**spoiler alert** 7/17/23: I just completed rereading David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens in part to prepare myself for reading this homage to**spoiler alert** 7/17/23: I just completed rereading David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens in part to prepare myself for reading this homage to it, Demon Copperhead (2022; right, 175 years ago, basically) by Barbara Kingsolver, a book meant to illustrate the relevance of Dickens's ideas for contemporary society. One set of ideas is a critique of the cruel treatment of children and women in his time, but another set of ideas is caught up in the importance of resolve, resiliency, kindness and acts of social justice. Education, health care, equal treatment at home and under the law, are crucial. Kingsolver: Dickens's literary and social conscience.
"They started calling me Demon Copperhead. I like it. It has power."
David Copperfield is auto-fiction, a bildungsroman based on Dickens's own rise from misery and poverty to prosecute bad guys, develop loving and supportive relationships, and become an esteemed and beloved novelist writing about necessary social issues. Demon is a nickname for Damon Fields, who like David is born to a single mother whose husband died while she was pregnant. Both David and Demon are engaging narrators. Demon is funnier, obviously speaking in contemporary language, but since I just read Copperfield, I'll say I also loved David as teller of his life. I also notice that Copperhead fits the Copperfield template very well, making deft comparisons between the mid-nineteenth English world and the American Appalachian territory where Kingsolver grew up and still lives. If you thought the treatment of women and children, and poverty were tough in England 200 years ago, you realize with Kingsolver's help that things haven't changed much, really.
Demon and David suffer cruel treatment at the hands of their step-fathers, and when "fostered" out to "charity" institutions. If alcoholism figures in Copperfield, in Copperhead it is drugs, the opioid epidemic. Copperhead is a kind of reimagining of Copperfield where the names of central characters and places are similar. But before I get too far, Demon Copperhead (that's a snake, in case y'all didn't know, but the name here for Damon/Demon refers also to his copper-colored hair) was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. Both authors are righteously angry and also very entertaining political novelists. I'm enjoying it, this great kid voice, and anguished about all the cruelty and bad breaks. I'm both yelling (ok, swearing) aloud angry and laughing aloud, as it is darkly hilarious.
7/20/23: This is very entertaining still in a Dickensian way, though I have to say, just having read Copperfield, it maps almost too perfectly on the Copperfield plot, with similar names and actions. I keep wanting to make a chart of equivalences, which is maybe not the best way to read a book, but it is still very good. This guy Demon is as down on his luck as David--since the book is only only a year old and just won the Pulitzer, I'll try not to give away too many spoilers--but as with David, who starvingly ends up at Aunt Betsey's door, Demon also shows up at Grandma's door in Murder Valley. The Peggotts (not David's Peggotty) can't take Demon in, but there he has his first taste of young love (attraction, really) with Emmy (David's first young friend is Emily).
7/23/23: I like how Kingsolver has Demon discover the novel David Copperfield, and read some of it: "That guy could have written that whole book in Lee County." Ha, good one, Barbara.
Some spoilers follow, sorry. So if you are going to read this, maybe skip the next part? I won't give away the ending, though, promise. But if you skip it, please alert me to yr own review and read what I wrote below to see if you might agree with me or not.
So as I said, this is sadly yet another OxyContin book: Demon has some luck on the football field, but hurts his knee, doctor prescribes painkillers, opioid addiction, boom. And cheap drugs are everywhere. But her primary target is not these weak country people succumbing to drugs; it is Purdue Pharma, the Sackler-owned company that contributed heavily to the opioid crisis with its aggressive (and spectacularly lucrative) push of OxyContin:
“She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines.”
“What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.”
Then Demon falls hard for a (shallow, immature) girl named Dori (David's similar girlfriend is Dora). Both come to the same end.
