What I read last month.
The centerpiece, for politically minded people, is William Ecenbarger's account of the Pennsylvania juvenile judge who accepted bribes to keep his rich buddy's juvenile jail full of kids. It made my blood boil, and will make yours boil too, in this age where your body and those of the people you love are just things to be traded among capitalists for their enrichment, and who gives a shit what happens to you peasants.
Also included are John Scalzi's Hugo-winning novel Redshirts, the Autobiography of a Yogi that has inspired generations, the usual mishmash of medieval-centric literature and murder mysteries, and much more. Enjoy!
A View from the Gallery: Redshirts, by John Scalzi
Chen who was new, snorted. “Oh come on,” he said. “It’s just a cave. What could possibly be in there?
“Bears?” Davis had suggested. “Wolves? Any number of large predators who see a cave as shelter from the elements? Have you never been camping?”
“There are no bears on this planet,” Chen had said, willfully missing Davis’s point. “And anyway, we have pulse guns. Now come on. This is my first mission. I don’t want the captain wondering where I am.” He ran in after the officers.
From his boulder, Davis looked down at the dusty smear on the cave floor that was all that remained of Chen. The land worms, called by the sound of the humans walking in the cave, had tunneled up under him and dragged him down, leaving nothing but echoing screams and the smear.
Well, that’s not quite true, Davis thought, peering farther into the cave and seeing the hand that lay there, still clutching the pulse gun Chen had carried, and which, as it turned out, had done him absolutely no good whatsoever.
The ground stirred and the hand suddenly disappeared.
Okay, NOW it’s true, Davis thought.
The amazing John Scalzi won the Hugo for this one and, keeping in mind I’ve only read two of the other four nominated novels so far, it seems to me he earned it. Red Shirts is the most hilarious bit of trope skewering since Galaxy Quest, and every bit as deserving of a big budget cult movie.
The starfleet ship Intrepid is a flying science fiction tv show joke. It is commanded by a handful of big-name officers with huge egos and penchants for highfalutin’ dramatic monologues. They personally go on dangerous away missions like clockwork, always surviving by the skin of their teeth while a handful of junior officers get killed in spectacular ways, always while doing something of vital galactic significance that is promptly forgotten as soon as the mission is over. The junior crew mortality rate is incredible. People run and hide in storage rooms whenever someone from the bridge is coming, and they always avoid decks six through eight when there’s a space battle, because that’s always where the one enemy missile gets through and causes bloody, explosive chaos. Anyone who gets on a superior’s shit list is punished by being outed to Chief Science Officer Q’eeng as ‘promising.’
Enter Andy Dahl and friends, the new recruits brought in to replace the last batch of saps who were eaten by ice sharks, zapped by defective control panels and killed by the same flesh-eating bacteria that almost got Lt. Karensky too! Dahl and his doomed friends quickly realize something is crazy wrong on the Intrepid, and their discoveries as they try to find out what’s going on are not comforting. But Dahl, by Grabthar's hammer, is determined to live!
I can’t believe Scalzi goes where he goes. It never works. All of the stories that try to do it end up terrible…except this time. Maybe Scalzi rerouted the energy through the matter transdeucers or something. Very highest recommendations.
The best part of the Old Testament: Proverbs
Better the poor whose walk is blameless than a fool whose lips are perverse.
Desire without knowledge is not good—how much more will hasty feet miss the way!
A person’s own folly leads to their ruin, yet their heart rages against the LORD.
Wealth attracts many friends, but even the closest friend of the poor person deserts them.
A false witness will not go unpunished, and whoever pours out lies will not go free.
Many curry favor with a ruler, and everyone is the friend of one who gives gifts.
The poor are shunned by all their relatives—how much more do their friends avoid them. Though the poor pursue them with pleading, they are nowhere to be found.
The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.
A false witness will not go unpunished, and whoever pours out lies will perish.
It is not fitting for a fool to live in luxury—how much worse for a slave to rule over princes!
A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense.
A king’s rage is like the roar of a lion, but his favor is like dew on the grass.
A foolish child is a father’s ruin, and a quarrelsome wife is like the constant dripping of a leaky roof.
