It’s Down the Rabbit Hole Month here at the Admiral’s Book Post, due to a plethora of culture shocks, non sequiturs, odd characters, surrealisms and just plain nonsense. Hope you are the same.
Crossposted to cfk's Bookflurries, Plf515's What are you Reading, eenrblog, and other related forums.
Going Down the Dusty Rabbit Hole: The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron:
I remarked to Christopher on the indignity of the peoples’ clothes: "Why does the Shah make them wear those hats?"
"Shhhh. You mustn’t mention the Shah out loud. Call him Mr. Smith."
"I always call Mussolini Mr. Smith in Italy."
"Well, Mr. Brown."
"No, that’s Stalin’s name in Russia."
"Mr. Jones then."
"Jones is no good either. Hitler has to have it now that Primo de Rivera is dead. And anyhow, I get confused with these ordinary names. We had better call him Marjoribanks, if we want to remember whom we mean."
OK, it’s not quite "Wooster of Arabia"--Robert Byron isn’t exactly an upper class twit, even if he spends a bit too much time in Britain’s Persian colonies grumbling about how he can’t find a decent marmalade and wrestling with motor vehicles in places where they’re still getting used to cars and the cars are getting used to dealing with large amount of dust. Byron, a distant descendant of Lord Byron the poet, is clearly intelligent, and his 1933 mission to explore the ancient mosques and towers of Persia and Afghanistan takes him through endless Graham Chapman stiff British officials and Michael Palin impishly uncooperative arabs. There are several photos of sites to which most westerners are not allowed, at least in the countries not occupied by the American military.
It stuns me how few people realize that the English and French tried to occupy most of the Middle East and gave up in frustration after a few decades of passive aggressiveness mingled with peasants shooting at them. It’s possible that if the White House had read this book, they might not have tried to make American colonies in a region that apparently hasn’t changed culturally since the days of Ibn Battutah. Then again, myopic western chauvinism is timeless as well—an early passage has Bryon cunvulsed with laughter at those silly Jewish people who want to be rid of the English and to create their own independent state out of Palestine: I don’t know how long they think the Arabs would suffer a single Jew to exist once the English went.
Going Down the Tropical Rabbit Hole: The Scorpion Fish, by Nicholas Bouvier :
In the long-forgotten time when piety still mattered on the Island, when parakeets spontaneously broke into sutras, you wouldn’t often have seen a bonze taking to the road. They used to move around by magic, tucking up their robes, mounting the winds, spinning like crimson cannonballs toward the Golden Isles or the Himalayas, unless they chose to plunge into the earth with a terrifying bang.
As their wickedness has long since deprived them of these powers, much against their will they have been reduced to using public transport, for which they have to pay like everyone else. He who has lost his virtue will cling all the more to his privileges. Their frustration knows no bounds. Thus the great pontiffs of the Monastery of the Tooth-Relic (a crocodile tooth, Buddha’s having been stolen and burnt in the sixteenth century by Portuguese infidels), who rank above all the others, have an old, highly acrimonious quarrel with the union of bus conductors: the pink bus linking my town with the capital all too often displays traces of it. At least three times a year it is blown up, momentarily shaking off the lethargy which I’ve begun to distrust, since it’s apparently only calm in the eye of the storm.
All the same, it’s a good old bus, as long as you’re not fooled by the sleepy appearance of the professional pickpockets who are always on board. While you are absorbed in looking at the shoreline praised by Thomas Cook, your watch disappears, your wallet evaporates, the contents of your inside pocket go up in smoke, and occasionally even people vanish into thin air, on account of those explosive toys that are all the rage for a few weeks. The bonzes hide them under the great folds of their yellow robes, then put them in the luggage rack and get out at the next stop pretending to be rapt in meditation, just before the grand finale.
When you arrive in the bus following one of these pyrotechnic feats, it has to be seen to be believed: ice-cream coloured cases and umbrellas strewn everywhere, some even dangling from palm trees; large chignon combs far away from the heads that will not need them anymore; and the wounded in sarongs, carmine, violet, cinnabar—marvelous colours for a Deposition—lined along a road sparkling with crushed glass. Two cops, rolling their eyes, count them over and over again. In the middle of the road, a pair of round, metal rimmed spectacles lifts its arms in the air, an enormous insect, angry and fragile, in search of a nose flown off the Devil knows where.