The Steerforth in Kingsolver's novel is Fast Forward, Demon's football handsome football here mentor. Both Steerforth and Fast Forward come to the same end. (Note to self: think about the ways water, drowning, Demon's love of oceans, works in this book)
The Uriah Heep character is U-Haul, and they are the same basic person, doing almost exactly the same things. He cheats Coach Winfield out of money and desires Angus (born Agnes), just as Heep cheats Wickfield and desires his daughter Agnes Wickfield.
This is really well written, but so far, 9/10 of the book done, almost exactly the same things happen in Demon as David. Though David becomes a successful social justice novelist, and Demon becomes a $50 a week social justice cartoonist (and later, graphic novelist. As a comics guy, I love that, Barbara, ty!).
7/25/23: So I finished Demon Copperhead and really did like it, but am thinking a lot of peripheral things about my experience:
*I think if you haven’t read David Copperfield or read it decades ago you will still love this grim, hilarious book, as well a kind of partner to another recent bildungsroman, Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart. Child neglect and poverty everywhere. A send-up of inadequate capitalist health care and education systems (45: "I love the poorly educated!"). Of the proliferation of drugs perpetrated by prescription drug-makers. And often darkly hilarious.
*But I did just read David Copperfield, and Demon Copperhead is basically the same book revised for contemporary America, specifically the Appalachia Kingsolver knows and loves and mourns for. I will award this five stars, because I tried to imagine reading it as a stand-alone, without having just read David Copperfield, and I know I would have loved it. I doubt any of the Pulitzer Prize committee, facing all that reading they have to do, reread David Copperfield before they read this book. If they had, they’d maybe take a point off for this pretty precise literary mapping. But the point is, does it stand alone as great? And I say it does. . *I also know very many novels echo/are homages to/speak directly to novels that have come before. Don Quixote, a classic I also read this year, lays out its narrative on the maps of many heroic/romantic Knight books that were popular in the century before it. And it is a great book. It references lots of books like it throughout. So maybe I should just celebrate Demon for what it is and not whine about what it isn’t, nor maybe ever could be, within the sub-genre of realistic, social and economic justice writing, and thank her for urging us to reread Dickens as crucially relevant for today. There. I did that.
*Rant here: We have to care for kids, we have to stop demonizing the poor for the failures of an unjust economic system (I have the image in my head now, posted just this morning by Lauren Sanchez of buff, sculpted Jeff Bezos this morning, ugh; how can I unsee him now, or in his billionaire rocket ship or stiffing the unions). Don’t we want what he has?! He can buy any body he wants! Screw the opioid crisis, some of us will say: Losers! And some will admire the drug companies “because they are smart, as 45 notes; because they know how to game the system; because they’re the winners we wanna be.”
“Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That’s what the big world thinks it’s worth, to save white-trash orphans.”
I loved the ending, even knowing it was coming, found it moving, coming back to Demon’s love of an ocean teeming with creatures he has never seen. I was misty-eyed, even though I had just read basically the same ending in David Copperfield a couple weeks before. Roughly 1500 pages of the same story told twice?! Masochism? But you know, I’m glad I did it, and urge you to do the same. I admire Kingsolver for her accomplishment and congratulate her on her Pulitzer. It’s actually even more misery than David Copperfield, but with a much funnier main character who now has his own place in literary history.
“I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe.”
A debut comic by Montreal artist Geneviève Lebleu. Aw, a women's comic: Several middle-class, middle-aged get together, there's tea and gardening! ButA debut comic by Montreal artist Geneviève Lebleu. Aw, a women's comic: Several middle-class, middle-aged get together, there's tea and gardening! But this is a horror comic, not a cosy mystery, where the women actually do not get along. At all. And something is in that tea, and the plants are sentient. . . and colorful, but a little scary! Weeding the garden can get you in big trouble!
At one point two of them (in an alternate weedy plant universe) wonder what is going on, and they discuss options we as readers have already considered:
--"To me this is just a giant maze." --"Sometimes I think this is just a never ending bad trip." --"It's like I'm in a video game and it doesn't really matter what I do." --"Or maybe we are in limbo."
