Category: Books

Bloomsbury, 2000
Another thing the visit from my friend Phil turned me on to was Kitchen Confidential, the autobiography/expose/rant from chef Anthony Bourdain. I found out that Phil and I had been talking about the same guy–I was telling him about this show called “Cook’s Tour” on the Food Network, and he was telling me about the book, yet neither of us could remember his name. When we browsed in Chaucer’s Books–and nothing made my friend happier than being in bookstores, so I certainly indulged him–I asked him for that title and–ah-ha–it’s the same bloke!
Turns out that I’m the last to read it–I’ve mentioned the book to several people and I get the “last on the bus” look.
I was going through a difficult chapter in the Will Durant book–the one devoted to Immanuel Kant, where even Durant suggests he has a bit of a problem reading the man (but not as much as Hegel)–so I eagerly turned to Mr. Bourdain’s down-and-dirty stories from behind the swinging kitchen door.
Bourdain obviously delights in revealing the kitchen of haut cuisine as roiling pits of raw testosterone, much as early on in his career he was shown the blistered and scarred hands of his boss after having the nerve to ask for a bandaid. Bourdain makes it sound like you could cut your own hand off and still be expected to come back to work a few hours later, stump at the ready.
He tells us when not to order fish (Monday), never to order beef well-done (they’ll pick out the worst cut for you, then throw it in the deep fryer), and the few simple ingredients to cook like a pro. In an amusing penultimate chapter, he visits a friend’s restaurant and has to retract all his hard, fast, and swinging-dick rules after seeing the gentlemanly behavior on display. There’s a nice chapter when he discusses his battle scars, and one section on a trip to Japan that made me quite hungry.
Bourdain swears like a sailor, has no fear in telling you what a smack-head he was in his early years, and successfully puts the fear of God into anybody half-thinking of owning a restaurant someday. Own one? I’m nervous now just to walk in one.
I read this in 3 1/2 days, so I don’t feel so guilty of leaving the Kant on hold (that chapter is now done, anyway).

Scribners, 2000
I picked this up at Border’s sale table. Good ol’ sale table. This book had just been discussed in the most recent issue of The Believer, and so for $4 I got it. Came home and damn near read the thing in one sitting. Understand I was a big King fan when I was a teenager, but I gave up after the bloated “It”.
Here, King gives us some tips on writing, but the first half of the book is really his autobiography. It’s a good read–King no doubt has the page-turning knack–and the writing craft section is fair. He doesn’t pretend that everybody reading the book can be a successful novelist, but he does preach dedication and obsession. “Throw the television out,” is one of his first suggestions. I agree with him there.
As I plow my way through my film script, I took a lot to heart. It was just the break I needed.

Prestel, 2002
There’s not too many books on DeChirico, one of my favorite Surrealist painters. And most of those are expensive and large, so it’s nice to find this small book from Prestel. In between the mammoth reading of Barrows Dunham and Will Durant (a report on which I swear is coming), I’ve sneaked in a few “in-one-or-two-sittings” books. I picked this up at LACMA and spent my time in Phoenix (where I developed stomach flu) reading it. A good primer on DeChirico (Rule One for writing on Surrealists: Not many of them were really Surrealists. Wha?) and one that stretches out to bring in the influence of Appolinaire and how Max Ernst created art that “answered” the ideology/symbolism as seen in DeChirico’s work. I had no idea really, but Schmied makes it all very clear. The book is no hagiography–it skips the last 30 years of his career–but hits all the major points. However, don’t read if you are looking to having stomach flu-based hallucinations. I found my self in a half-awake state stuck in one of his empty plazas with his mannequins. Unpleasant.

Dell, 1965
Technically this is Fowles’ first novel, and the first that I have read (the first the public knew was The Collector). This was recommended to me by G_____ and I soon moved from the teeny-weeny print of the paperback to our library’s hardback version, the better for reading a 600-page tome while in bed. The Magus tells the story of a young Englishman who travels to a small Greek island called Phraxos to teach English. Instead he gets wrapped up in the psychological games of a mysterious millionaire islander called Conchis, who may or may not have helped the Germans in the war, may or may not be able to summon the dead, bend time, and offer a glimpse into a world beyond reality.
The book was a quick read, though dense and literary, and respectful of the reader (he drops many references to The Tempest long before one character points them out). In plot it’s similar to the reality-bending thrillers on the late-’90s, where every 25 pages some new revelation turns all previous events on their heads. Near the end it begins to sound a lot like David Fincher’s “The Game” from 1998, but with much more at stake than making some business executive learn to laugh and love again.
Fowles evokes not just the Greek Island, but the feeling of traveling abroad after college, the sexy danger of it all. The lead character Nicholas is indeed right in the middle of one of those identity-forming experiences, one that Conchis exploits.
The end doesn’t wrap up the plot, but thematically it closes well, though far off into the abstract. There were a few nights where I wound up going to bed at 4 a.m. because I got so caught up in it.