Houses and wealth are inherited from parents, but a prudent wife is from the LORD.
Laziness brings on deep sleep, and the shiftless go hungry.
Whoever keeps commandments keeps their life, but whoever shows contempt for their ways will die.
Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done.
Discipline your children, for in that there is hope; do not be a willing party to their death.
A hot-tempered person must pay the penalty; rescue them, and you will have to do it again.
Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.
Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.
What a person desires is unfailing love, better to be poor than a liar.
The fear of the LORD leads to life; then one rests content, untouched by trouble.
A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bring it back to his mouth!
Flog a mocker, and the simple will learn prudence; rebuke the discerning, and they will gain knowledge.
Whoever robs their father and drives out their mother is a child who brings shame and disgrace.
Stop listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge.
A corrupt witness mocks at justice, and the mouth of the wicked gulps down evil.
Penalties are prepared for mockers and beatings for the backs of fools.
----Chapter 19
I have a natural penchant for books of short, pithy sayings (Pascal, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, etc.). They’re handy to whip out and read short passages while waiting on line, or you can meditate on one saying or two at a time. Proverbs is, to me, definitely the most interesting part of either the Old or the New Testament.
It is not without its faults. The first several chapters consist of admonitions from Solomon to his son, advising him to seek wisdom and understanding, over and over and over again. For every nugget of real wisdom, there’s another nasty bit, like the most famous line in it, “He who spareth the rod hateth his son” (Amazing, isn’t it, how that’s the line so many american ‘Christians’ like to quote? And don’t bother speaking of the rod as a metaphor. Solomon does it again in 23:14, “You shall beat him with a rod and deliver his soul from hell.”). Nevertheless, overall, these are excellent rules to live by, for reasons related more to common sense and ethical philosophy than to religious dogma.
Patriarchy-based zealots might pause to consider 31:17, which urges women to develop strong arms, and 31:25 (which I first encountered used as a feminist slogan protesting degrading fashion trends) “Strength and honor are her clothing”. Go Old Testament girlpower!
New Testament: John’s Gospel
If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, to wit, the Son of Man who is in Heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
---3:12-16
That last sentence is the one that that placard-waving guy in the football stadium wants you to read.
One of these Gospels is not like the others. Matthew, Mark and Luke have a lot in common with one another, especially as to asserted facts. John leaves out most of Jesus’s life; includes episodes (the dialogue with Nicodemus; Lazarus rising from the tomb; etc.), and contains most of the ‘philosophy’ or Catholic doctrine regarding trinity and afterlife. It is also the most antisemitic; it’s full of episodes where ‘the Jews’ try to stone Jesus to death while he eludes them by cleverly sneaking out the back door of the temple or whatever. The other three tellings put the blame on Caiaphas, Herod and other high mucky-mucks in authority, not so much on the general population (Caiaphas and Pilate, but not Herod, do appear in John.)
If you got your gospel mainly from Godspell or JC Superstar, John is going to be strange to you. I’m still trying to decide whether it’s actually the gospel most quoted by modern Christians, or whether it just seems that way because of all the “Oh that’s where they got that part” moments, while the bits from Matthew and Luke have been in my consciousness for decades. If it diverges from other gospel-writers, it fits quite consistently with Paul’s letters, to the point where I wonder whether John and Paul may have written contemporaneously and in tandem, much later than the other gospels. I’m not the only one who has had this thought.
Whether Christianity is your RPG system or not, John is pretty essential reading just to understand what millions of people around you are talking about. As books of the bible go, it'’ pretty readable, and the chapters are more likely to be self-contained, unified episodes.
I Want to be both Pope and King: On the Governance of Rulers, by Thomas Aquinas
So, then, if to kings an abundance of temporal goods is given and an eminent degree of beatitude prepared for them by God, while tyrants are often prevented from obtaining even the temporal goods which they covet, subjected also to many dangers and, worse still, deprived of eternal happiness and destined for most grievous punishment, surely those who undertake the office of ruling must earnestly strive to act as kings toward their subjects, and not as tyrants.
This short, fragmented work has the advantage shared with last month’s Being and Essence of being brief, while unlike that book it is mostly secular and actually interesting.
