At the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" but there isn'tAt the moment there is a block on all new ratings & reviews of Hillbilly Elegy because of what GR has decided is "suspicious activity" but there isn't a block on this combined book, so here's my Hillbilly Elegy review. (This is what's known as a work-around.)
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HILLBILLY ELEGY by JD VANCE
1) When JD Vance was chosen as Trump’s Veep I thought – wait, where have I heard that name, didn’t this guy write a book, which was some kind of famous? Well yes, he did, so I thought now I have to read it.
2) It’s the story about how occasionally one unusual hillbilly can become upwardly mobile and go to college and then Yale and make something of himself and have a stable marriage and stable kids and just live the American Dream whereas 99% of his childhood pals will be strung out on opioids with three illegitimate kids from three different mothers – you know the cliches. They’re in a thousand tv shows and movies. I thought : this book is not well written, his voice is flat, he generalises, even in the midst of the overdoses and incarcerations; but he was only 30 when he wrote it, so give the guy a break.
3) If there’s one thing this book is about, it’s the hillbillies dreadful self-destructiveness. According to JD, every day they live in a war zone of their own making, each family hates each other and all their neighbours with gusto, venom and a loony recklessness that takes no heed of any consequences, they were all born with one layer of skin missing, they all have hair-trigger volcanic tempers, they are really scary. Especially Mamaw, the grandmother. This leads to continual chaos in their lives, revolving doors of bad boyfriends, absent fathers, blah blah. There is probably nothing in this book about hillbillies that will surprise you. Except this :
4) In the middle of the Bible Belt, active church attendance is actually quite low. He says all the polls are wrong – hillbillies will always say they go to church regularly, but they are not telling the truth. And although they all fervently say they are Christians what they mean by that is some weird hodgepodge of bits and pieces which they add to and discard at will. This is what Roger Olson is talking about when he says that in parts of the USA Christianity is becoming a “folk religion”.
5) Can anything be done about this nightmare life-destroying culture? JD Vance says : no. They only thing you can possibly do is have a great supporting fierce Mamaw like he did and leave your hometown as soon as possible. He says
I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.
(But my guess is from here until November JD will be telling everyone who will listen that all America’s problems can be blamed on that disastrous worst president ever Joe Biden and his veep. )
6) When he gets to Yale Law School it becomes oppressively self-congratulatory and very dull. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is – a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences – I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States.
7) Online articles like one from Politico have gleefully dug up all JD’s past Trump-hating comments, like :
“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, a clip used in both the new ads. “I never liked him.”
Since then, things have changed. We can imagine him ducking into a phone box and re-emerging as an Always Trump guy. He’s apologised. Heck, we all of us say silly things now and then.
8) The theory goes like this : Trump wins in November – in 2028 vice president JD Vance becomes the Republican nominee; he picks Donald Trump Jr as his VP; he wins the elections in 2028 and 2032; in 2036 Donald Trump Jr becomes the Republican nominee and wins the next two elections. Many a truth is spoken in jest!
Rating : 2.5 stars - a pretty interesting read but also a pretty repetetetititive one.
FURTHER READING (AND ALL LOADS BETTER THAN JD VANCE)
Educated : Tara Westover American Rust : Philipp Meyer A Childhood : Harry Crews Mostly Redneck : Rusty Barnes Trash : Dorothy Allison Knockemstiff : Donald Ray Pollock American Death Songs : Jordan Harper Demon Copperhead : Barbara Kingsolver...more
In my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime” section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateuIn my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime” section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateur sleuth types that know a thing or two about a thing or two with a twinkle in their still clearsighted eyes. This must be a reaction to the default viciously cynical choking atmosphere of used needles and grime and terminal bleakness of all other modern crime fiction.
I think it would have been funnier if Martin Amis had tried to write a cosy crime book instead of this pastiche hardboiled Night Train. I would have loved a Martin Amis version of Miss Marples. That would be something. This, not so much.
Detective Seen It All Nothing Shocks Me Former Alcoholic Mike Hoolihan, who is a woman with a man’s name, is assigned to investigate the apparent suicide of an old friend of hers, the perfect in body and mind Jennifer Rockwell, an astrophysicist doing (at the age of 28) some cutting edge work on The Universe (not any old universe, THE universe) up at the observatory on the hill. She’s been found in her apartment naked with three self inflicted bullets in the head, very flamboyant, two more than you would think was strictly necessary. So, well, might possibly not be suicide. She had everything to live for. It’s a whydunnit.
So Detective Mike rounds up the usual suspects for the usual shaggy dogging tale of woe. She interviews the professor boyfriend (get on up, he’s a sex machine), the father, the casual bar pickup, the medical examiner, her boss the astrophysicist, her old friend the manic depressive (so that’s where she got the lithium!). And the whole book is really her interviewing herself (neat!).
As you read you can hear Martin saying to himself “that James Ellroy, that Ed McBain, that Elmore Leonard – I can do that, I’ll show ‘em, it’s not that hard”. But it is that hard. Night Train is karaoke. It’s your auntie singing “Oops I Did It Again”. No offence to aunties. ...more
This book has an agenda with a capital A. I didn’t realise! I impulse-bought this in a naïve “I want to read a history of British feminism” kind of waThis book has an agenda with a capital A. I didn’t realise! I impulse-bought this in a naïve “I want to read a history of British feminism” kind of way, without reading any other reviews (it’s brand new), and I thought “Sexed”? What a strange (bad) title. It was a clue but I did not realise.
If you skip the introduction and the last chapter anyone could read this short history of British feminism, anyone at all. It’s straightforward, it’s never dull, it races along, it’s solid stuff, just what I wanted. Recommended!
But there’s no point in reviewing that part of the book. Susanna is here to talk about the currently residing elephant in the room, that is, the massive ongoing conflict which we have seen engulfing feminism in the last decade or so. On one side is what the author describes as “gender-critical” feminism, which defends “sex-based rights”. This is the side she is on - indeed, this is why she wrote this book. So : what do these feminists want ?
They are committed to resist efforts to displace sex and sex discrimination with an alternative set of concepts: gender, gender identity, gender equality, and so on.