Interestingly, Byron finishes up in 1933 by exiting Afghanistan and catching a boat from India back to England. 50 years later, Nicholas Bouvier begins his journal by setting off for a stay in Sri Lanka from about the same spot where Byron finished. He ends up in a much different place, however, and has the kind of experience Carlos Castaneda has, in which feats of magic are reported as having been actually witnessed by the author.
Bouvier is much more poetic than the uptight, frustrated Byron, and more inclined to let the absurd and violent native customs just wash over him with an air of bemusement as the natives grin at him like Cheshire cats while explaining that everything costs more and takes more time than he was earlier promised. As usual, where religion is mentioned, the key lesson is that there is no such thing as a "religion of peace"; not Christianity, not Islam, not Hinduism and not even Buddhism. I’ve stopped being disillusioned. I have a romantic, imaginary vision of Indian culture, and the more of the truth I see, the more I want to get no closer to the real thing than my encounters the cheerful customer service representative who tells me "Please to be put on hold now; you be waiting a bit, yes?" Bouvier met that guy many times over.
Going Up The Rabbit Mountain: The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann :
Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping himself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to your armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same proceedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit when he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.
The above is a description of the daily rest cure at The Berghorf Institute, where characters go to relax from the stress of having to symbolize entire pre-WWI European nations and philosophical schools of thought, all vying for the young protagonist Castorp’s allegiance in Mann’s thick magnum opus.
My father used to tell me that he and my uncle used to pass the time at Barrayar University by wrapping themselves in blankets and sitting on the rooftop gardens, pretending to be tubercular patients in this book. I don’t think I could have been more horrified if he’d told me their idea of a good time had been to go to the supermarket and play with the electric doors. As it turns out, the rest cure isn’t nearly as uberdorky as it sounds—the lounge chairs are the most luxuriant seats one could hope for, and the experience is like relaxing on a luxury deck chair on an arctic cruise ship, watching the ocean go by, except that you’re up in the alps, watching the view and thinking deep thoughts. That’s what the patients do all day. They navel-gaze, and think deep thoughts, and attend lectures and discussions about death and medicine and the scientific meaning of love and life with their heads in the clouds, while the silly frenetic people down below do all the mundane boring stuff like keeping the world running. People tend to go up there to visit a friend, and end up spending the best years of their lives there.
The philosophers tended to be ridiculous. One man would declare that the best government is the one that smiles and pats people on the head, and another would declare that no, the government must HIT people on the head, hit them hard, make them obey—and by the way, how elitist and patronizing and offensive the first man must be to talk of patting people on the head. Not until very late in the book when the old Dutch satyr Mynheer Peeperkorn showed up and put everyone to shame by simply living with passion did I find someone truly likable. Besides, it’s fun to say "Mynheer Peeperkorn".
Definitely the accommodations and the food would make the Institute (and hopefully, the rooftop gardens at Barrayar U) a nice place to visit, but I’d much rather spend the best years of my life on a meandering cruise ship without all the death and illness and things.
Going Down the Russian Rabbit Hole: Collected Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov :
"No, that’s not the General’s dog," says the policeman, with profound conviction, "the General hasn’t got one like that. His are mostly setters."
"Do you know that for a fact?"
"Yes, your honor."
"I know it too. The General has valuable dogs, thoroughbred, and this is goodness knows what! No coat, no shape...a low creature...and to keep a dog like that! What’s the sense of it. If a dog like that were to turn up in Petersburg or Moscow, do you know what would happen? They would not worry about the law, they would strangle it in a twinkling! You’ve been bitten, Hryukin, and we can’t let the matter drop...We must give them a lesson! It’s high time..."
"But maybe it is the General’s," says the policeman, thinking aloud. "It’s not written on its face...I saw one like it the other day in his yard."
"It’s the General’s, that’s certain!", says a voice in the crowd.
"Hmmm, help me on with my overcoat...the wind’s getting up...I am cold...You take it to the General’s, and inquire there. Say I found it and sent it. It may be a valuable dog, and if every swine like Hryukin goes teasing it, it will soon be ruined. A dog is a delicate animal...and you put your hand down, you blockhead. It’s no use your displaying your fool of a finger. It’s your own fault..."