It’s actually a restatement of Aristotle’s Politics (Bookpost 2011)---Monarchies are better than aristocracies are better than democracies yadda yadda—with the distinction that Aquinas can’t help but go into theology even here, and assert that kings (only the good ones, though) are meant to be God’s representatives on earth. Tyrants are also sent by God, as punishment for sins. As part of what Mortimer Adler called “the great conversation”, it deals squarely with ‘great ideas’ concerning rulership and justice, but only in an elementary way, suitable for a high school course on the moral basis of politics.
Murder, She Cruciverbaled: Last Puzzle and Testament, by Parnell Hall
All the rest, remainder and residue of my estate shall go absolutely, irrevocably, and without question to whichever of my heirs shall be the first to correctly solve the puzzle. I know you are probably shouting ‘What puzzle?’ and giving Arthur a hard time. Please do not do so. The poor man has no more idea than you do. He did not draw this will. He does not know the contents. He has no idea what I have planned. I will tell you now. To begin with, the puzzle is not your ordinary kind. To solve it will take more than intelligence. It will take ingenuity, intuition, persistence, and perhaps a trace of luck. Solving it will indeed be an interesting challenge. I wish I were around to see it.
I’m amused. Back in August, I read the first “puzzle lady” book and noted that the schtick was the inclusion of a crossword, just as an appendix to the book, “ Not a part of the plot, like where a crazy millionaire put it in his will and they have to solve it to find where the money is” (Go ahead, go back and look it up). Little did I know that the second book really WOULD have an eccentric millionaire leaving a treasure-hunt will!
So, here’s Cora and Sherry, the aunt/niece puzzle constructing team, confronted with a crossword that really does appear in the plot. A crazy rich bitch whose progeny apparently inherited the family tendency to enjoy other people’s suffering, names Cora as the judge and final arbiter to decide who first solves the puzzle, and so Cora and Sherry are swarmed with angry, ultracompetitive would-be heirs demanding rulings; they have to solve parts of the puzzle before the heirs do so as to find the next clue; and, yes, people start to turn up dead; and yes, you can solve the puzzle along with Cora and Sherry.
My biggest complaint is that crossword clues pop up intermittently in the story, so it’s hard to read and solve while on an epilleptical machine, which is where I do most of my reading these days. The solution fooled me, and I considered it outrageous and unfair, but then I went back and read the relevant chapters and, improbable or not, there really are clues to that puzzle as well.
"The Medieval Murders: Treason of the Ghosts; The Corpse Candle; The Hangman’s Hymn; Death of a King, by PC Doherty. The Lark’s Lament, by Alan Gordon
Thorkle’s throat went dry. A cloaked figure had stepped out of the darkness, a cowled hood over his head. What was he hiding? The flailing stick? Thorkle drew his knife.
“What is it? Who are you?”
“The winnower, separating the wheat from the chaff.”
Thorkle was sure he recognised the muffled voice.
“What is it you want?” Thorkle edged closer.
“Justice!”
“Justice?” Thorkle squeaked.
He stood frozen to the spot. The figure walked quickly forward. Thorkle was confused. He tried to move, but the assassin was faster. The flailing stick swept back, and its clubbed edge caught Thorkle on the side of the head, sending him spinning to the ground. The pain was intense. Thorkle could already feel the hot blood. He stared up. The flailing rod fell time and time again, shattering Thorkle’s head till his brains spilled out.
--from Treason of the Ghosts
Gildas walked to the half-open door and pushed it open. “Who’s there?” he repeated. He walked inside, narrowing his eyes against the gloom. “Who’s there?”
“Gildas!” The words came as a hiss. “Gildas! Guilty Gildas!”
The stonemason decided to flee. Yet, even as he made to hasten away, he realized his mistake. No soldier should turn his back on an enemy. His foot slithering, Gildas turned. a dark figure hurtled toward him and then a club smacked against his head, sending him crashing to the ground.
--from The Corpse Candle
Orelton handed me the parchment and instructed me to construe the following sentence: "Regem noli occidere, timere bonum est."
"Do not kill the king, it is good to be afraid?" I translated questioningly.