And she adds : ��To an outsider, the difference may seem abstruse. But it is a crucial fault line.” Well, you can say that again. So Susanna’s opponents are “trans-rights activists”. Having said that, I have said enough for many people – they will want to boycott this book and advise everyone else to avoid it like the plague. Susanna says
It is perfectly possible to disagree fundamentally with trans activist aims while supporting the right of transgender people to be protected against discrimination.
I suspect many people would dispute that. And she freely acknowledges that attacks on trans rights are usually bundled up with the usual rightwing attacks on all minorities.
I made pages of notes as I read this book, and I would have written up my usual far-too-long type of review, and discussed all kinds of interesting issues, such as the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864) and why feminists campaigned against them, Margaret Thatcher and why women in the 1980s voted for her, whether capitalism or patriarchy is the real enemy, the struggles of intersectionality, the disturbing story of the Pankhursts, and so on, and so forth – there is enough material in this book for one three times as long. But in the end the extremely contentious arguments about gender, upon which the whole book floats, capsized that idea. Because of these arguments this book will be regarded as a clarion statement of pure common sense by some people and a horrific diatribe to be anathematised by other people....more
I really loved these Cheever stories from the 50s set in his beloved/behated suburbia but it was strange, mostly he seemed to throw away the endings. I really loved these Cheever stories from the 50s set in his beloved/behated suburbia but it was strange, mostly he seemed to throw away the endings. Each time I wanted a few pages more! ...more
Respect to John Fogarty – when he found out people were mishearing the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in "Bad Moon Rising" he would often sing Respect to John Fogarty – when he found out people were mishearing the line “there’s a bad moon on the rise” in "Bad Moon Rising" he would often sing what they thought it was – “there’s a bathroom on the right.” Does anyone pay any attention to modern lyrics? I would have thought no, but the Swifties apparently know every word of every song.
This book covers 1900 to 1975 and omits with a sigh of regret all folk, country, blues and rock, so no Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Hank Williams, none of that. This is a book of what has been called The Great American Songbook, which really only got started in 1925, so we are talking about 50 years of great songs here. That’s a lot of years.
There’s one song out of the thousand-odd here which was performed by the Rolling Stones.
The big five great lyricists are Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein. But there are hundreds of others who threw in one or two timeless classics. All these writers all churned out a whole lot of rubbish as well, naturally, it was their day job – three songs by Thursday afternoon, one comic piece please. A guy named Leo Robin wrote "My Cutey’s Due at Two-to-Two Today", which you would probably pay not to hear, but then he also wrote the devastating "Thanks for the Memory" (of sentimental verse, nothing in my purse, and chuckles when the preacher said ‘For better or for worse’).
And this vast compendium does seem to include quite a lot of the less familiar and frankly dubious titles – did you hear "Bungalow in Qougue", "I Wonder Why She Kept on Saying Si-Si-Si-Senor", "Let’s Take a Walk Around the Block", "My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More", "When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba", "When I Take my Sugar to Tea", "Nobody Makes a Pass at Me" or "Shall we Join the Ladies" being revived by Rod Stewart or Michael Buble any time recently ? Nope. If you deleted all the totally forgotten songs from this big book it would be one third the size.
The language of these songs ranges from the elevated literary flourishes of
Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide ("Smoke gets in your Eyes")
to wonderful bursts of antique slang
Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack ("There’s no business like Show Business")
to frank innuendoes
The rich get rich and the poor get children ("Ain’t we got Fun")
and the frankly surprisingl
Some get a kick from cocaine ("I Get a Kick out of You", 1934)
Otherwise ordinary lyrics can ignite with one single wonderful line
You go to my head With a smile that makes my temperature rise Like a summer with a thousand Julys
And
When love congeals it soon reveals The faint aroma of performing seals
And they’re resplendent with lines that seem like they ought to have been already written by Dante or Milton or somebody :
Some enchanted evening you may see a stranger across a crowded room
The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
There wasn’t a thing left to say the night we called it a day
We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode
And there are terrible lines in good songs too! From "Sophisticated Lady" :
Dancing, dining with a man in a restaurant Is that all you really want?
They like throw in the odd tongue-twister too
Spangled gowns upon a bevy Of high browns from down the levee All misfits, puttin’ on the Ritz
Or
I’m bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night pouring light on the dew
("A Wonderful Guy" - any other song that used the word bromidic?)
And they casually throw in some off-hand devastating psychological observations :
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget – Don’t you want to forget someone too?
They have earcatching opening lines - from the same song "It's All Right With Me"
It’s the wrong time and the wrong place Though your face is charming it’s the wrong face
They wrote introductions to their songs, which were binned by later singers. Here’s the introduction to a very well-known song – can you spot it :
The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway There’s never been such a day in Beverly Hills LA
They had a total mania for cramming as many rhymes into as tiny a space as possible, like this –
Naughty, bawdy Gaudy, sporty Forty-Second Street
Or
Why should a sheik learn how to speak Latin and Greek badly? Give him a neat motto complete – “Say it with feet Gladly!” ("The Varsity Drag")
Or
On the first of May it is moving day. Spring is here so blow your job, throw your job away Now’s the time to trust to your wanderlust In the city’s dust you wait – must you wait? Just you wait. ("Mountain Greenery")
Or
I never want to hear From any cheer- Ful Polyannas Who tell you fate Supplies a mate – It’s all bananas (But Not for Me)
Which brings me to : rhyme as humour. In "Little Girl from Little Rock" :
I was young and determined I was wined and dined and ermined
Or
Summer journeys to Niagara And to other places aggra -vate all our cares. We’ll save our fares. ("Manhattan")
And
The lovely loving and the hateful hates The conversation with the flying plates ("I Wish I Were in Love Again")
And
Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy It’s not your style (now comes the outrageous contorted rhyme) You’ll look so good you’ll be glad you de- Cided to smile ("Put on a Happy Face")
YOU'VE CHANGED
The Broadway musical/Tin Pan Alley hegemony over popular song was demolished by early brutal rock and roll
Long Tall Sally she’s built for speed Got everything that Uncle John need
and the two pronged attack of the Beatles and Bob Dylan made a new Rule Number One : write your own songs. The editors here marvel over Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Noel Coward – they actually wrote the music too! How extraordinary! These days it's the other way round.