Discuss.
Anyway, this is a surreal comic that is pretty funny. It looks quite a bit like a horror coloring book. Doesn't really seem to be advocating "get back to nature!" Jesse Jacobs blurbs the book, and so that reminds me of his Safari Honeymoon; a combo of body horror and plant monsters. Little Shop of Horrors with middle-aged suburban women!...more
My third exclusive (ooh!) (and short--a couple hours) Audible book, by Michael Pollan, who also reads it aloud, where he makes a brief case for how caMy third exclusive (ooh!) (and short--a couple hours) Audible book, by Michael Pollan, who also reads it aloud, where he makes a brief case for how caffeine shaped our modern world. Most humans--including children--are addicted to caffeine, through coffee, tea, soda, and more recently, through hyper-caffeinated “energy” drinks. And we have in recent decades seen studies that seem to support the contention that a certain amount of caffeine is good for you (though I always think the billion-dollar coffee/tea/soda industry may be invested in these studies, as the alcohol industry is in all these pro-booze "studies.").
The pretty heavily-caffeine-addicted Pollan did his own self study on a medical researcher’s advice: Go through withdrawal and stay off caffeine for a while and see what that does to your body, and then, if you like, start ingesting the drug again. But none of what he discovers would be surprising to any of us.
The first half of the essay establishes that caffeine in recent centuries has fueled the world's "progress," including the Industrial Revolution. He makes a case for it being aligned with rationality and productivity. He describes coffee as he would a lover, and claims he could not have accomplished so much as a writer without it. He says we individually and socially are more “productive” when we are caffeinated.
But in the second half of the book Pollan relies on his reading of Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams to (lightly) question the assumed virtues of productivity, rationality and capitalism itself. He establishes that, while he will go back to his lover/addiction, he acknowledges that sleep loss in part fueled by caffeine has shortened some people’s lives and promoted heart problems, high blood pressure and several other diseases.
And what about, I'll add, the argument for slow growth, slow eating, the “end of progress,” and quiet contemplation? Is more always better than less? Look at the destruction of the planet. Is it not the result of "progress"? Are is there a downside to your productivity and professional accomplishments?
How many of us during the pandemic (and regarding the related issues of climate change, war, refugees, you name it), have become more anxious, depressed and seen the rise of violence in our homes and communities? Can we blame caffeinated drinks for the state of the world? Well, maybe think of it like this: Might meditation and long walks in the woods and eight hours sleep be better for your health than two more shots of espresso?
Here’s one zinger for ya: Pollan says that both caffeine and the minute hands on clocks came to Europe at about the same time. Yes, our obsession with not wasting time, billable hours/minutes was established with the “help” of caffeine. Drink more caffeine, sleep less, and achieve! (I've followed that mantra at various times in my life, I'll admit).
The military is heavily invested in caffeine. If you are in the middle of a drive, you need to stay awake and “sharp,” and it’s assumed caffeine will do the trick. Was reminded of that book, Blitzed, about how Hitler and the Nazi regime achieved some of its early success, blitzed on drugs.
Is there a good reason we caffeinate the soda that we give to kids?
I was never addicted to caffeine (I know, I know, all addicts says this!), but it took me years to discover that it affected me adversely. From my teens to my mid-twenties I--like almost everyone increasingly since the early seventies--drank a lot of caffeinated soft drinks. I was already an ADHD kid, and I never needed an alarm to wake me up, much less caffeine, and still don’t. I like the taste of a little coffee in the morning, I like the social culture of coffeehouses as I do bars for talk, but I have had to drink decaf most of my life or I spin out of control. I get the shakes with 2-3 cups of caffeinated anything. Caffeine would not make me a better soldier, trust me. But you know, everything in moderation, right?