Orelton nodded with satisfaction and quickly scrawled another message for me to read. The phrase was identical to the one before and I was about to hand it back when Orelton told me to scrutinize it more carefully. I did so, and noticed that although the words were identical, Orelton had moved the comma from the timere forward to the occidere, so the translation now became "Do not fear to kill the king, it is a good thing."
---from The Death of a King
Simon ran ahead. The clearing was dark, still dripping with rain, but on the execution tree, the makeshift gibbet, all that remained were three empty nooses hanging down from the branch beneath which the chains had been so neatly piled. Of Agnes and her daughters there was no sign. Simon felt uneasy. It was so cold here. He was about to go back and inform the rest when he saw the red marks daubed on the great white crag of rock. Simon hastened across. he spelt out the letters and the chilling warning they carried: "I told you that we would meet again!"
--from The Hangman's Hymn
In the morning, Theo handed me Laurent's letter, and i handed him Portia. He held the baby out in front of him with both arms, and they looked at each other quizzically.
"What is this?" he asked.
"That is your child," I said. "Try not to drop her until I return."
"And then I can?"
Portia immediately looked worried.
"No," I said.
--from The Lark's Lament
I’ve been picking on Doherty’s Scooby Doo-like Hugh Corbett series, with its endless hooded/cowled spooky guys, thought to be demons, and the high body counts. Treason of the Ghosts is several cuts above average, maybe the most interesting one in the series. It takes place five years after a nobleman has been executed for a series of nasty, triggering murders of women. Not only are similar murders beginning to happen again, but jurors, witnesses and officials responsible for the nobleman’s execution are getting murdered too. Was the wrong person killed? Are there now two killers, the original serial killer and another person trying to avenge a wrongful execution? What happened to the defense witness nobody believed, who disappeared soon after the trial?
Doherty isn’t subtle about clues, and so finding out is simple, but watching Corbett get there too is a heck of a good story nonetheless.
Corpse Candle, not so much. It’s pretty much indistinguishable from all the previous haunted churches with dirty secrets, old macguffins ‘cleverly’ hidden on the grounds, and church brethren with guilty secrets who keep getting killed one by one. I actually got distracted in the plot, momentarily thinking I was reading last month’s Ghostly Murders again, and wondering why a particular clue wasn’t being mentioned.
The Death of a King is actually Doherty's first mystery, though it is set chronologically later than all the ones I've read so far, and features a one-time-only detective who is sent out by Edward III to investigate the (historically true) odd circumstances concerning the death of his father Edward II. This is one where Doherty had a 'what if' moment during historical research and ran with it in fiction. Apparently he decided he liked it, and kept writing mysteries. This one is not so much a whodunit or even a how-did-it-happen as a tale where real historical documents come to the protagonist’s attention gradually, and he comes to a historically justifiable conclusion. The climax is no surprise at all.
The Hangman's Hymn is part of the Canterbury Murder Tales series, this time with the carpenter taking center stage (There is a carpenter in Chaucer's original group of pilgrims, but he's only described in the prologue and does not tell a tale). The carpenter is hired to build gallowses and assist the hangman in the usual small English town, and things get interesting when he begins to see the people he has executed walking around town. Things get more interesting when a trio of witches on the scaffold curses everyone responsible for their execution, their bodies subsequently disappear, and the revenge killings begin. The carpenter has to discover the truth behind the witches' curse and avoid becoming the next victim. Despite having one of the most obvious "secret, hidden" mastermind behind it all of any Doherty book, the story is chilling and entertaining.
Finally, Alan Gordon's family of fool's guild adventurer-spies travels to south France for about as jolly a romp as one can have with people getting killed all around one and being targeted by killers oneself. Theo and Claudia try to persuade a former member of the guild who has joined an abbey to come out of retirement for more foolish missions. One of the monks in the abbey is murdered and a cryptic message written in blood at the crime scene, and the fools must solve the crime in order to get their former guildmember to join them. The fools travel from town to town, trying to track down the lyrics to a troubador's song that holds the key to the mystery. The solution is almost nonsensically improbable, depending on several people being too mad to think properly, but don't think too much about it. It's still a good, chilling, haunting story with abundant comic relief, and worthy of high recommendations.