These Great American Songs are almost never serious, almost always lighthearted, wry, self-mocking, rueful, wistful. This is not so surprising, they mainly came from Broadway entertainments or movies. It was the post-rock infusion from serious folk music that introduced a whole new register of possibilities. The handful of serious songs in this book are "Old Man River", "Buddy Can you Spare a Dime", "My Forgotten Man", "Strange Fruit" and "Gloomy Sunday".
OBSESSIONS
The songwriters had a few obsessions. They liked to poke fun at ethnic stereotypes, and this calls forth one of the very few comments the editors allow themselves:
The only genre that seems really alien is the race song of the first decades… luckily none of those we encountered had any merit… Later songs that might make one slightly uncomfortable today – Peggy Lee’s Manana say – are so clearly good-natured, so little mean-spirited, that their merits seem to outweigh one’s mild embarrassment about them.
That said, we still have plenty of comedy South American/Mexico songs here
"I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like you Very Much)" "South America Take it Away" "They’ve got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil"
They were also obsessed with Paris
"You Don’t Know Paree" "I Love Paris in the Springtime" "The Last Time I Saw Paris" "April in Paris" "Paris is Not the Same"
To the point where someone wrote a song called
"Another Song About Paris"
And they loved to write about Spring
"Younger than Springtime" "Spring will be a little late this year" "Spring is Here" "Spring can really hang you up the most"
INFANTILISM
There was one tendency in some of these lyrics that struck me as slightly gross, and I could believe would put off a modern listener, and that’s baby talk.
"Embraceable You"
Don’t be a naughty baby, come to papa – do My sweet embraceable you
"You Make Me Feel So Young"
Do I seem as cheerful as a schoolboy playing hooky? Do I seem to gurgle like a baby with a cookie?
You and I are just like a couple of tots Running across a meadow picking up lots of forget-me-nots
"Misty"
Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree
"How Long Has This Been Going On"
As a tot when I trotted in little velvet panties
"Glad to be Unhappy"
Like a straying baby lamb with no mammy and no pappy I’m so unhappy
"Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered"
I’m wild again, beguiled again A simpering, whimpering child again
This is just ugh, please.
SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
There are songs with totally out of date lyrics – "A Fine Romance". There are great songs with totally rubbish lyrics - "Skylark". There are songs with boring nothing lyrics which become completely magical when a voice and an arrangement are added – "The Folks who Live on the Hill".
And : a few songs in here have the wrong lyrics or chunks of them are missing ! "Fings Ain’t What they Used to Be" has a different set than the one on the hit record; "Thanks for the Memory" is almost completely different to the Bob Hope/Shirley Ross version ; "On the Acheson Topeka & Santa Fe" is missing 90%. Well, this is nitpicking in a book of 700 pages. It’s great !
AN ANECDOTE FROM ANOTHER BOOK
Harry Woods was a songwriter, but he had a violent temper.
He once got into a barroom brawl that was so bad somebody called the police. They found Woods sitting astride his adversary clutching him by the throat with his good hand and pounding his head. “Who is that horrible man?” a woman asked. One of Woods’ drinking pals piped up “That’s Harry Woods. He wrote 'Try a Little Tenderness'.”
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood” eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia – slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies’ brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.” The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on”.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes”. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!” he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion” that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer – for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?”
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath” …. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs…. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking…. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me… I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive…
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
This is a bunch of movie reviews and mini-essays by a favourite critic of mine who almost always agrees with me (or is it the other way around) exceptThis is a bunch of movie reviews and mini-essays by a favourite critic of mine who almost always agrees with me (or is it the other way around) except he sometimes inexplicably likes the wrong thing. The idea (it’s a bit cutesy) is that each chapter is about The Films That Made Me….feel or ponder various things – for what it’s worth (very little no doubt) here’s how it pans out.
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME FEEL GOOD
He doesn’t mean feel-good movies, he means movies that made him feel good because they are good movies. What kind of linguistic legerdemain is this! In fact some of them are actually feel-bad movies, but they made him feel good because they are good movies. His choice includes
Juno Margaret Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Under the Skin
I agree with those – but not
Synecdoche, New York – Pete, you got to be kidding - that is a pour gasoline over yourself and light a match movie
Recentish ones for me :
A Thursday Boiling Point 7 Prisoners ( a feel bad one!) Red Rocket Wild Men The Innocents Mid-August Lunch
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THE FILMS THAT MADE ME FEEL BAD
Likewise he thinks these are bad movies so they made him feel bad. Well, they were mostly a lot of obvious dreck that he had to watch because he’s paid to. But he included Babel on this list. WTF?
Some recent ones I saw that some people think are good but really were bad
Licorice Pizza The Invisible Man Mary Poppins Returns Mandy Me Before You
That list is practically endless. Let’s move on.
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME LAUGH
His list includes some good ones –
Being John Malkovich 2 Days in Paris This is 40 The Wolf of Wall Street What we do in the Shadows Toni Erdmann
But really, Peter, not Borat it’s eurrrghhhhh.
Good comedies are difficult to make. I don’t have many favourite comedies. So I’ll stick with
The Gentlemen The Death of Stalin The Happiest Days of Your Life (an old one - Alistair Sim and Margaret Rutherford)
THE FILMS THAT MADE ME CRY
I can’t disagree with
Toy Story 2 ET Still Alice
And I would add
The Father The Assistant Stan and Ollie Your Name
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THE FILMS THAT MADE ME SCARED
Peter says (amongst many others)
Audition Paranormal Activity Threads Get Out
No problem, but then he adds
Suspiria (why does everybody like this brightly coloured nonsense) It Follows The Cabin in the Woods
Instead, try these
Capture kill Release Be my Cat You’re Next Eden Lake Martyrs
If they don’t scare you nothing will.
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THE FILMS THAT MADE ME REFLECT ON CHILDHOOD
He picks out some good ones including
Persepolis Toy Story 3 When Marnie was There
I would like to add the following and say that modern movies feature many wonderful performances by kids
Eighth Grade Capernaum The Quiet Girl Leave no Trace The Florida Project The Golden Dream Tomboy Nobody Knows
There are five other categories but that’s enough for one review.
It’s almost appropriate : a carcrash of a book telling the story of a trainwreck of a group. Oh my goodness me, where do I start ?
