Category: Books

Viking
2003
I came to this book for two reasons–one that I am interested in Eadweard Muybridge, as he is considered the grandfather of motion pictures (and a character in a story I am/was writing), two that I’ve read Rebecca Solnit’s writing on Tom Dispatch, where she usually writes hopeful essays of an ecological nature. So when I heard that she had written this book on Muybridge and the birth of the modern world, I needed to check it out. And damn, can this woman write! This is the kind of history book I love, one that takes in disparate elements and demonstrates how they all snap together. The previous history of Muybridge I have read was straight hagiography and focused on his motion studies and his time in Stanford and Philadelphia. But Solnit is more interested in the years that went into creating a man who would change history–stopping time, in essence; making people aware of themselves as an image–and the society that surrounded him. Solnit brings in the railroads, San Francisco history, the emancipation of women, the last stands of the Native Americans, the birthing of educational and artistic institutions, and much more. Here is a sample paragraph which demonstrates Solnit’s command of the language and of juggling several ideas:

Those great landscapists Russel, Hart, and Savage photographed the physical process of the building of the railroads, and when the line was open, Mybridge and Watkins both made extensive stereoscope series of the scenery along the route. Most accounts of the building of the railroad concentrate on just that: the heroic and unprecedented toils of the laborers and engineers that drew a line in wood and iron across the continent. But less visible webs were being spun. The transcontinental railroad was far vaster than any of the manufactorites of the East. It required unprecedented strata of bureaucracy, unprecedented degrees of managerial coordination, and it reached as far into the political and economic systems of the United States as it did into the landscape. The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific were the biggest corporations of their time and the first to have such extensive dealing with the federal, state, and local governments. The modern corporation’s complex synchronizations first appeared there, and so did the penetration into the world on such a scale. First the railroads, then the networks for distributing energy, food, and basic goods, drew people further and further into a system; and more and more of them became employees of such systems. The independence of the frontier and the subsistence farmer retreated further and further. This was the moment in which many Americans first began to feel like cogs in the machine.

And so here we are today. One of Solnit’s points is that the “Wild West” was the last gasp of a mythologized frontier that was about to become less wild and more regimented, just as authors were romanticizing the Native Americans while the Feds were busy killing the last “insurgents” off.
Muybridge comes across and driven, but private, only partly aware of the changes he is making to the world, and maybe not as honored in his time as he should be. The ultimate American success story, he retired to England where he was born, and died ten years later in 1904, the graveyard slab misspelling his name as Maybridge. Whoops.

Who woulda thought?
The
Search for Alfred E. Newman
By way of Metafilter.

Metropolitan Books
1998
Ecology of Fear is Mike Davis’ follow-up to his groundbreaking City of Quartz, that most wonderful alt-history of Los Angeles. Ecology of Fear is not so fiery, and concerns itself mostly with the L.A. basin’s propensity to natural disaster. The chapters focus on one disaster type each: Earthquakes, Fires, Tornados, Wild Animal Attacks, and such. Later chapters approach the subject from a different angle–one traces the literary history of the destruction of Los Angeles (a fascinating chapter) and another is more of a revisiting of the themes of City of Quartz, that is of the class segregation and class war.
Davis shows a weakness here not seen in City of Quartz, in that his rhetorical tactics start to show through. When he believes a danger is real, he accuses the authorities of being complacent. When they are not, the authorities are over-reacting. Of course, this varies due to the danger, but it’s still there.
The book drags a bit, as Davis tries to get every example of a disaster in their appropriate chapter. After a while, the rare L.A. tornado got a bit dull to me. I did, however, love his hagiography of disaster novels, and how their heritage is racist and reactionary–natural disasters usually being an excuse for a good ol’ “final solution” style mass death, which we still find today in those awful “Left Behind” Bible-porn books. I also liked Davis’ history of forest fires, which is a collection of dumb rich people building in fire zones and then watching them go up in flames. Mostly, Davis questions ideas of historical data–how can we say what is “normal” for Southern California when records have only been kept for 150 years? When the Owens Valley lake was drained, opponents protested this destruction of a natural object. However, at the bottom of the lake, they found tree stumps, evidence that very long ago, a drought had stayed long enough in California for a forest to grow. And we think a seven year drought is bad…

Dover
1904 (this edition 1968)
Strange that it took an American emigre to immortalize Japanese folk tales, writing at a time when the oral traditions he was capturing were dying out. Strange also that his Kwaidan (“odd tales”) is so short, when Japan is brimming with ghost stories and monsters. Of course, there are other books in Japanese by Japanese authors of folk tales, but this is the classic, and Hearn became an honorary Japanese. Kobayashi’s film of the same name tells five of these stories, but readers will spot that only three come from the “Kwaidan” volume, the rest from his other books. Hearn’s insect studies are also included here–his essay on ants is particularly good, as he compares human society to the ant colony, and the colony wins. He also tries to get his mind around how humans would adapt to living with a hive/soldier ant mentality of pure selflessness, and doesn’t succeed.
My friend Gerald gave this to me in 2003 on my birthday, along with The Glass Key by Hammett. I finally got around to it. In fact, I think I read it in Japan, but my memory is foggy–I surely don’t remember the ants article.