I like the book and like him as a writer very much. ...more
If all you know of stoner comics is Simon Hanselmann (of Megg & Mogg fame), then you need to go to the roots of stoner comics with Gary Panter (and CrIf all you know of stoner comics is Simon Hanselmann (of Megg & Mogg fame), then you need to go to the roots of stoner comics with Gary Panter (and Crumb and many others)!
Gary Panter is, among other things, a painter, from Texas, now west coast, LA. He has drawn alt comics such as his Jimbo series. He had a long association with Pee Wee Herman, helping him create his Playhouse. Worked with and drew covers for various punk/psychedelic bands. In 2017, he created an art installation, Hippie Trip, inspired by his first visit to a head shop in 1968. This book, which is a very large hardcover and also contains a stapled comix version of itself in a cover envelope, is a kind of homage to the sixties and what it accomplished artistically and socially. And drugs, connected to alternative states of consciousness (thanks, Timothy Leary. Tune in, Turn On and Drop Out! as I was around in 1968 and almost ready to retire, I just might be ready to follow his advice, at long last).
As he says, the sixties birthed some great movements that never quite went away, it just went further underground for awhile, during the long Reagan to Trump years, but some of the Left alt art and ecological movements we see today as he sees it are linked to the best impulses of the sixties. The characters in this short book are straight out of sixties alt comix, fueled by a lot of acid. So, yes, psychedelics, which also seem to be taken seriously for healing properties again. Not by me, but hey, baby, there's work going on there now:
The last line from the last full page depiction of some crazy guy is a call to action: “Okay, you kids! Get your shit together! We have to get out there and plant a billion trees!” I agree with the dude, though I am not sure I am going to be following him anywhere anytime soon! I'd take his keys before I'd let him drive. But hey, relax, chill, this is a fun book with a heart so don't ruin his vibe, dude!
An appendix lists hippie comics like Zap Comix and movements such as the Hairy Who? art collective in Chicago as evidence of cool trippy sixties happenings of note, and then shows us contemporary happenings that extend from that early work from fifty years ago. ...more
So, while the majority of us lay stunned by the pandemic, Simon Hanselmann found yet another gear and created a daily webcomic about his profoundly, tSo, while the majority of us lay stunned by the pandemic, Simon Hanselmann found yet another gear and created a daily webcomic about his profoundly, terrifyingly and hilariously damaged crew: Megg, Mogg, Owl and WereWolf Jones, who takes his place front and center as the most offensively disgusting comic book character in the series (and maybe in comics history). The group has always been falling apart, and Hanselmann travels the line between outrageous hilarity and despair (with Megg and her depression front and center).
Crisis Zone answers the question you maybe didn't want to know the answer to: What happens to a group of people that were already close to madness and tragedy as they get slammed the pandemic? And the answer, not surprisingly, is not pretty. Look at that amazing cover; look at sad Megg and Booger and Owl and you know, it can only has gotten worse with Covid. And what is Hanselmann's response to all this? To focus on the most despicable character, WWJ, and his kids. No, not to be gentle and caring, of course, but angry and outraged and to use the darkest humor he can dredge up from the gutter to scream his denial. And I can't even write about what WWJ drags the crew into, but involving Booger's many boxes of thongs collection is just the beginning. It's almost as if he is psychically screaming screw you to the universe as his characters face it all down.