Well, how about witIt’s almost appropriate : a carcrash of a book telling the story of a trainwreck of a group. Oh my goodness me, where do I start ?
Well, how about with the weird un-edited-out repetitions :
Page 8 : it was a bizarre amalgam of private Catholic school and military academy Page 9 : it was a bizarre combination of private Catholic school and pseudo-military academy
Page 140 : Cass and Rusty got jobs waiting tables to bring in some much-needed income Page 142 : She and Rusty had taken waitressing jobs to provide some much-needed income
And then there’s the head-scratching sentences like
They twisted, hully-gullied, and ponied along with the music and balanced their ominousness rock band counterparts with sex appeal. (p156)
or
On the surface, it must have seemed a bit surreptitious to John and Michelle and Derek easily let her say what she was thinking (p249)
Huh, what ? And then we have occasional clangers like this
Denny’s hair, though still long, had been professionally quaffed with sideburns that ran at least an inch past his earlobes. (p247)
I thought – quaffed? That’s an old fashioned word meaning to drink something. Wait ! I have it! He means coiffed! It sounds the same !
All right, let’s stop being such a grammar nazi. Let’s concentrate on the prose itself :
He found his sexual release through gangbangs with a few neighborhood trollops. (p18)
In what era could that ever have been an acceptable sentence. And then we have these passages which appear to have strayed over from a Jackie Collins novel :
Michelle would prepare with a light foundation to cover her freckles and eyeliner to highlight her baby blues. She got her hair done regularly at Tamar’s hairdresser, and twice a week, rinsed it with lemon juice to make it look richer and fuller. (p61)
He couldn’t help but admire her fair skin glistening in the azure blue waters of Cinnamon Bay and how the sun shone on her long blonde hair. (p132)
He and Michelle were still up celebrating until Denny crept over the sliding door that led to the balcony and, with a devilish grin, beckoned Michelle to follow him. She knew what was on his mind and followed willingly. (p170)
He sings with the desperate senses of a spurned lover that only he could muster (p190)
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But wait ! Where is Scott Shea getting all this terrific amount of granular detail from? How does he know about Michelle’s lemon rinses and Denny’s earlobes? In most biographies there are lots of notes crammed in at the back detailing all the books & mags referenced and interviews made. Scott mentions briefly that he interviewed 8 people (none of the M&Ps of course). And then there’s two autobiographies (by John and Michelle) and one previous oral history. So the overwhelming detail (“handy Denny converted their wall oven into a hot plate”) must come from those sources, plus the usual contemporary articles.
Frequently Scott gets completely carried away when a famous person is encountered - when Mia Farrow hoves into view we get a few pages of her biography – and when John Phillips gets involved in the Monterey Pop Festival we get 66 pages about it, every single act is described (p243-309). I know it was a Significant Event but this is too much, and I don’t mean “too much, man”.
And yet, I read the whole thing compulsively. It was a couldn’t look away kind of thing. All the sex drugs and blissful harmony (really, you can’t call the M&Ps rock and roll). Ironic indeed, all that harmony proceeding from such an inharmonious collection of unhappy souls.
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Current three favourite M&Ps songs : "Safe in my Garden"
Cops out with the megaphones Telling people stay inside their home Man, can't they see the world's on fire
"Dedicated to the One I Love", (this is not so much a version of a 50s oldie as a complete re-imagining, and so brilliantly done) ; and "Look Through my Window", not much of a hit, why I can’t imagine. But what with all the drugs and personal chaos it’s quite surprising they managed to stay together for four years and put out a series of great singles, six of which are probably all that anyone remembers.
I feel I should also point out to potential readers that there’s a story about Queen Elizabeth II on page 22 which I frankly don’t believe, I think John Phillips made it up, and the famous incest story gets dropped onto the very last two pages – you can hear Scott thinking “ugh, I suppose I have to mention this”. Well, I suppose he did.
Gruesome book about a gruesome group who produced a handful of immortal records.
The author Paul Hillyard has a lovely sense of humour, which I believe must be essential if you are trying to sell spiders to the rest of us. I have oThe author Paul Hillyard has a lovely sense of humour, which I believe must be essential if you are trying to sell spiders to the rest of us. I have over the years overcome my phobia and can now admire the elegance of common garden spiders and their fabulous webs and the vibrating cellar spiders who live in my cellar, where else. But that doesn’t mean I’m ever gonna get up close and personal with these strange cohabitees of our beautiful and terrifying planet.
Here are some favourite quotes from this small but perfect book :
The problem for spiders in general is that they are good to eat
The male has a huge pair of jaws to restrain the female during mating
A bizarre species that at rest resembles a bird’s dropping
The prey is sucked dry rather than mashed up
Giant Huntsman : an impressive species, especially when found in a house
Beautiful, rust-coloured and fast-moving
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A notorious species which causes considerable fear
The small male looks like an ant
The mouse spider : the species appears somewhat “mouse”-like
The spider runs very fast in short bursts with frequent changes of direction
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Runs over vegetation with great agility, leaping from stem to stem
Known for its unusual method of courtship in which the female requires a present from the male, before mating, of an insect wrapped in silk
The brown male is so small he can fearlessly climb over the female’s body
Vibrations from a tuning fork can bring a response from this spider
During the day this weird spider resembles a twig
This spider is difficult to see because it is reluctant to emerge from its impenetrable web
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When disturbed the spider bounces up and down and becomes a blur
A beautifully-marked but temperamental species
He often lives with the female for some weeks but then dies and she eats him
There is good violence and there is bad violence. You could say that the task of civilisation is to figure out which is which. I could say that whole There is good violence and there is bad violence. You could say that the task of civilisation is to figure out which is which. I could say that whole movie genres are all about this question. The gangster movie, the war movie, the Western – all these show the struggle between bad violence and good violence. And the movies also demonstrate that we righteous members of the audience (and participants, however reluctantly, in real life) enjoy both types of violence. We like the gangsters roaring around in Scarface, Public Enemy, Goodfellas etc; and we like it when the FBI tough guys shut them down too. We have our cake and eat it too. The most extreme example of this bad violence/good violence problem is in the various rape-revenge movies, of which the most horrendous example is I Spit on Your Grave (what a brilliant title) – for half an hour we watch the disgusting rape of the victim; the last hour is dedicated to her violent killings of the rapists.