Universal Love means never having to wear a sari: The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda
The lifelike images of the motion picture illustrate many truths concerning creation. The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of space. Just as the motion picture images appear to be real, but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture, temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast on the screen of man’s consciousness by the infinite creative beam. A cinema audience can look up and see that all screen images are appearing through the instrumentality of one imageless beam of light. The colorful universal drama is similarly issuing from the single white light of a cosmic source. With inconceivable ingenuity God is staging an entertainment for His human children, making them actors as well as audience in His planetary theater.
It’s always hard for me to react to books, presented as nonfiction, that describe impossible things. Bouvier’s The Scorpion Fish (See Bookpost, August 2008); the Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda...heck, how about the Gospels (which are referenced from a Hindu perspective extensively by Yogananda). The default for me is to assume the author is making up bullshit, but is that fair?
Much of The Autobiography of a Yogi consists of the author’s meetings with ‘living saints’—not just People like Gandhi and assorted gurus and holy masters in India, but Catholics like the German Therese Neumann, who allegedly survived for decades eating nothing but one communion wafer per day (There’s a woman in India who allegedly one-upped Neumann by living to extreme old age on a diet of air and sunlight). A yogi is attacked by police who chop off his arm. He calmly turns around, blood spurting from his shoulder, and tells them he’s not the criminal they’re looking for. With an ‘it’s nothing’ sort of gesture, he picks up his severed arm and sort of screws it back on and tells the police, “come find me here tomorrow. It will have healed and you will no longer feel remorse.’ Yogananda’s guru, he says, is able to will the mosquitos to not bite him.
What are we supposed to do with that? Accept it? Or not? for Christians, the question may be a bit more difficult when Yogananda starts to cite Christ’s miracles as completely understandable Hindu practice. Walking on water? Feeding the multitudes with a few loaves and fishes? It’s all about self-control. Jesus was a yogi.
Yogananda has much to say about growing up and learning in India. although he spent extensive time teaching in America, he has surprisingly little to say about that, other than a short chapter about his friendship with Luther Burbank. I would have liked to see more about what he has to say to Americans about what we might do better.
Many people I know have received great spiritual sustenance from Yogananda’s memoir. So did George Harrison and many other notables I never met. then again, I also know people who get similar benefits from the Bible, or from Richard Bach or the Celestine Prophecies or The Secret or any number of pseudo-spiritual books sold to suckers. Autobiography of a Yogi may or may not be for you. Only way to find out is to try it. At the very least, it’s very interesting.
Modern America’s War on Children: Kids for Cash (Two Judges, Thousands of Children, and a $2.8 million kickback scheme), by William Ecenbarger
Mosee squirmed, his patience slipping away, but he rallied and asked why zero tolerance was tolerated. Russin answered with rising exasperation, “Because everybody loved it. Everybody loved it. The schools absolutely loved it. They got rid of every bad kid in their school. When I was in school, if you threw a spitball maybe you went to the principal’s office and sat for a couple periods. Last couple years if you threw a spitball, they got the police and you ended up in juvenile court and got sent away. Schools got rid of all their problems. Parents, parents who had problems with their kid at home, they called the police. Police said, you want us to take him away? Sure. I can’t control the kid any more. Away the kid would go. Parents loved it. Police loved it. They knew every arrest they made the kid got sent away. And despite what you heard this morning, the DA loved it because they were getting convictions. They were never losing cases.”
This may be one of the more important books I’ve read this year. On the surface, it’s about Mark Ciavarella and Mike Conahan, the Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judges who accepted huge bribes from a private, for-profit juvenile detention center to keep the cells profitably full by sentencing All The Kids to jail. Just one little corner of America where a confluence of mafia politics, coal company politics (which is different from Mafia politics, I suppose because the government is more open about being bought and paid for), lack of oversight, greed, and two lone people’s extraordinary, uncharacteristic corruption, combined to create a judicial Chernobyl that could never happen anywhere else in America. Of course.