Chekhov is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. There are ose horrors, like the one where a nursemaid, sleep-deprived and exhausted to the point of hallucinations, strangles the master’s shrieking infant and immediately collapses into slumber with a sweet, relieved smile on her face. There are supposedly "funny" stories like the one quoted above, in which groveling officials with no dignity left make spectacles of themselves in the face of authority. You’re supposed to laugh because their cowardice is so total; I just see the remains of people whose very humanity has been stolen from them by bullies—I can’t help it; I felt sorry for Peter Pettigrew too, at first. There are several stories in which nothing happens at all, and it’s hard to see what the point is. And then, there are absolute masterpieces. Tolstoyan parables like "The Devil and the Shoemaker" and "The Bet". Perfect captured moments like "The Lady with the Dog" and "The Ravine" in which emphasized details layer mundane events with infinite meaning. Endless seas of dirty, ignorant peasants, blind, pompous aristocrats; fat, lazy clergy; brutal, stupid cossacks; officials and more officials, rivers of vodka, and depression that hangs over the steppes like a palpable fog. And Chekhov hanging over it all, weeping for foolish, doomed humanity. I’ve been there. Oh boy, have I been there.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Chekhov wrote in the age of the Tsars, before communism—the sheer number of Russian officials and the amount of government intrusion even in the most rural villages could serve as posters for a capitalist denouncement of the alleged evils of socialism. Other times, the monstrous levels of inequality make it obvious why this nation eventually went the way of Marx in a desperate leap for change. In fact, to the degree Chekhov portrays the times accurately, one wonders why they waited another 15 years to rise up and begin slitting throats.
Going Down on the Rabbit Hole: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland:
Her sturdy stallion had now unbuttoned, and produced, naked, stiff and erect, that wonderful machine which I had never seen before, and which, for the interest my own seat of pleasure began to take furiously in it, I stared at with all the eyes I had: however, my senses were too much flurried, too much concentered in that now burning spot of mine, to observe anything more than in general the make and turn of that instrument, from which the instinct of nature, yet more than all I had heard of it, now strongly informed me, I was to expect that supreme pleasure which she has placed in the meeting of those parts so admirably fitted for each other.
This was all the more refreshing coming on the heels of Clarissa Harlowe, in which the heroine finds herself in a compromising position, and spends page after page after page with the back of her hand pressed to her forehead and sighing "Oh! Oh! Woe is Me, whatever shall I do?" Fanny Hill, on the other hand, left in a much more compromising position, rolls up her sleeves and with a lusty "Bring it On!" gets down to some robust, vigorous, agile, firm-fleshed country gal fun! When she pauses for air in her own athletic endeavors, she gets to spy interesting things happening through holes in the wall, engage in round table discussions with a houseful of bawds about the tales of their "first time", and---well, you can guess pretty easily which book, this one or Clarissa is more appealing to read. Unfortunately, you can also guess which book is 1500 pages and which is 180 pages. I wouldn’t have minded if it was the other way around.
It isn’t all wenching, though. In the famous obscenity case Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court dutifully read every healthy, stimulating, lion-loined page, going over the more controversial parts several times to make sure they understood the base appeal to the prurient interest—and ruled that the work had redeeming social and literary value. It’s not hard to see why. Not since Rabelais have I seen subject matter that is rarely mentioned in polite company (and mentioned with unappetizing coarseness in impolite company) discussed with such charm, wit, and guiltless gustatory appreciation of humanity’s more delightful instincts and bodily functions. High recommendations, when you’re in the right kind of mood.
After the book was published, Cleland joined his own lynch mob and denounced it, calling it "a book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my soul, buried and forgot." Today, it’s his only thing in the world for which he is remembered. Silly prude.
Going Down The Rabbit Hole Dentata: The Great American Stay-At-Home-Wives Conspiracy, by Dan Merchant and B. Scott Taylor :
Cassie, my little angel, light of my life, dainty princess, had been sneaking sips of my Coke and was now eight miles high. She bounced around the booth like a Chinese fucking acrobat. She’d eat a bite and do a somersault. She’d eat another bite and do a round off. She’d swallow some more food and do a back handspring. What, is she trying to qualify for the Olympics here or what? She gulped down her lemonade, inhaled her French fries, chomped on Andy’s burger, scarfed her own cheese sandwich, and then—launched all of it in an impressive display of projectile vomiting. The East German judge gives her a perfect ten.
The creamy splatter elicited a shriek from some fat bluehair at the next table, who quickly fled. The shriek in turn woke Brent. "Cassie barfed on my dinner! Why can’t she barf on her own dinner? She barfed all over my dinner."
Cassie launched another impressive load, this time narrowly missing Andy. Andy started to cry hard again.
"What are you crying for? You’re not the one spewing your dinner, honey."
"I burned my hand."
"That was forty minutes ago," I calmly pointed out.