While Google announces new acquisitions almost daily (the universal library is fairly mindblowing), Amazon makes little improvements which you only notice later. For example, I just added Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear to my “Now Reading” sidebar, and went to grab the URL. You can now read the first sentence of the book, and get a list of the books Davis cites in his book (all hotlinked) and a list of books that cite Davis’ book (also holinked). It’s a minor improvement on the site, yet quite cool.

Vintage
1985
I first heard about Steve Erickson’s writing in a long artist-resurrection article by Brian Evanson in The Believer (one reason why I love the magazine). It was an examination of how Erickson was labeled the “next Pynchon” after the success of his first novel, and what happened to him since (quasi-obscurity). It was much later that I found his first novel in a used store for a dollar. Can’t say better than that. It wound up being my read over the two weeks spent in Taiwan this November, so the novel and the country are strangely mixed.
Perhaps Erickson would want it that way, for “Days Between Stations” is all about dislocation, not just of place, but of character and place. There are several characters in the novel, which begins in modern day (the 1980s) and jumps back to the 1910s, but I got the sense that essentially we were meeting the same three people in different guises, whether or not they turn out (later in the novel) to be related through the decades. There are love triangles between Lauren (the first person we meet) her philandering husband Jason, and her mysterious downstairs neighbor Michel. But Michel could also be a version of Adolphe, a wunderkind who grows up to be an Orson Welles of the silent era, audacious and revolutionary in film as D.W. Griffiths. He’s in love with Janine, the star of his film on the French Revolution, who also may be his half-sister, but she is “owned” by a unscrupulous rich bloke called Varnette. Janine, in turn, may be Michel’s mother. Or maybe not.
This is not a straight-forward novel, and when we meet Lauren and Jason, they live in a Los Angeles that is turning into a large sand-dune, battered by desert storms. Later, we learn that the Mediterranean has receded so far as to run Venice’s canal’s dry. There are also time loops and mysterious fogs and experimental films and unfinished masterpieces and a cold snap that almost leads to the immolation of Paris. It’s like Sci-Fi Romanticism, without any explanation how these events are happening. Erickson doesn’t care how it happens, he cares what happens to the people it effects.
In the end, some of these questions are answered, some not, and the great romance that’s promised remains tantalizingly out of reach.
As for reading, the opening takes some bearing-getting, but once I got to the silent movie sequence, I was hooked.

Dell
1968
When I was in the 5th Year (the equivalent of 10th grade in the States), I had a most excellent English teacher called Mr. Arbon. Our class was a bit above the usual, personally selected in the 4th for “advanced studies” and so were only about 15 in total. Twice during the year, Mr. Arbon would assign a book report, and choose individual books for all of us. The first time I was given Catcher in the Rye and the second time it was Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Imagine writing a book report on that–I was too busy picking up bits of my blown mind to really write a report of any coherence, though I did respond by writing my own Brautigan-inspired short stories. Mr. Arbon then lent me all the other Brautigan books he owned, which was nearly all of them, but not quite.
In Watermelon Sugar was one of the missing, and I only read it recently. It’s a thin book, just over 100 pages, and took me most of a day to read. How does Brautigan fare now? Well, I like him just fine, actually.
The story of “In Watermelon Sugar” describes a writer living in a sort of “new Eden”-like commune, a town called Watermelon Sugar, which also processes watermelons for all sorts of fantastical things. There is the main gathering place, called iDeath, and a villain of sorts, inBOIL, who represents the old ways. It’s a novel of dualities–Watermelon Sugar is both a place and a thing; the location is both wilderness and city; it is finite and infinite. There are two women the writer gets involved with, one who goes astray and one who doesn’t. There is a joy of life about the inhabitants, but death is a constant presence.
Brautigan’s style is at times close to Japanese haiku in its economy of language and the jumps it makes line to line.
Over time Brautigan came to symbolize the hippy movement to many, and the idyllic nature of this novel suggests why–a glimpse of a downhome utopia threaded through with a gentle surrealism borne of the American forest. It’s sort of my spiritual home.
By the way, there’s a much better essay on the novel, which unearths its Christian mythos over at the Brautigan archive. There’s also a more recent musing on the name of iDeath in an era of iPods and iMacs. Finally, here’s a sample of the first few pages.