But in reality, it goes deeper than that. There are private, for-profit prisons for youths and adults all over America, and they openly lobby for contracts and laws designed to make sure the prisons are always filled to capacity, whether crimes are committed or not. There are ridiculous ‘zero-tolerance’ school policies all over America designed to make criminal and expellable offenses out of ordinary youthful folly. There are citizens all over America who have a hyper-responsibility disease that favors “get tough” philosophies of justice that focus on punishment at the expense of rehabilitation and reformation. And there are children all over America—the ones you count on to thrive, keep America going one day pay for your Social Security—whose lives and ability to function are being systematically destroyed.
Trigger warnings are appropriate. All through the book are stories of actual teenagers who were thrown away so that capitalist bigshot Rob Mericle's "PA Child Care" detention center could have a profitable head count. Honor students and star athletes with no record of making any kind of trouble, some of them in their senior years, were yanked out of school and locked up over graffiti, stupid practical jokes, disrespect to administrators, "receiving stolen property" in the form of a gift from a parent who bought something at a yard sale not knowing it was stolen. Sometimes a parent in a custody dispute would call the police in an effort to harm the other parent, and the children would b taken away. Parents and children were told by police and probation officers that it would be better for them if they waived their right to counsel and got it taken care of quickly. They would be assured that Ciavarella would give them community service, but instead Ciavarella sent them to "PA Child Care". Even the ones who served a few weeks would miss schoolwork and receive poorer than normal grades, be shunned by their peers and labeled as 'troublemakers'. Some never graduated. Some developed psychological disorders. Some became career criminals. At least one, who had been 'promising' before he met Judge Ciavarella, committed suicide, and another had a grand mal seizure while confined without her medication. I'm not sure which parents were more pathetic: The ones who screamed and cried when their children were dragged off in shackles contrary to the deal they expected, or the ones who cheered because the troubled kid they didn't care for would get a lesson as to how worthless he was considered by the people who were supposed to be caring for him.
Am I bitter and upset? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? There but for the grace of God...In eighth grade, I was suspended from school for "fighting" while the three bullies who jumped me in the hall were not punished. For the rest of the school year, an assistant principal shadowed me, keeping an eye on the "troublemaker", hauling me out of class to sit for hours while he decided whether the vitamin pills in my pocket were contraband, assuming my guilt without question when someone planted alcohol in my locker. I lost friends. I was punished at home by my mother, who overrode my father's concern and believed the school over me. By the time the school year was over, I was cutting class and hiding as much as possible, not doing any work. Looking back, I'm not sure I even passed 8th grade so much as got kicked upstairs, where fortunately high school was different and I got a fresh start from everyone except my own damaged psyche. Took a long time to establish a sense of self-worth. Now imagine if I'd gone to jail at age 14. I wouldn't be here blogging. I wouldn't have the job I have now, and I probably wouldn't have a family because I'd be serving a prison sentence, and not my first.
Kids for Cash is supposed to have a happy ending in that Ciavarella and Conohan got caught, but it does not. It took the Feds to do anything about it, and the trials were all about the bribery and kickbacks, not at all about the children whose rights were violated. Not one of the thousands of now-adult victims were called as witnesses. Worse, Luzerne County continued to back Ciavarella up until he was sentenced, continuing to call him 'tough but fair' after EVERYTHING was known. Court staff, district attorneys, overworked and disempowered public defenders, did nothing.
In Del Norte County, California, it is impossible to get a fair trial because the state prison is by far the predominant source of jobs in the county, and any random jury will include people who get paid if the defendant goes to prison. In Oregon (hardly the only state), rich people with a vested interest in high prison populations have spent the past two decades pushing ballot measures increasing the presumed prison sentences for minor crimes, and the public has eagerly passed them. I personally know of a guy who went to prison for two years for opportunistically buying a round of tacos with a debit card that the previous customer had left on the counter (called 'computer crime' because the use of an electronic interface to swipe the card counts). Is this what justice is? Do you remember being a hormone-laden, confused teenager subject to peer pressure? Do you have faith that YOUR son or daughter will make it through adolescence without ever once doing anything stupid?
Think it over. Do something about it.
Life is a Cabaret: The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood
I was curious to see how Sally would behave. I had imagined her, for some reason, rather nervous, but she wasn't, in the least. She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides--yet her performance was, in it's own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging curiously limp, and a take it or leave it grin on her face, she sang.