"It hurts. Don’t you care? Don’t you love me?"
Not now kid. This is not the time to start milking it.
Cassie crawled toward me. "Daddy, I’m sick." Woof. Half-eaten burger and Coke splashed onto my lap. A moment later the smell hit me. Wet egg salad. Why does puke always smell like egg salad? I stared at my lap. I noticed that my little princess didn’t chew her food all that well. I’d have to speak to her about that later. Out of the corner of my eye, I swear I saw a little smile begin to creep onto Alicia’s face. Not a full smile, no teeth, just the hint of the slightest upturn at the corners of her mouth. She knew victory would be hers and she couldn’t wait to celebrate. It was that damn smile of satisfaction again.
Good God. Even the dysfunctional households whose marriages I see fall apart in court are content to simply take up meth habits, run up bills without telling each other, commit domestic violence and leave 12-year marriages with children in order to run off with 20-year old waitresses and guys they met on the internet. The incident described above was engineered by the wife solely to provoke an outburst so that she could lock the husband out of the bedroom and deduct "points" from the tally she kept on their marriage. And that’s a new one on me.
This book, which I impulse grabbed from the library based on cover appeal, invites the reader into an upscale Portland suburb of the absurd in which all the men are Howard Stern-viewing football couch potatoes whenever they’re not at their upscale jobs, and all the women are manipulative bitches in league with one another to turn their husbands into kept servants. An updated version of the old cartoons where the husband staggers home every night, reeking of booze, having blown his paycheck at the track, and the wife is standing at the door in a housecoat and curlers, holding a rolling pin. Do people really live like this? If so, I’m glad it’s in a culture alien to mine. I don’t believe I know any women who would even think about keeping her husband on a "point system", handing him "honey-do" lists of chores, locking him out of the bedroom, or deliberately causing child meltdowns for tactical advantage, nor do I know any men who would remain married to a woman who tried that. Heck, we CAN’T lock the bedroom door due to the toddler gate. Maybe my crazy life is saner than I thought.
Going down the Legal Rabbit Hole: A Practical Guide to Oregon Criminal Procedure & Practice, by Paul J. DeMuniz :
From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law. This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with a crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.
I haven’t read a legal casebook cover to cover since law school, but this 2008 treatise is an especially good one, and full of things I have to keep up on in my career. I’ve been grazing in it for about the last six months or so, and this month I finished it. Not recommended for nonprofessionals, but highly recommended for criminal attorneys. Since it counts as a book I read this year, I’ve included it here.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole of the Future: Maximum Light, by Nancy Kress :
One in four Americans was over 70. There were only 1.4 taxpaying workers to support each "retiree", even with the wretched non-living-level subsidies most elderly received. The number of "very senior citizens", those over eighty five, had quadrupled in the last fifty years. The global birthrate was less than twenty percent of what it had been a century ago. In some countries, it had dropped to five percent. In the relative absence of children, the world had grown old.
We drove past the huddled, sleeping forms. Past the holosigns, the most visible aspect of Project Patriot, bright cavorting shadows whose captions urged SHARED RESPONSIBILITY and THE SOCIAL CONTRACT==YOUR GUARANTEE OF A GOOD FUTURE! Past the broken bottles and drug discards and human shit—the usual. Plus, of course, the rats, bolder and more aggressive than rats had been in the entire history of man. I knew why, but the committee wouldn’t let me tell them.
And in the middle of the early morning street, dressed only in a pink tunic, a brown skinned toddler with huge dark eyes and long black hair topped with a crisp pink ribbon.
"Stop the car", I said to the driver, who was already screeching to a halt, as startled as I was.This did not happen. Washington was at the bottom of America’s regional variation curves in sperm count—the bottom for motility and normalcy and volume—and thus for birth rate. Artificial conception, in all its varieties, was still too expensive for most couples, now that the health insurance industry had crashed. And cloning, which had once seemed the hope of the world, had turned into a bitter joke....children were scarce and precious; they were not allowed to turn up half-naked and lone in the middle of filthy streets. Especially not children with no visible birth defects. There were a great many infertile couples who would kill for this little girl.
I didn’t quote the passage that explains the REASON for the birth defects and sterility—describing in detail how pollutants in the air and water get into the body, and how business and government collude to assure the public that everything is absolutely safe, and these illnesses are NOT caused by the industrial conglomerates that they know are in fact causing them. I’ve been reading this book out loud to The Redhead, who got it at WorldCon after seeing the author on a panel and being very, very impressed with her, and that passage was the point at which The Redhead asked me to stop reading. Too dang painful, with little Two-Foot happily playing in the room, three years old and unable to walk upright or speak.
