

Rohmer takes the tales of Sherlock Holmes exactingly as model. The relentlessly focused hero and his down to earth sidekick meet mystery and danger at every turn. Nayland Smith is far more bumbling than Holmes, however. In the end he never seems to defeat the insidious Doctor. Instead some Deus ex happenstance thwarts the evil one this time. 

Tho more upright and ascetic, Sir Denis Nayland Smith resembles James Bond, a dedicated functionary of the colonial machine. He evokes a Britain of caretakers thoughtlessly fulfilling the white man’s burden. The instinct to lift the primitive toward that creamy excellence called Civilization constitutes the soothing narrative implicit in all actions in these stories. 

The stories routinely begin with Nayland Smith breathlessly arriving at his friend Dr Petrie’s place fresh from some barely explained trouble in Burma. The name Burma itself oozes with danger and mystery. Always Smith is pursued by the lascars and dacoits that serve as minions of the Evil One. Lascars are sailors from Southeast Asia, and dacoits are bandits from the same region. Rohmer—real name Arthur Ward—makes them seem like mongrel races, certainly not the stuff of Eton. They are red shirts in the service of evil.

As this novel begins, Smith anxiously attempts to protect Sir Hyphen-Hyphen, Assistant Minister of Something About the Orient, from the fell plans of the acknowledged Master of the Yellow Menace. Alas, Smith is too late. The fiend has managed to kill this august personage, right under Smith’s nose.

Despite acknowledgement as a genius, DrFu Manchu’s methods always seem convoluted. The initial murder in this tale provides illustration. While the victim works in his study, a dacoit climbs onto the roof and lowers a deadly centipede down the chimney into the study. I may have the details skewed because the rush of prose causes my reading eyes to race ahead. But how to get this centipede to attack? Why, first send the soon to be victim a missive with a special scent infused in the paper. This inexorably draws the deadly centipede to Sir Hyphen-Hyphen, and Sir Hyphen-Hyphen to Death’s fell clutches. Conan Doyle has worked similar magic but perhaps never so outré.

In the Holmes stories, Dr Watson mostly serves as narrator. He may pull out his pistol but Holmes is the show. Dr Petrie does that but more. He is dazzled, and I mean dazzled, by Fu Manchu’s daughter. She shows up early on as branded Woman of Mystery. Petrie is smitten. Rohmer tempers not his adjectives in warmly describing her effect on Petrie. And the feeling is mutual. This provides narrative tension because her dad, you know, a confirmed murdering maniac. Also, he is Oriental. 

The two meet cute in this story but I am pretty sure they’ve met cute in other stories. They eventually marry in one of the books but I don’t think dad walked her down the aisle.

The Thames oddly plays a vivid role in these stories. Fu Manchu chooses riverside opium dens for his hangouts. Which makes sense what with all the shipping bringing new shipments of lascars and dacoits to do his bidding. In this story, the boys confront the evil genius in the comforting dampness of his den. Petrie leads the rush but the Doctor releases a trap door and Petrie like to drown. Sir Denis could not quite reach him. Is it up for Petrie? A chinamen that had been in the den removes pigtail and mask. It is Fu Manchu’s daughter. She gives the queue to Sir Denis, who pulls Petrie to safety, then disappears into the sinister night. Whew! More narrative will surely follow.

Rohmer expends some prime prose describing the river’s beauty and threat. In the end, tho, the lurking presence of the evil green-eyed doctor remains. It is the fear of fear, a fear that we all know.

Some Flann O’Brien

 I’ve read three novels by Flann O’Brien, each multiple times. At Swim Two Birds shows an extravagant imagination, as well as the influence of James Joyce. I shall read it once again. It is a power of writing but almost too much so.

The Dalkey Archives nearly seems ordinary compared to its mates. It is fun and silly and surely shows O’Brien’s gift. Maybe he has tempered his wildness for readership’s sake. 

The Third Policeman never met publication in his lifetime. Possibly Dalkey tried to answer that. I find The Third Policeman brims with wonders. It is dark, extravagant, humourous, eerie, strange, folksy, and furtherly described by adjectives, including unsettling, and more. O’Brien presents some wild ideas. One such is the Atomic Theory, which explains how people can become bicycles by the trading of molecules during bumptious rides. I don’t read with scholarly might but I enjoy the breadth and wonder of singular works. Those are the sort that O’Brien wrote. He should be read breathlessly.

The Idiot by F. Dostoevsky

 

I am reading *The Idiot* by Dostoevsky. Doing so on a tablet, I didn’t grasp how long it is. That I remain vague about the book’s length disconcerts me. That the pagination changes according to the orientation of the tablet leaves me a trifle wobbly. That the novel is part of a collection of D’s work leaves me unsure where I am. However, read I do.