A lot, maybe most, of these movies are like adverts for violence.
In Unforgiven the violence becomes ever more ambiguous. Clint plays the over the hill William Munny who used to be a very bad violent man but he’s reformed and is now an unsuccessful pig farmer. But he takes up his gun again to seek vengeance for a poor prostitute who was razored by a vile cowboy at whose genitals she unfortunately scoffed. But Munny is only in it for the money. Little Bill is played by the always great Gene Hackman who loves to dish out violence, he relishes it - but wait – this is the good violence because he’s the sheriff of Big Whiskey and he is enforcing a policy of No Guns Allowed In Town. He seems to be dedicated to enforcing peace in sadistic ways. His good violence is bad violence in disguise.
Unforgiven is a great examination of the whole nasty business and this little book is an excellent discussion of it.
With these BFI Film Classic books you never know what you’re going to get, some terrible hoity toity professor writing unreadable jargon or the lovely gossip filled story of how the film was made; and all points between. But all these books are so pretty I have to forgive them.
This book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squirThis book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squirming and looking away and muttering surely, surely people aren’t all like that?
One big common sense basic here is that if you depend on the support of a lot of people (i.e. their democratic vote) you will be trying to please all those very people, whereas if you depend on the support of a few people (army chiefs, ministry of the interior, police) you can cheerfully ignore the starving millions, because they just don’t matter. Another big not so common sense point they make is that all leaders, democratic or despotic, want to stay in power FOREVER :
So we started from this single point : the self-interested calculations and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics.
Does this mean that every time a politician spouts about improving housing, education, health services, care for the elderly, all those nice baubles, this is always based on finely calculating how much of this soup they need to ladle down our throats in order to secure our votes? Don’t they believe even a tiny bit of it?
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Well, it seems the authors think that one main difference between democracies and dictatorships is that democracies make it tougher to siphon off the nation’s cash into their own accounts, but you should bet they will all try their best anyhow, because that’s why they’re politicians. Because it’s not that power corrupts, it’s that, as another reviewer said, corrupted people are irresistibly attracted to politics like buzzy bees to pollen bearing flowers. And what has more pollen than the State Bank?
TINY LITTLE BABIES
So the level of cynicism here is severe :
A leader who can afford to keep the people isolated, uneducated, and ignorant and chooses not to do so is a fool.
And:
It so happens that even in many autocracies with reportedly good healthcare systems, infant mortality is high. This may be because helping little children does not particularly help leaders survive in power.
What about where the dictator happens to be sloshing around in a sea of oil? His overseas bank accounts all runneth over. Won’t there be some left for the people and their little babies?
It is ironic that while oil revenues provide the resources to fix societal problems, they create political incentives to make them far worse.
This part is explained by two incidents I remember from English history – the Bad King John (a tyrant) went broke and had to ask for money from his barons, and they wouldn’t give him any until he signed the Magna Carta, that founding document of liberty. And fastforwarding to 1640, likewise the Bad King Charles (a tyrant) had to convene parliament (which he’d avoided for 11 years), again to ask for money; and one thing led to another and the parliament chopped his head off in 1649. If King John or King Charles had have discovered oil on his royal estate, none of that would have happened. Well, they wouldn’t have known what to do with the oil, but you get the idea.
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So, the more you have to rely on taxation, the more you will be pushed towards democratizing your country. The less you have to rely on taxation – say, if you have free money bubbling out of the ground – the more the people can get stuffed.
POL POT WAS AN IDEALIST
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The rules for dictators explained in this book seemed to me pretty straightforward, even kind of obvious, but when the authors claimed that they fit anyplace anytime I couldn’t but disagree. They perfectly fit dictators like Saddam Hussein, Emperor Bokassa I, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Macias Nguema, Samuel Doe, Ferdinand Marcos and Augusto Pinochet. These ones seem to have had no concept of improving their nation, they just wanted to settle on it like a vampire bat and make sure all the other littler vampire bats got enough blood to suck on. But other dictators had notions of entirely rewriting human society for the good, that is, for what they considered to be the good. And they tried their best to crush and squeeze society into some new lunatic utopia – Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong. I admit, these are the unusual ones.
NATURAL DISASTERS
The authors ask : Why are the effects of earthquakes so much worse in autocratic regimes? Simple – because the leaders steal all the funds that could otherwise spend on better infrastructure, building regulations, etc. They examine earthquake outcomes in Chile and Iran and the deaths from comparable earthquakes are way higher in Iran. But I was dubious – we may profoundly disagree with the ayatollahs of Iran but can we put them on the same kleptocratic footing as all the other rascals? The authors clearly do. Again, their cynicism is breathtaking.
COULD DO BETTER. SEE ME AFTER CLASS.
The authors veer from specific examples which are always welcome to tiresome abstractions which aren’t – they love sentences like this :
Our subject is how variations in the size of the group of essentials and interchangeables determines how resources are allocated between public and private rewards
I couldn’t love that. Aside from the stylistic infelicities and the level of repetition you tend to find in books of arguments like this, I do kind of recommend The Dictator’s Handbook as an act of provocation.
Is the world really like this ?
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*Whereby the religious might pipe up to say yes, they are, this is what we mean by the fallen state of man – read our book, not this one!...more
When we met Elvis he was tall so Ringo had to stand on a box to shake his hand. When I wrote Yesterday I went round playing it to random people and I When we met Elvis he was tall so Ringo had to stand on a box to shake his hand. When I wrote Yesterday I went round playing it to random people and I asked them Did You Write This Song and they all said no, so I realised I’d written it in my sleep. Then it became the most recorded song of all time. I was quite surprised. In the early days we tried to keep things very simple, Love Me Do, that’s very straightforward, but She Loves You, now that’s sung by an intermediary so it’s already getting sophisticated. When we moved to London we learned words like intermediary and we discovered Stockhausen. It’s hard to believe that when I was growing up in Liverpool they had only just invented the motor car. I go back so far I’m in front of me !
John was never violent, people have got the wrong idea. He didn’t need to be – he just gave you that look and you’d beat yourself up. His Aunt Mimi was a tough lady. Twice a week she would break his guitar over his head and every time he would buy another for eleven and sixpence. That’s old money. Young people wouldn’t know what shillings and pence were, or things like radios or horses. I get told I’m a real boomer. I’m not sure why. When I was growing up there wasn’t any such thing as The Beatles. It’s hard to imagine that now. I’m a keen ornithologist.