Ok: Even if I get the point, it was too much WWJ, too offensive. And yet I give this four stars??! I guess it is for the achievement of it as a reflection of Covid 2020, enacted in real time, now one of Hanselmann's dozens of depictions of his world. And I like it that Owl takes a more substantial role, and isn't just a doormat (of course he would be the only one of them to wear a mask as they all get Covid). And I love Megg and feel so sorry for her and her paralyzing depression. And yes, real death and dying happens in this very long, 286 page volume I had to read in fits and starts because it was so outrageous. NOT recommended for any but the strong of stomach and for those with depraved senses of humor. But even as I say that I see that the line-crossing here mixes with his genuine caring for his characters that is admirable in some sense. Yes, I will read on, even into the valley of the ten thousand butt jokes....more
Very low rating on Goodreads for this comic, the topic for which surprised me, somewhat wincingly, as a book about addiction, one of a few I seem to bVery low rating on Goodreads for this comic, the topic for which surprised me, somewhat wincingly, as a book about addiction, one of a few I seem to be reading on the topic. This appears to be a cute little Brian O'Malley story featuring anthropomorphic animals, where you keep expecting the punchline but only get punched again and again. Julian is addicted to prescription medication--drugs--and is going nowhere. The son of the former mayor, living with an indulgent girlfriend, she finally kicks him out and he has nowhere to go, sleeps on benches, like thousands of folks in this city.
You keep hoping for the turn to hope and transcendence, but. . . sometimes literature is about disaster, loss, despair, and so I appreciated this stark realism. I had a hard time reading it, still, as I had never had anyone close to me that was severely addicted to drugs, but now do have, and I read this as true life horror, a warning against my naivete and defensiveness (oh, he's not really addicted! He'll pull out of this!). And maybe he will.
Read the review from cartoonist François Vigneault to appreciate what this work is about and why the art work works so well as a counterpoint to the dark themes. Yes, this is kind of starkly miserable, but I for one am thankful for it, and I'll surely read more from Jon Allen....more
While we are waiting for the next installment of the Megg & Mogg saga, we get this big collection of a decade of stories out of their world, which is While we are waiting for the next installment of the Megg & Mogg saga, we get this big collection of a decade of stories out of their world, which is two things, basically, a gross-out, hilarious stoner comic, and a horrifying cautionary tale about these out-of-control friends drinking and smoking themselves to meaninglessness and death. Twenty-something, sideways, lost in space chaos. But can it be both, alternating between stoner goofiness and everyday death spiral? I say yes.
This collection doesn't give us anything we didn't know before: Megg and Mogg are struggling; Megg turns to Booger for release; Werewolf Jones is the worst and most irresponsible human being (and father) we can imagine, and everyone is mean to Owl. Culled from a collection of work spanning ten years and found in zines, alternative comix rags, alternative newspapers, and so on, it is still a must-have for Simon Hanselmann completists. It's hard to read, as it is in very small print to make the book marketable, but worth the effort, most of the time. There are what amounts to "outtakes" and experimental sketches, even some sci-fi tales. Psychedelia, of course. A range of sketchy self-published work to gorgeous full-color nightmare paintings.
Let's see, some highlight/lowlights: There's no food in the house, so Werewolf Jones suggests that they go trick or treating, and get candy to eat. It's not Halloween, so nobody plays along wiht the joke, people aren't home, so WWJ plays tricks on the homeowners. They all get away except Owl, of course.
WWJ wants the money from a Princess contest, so he forces two of his sons to dress up in drag. They win the contest.
There's really gross stuff I'm not telling you about, sexual stuff, anything involving a range of bodily fluids, which will either turn you off forever, juvenilia, or make you laugh until you cry. (I also just read Samantha Irby's Meaty, and I am musing on a theory of humor as body humor/outrage I see in both of their works).
But the images that stick with me, really, are the contrapuntal ones of Megg in tears, torn by depression, eyes in horror. Madness. Hanselmann is one great cartoonist, both alt-comix guy in the wacked-out, drugged-out sixties tradition of Crumb and Tijuana Bibles and Beavis and Butthead AND a glimpse into the nightmare side of it all. Quite an accomplishment, really....more
Winter Count—a series of pictographs drawn on buffalo hide, cloth, or paper that was used to help remember community history among some tribes of the Winter Count—a series of pictographs drawn on buffalo hide, cloth, or paper that was used to help remember community history among some tribes of the Northern Great Plains.
Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Early on he demonstrates how this works as he beats the living crap out of a guy most people knew assaulted a little girl. Where was the Tribal Police?