I have read and appreciated *Crime and Punishment *. *The Brother Karamazov * is another matter, having thwarted me twice so far. I never caught a sense of its trail so the collection of irritated characters just kind of stand there for me. I feel similarly about the characters in *The Idiot* but at least I perceive plot machination or manifestations. The prince and Natasha will dance somehow, and maybe Aglaya.

I am less than keen about characters as directed forces. I see a molecular way the characters bounce against each that creates the plot. The random acts create intention. Acts and consequences will happen in the next—good lord!—several (I think) thousand of pages left. I wouldn’t bother reading on but that Dostoevsky makes the effort worthy. At least to the degree that he has a keen eye and an unexpected sly humour. You can wish me luck in this endeavor, I may not be equal to the effort needed. I still have a bio of Rasputin to return to.

Clash of the Titans, the Movie and the reproach

 This past summer I watched both versions of the movie Clash of the Titans. The movies follow the adventures of Perseus, famous Greek hero. Unsurprisingly, the plot is the same with both movies, save the city, save the girl. A considerable difference in storytelling stands between the two efforts. One notes the dramatic technological change in movie making between the one made in 1981 and the one made in 2010. Movies don’t seem to age well. Not just technologically, either. One becomes aware of attitudes and mores of the older era. Still, a common thread runs thru the two movies, heroic quest.

As a title, “Clash of the Titans” sounds good. Really, tho, it should be Clash of the Gods. The Olympians were the generation following the Titans, tho sometimes gathered under the Titan name. The battles of Cronus, Saturn, and the rest, that was the real Clash of Titans. It would be a good movie if someone tried. Avengers End Game almost does that job, but the life of the franchises powered that too much. Even the Apocalypse needs a sequel. But anyway.

The older version of Clash should have been a doozy with hero and quest. The trials of Perseus offer cinema-ready action, and special effects were by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen created the skeleton warriors, animate bronze statue, harpies, and the other monstrous threats that Jason battled in Jason and the Argonauts. That all mesmerized a certain adolescent, the perfect adventure movie. Clash 81 proved a tepid affair, however.

Harry Hamlin plays the lead role, Perseus, the hero. I know he starred in that popular lawyer show sometime after, but I have no more than that. I suspect that the director or producer chose him mostly for his yum factor. Unfortunately, dreamy eyes and hairless chest don’t provide enough zing for playing the Number Two Hero of Greek myths behind Hercules. Thru out the movie his quest seems merely like something to do till he can get to a club. I vaguely recall that he and the older but by no means creaky Ursula Andress became a Hollywood item. Forty years, I could be wrong about this exciting tidbit, but it does provide a meta look at Hollywood’s own Olympian playground.

The director had no interest in delivering what the Jason movie had in abundance: eye-popping action. Instead, it seems more like a drab philosophical inquiry about the world. I mean, he’s got Sir Laurence Effing Olivier as Zeus but the whole Olympus thing looks half-hearted and merely cheesy. The hero should be energized by his quest but instead strolls about his business. In the meantime, Olivier, Claire Bloom, and the aforementioned Ursula Andress all pick up checks for a few hours in a smoky studio. As gods, they just stand there. Now there is some strong commentary. No hint of the exaggerated egos of the immortals we know from the tales. They merely look uncomfortable waiting for the director to tell them what to do. The director, the real god here, doesn’t know. The pleading rashness of the gods has been set aside. They function as deus ex machina in drapes. Timeless mannikins. 

Meanwhile Perseus listlessly wanders into a few temperate battles against monsters and whatnot. His legion of red shirts, unnoticed by the gods, pass forgetably into oblivion, just like the middle class. At least Perseus scores the big payday as hero. He’ll be good-looking forever.

In contrast to the low-intensity aerobics of Clash 81, Clash 2010 embraces a vigorous sense of pesty gods, loud as rock stars. First we get some back story. Baby Perseus has been set adrift on the sea with his mother because the king her husband did not father the child. The child survives but mom does not. A kindly fisherman finds and adopts the child. The child becomes the short-haired and rugged star of the show. This Perseus is oddly muted. He has spirit but internalizes it. When he is grown to manhood the gods war against a city of uppity people. As collateral damage, the fisherman and his family, except Perseus, get killed. The smell of vengeance rises.

Visually, this movie is already way ahead of Clash 81. A god, a freakin’ god, bursts directly out of the sky. If that don’t make you jump... Well that’s Hades, pissed. Ray Fiennes plays him as if he was never satisfied with any of Shakespeare’s villains. Angry and mighty, yet with a touch of snivvel, Hades got some character attributes, as he wars against Zeus.