I really enjoy dancing, cooking, driving fast, composing for large orchestras, painting, writing poetry, playing drums and meeting the Queen. She was very cool. Not as tall as Elvis. Young people today won’t remember that but she wasn’t. She asked me, did you write These Boots are Made for Walking? I said no ma’am, that was somebody else. You have to call her ma’am. And you have to walk backwards. It’s true I’ve met quite a few people, Willem de Kooning, Harold Pinter, Bertrand Russell, Dustin Hoffman, you know. But really that’s the wrong way to put it. They met me.
*
Or :
Diamond geezer, national treasure, somewhat like listening to your granddad ramble on and on, repeating some stories word for word, if your granddad is the world’s most successful musician ever....more
This book is a practical guide to deprogramming your friend or family member. In order to get to grips with the whole thing we hTHE CONSPIRACY ICEBERG
This book is a practical guide to deprogramming your friend or family member. In order to get to grips with the whole thing we have to start by understanding this other conspiratorial way of thinking, beginning with the conspiracy iceberg. I thought this was a useful way to think about conspiracy theories. There’s a hierarchy. At the top is the almost reasonable, and the bottom is the clearly batshit. This is Mick’s little list:
1. Big Pharma – they conspire to sell drugs that people don’t actually need. 2. Global warming – it’s a hoax. 3. JFK – blah blah 4. 9/11 – it was an inside job. 5. Chemtrails – they are putting something sinister into the atmosphere. 6. False flag shootings – the LA and the Sandy Hook shootings were false flag fakes. 7. Moon landing – look at the shadows, sheeple 8. UFO cover up – blah blah 9. Flat earth – now you’re talking 10. Reptile overlords – yeah, those shapeshifting rascals. The Queen of England was one, you know. In fact the whole royal family.
It turns out that someone who believes in 9/11 theories thinks flat earthers are crazy and quite likely government shills paid to make decent conspiracy theorists looks like idiots.
Now the next excellent point : within the mainstream theories there are also hierarchies of believability. The 9/11 stuff gives the clearest example. The most believable version of that one says that the Bush government knew it was going to happen and deliberately allowed it. In this entry-level theory, you can agree on the rest of the official version, that the planes brought down the towers. The next set of 9/11 theories say the US government made the whole thing happen themselves, that it was a gigantic false flag operation. Controlled explosions, not planes, brought down the towers. Then down there in the bottom of the barrel are the “no-planers” : a group who thinks that all the television footage was faked, that nothing hit the towers and that all the screaming running crowds were paid actors and the planes were CGI. The mainstream truthers think these no-planers are either raving idiots or quite likely government shills paid to make decent conspiracy theorists looks like idiots.
In order to begin extracting your friend from the rabbit hole, says Mick, you need to locate their demarcation point – the line where they say this bit is what I believe, but that bit is silly. And then you can start investigating the bit of the believed theory that is closest to the demarcation line, and start to move the demarcation line inch by inch towards reasonableness. It might take a long time, and you have to do it with maximum respect. No name calling. No sneering!
YOU ARE MIRRORED IN THE EYES OF YOUR OPPONENT
He says you have to remember that the conspiracy believer thinks you have been fooled by bad information into believing something that is clearly impossible. Hey, just exactly what YOU think about HIM. So, proceed with caution. You can let him try to convert you. You can restate his argument and improve it! This reminded me of the Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown
On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind But after a while I realized you were disarranging mine
IT WON’T BE EASY
For example, the difficulty in rebutting the truthers’ controlled demolition 9/11 theory is that this was a unique building collapse, so when they all say well, it just doesn’t look right, how could they fall down so neatly we can’t point to other examples where 102 storey buildings fell down.
THREE COMPLAINTS, KIND OF
This is a pretty good well meaning book but of course there were a couple of things wrong with it. Mick began his debunking by spending years investigating chemtrails so this is his big expertise, and I myself wouldn’t care if twenty chemtrails fell on my house, I have zero interest, so pages 85 to 128 were useless, and should have been devoted to something of more general interest. Also – a bigger question is glanced at but never confronted, which is : what kind of world do the truthers think we are living in? If the US government is so evil they will murder 3000 of their own citizens to provide themselves with a pretext for a couple of foreign invasions (that seems to be the gist of the argument) then – are Americans actually living in a democracy at all or is this elaborate Congress and elections and political parties set-up just shadowplay? If the deep state can steal one election, why won’t it steal the next election too? And by the way how come they allow all you truthers to run about undermining their total information control? And also by the way what are we supposed to do with all this truth? If enough people believe in the 9/11 theory will that mean we can rise up and catch the criminals and put them in prison? Is that the point?
Also – and this is probably true – in order to rebut most of the conspiracy theories you have to arm yourself with the most arcane knowledge, because that’s what the theorists do. When they quote Newton’s second law of thermodynamics at you
you tell them that Newton’s laws only apply to abstract point masses, and they will tell you that’s bullshit. You try to tell them about point masses versus rigid bodies versus articulated bodies, elastic versus inelastic collisions, conservation of momentum versus conservation of energy, potential energy in the building versus chemical energy from explosives, static force versus dynamic force, vertical support cross-sections, and the square-cube scaling law. They tell you that’s all a bunch of handwaving because they think “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” proves the buildings could not have simply collapsed as they did.
THERE’S PROBABLY A CUTE NAME FOR THIS FALLACY
The 9/11 theorists can’t abide the idea that 19 guys with box cutters caused all that horror. It can’t have happened like that, there must be something more to it. This is the same thing as thinking that weaselly nobody Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed JFK either at all or by himself. One nasty little guy killing the most powerful man in the world? Come on. Must be more to it than that.