The Adobe Bookstore in San Francisco decided for one week to arrange their books by color. Why? Why not?

Picador
2001
Michael Chabon’s imaginary tale of two revolutionary comic book creators in the late ’30s/early ’40s has a wealth of pleasures for the comic book fan. Those who know their history, from Superman and the hero boom up through to the Wertham hearings of the 1950s (the comic book industry’s own McCarthy trials) and beyond to the birth of Marvel, will smile to see how Chabon fits Kavalier and Clay into this timeline and not step on any toes.
The novel moves quickly, jumping from Joe Kavalier’s magical flight from Prague as the Nazis close in, rooming with his cousin Sammy Clay in New York City, and the birth of their comic book character the Escapist. Chabon’s imagery and metaphor is simultaneously surface-level and subconscious. Joe’s escape from the Nazis directly leads to the creation of the character that will make Empire Comics millions, but as the novel progresses, both characters find themselves struggling against their own mind-forg’d manacles. Joe feels survivors’ guilt over his family, and eventually runs off to escape his failure, joining the armed forces to fight the Nazis. Sammy meanwhile is trapped by his sexuality, becoming trapped in “the closet.” Then there’s Rosa, Joe’s love from almost the first time he sees her (naked, by accident, who winds up trapped by circumstance.
Celebrity cameos dot the novel (as somebody noted somewhere, it’s a sign of post-modernity that only by including celebrities into historical fiction do we feel the character exist in “reality”) from Orson Welles (K&C attend the premiere of Citizen Kane) to Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. By this section–where Chabon suggests that the radical storytelling used in Welles’ film influences K&C, and Kavalier becomes a sort of amalgamation of Will Eisner and Gil Kane–I was starting to lose interest. Clay discovers his sexuality when he falls in love with the radio star playing the Escapist for broadcast. Kavalier foils a bomb plot by an anti-Semite. Then Chabon throws Pearl Harbor in the mix (we know it’s coming, but we don’t see it coming) and the section of the novel where Kavalier goes slightly batty stationed in Antarctica. This turned out to be my favorite part, actually–something about humans in extreme situations are always suspenseful, and also because it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, “The Thing” (John Carpenter).
The rest of the novel follows the fallout from this central episode, where Kavalier can finally indulge his own superhero fantasies of battling Nazis, and finds himself wanting. And once again the themes of lost fathers and father-figures comes full circle.
It took me a bit longer than necessary to get through what is actually a book that demands a quick read, but every moment I spent with it was, well, pure escape.

Touchstone
1993Does what is says it will: give voice and the language to the nagging feeling that much of America suburbia, building, and way of life is a empty, hollow void of greed and consumerism. However, it’s not all a tirade against this modern world, but more a history of how we got here. Don’t look to Kunstler for the rosy glasses and small town nostalgia–his tour of major movements in American planning shows how the rot was there from the start. The main strand he sees that links us to our Puritan town planners is their break from European tradition and the idea that land and property have value beyond that of the dollar. This is what results in the splendid cultural and social centers of Europe–the Italian piazza, the central square. When land is assigned monetary value only, there can be no public places. Now, of course this changes–there’s a nice section on the design and theory behind NYC’s Central Park–but the idea of property value stays with us. Doing what you want for yourself and not for any public good has resulted in bland, anti-social architecture, strip malls that beg not to be looked at.
The bad cop to David Sucher’s good cop, Kunstler in small doses is a hilarious crusty curmudgeon (though he’s not that crusty). In book-length form, he’s a serious, world weary analyst of our particular social malaise. It was only when I read out the following passage to my friend that I realized how funny it was:

Carpentry is an exacting set of skills. Even at the professional level it has been debased as a consequence of mass production, and the number of incompetent building contractors is disturbing. At the amateur level, it is worse. In fact, the home improvement industry actively promotes the idea that skill is not important. All that matters is buying the right tools and building materials. The tools will do the work, and the materials–such as factory-made drop-ceiling kits–will eliminate thinking. All the homeowner need do is lay out some money at the building-supply store, and then take the stuff home Saturday morning. The job itself is “a snap.” All this is based on two contemporary myths: [1] the idea that shopping is a substitute for design, and [2] the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing, in this case skillful work without skill.

For me, there’s very little exaggeration, and so I had stopped laughing some time back.
Some of the book takes in the best and worst of American cities, best being represented by Portland, the worst by Las Vegas, Atlanta, and, well, pretty much everywhere else. He’s ambivalent about Los Angeles, which can be new urbanist or hellacious depending on which onramp you choose.
Kunstler’s theories on the end of cheap oil and the downfall of suburbia should be listened to, if not heeded. There’s little chance of that these days. But being so, this is an essential book.