Perseus commits to being his own man. He learns that Zeus is his father but Perseus turns away from the god side of his nature. It’s like Jesus saying he’ll just remain a carpenter. Perseus ends up getting cajoled into his hero quest. As played by Sam Worthington, Perseus is grim and humourless. He gathers a much more lively crew than Harry Hamlin did. The crew that joined Perseus in the earlier Clash seem like those who gathered around cocaine lines at Studio 54. I mean, whatever!

2010 bobs along as a quest. Perseus reconciles with dad, played with vocal reverberation by Liam Neeson. The Hero loses most of his mates along the way, but the two funny, blundering guys survive. This is religion, right there.

Weirdly, we just don’t think about the things we think about. In 81, Perseus receives the various aids in his quest as needed. It resembles a scavenger hunt for him. The helmet of invisibility, the flying horse, the shiny shield all come serendipitously to him expressly to be useful. In 2010, I do not think he gets a helmet, and the shiny shield is just laying around and he sees a use. Zeus does give him something or other, I forget what, which helps bring victory. This gift is more a token of their reconciliation than help of the gods.

In myths, the heroes seem less self-motivated than just following the only path before them. You’ll need a helmet of invisibility, Perseus, someone says, and so he has the useful tool for moving on. Presently, heroes everywhere challenge the world with their belief or denial of the pandemic. In each case, the hero becomes firm to the point of combative to follow their belief. Yesterday at the store a man agreed with someone that the pandemic is nothing to worry about. “It’s bullshit,” he said. His 97 year old mother will be fine when the family gathers for Thanksgiving. Yes, and Perseus knows Medusa can be defeated, the sea monster can be defeated, the gods can be defeated. Confidence wins the day. The proof is in the movie. Even listless Harry Hamlin can beat the gods just by doing what someone tells him.

One feels satisfaction when the hero wins. The path has been followed, the quest finished. What follows the adventure may be diminishment. Jason and the Argonauts ends with Jason and Medea smooching, but the gods know there’s some hot material for the Greek playwrights as the love match progresses.

Clash 81 proved hard to follow because nothing in the quest seemed to matter, and Harry Hamlin is too good looking to die. Clash 2010 provides the tension and the zesty visuals to soothe the need for hearty heroics but ends with something akin to Field of Dreams dad hugs. Hollywood the God of Gods exerts control.

When Donald Trump became an actual candidate, let alone President of the United States, I despaired. He rode into all this on a flying horse called Bullshit. The rumble of his self-aggrandizing swagger sounded heroic to way too many people. The fat gaudiness of his image resonated in a populous way. He became a monstrance of hope for certain disenchanted people. Their disenchantment is real but his mission was never. A hero is the deed itself, not the bragging puffery. Trump exploited the urge and need that kept the tales of such as Perseus alive even now. Both movies are cheesy because Hollywood cannot do otherwise, but they still bespeak a human need for heroic endeavor. Trump just twisted that, and the gods just laugh.

Beyond the Pandemic a Bit

 A customer wished to redeem a handful of cans. I told him we cannot accept those of his that we don’t sell. He asked with dismay, “When will things be normal again?” I replied perhaps too vigouroudly: “Normal doesn’t exist anymore.” Seven months into the pandemic and we are still working on that.

The customer assumed this change in our procedure owed to the pandemic, as so much has these past months. In fact, beverage distributors have simply become more rigorous about what they’ll receive from us. Blaming the pandemic for the change proves easy enough, tho. A persistent narrative concerns how much we all have lost because of the virus.

I need not catalog that loss. Everyone has felt it. The narrative need not solely focus on the losses we have endured. We are learning along the way.

The lament about lost normalcy will remain a commonplace. Normal has changed yet we all still have things to do. A sales rep remarked recently that nearly 800 restaurants appear on the alcohol commission’s list of accounts in arrears for more than ninety days. I think twenty or less would be the typical number. A hotel association a while ago stated that ALL of Boston’s hotels face the risk of closure. One can add a touch of salt to the statement, the association wants to make a case, but obviously the pandemic offers no boon to the industry. Dominos tip in multiple directions at this time. Perhaps we can reset.

The forces unleashed by the pandemic, and I am okay with the drama of the verb, have revealed drastic weaknesses in our normal. world. We see many people and many businesses in straitened circumstances after just weeks of disruption. The economy is NOT GOOD, whatever the Wall Street soothsayers claim. Few back ups exist when things go pear-shaped. Public education, i.e. school as daycare, seems in mid-flub right now. Healthcare for this interconnected population clearly, clearly ignores the poor. The poor, according to any abacus, represent the vast majority of the population. Like such a majority could be ignored. Maybe the luxury of ignoring the problem has disappeared. 