I LIKED THIS
The common concession in debates that “the truth is somewhere in the middle is a fallacy. The world is not half flat
I BELIEVE IN THE GOVERNMENT AND I LOVE THE FBI AND THE CIA
Non-theorists are always in the invidious position of sort of more or less accepting the Official Version of 9/ll or climate change or vaccinations, etc, for which we are continually mocked. It’s cooler to be a conspiracist....more
I should have read this total banger years ago. This is from 1956 and it’s cold as ice. I was expecting a cosy John Wyndham English catastrophe; an olI should have read this total banger years ago. This is from 1956 and it’s cold as ice. I was expecting a cosy John Wyndham English catastrophe; an old buffer with a pipe and a determined young botanist from Oxford would figure the whole thing out, as usual. Not at all. This novel is so vicious, bleak and nasty.
I think all apocalypse/post-apocalypse stories are the same story. The Death of Grass is really the same as The Walking Dead, but without zombies. (And without grass too, it goes without saying.)
In these stories there is a catastrophe which collapses state authority, there is anarchy, and decent men and women have to fight indecent men for quickly vanishing resources. First phase is day to day survival, second phase is building a small new community. The indecent men will continually try to take from you anything you got so there is always the problem of how indecent you yourself have to become to protect yourself/your family/your tiny village. How many of those liberal values you assumed so easily growing up in your leafy suburb are ridiculous luxuries? Can some of them be saved or will everything fall away like the memories of that lost world of jobs, houses, electricity and fifty flavours of ice cream? Democracy will be ditched without a thought, but the rule of law – maybe we should keep that one. But is there any rule of law without democracy? So many questions. Is it those values that make us human? What’s so good about being human anyway if it got us into this mess? Will the best survive or maybe more likely, the worst?
This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreadaThe survivors will envy the dead.
- Nikita Khrushchev
This book is terrifying and tedious at the same time. In fact, I might say it’s borderline unreadable – not because of the ghastly scenario it spells out but because of the horrible uncontrolled gushings of military acronyms falling like fallout on each and every page
SIOP NORTHCOM STRATCOM SBIRS FEMA COOP SLBM The Football The Black Book SecDef KNEECAP
And so on, but also because of the inevitable GIGANTISM of everything being described here : because everything concerning nuclear war is extreme ! The power of the bombs, the vastnesses of the military bases, the complexities of the delivery systems, the silos, the subs, the casualties, the deaths, the deaths. I must say that Annie Jacobsen appears to be obsessed with the size of everything :
The Ivy Mike prototype bomb weighed around 80 tons (160,000 pounds), an instrument of destruction itself so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated aluminium building eighty-eight feet long and forty-six feet wide.
The underground Battle Deck, a 1000 square foot, concrete-walled room
Some 720 million gallons of sewer-infested waters flooding the base, ruining 137 buildings and destroying 1 million square feet of workspace, including 118,000 square feet of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility space (also known as SCIF space)
With its 16 petaflops of speed and 236 petabytes of storage capacity
This one-of-a-kind, stadium-sized, seagoing, self-propelled radar station weighs 50,000 tons, requires 1.9 million gallons of gas to run, can withstand 30-foot-tall waves, is larger than a football field, requires 86 crew members
CUT TO THE CHASE! WHAT HAPPENS ?
Annie imagines the following possibility :
1. North Korea fires a missile towards the USA, targeted on the Pentagon. This is spotted quickly but the Americans can’t tell what’s in the warhead – could be a dummy, could be biological or nuclear weapon. Might have been fired accidentally. The Americans try to shoot it down and don’t succeed, because, as the quote on p 73 says, it’s “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet”. But I did not really understand this bit – as luck would have it, I’m writing this on 14 April 2024. Overnight, Iran sent around 300 drones and missiles towards Israel, and “almost all” of them were intercepted and shot down. Probably it’s because drones are easier to hit because they’re slower than an ICBM? But also they’re smaller! So I don’t know.
2. 17 minutes later, a second missile, fired from a Korean submarine off the coast of California, aimed at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, a nuclear plant. This second one detonates first.
3. Americans retaliate with 50 missiles aimed at N Korea. Because of limitations of range, these missiles have to go over the North Pole. Because of the known inadequacies of the Russian detection system (Tundra) they can’t tell the destination of over-the-pole missiles, so they could easily think it was Russia under attack, and that is what happens in this scenario. Because of the chaos of the NK attack, the Americans have not been able to get in touch with the Russian president. The whole thing from beginning to end has only taken 34 minutes.
4. The first missile hits the Pentagon; Washington DC is eliminated from American geography.
5. After that, things go downhill rapidly.
THE FOURTH WORLD WAR
Everybody knows it will be fought with bows and arrows, in about ten thousand years from now. The first chapters of Annie Jacobsen’s horrifying book are the best, dealing with the way the American military has successively considered the way a nuclear war should be conducted, exactly how many millions would die, how many cities should be deemed expendable and so forth. Because they were “governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink” they just got on with the assigned task, they never refused to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Everybody should read this part. This is where we are right now, flinging lighted matches around in a leaking gasoline storage depot.
The worst part of Annie’s book, which I would be most surprised if she doesn’t now regret, is the reason for the initial North Korean missile strike. Kim Jong Un, it seems, harboured a very deep grudge about photos released by Western sources showing satellite images of the Korean peninsula at night. The south was awash with bright electric light, the north was dark, and North Korea was ridiculed as “electricity poor”. To a mad king, this comparing image was like a poke in the eye…. What happens next is revenge for that insult.
Really, this is very bad! I hope no copies of this book end up in Pyongyang....more
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragHOW I GOT HERE
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragged into reading The Most Disturbing Books Ever. He would do a video about one of these every now and then. The titles were suggested to him by his booktube followers and friends, and you can imagine they were mostly the usual suspects. One must-read on this list was Notice by Heather Lewis. He discovered it was out of print & shelled out for a second hand copy. Then he read it and was mightily impressed and contacted Serpent’s Tail, the original publishers, asking why they’d let it go out of print. Lots of back and forth later, and lo! Because of his enthusiasm and encouragement they republished Notice in February this year.
How nice – it’s like finding out that us book fans actually count for something! Power to the people!
THE MOST DISTURBING BOOKS
Olly read Cows by Matthew Stokoe and quite rightly called it The Least Disturbing Book Ever – that was great (I agree). Anyway, after all this extreme reading he nominated Notice as The Most Disturbing – much worse than American Psycho, The Wasp Factory, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc etc. (BTW Lolita was on the list, quite rightly.) So naturally my curiosity was somewhat piqued.