"By federal law, tribal police couldn't prosecute any federal crimes that happened on the rez." This same fact is also central to Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. In an afterword x answers the two most common questions he has gotten after publishing his book: 1) Is this an actual federal law? And 2) Are there enforcers on reservations to enact tribal justice? He says yes.
So drugs and alcohol are problems on the rez, but one tribal leader says he thinks one tribal member is helping a gang in Denver establish a heroin trade on the rez. Virgil says, “not my problem,” until it becomes his problem, as hs fourteen year old nephew Nathan overdoses on a “free” hit given to him to get him hooked.Virgil is a recovering alcoholic, he’s a violent guy, and he has no particular commitment to indigenous cultural or spiritual values or even political history.
In the process of asking around he enlists the help of his ex, Marie, the daughter of Ben Short Bear, a candidate for Tribal President. She is smart, applying to med school, and is interested in learning more about how ceremonies and ancient indigenous food can heal her people. Virgil wants none of any of that. And at the ⅓ to ½ place in the book connect it to Round House and Tommy Orange’s There, There, which are all written by Native Americans and have been relatively recently published, (and which I have reviewed here), and I make my guesses:
Will violent Virgil adopt Lakota spiritual and cultural practices of peaceful harmony with the land and compassion or become Lakota Warriors against white abuse and colonization such as were Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse? (I guessed the former) Will Virgil in this process get together with ex Marie? (I guessed yes) Will Virgil get heroin off the rez? (I guess yes, or make a good start).
My view of all these books (at the midpoint of this book, at least) is that they are written by Native authors for Native Peoples to encourage them to save themselves by the re-establishment of indigenous traditions and spiritual practices. I mean, the title refers to a Lakota practice of mapping cultural history, but I guess there is a range of history. . . I mean, I don’t expect a lot of surprises.
But then I am surprised! In the process of researching gang and cartel practices Virgil finds stories of torture and grisly murders, and then Nathan is kidnapped by the gang in a failed sting, where he is discovered wearing a wire. Let me just say that torture and grisly murder happens on both sides, as Virgil essentially takes the Crazy Horse way of the warrior in protecting the rez (and Nathan). I am not judging here; if my nephew was drugged and tortured and I had the brutal skills that Virgil has, I might just use them against the drug dealers. And it’s not just a white vs Lakota war going on in this book, as a couple main Lakota characters are made to pay for their sins (by Virg).
So it’s a good first book for David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and I understand others may follow, so I’m interested. It’s a good, character-driven story. I like Virgil and I like Marie. I'll say 3.5, rounded up not because I necessarily like the revenge-oriented Sam Peckinpah Straw Dogs level of crazy violence, but because it contradicted my expectations. I prefer to be surprised. But it's more a violent thriller than a mystery, in case you are wondering. ...more
“That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the macke“That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect”--W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
“It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart”--Anne Frank
I have been wondering about this statement from Anne Frank’s Diary lately, and as I am reading Cormac McCarthy, whose Blood Meridian makes it clear that the Conquering of the West by white people was one vicious, bloody series of events. But I’m not joking in juxtaposing McCarthy with Frank, as opposite as they may seem. I know he doesn't believe what Frank says. But I still want to know from this blunt critic of the decline of the human race if he thinks Goodness can possibly save the world. Blood Meridian features The Judge, an articulate nihilist bringer of Death--not much hope there in the past some might imagine returning to; his The Road depicts a post-apocalyptic world where a father takes care of a son to the bitter end--a small ray through the radiation haze, maybe, but still, not much hope in the future. Yet I’m always looking for some crust of hope in McCarthy, some sign of remaining Goodness in the human race.