I just today read that the University of Michigan issued a stay at home order to combat the spread of the virus. Student athletes, the money earners for the esteemed institute, stand exempt from the order. You have to believe the bottom line defines the mission to make that acception. I know some believe that we must keep the economy’s rockets firing. I get the thinking but not how such action meshes with the reality of doing so during a pandemic. The pandemic wants to win so badly.

While I believe some people really don’t accept the pandemic as serious, most do. Boredom and resistance to change seem like strong motivating factors for treating the situation as normal. We think the enemy is the virus but it is not. We have been treed by a culture of disintegration. The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. Humans are not isolatoes, however. We are all creatures of the same light. As such, we are empowered by our connections, not our divisions. Tear down the walls!

Masque of the Red Death Lately

 I just read “Masque of the Red Death”. I haven’t bothered to read Pandemic-themed classics (The Plague, which I read in high school anyway, or The Decameron) during our travail. I’ve read “Masque” before but a Facebook friend posted a link to it yesterday so I partook. 

The story offers little plot. Poe just paints a formidable atmosphere. Like Hawthorne, Poe sets scenes as a state of mind. And that state is of a nervous intensity. Perhaps Hawthorne shows more Puritan restraint while Poe works out of night sweats. Both have a sort of stoned fascination with morbid consequences.

As I mentioned, “Masque” presents little by way of plot. Prince Prospero has opened his castle to his thousand most intimate hangers-on as they ride out a plague. My mind’s eye uses the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston to picture the scene. Once the residence of Gardener, the museum is a castle-like testament to the virtue of money transformed into courtyards, balconies, tapestries, and shadows. Poe describes the scene and the actors within it with an avid wildness of colour and detail. Think the shining nothingness of Studio 54. Poe’s story “Hop Frog” comes to mind too for its similar setting. That story has a plot, however, and the soothing delight of revenge. “Masque” simply brings Death personified into the tacky horror of Prince Prospero’s upper class playground, and Death don’t have no mercy. It is simply a consequence.

Poe’s language is lush yet lightly handled. The pulse of his heart pounds in each word. Words are not distant things to him. He knows each one he uses possesses ample charge. He was a learned but not schooled person. Last in his class at West Point, yet he often writes as if out to prove how brilliant he is. He writing is brilliant in its unsealed vigour. The vision he sees of the decrepit celebrants leaves him with eyes wide. Now slide partying college students into the picture, or avid participants at rallies, or any avoidable crush of people at the end of the world. See the child Trump enjoying his Halloween fun.

A Rushed and Indelicate Statement

The gaseous contents of the Republican soul sees no value but in ‘values’. These values carry nothing but a plutonic weight. They pretend toward a fixity that does not exist. They feature no moral compass beyond the cunning of Old Testament restriction. No doctrinal Prince of Peace provides comfort to this mindset beyond the great and welcoming Hell they envision for others.

The present administration shares no warmth or goal for the people, any people. The Heaven they intend for themselves bases it’s golden number in opposition. They enjoy the right side of the binary.

I use the word Republican but these feasters exceed the idea of party. The adepts just know that the world is a thing, a thing to corner, to collect, to devour. These words feel terrible to invoke. I mean, to consider such a ghastly register as the only view of the world and thus yourself. At some point we turn away, because we are alive. Alive just to autumn’s changes, wind in trees, abundance and sustenance in the mycorrizhal Earth, the mutual compact. None of your bullshit, then, this election year and in the world beyond.

The Pluck of Raspberries as Autumn Returns

 Today we made yet another trip to Autumn Hills Orchard in Groton. Google sends us North on Rt 3 till we reach the Dunstable exit. From there the trail is southeast thru still viable New England farmland. It is a pleasant ride. Beth wants more raspberries to freeze. Again, it’s just an excuse to feel the early autumn sunshine on our faces. 

Fluffy clouds and steely sunshine filled the eye, with a constantly blowing and gravely refreshing breeze. On such a Sunday afternoon we were by no means alone along the lengths of raspberry plants. Apples too, Honey Crisps and Macs, were available for picking. The day’s largesse of ripe berries was nearly done by the time we arrived after one. We got two quarts but it took close perusal among the bent stalks to accomplish that.

I haven’t recounted yet how I picked raspberries one summer while a teenager, thus prepping me for these labors years later. My friend’s neighbor had a raspberry patch. My friend, his younger brother, and I got to pick the berries then take them to the local farm stand. I don’t know what profit the neighbour took but I got enough money for some records and books. Because the brothers routinely would end up throwing things at each other and chasing each other, I picked the most pints. It was a sweet deal. Now Beth and I pay for the privilege. The warm sun, the cool wind, the blue sky, the imposing white clouds, and the apple trees full of fruit indeed made it a privilege. I should now read The Shepherd’s Calendar by John Clare, and maybe I will,