The problem with reading this is that, in 20/20 hindsight, it reads like a poor draft of I Am a Camera, which in turn reads like a rough draft of Cabaret, but of course Isherwood came first and invented Sally Bowles (who is definitely based on a real person, though it's hard to tell how much was embellished by the author) before Liza Minelli was born.
Bowles and the landlady are here, and Bradshaw of course (Isherwood's stand-in for himself), as well as an ensemble of other characters who don't appear in the musical version. No cabaret emcee and no Jewish love interest to sing about meeskites. Also, the book is divided into two short novels, the other of which is a marginally related story about a hopeless spendthrift named Norris who ends up spying for the communists to meet his debts, while Bradshaw looks on. The main character is early 30s era Berlin, which reminds me a lot of the Centauri Republic at the beginning of Babylon-5: washed up and decadent, partying desperately out of nihilism, and about to be taken over by something very dangerous. Both of the stories end as the Third Reich begins.
Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: Letters of Abelard and Heloise
At this news her uncle and his friends and relatives imagined that I had tricked them, and had found an easy way of ridding myself of Heloise by making her a nun. Wild with indignation, they plotted against me, and one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained. Then they fled, but the two who could be caught were blinded and mutilated as I had been, one of them being the servant who had been led by greed while in my service to betray his master.
Peter Abelard was possibly the most important contributor to philosophy/theology of the 12th Century, and his romance with Heloise, who was possibly the cleverest woman of the age, made one of the great true love stories of western civilization. Plus, the book of letters happened to be in my house, unread, among the medieval books, and so I figured it might be worth reading.
Not so much, except maybe as an object lesson as to how great minds can be stultified in a world controlled by overentitled clergy and even ore overentitled "noble" families, like the ones that castrated Abelard because they could. As philosophy, the letters contain nothing that you can't find in Aquinas, Chaucer, Anselm or William of Ockham, and as love letters they are pathetic. Abelard and Heloise write to each other as if they are afraid St. Barnard or the Pope are intercepting the letters and looking for an excuse to burn them--which Barnard possibly really was. They make love learnedly. Their tender missives digress into lectures to one another on the benefits of temperance and the dangers of pride, and when Abelard turns to the Bible's Song of Solomon for amorous sustenance, so help me, he inflicts a ridiculously dry and dusty theological interpretation of the work. History has not preserved, or Heloise left unsent, her incredulous one line reply, "Come on, Romeo! That be-eth IT??"
Absolute Power: Slan, by A.E. Van Vogt
His mother's thoughts stabbed through his reflections. "There are some ahead of us now, Jommy, and others coming across the street. You'll have to go, darling. Don't forget what I've told you. You live for one thing only--to make it possible for slans to live normal lives. I think you'll have to kill our great enemy, Kier Gray, even if it means going to the grand palace after him. Remember, there'll be shouting and confusion, but keep your head. Good luck, Jommy."
According to the introduction, around the 1950s Slan "was considered the single most important SF novel, the one that everyone had to read". Until this year, i had never heard of it. As with Shakespeare, I had to keep reminding myself that all the tropes that look like hackneyed cliches were not yet cliches at the time because this author invented them. If a big budget Slan movie is made, it will only work if cheap 60s-era special effects are used.
Robert Heinlein, I'm sure, was influenced by this book. So was Frank Herbert. So was Suzanne Collins, and the creators of Babylon-5, and...and.... They've all taken Van Vogt's speculation about new races of people born with superhuman powers, who either try to exterminate humans as inferiors, or are hunted for extermination because humans think they will do that; about shadowy supreme dictators in central capitols, dueling with diplomacy and skullduggery from upstarts who want to take their places; about lone individuals fleeing huge mechanized interplanetary armies against seemingly overwhelming odds; about telepathic powers and the ethical dilemmas inherent in reading minds, and the power to kill; about chosen heroes fated to stop The Evil. It's all there in Slan.
I found it a little hard to take seriously; at times it borders on "Protagonist uses his Omnipotence Powers to win" and "If we obtain the Magic Doodad of MacGuffindonia our problem is solved" territory. But hey, it's classic SF from the Golden Age. You know what to expect here, and you probably know whether it's for you or not. Falls into the "Everybody ought to read it once" category.