Violence is always present in McCarthy. This is how the country got made, and how it continually gets unmade. Old Men features three military veterans who have all been traumatized by the violence in war. We’re in Texas, 1980, and it’s just the beginning of the overwhelming presence of narcotics and the violence that is wedded to that dimension of our decline. One of those boys, a welder, Llewellyn Moss, finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bunch of dead men. A stash of heroin and two million (2.4) dollars in cash are still in the back. Moss takes the money, but an enforcer/bounty-hunter/incarnation of Evil, Anton Chigurh, is Hell-bent on getting it back and killing every single thing in his path. The third main guy, Sheriff Tom Ed Bell, one of the “old men” of the title, is determined to slow all this mayhem down. If Chigurh is Evil, Bell is Good.
That goodness, those Frankian ideals, are present in the loving relationship between father and son in The Road, though they seem almost cloyingly naive after reading Blood Meridian. And in No Country For Old Men? It’s there in the sweet and almost sentimental relationship between Bell and his wife; it’s there when Moss picks up a hitchhiker, a teenaged girl, and gives her money to get her to California as he is on his way back to his wife. There’s goodness, I guess, in the reflections on how only Satan himself could have invented narcotics and the societal destruction it has caused. It’s present in the very being of Bell (and no, I can’t get the movie version of Bell, sweet and crusty Tommy Lee Jones, out of my head even as I listen to the superb audiobook reading of the book by Tom Stechschulte).
This is not McCarthy’s greatest work, but it is up there, a crime novel that also over the course of the book becomes a profound exploration of the soul, morality, the human spirit. Where Blood Meridian is Biblical in its poetic prose, the writing in Old Men is stripped down, with an ear for tight-lipped Texas dialogue and philosophizing that only a master like McCarthy could accomplish. It’s Jim Thompson and Stephen King brutal, but with a reflection on human nature. And these characters, Chigurh (no relation to sugar in the least) is one of the literary crime monsters, Bell is one of the great cops, Moss is a good man Anne Frank would approve of who made a mistake I would have probably made myself. And I love Bell’s wife, Moss’s wife, and the hitchhiker. Unforgettable characters.
Oh, if I had to look for something critical to say I might acknowledge that both Bell and Chigurh are somewhat cliched representations of Good and Evil. Allegory. I might have wished for a little less folksy old fart cultural reflection on the level of “the good old days” and “we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket,” but then again, as a daily aging old fart myself, I kinda agree with that, and on the whole I was moved by it, maybe especially Bell’s wartime confession. The great movie version, those greators in the central roles, I’m gonna see it again, yeah....more
Amazing and grim 2010 book that was almost immediately made into a highly successful film I love starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes. I read itAmazing and grim 2010 book that was almost immediately made into a highly successful film I love starring Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes. I read it for the first time this week and was just awed by it. Set in the Ozarks during the crazy rise of crank, or crystal meth, it is in one sense a fairly straightforward coming-of-age book featuring 16-year-old Ree Dolly and in another sense a tale of an off-the-grid American culture steeped in ancient history. Ree's mother is debilitated by severe mental illness, her Dad is a crank cook, latrly out of prison, still gone most of the time, leaving Ree to feed and raise her twin little brothers and take care of her ma.
“Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.”
Of Ma: “Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.” It's a kind of metaphor for the rural region itself, always poor, now spiraling into accelerating into decay more quickly with the infusion of drugs.
“This floor, here? I remember when this floor here used to get to jumpin' like a fuckin' bunny from all the dancin'. Everybody dancin' around all night, stoned out of their minds - and it always was the happy kind of stoned back then.”
There is basically no money for Ree to draw from, though there is a thin but stable friend network, and the family claim that "everyone is related to everyone else" that has for centuries been a sign of cultural stability is being stretched by the attendant drug-related violence I also just read about in No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and am reading about in Deacon King Kong by James McBride: When this country turned from booze and pot to hard drugs the fists and knives turned murderously to guns and bigger guns. This crisis takes no prisoners and we are still very much in it in 2020, with no sign of relief.