Why do we read disturbing books anyway? Same reason as we watch horror films. Which is? Well, sometimes I think it’s just a macho thing – do you dare to watch The Human Centipede Full Sequence? (Answer : no!!!) Like – do you dare to ride the great big scary rollercoaster? (Answer – no!!!!)
I’ve read a bundle of these Disturbing Books and there’s another bundle I would never ever read – 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, Hogg by Samuel Delaney, anything by Peter Sotos, My Absolute Darling….
CONNECTIONS
Heather Lewis writes somewhat like Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskell, the subject matter is ghastly, awful, horrendous, but it’s recounted in a lacksadaisical, lacklustre, affectless zoned-out style, quite appropriate for the first person narration, because this first person is severely traumatised and gets retraumatised at least twice.
And Notice can be filed next to some other narratives of female self-immolation, like Story of O and The Piano Teacher. It’s in that unhappy orbit.
WAS IT ANY GOOD
Well it was strange – nothing like the vortex of horror I was expecting. This is the story of a self-destructive woman who drifts in and out of prostitution and runs into a couple of horribly sadistic clients; but mainly it’s the story of her lesbian relationships with two women, and these take up the great majority of the book, and are written about very tenderly, but also in a blank ghastly can’t-escape-from-my-own-head kind of way. The language is distant, desiccated, debilitated, and frankly very wearing :
I glanced at Beth because I hadn’t been keeping an eye on her and had just now noticed it. She was looking right at me. This put me further off base because until then I thought maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. Realizing she was confused me all the more because I’d been both wanting her to and not. Or I’d been wanting her to but at the same time was afraid of it.
There are pages of this kind of mad waffley sub-psychobabble. It was like Henry James if Henry James was a 14 year old girl strung out on quaaludes.
As I say, an appropriate voice for the character, but for me a turgid not great read, sorry to say....more
Married at 19, father at 20, and again at 21. Became possessed with the mad obsessive desire to become a “writer” which his wife A DIFFICULT BEGINNING
Married at 19, father at 20, and again at 21. Became possessed with the mad obsessive desire to become a “writer” which his wife amazingly agreed with – she thought he was going to be a great writer too (and she was right). Because the house was full of kids and Raymond and Maryanne were constantly working at this or that low pay job and moving from one apartment to another house and back again like flies trying to find a way our of a room (a room called poverty) novel writing was out of the question – it had to be short stories, that’s as far as RC’s concentration would stretch; and sometimes to get a moment to write anything he had to go and sit in his car which a friend described as “just beat to shit, an old rattletrap that looked like if we got in it would collapse around us”.
But Raymond was one of those obsessive types. Nothing would stop him writing.
AMERICAN EDUCATION IS STRANGE
I guess the word is probably modular. In the UK you go to a university for three years & an extra year if you do an MA. Job done! In the USA you go to this college and pick up some credits, then that university and switch courses and grab more credits; then some teaching here; then there. And the years tick by and you still haven’t got, you know, an actual degree. So Raymond and Maryanne did ten plus years of that.
Along the way they both became alcoholics and smoked a ton of weed.
UPWARDLY MOBILE
In 1978 (aged 40) Raymond Carver was dead broke. He’d never worked a job for more than 18 months, and he’d never made enough money on his writing to consider himself a full-time writer. …His children were living hand-to-mouth on the money they could make doing service jobs or manual labour.
Ten years later Carver was the full or joint owner of three houses, two newer automobiles and a ten year old boat. Additionally he had savings totalling nearly $215,000.
WHAT WAS HE LIKE?
He was a huge shambling muttering mumbling chain smoking dope smoking drunk who couldn’t stand to be alone but needed to be alone to write and mercilessly used all his chaotic always-falling always-failing family’s most intimate moments in his sour funny stories. He loved to fish.
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THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CARVER
He said :
You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat or a thief. Or a liar.
A friend who visited said he’d never seen a house
so pockmarked by human conflict – holes in the plasterboard, the carpet and furniture tattered.
Raymond said :
this horrible, mindless poodle…she attacked our laundry and urinated on the living room rug every chance she got… we’d just laugh instead of cry. No furniture…. We couldn’t pay the light bill, and they shut the power off, and we were beaten.
The author says :
When both Ray and Maryanne were arrested, sixteen-year-old Chris was called to fetch her delinquent parents out of jail.
And
The unemployment checks were miniscule, the liquor bills were astronomical - $1200 a month, Ray once bragged (This was 1975)
THE GORDON LISH PROBLEM
Quite early on he got himself an editor called Gordon Lish who was as loud and assertive as Raymond was mumbly and shy. Lish had “aggressive” ideas about editing. I used to believe naively that the manuscript received from the author would be published pretty much as they wrote it. Okay we know that in some cases, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, another person (Ezra Pound) constructed the thing we now have from a heap of materials produced by the author. But I never came across as weird and radical a version of “editing” as what happened to Carver. His stories were sculpted and moulded and refashioned to the point where Lish would say Raymond Carver that was his creation. This is not a myth! It’s all true. (This was the part I was most interested in. )
As a sound engineer might bring up one instrument and play down another, Lish eliminated details that give characters a defining personal history or make settings specific and intimate… Sometimes he changed the emphasis of a sentence and, substituting a few words, made the stories louder and brassier. In others he enhanced the tones of loss and menace.
But take a look at a remarkable example from a story called “They’re Not Your Husband”. Earl watches his wife as she works in her restaurant. She is scooping ice cream. The original version :
The white skirt tightened against her hips and crawled up her legs, exposing the lower part of her girdle, the backs of her fleshy thighs, and several dark broken veins behind her knees.
Lish edited this into :
The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display.
Well, friends, this is not editing, this is rewriting. Carol Sklenicka says “that’s typical of what Lish did throughout What We Talk About When we Talk About Love”. She remarks :
Carver was shocked. He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories. He had not expected him to take a meat cleaver to them.
There was some back and forth between them but the eventual published version was Lish’s, who, by the way, is still with us, aged 90. So the great writer caved before the intimidating rewriting frenemy-editor.
A GREAT EXHAUSTING BIOGRAPHY
Almost you can follow the tortuous rackety life of Carver from day to day in this dense dense book. I thought I would be able to skip some of it once Raymond got successful but no, the dramas kept on coming.
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