So THAT's where George R.R. Martin gets it: La Reine Margot, by Alexandre Dumas
Charles cocked his arquebuse, and, stamping his foot with blind rage, cried as he dazzled Henry's eyes with the polished barrel of the brandished weapon, "Will you accept the mass?"
Henry remained mute.
Charles IX shook the vaults of the Louvre with the most terrible oath that ever issued from the lips of man, and grew more livid than before.
"Death, mass, or the Bastille!" he cried, taking aim at the King of Navarre.
This historical epic of the French Renaissance lends itself to the Game of thrones universe, with Catherine de Medici in the Cersei Lannister role, Charles IX as Robert Baratheon, and Margot as Sansa, with the distinction that many or most of the most bloody things in the novel actually happened.
The Red Wedding St. Bartholomew's Day massacre occurs early in the novel, and the body count only goes up from there. Assassinations, attempted assassinations poisonings, torture, hunting party 'accidents', duels and other treachery abound, as well as implied sorcery, prophecy, curses and other supernatural tactics and events. The first chapter is an information dump about an abundance of kings, dukes, Catholic and Huguenot partisans and their families, that must be studied closely so that you understand who hates who and why before proceeding to the ensuing carnival of carnage.
Two stories stand out in the middle of it all. One concerns the redshirts La Mole and Coconnas, who might as well be the Two Musketeers as they stand on the ground looking up and commenting at the intrigues and skullduggery of the high and mighty above them while providing a dose of Stark Family honor and friendship to a world where such things are derided as weakness. The second, and central, story, is about Henry, King of Navarre, and his arranged marriage to La Reine Margot, daughter of Charles IX. The two do not love each other, and each has a lover on the side, but they respect each other with enough platonic affection to join forces and get one another out of jams.
That was Zen, This is Tao: Buddhist Writings
Thereupon the god M ra caused a whirlwind, thinking, “By this will I drive away Siddhattha.” Straightway the east wind and all the other different winds began to blow; but although these winds could have torn their way through mountain-peaks half a league, or two leagues, or three leagues high, or have uprooted forest-shrubs and trees, or have reduced to powder and scattered in all directions, villages and towns, yet when they reached the Future Buddha, such was the energy of the Great Being’s merit, they lost all power and were not able to cause so much as a fluttering of the edge of his priestly robe.
Then he caused a great rain-storm, saying, “With water will I overwhelm and drown him.” And through his mighty power, clouds of a hundred strata, and clouds of a thousand strata arose, and also the other different kinds. And these rained down, until the earth became gullied by the torrents of water which fell, and until the floods had risen over the tops of every forest-tree. But on coming to the Great Being, this mighty inundation was not able to wet his priestly robes as much as a dew-drop would have done.
Then he caused a shower of rocks, in which immense mountain peaks flew smoking and flaming through the sky. But on reaching the Future Buddha they became celestial bouquets of flowers.
The collection of poems, parables, fables and accounts of the life and death of the Buddha comes from the Harvard Classics. No original author is given.
The ten pillars of Buddhism are Alms, Precepts (not set out here), Renunciation, Wisdom (again, not further defined), Courage, Patience, Truth, Resolution, Good Will and Indifference. Some of these are hard to define; the ones that are understandable are nearly universally advocated to some degree regardless of one's religion, but may be discouraged when carried to extremes--as they all are in Buddhism. The giving of alms, for example, emphasizes giving away all that one has, which would leave the giver as the next object of charity. As with Christ's similar admonition, it seems to me directed to those who would be perfect saints, not for the general public. My family used to say, "Don't give till it hurts. give till it feels good."
Questions of extremism, and claims of miracles such as turning fired bullets into flowers aside--the tales in general seem to me to be more gentle, and closer to spiritual truth than most of the other scriptures I've read this year. I would certainly rather have a kind Buddha/Blessed One have ultimate power over the world than have the grumpy, often cruel, patriarchal Old Testament god.
DID YOU KNOW?---There are female Buddhas in the scripture. They have the strength of ten elephants and give birth to hundreds of offspring, eventually looking younger than their own children.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/...