The basic plot turns on the news that Ree's father, Jessup, in order to bond out of jail, has put his house and property up to cover the cost, and the county sheriff's office has come to tell Ree they'll lose the house in a month if Dad doesn't show up. So she goes from house to house, family to family, to find her father, which lends the air of mystery to the cultural/economic portrait. It feels as simple and bleak and inexorable as McCarthy's The Road, another lost "road" apocalypse book.
Being a Dolly, Ree calls on all Dollys to help her, but things may have changed in the light of all the devastation from crank. What is loyalty and family now? It feels like the Yeats lines from "The Second Coming":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
“The Dolly's around here can't be seen to coddle a snitch's family--that's always been our way. We're old blood, us people, and our ways was set firm long before hot shot baby Jesus ever even burped milk'n sh*& yellow.”
Yet Woodrell, while never romanticizing, loves this place of haunted, lost beauty, infusing this world with such anguished lyricism in places to make your heart break. And the courage of Ree, yes, we love her, but it's not in the least happy, just a tale of white knuckle survival bathed in poetry.
“The going sun chucked a vast spread of red behind the ridgeline. A horizon of red light parsed into shafts by standing trees to throw pink in streaks across the valley snow.”...more
In the sixties and seventies there were a variety of writers I and my friends read just for fun: Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams. Joseph Heller and PhillipIn the sixties and seventies there were a variety of writers I and my friends read just for fun: Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams. Joseph Heller and Phillip Roth were also funny, but more seriously “literary.” Richard Brautigan wrote any number of fun and silly and inventive novels, usually filled with absurd similes and bizarre flights of thought and weird insights. This book, A Confederate General at Big Sur (1964) was his first novel and one of his best, though none of them pay too much attention to plot. He’s always going for the joke, with large doses of sex and drugs. I listened to it today as I ran and really liked it, laughing aloud a few times. Because I was smiling a lot more people seemed to say hi to me, so it’s all good!
So Big Sur (in northern California) turns out to be an outpost of the Confederacy, with a (possible) General there, and Brautigan comes back to this theme time and again, looking into the history of confederate generals and the military without saying anything really useful about them, but that’s not the point of the book. (I don’t know what the point is but I really don’t care; what I care about is the four main characters and their interactions, which are generally cannibis-oriented.
You can here get the flavor of what he is about in this book, early on in his career when his absurd imagination was just buzzing:
“Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.”
“She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.”
“I was of course reading Ecclesiastes at night in a very old Bible that had heavy pages. At first I read it over and over again every night, and then I read it once every night, and then I began reading just a few verses every night, and now I was just looking at the punctuation marks.
Actually I was counting them, a chapter every night. I was putting the number of punctuation marks down in a notebook, in neat columns. I called the notebook ‘The Punctuation Marks in Ecclesiastes.’ I thought it was a nice title. I was doing it as a kind of study in engineering.”
“Yes, “I farted.
“Were you going to the store?” she lied.
“. . . she opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys.”
“The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history.”
So it’s surrealism or absurdism with a beat/hippie bent. Humor, flights of fancy, dreams, hallucinations. Bees living in hives made of liver. Bears dressed in nightgowns. Whisky-drinking geese. Men in debt have the shadows of giant birds attached to them.
“This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That's what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.”
Here's a couple Brautigan poems that get at his mischievous nature, his way of poking fun at Literature, and then, his sweetness:
A piece of green pepper fell off the wooden salad bowl: so what?
Oh, Marcia, I want your long blonde beauty to be taught in high school, so kids will learn that God lives like music in the skin and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord. I want high school report cards to look like this:
Playing with Gentle Glass Things A
Computer Magic A
Writing Letters to Those You Love A
Finding out about Fish A
Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty A+
Oh, and I write this on Easter at what might be close to the peak of the pandemic in Chicago, with artists painting murals everywhere and 60 shootings in five days and people sewing masks. Happy Easter, everyone, whether you are a Christian or not....more