A later passage, explaining what various shadowy people are doing in response, and what they’re about to do to an unwilling subject, is even nastier than that.
This is not for everyone. But if you have the stomach, it’s very well-written, very well characterized (there are three protagonists, who take turns narrating the chapters), and has a point to it that everyone needs to contemplate.
Little Rabbit Hole on the Prairie: Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather :
Her husband put on his coat and boots, went to the door, and stopped with his hand on the latch, throwing over his shoulder a crafty, hateful glance at the bewildered woman. "Here, you! Come right along, I’ll need ye!"
She took her black shawl from a peg and followed him. Just at the door, she turned and caught the eyes of the visitors, who were looking after her in compassion and perplexity. Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger, she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it had communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.
Four Willa Cather books, and my favorite is still O Pioneers. Cather clearly spent some time in New Mexico, as this is the second with a solid presence there. Unfortunately, she has chosen to tell the story of two venerable, kindly Spanish missionaries of the 19th Century, in a my, what-good-men-they-were sort of way, and I know too much about what the Spanish from Father Serra onward spent centuries doing to the indigenous peoples to swallow it.
As usual with Cather, it’s such a pity that the original frontiersmen, who all loved the land and knew they belonged there from the moment The Lord created it in 1492 or so, have to weep as the marching morons show up 50 years later and spoil it all. I kept waiting for their faithful guide Jacinto to look unimpressed at their complaints and say "Tell me about it".
Going Down The Political Rabbit Hole: The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman :
Medieval theologians debated how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. Modern economists debate whether American median income has risen or fallen since the early 1970s. What’s really telling is the fact that we’re even having this debate. America is a far more productive and hence far richer country than it was a generation ago. The value of the output an average worker produces in an hour, even after you adjust for inflation, has risen almost 50 percent since 1973. Yet the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small minority has proceeded so rapidly that we’re not sure whether the typical American has gained ANYTHING from rising productivity.
Since I crosspost my monthly book post to Kos, eenr, and other forums that are mostly political, I’m relieved when I can comment on an overtly political book once in a while. The trouble is that it’s often hard to comment because the book is just argument, and usually just telling me what I already know and doing my blood pressure harm by reminding me. Krugman, though easy to read and impassioned and well researched, is no exception.
The brief summary of his thesis: The Federal government under FDR created a decent economic society, overcoming the forces that tend to go with the status quo to do so; and the government under Reagan and the Newtists did the same in destroying it. Now, the pendulum is ready to swing back again, if President Obama and the Democrats are ready to duplicate the New Deal Strategy, starting with Universal Health Care.
Additionally, the Newtists succeeded not because of "values voting" or "national security", but SOLELY because the New Deal coalition depended on the South, and White Southerners began voting Republican because of racism faster than northerners and westerners switched away from the Republicans. Because racism is slowly fading as a FIRST reason for voting, and because America is becoming more nonwhite, movement conservatives cannot hold on to their gains fairly, only by stealing elections. National Security became a factor only after 9/11, causing the Newtists to try to revive the Cold War with a new villain. Their failure in Iraq has been so spectacular that voters no longer trust the GOP on national security.
Anyone have anything to add to that?
Going Down The Original Rabbit Hole: The Complete Nonsense Book, by Edward Lear :
TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES: Take a pig three or four years of age, and tie him by the hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 3 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and 6 bushels of turnips, within his reach. If he eats these, constantly provide him with more.
Then procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, 4 quires of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.
When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the pig violently with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.
Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if, at the end of that period, the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.
If it does not, then it never will; and in that case, the pig may be let loose and the whole process may be considered as an abysmal failure.
I got this one to read to little Two-Foot, who is not yet ready for it, as she wants to eat the pages if I show them to her, and tries to poke my eyes out if I do not. The little totkin is one of the few people in fandom who is apparently filled with inertia by my story-reading voice. Chekhov would have nodded knowingly at that one. For ME, on the other hand, this is the most fun book of the month, right up there with Lewis Carroll, from the Jumblies and the Owl and Pussycat to the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo and the Pobble Who Has No Toes.
To Two-Foot’s credit, she is at least wise enough to laugh with delighted amusement when I say "Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo". Otherwise, I’d start to wonder if the bonny wee lass had been replaced with a changeling.