Hackett Publishing, 1999
After the stories of shipwrecks and survival in Leslie’s book, I decided to complete my Homer duology and do the Odyssey. It’s another fantastic translation by Lombardo, and brings the poem alive.
Knowing about the poem and actually reading it (for the first time, unlike the Iliad) are two different things, obviously. All the juicy, famous bits (Circe, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, etc.) that have been passed down to us through art at literature are actually taken care of quickly, with the Lotus Eaters getting so short a mention I kept waiting for them to come back. For me, a lot of this surprise comes from reading Joyce’s Ulysses (10 years ago, blimey), who devotes a whole chapter (“Wandering Rocks”) to an option that Odyssius doesn’t even take. (I wonder how different my reading of Joyce would have been if I had read this first, despite using three navigational supplements alongside it.)
Such a different work than the straightforward Iliad, here full of time-shifts, false narratives, flashbacks. Disguises and tests of loyalty.
In a discussion the other night, my friend DJ mentioned that one of the book’s themes is hospitality, which indeed strikes me as correct. How to treat guests, and how to act when you are a guest is an idea returned to over and over, from the Oxen of the Sun and Circe back to Odyssius’s return, where his ill-treatment at the hands of the beggars makes his revenge much sweeter–though incredibly delayed.
My favorite moment, very personal, is the brief episode with the dog Argus, who waits twenty lonely, abused years for his master’s return, and is the only being that recognizes him in disguise. Once he has seen his master enter his home, the dog gives up the ghost. Homer handles this with great economy and emotion and little melodrama.
Like the Iliad, the epic ends in an unexpected place, with Odyssius about to go out again into battle, but called back suddenly by the gods. Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that, the gods ask, rhetorically.

Mariner Books, 1988
When I started reading this anthology of tales of surviving (or not) shipwrecks, airplane crashes, and general lost-in-the-woods survival, it was pretty easy going. But 520 pages and something like two months later I made way to the back page, a little undernourished, slightly crazed, and vowing never to read any more anthologies on just this subject.
Well, I kid. But Edward E. Leslie is a pretty generic writer. He did his research, but most of this book is a paraphrase of survivors tales from the Elizabethan era onward. Only a few times does he fill in some of the historical data (a bit on pirates, a bit on the “survivor tale” cottage industry, a bit on the early days of aviation where barnstorming and daredevils were all the rage) as a context. There’s a few pages on analysis on the psychological effects of surviving near-death experiences, on cannibalism, and, right near the end, a bit of modern commentary on the shallowness of the “life lessons” more recent survivors have gathered.

Most survivors who have come of age since the 1950s do not claim to find any deep meaning in their travails. Conditioned by popular culture, they report that what they have learned is to live for the moment and to appreciate the little things in life. It is remarkable just how often these sentiments are expressed using these very words. For instance, one recent surivivor, referring to an ordeal during which he was very close indeed to dying explained that “when God didn’t let me go, I was sure He had something in mind for me. And now I think I know what it was–learning to really appreciate living. Little things I used to take for granted, i don’t anymore. Just getting up in the morning or watching one of my boys hook a fish is an unbeleivable thrill. I never felt this way before–and it’s wonderful.”
Did God have Job and Jonah suffer just so they would notice the flowers beside the well-worn path or the play of light in a drop of water? Paul was struck blind on the Damascus road so that he might be able to open his eyes and see. Today, sitting atop the ruins of our lives, we do not reconcile ourselves to God, fate, or the laws of the natural universe; instead we find wonder in the petals of roses that push up through the ashes. We do not discover inspiration in the belly of the leviathan; rather we emerge from that enormous digestive tract to pay heed to the phosphorescent fishes that swim near the surface of the vast ocean.
As we kneel on that ancient thoroughfare, the scales having fallen from our eyes, we lift our heads and cannot perceive anything in the bright new light that our popular culture has not instructed us will be there. And this culture teaches us that nothing is of value except wealth and immediate gratification.”

And this is the last page where it starts getting interesting. I would have liked to have seen a bit more of this quasi-Christian editorializing, disagreeing with some of it as I do–(Is Leslie hoping that all survivors will gain deep wisdom, that of a prophet? Does he favor the Old Testament God to Jesus? He throws the bit out there about popular culture, but spends an early chapter discussing the survivor narrative. The fact that some of these sailors returned repenting their sins. Is that a better reaction? Can’t it be just as shallow?) As I said, he barely goes into it.
Mostly, though, the book is just paraphrasing.
There are some good stories to be found. Most chilling is a diary kept by a man marooned on an island by pirates for what we take to be buggery (on the high seas, as the comedy sketch goes). He does well to survive 150 days, but he makes some crucial mistakes, among them wasting entire days repenting to God. Reading the diary excerpts, I assumed he had made it home. But no, he goes crazy from hunger and illness and dies. The diary was then purportedly found by soldiers a year later (sitting next to a skeleton, perhaps?).
I also liked this WWII story of three men in a life raft in the Atlantic, slowly going insane, until there’s one man left. It’s grim stuff.
Leslie leaves some trivial but important details out, too. But then, in other places it seems like all he’s concerned about is the trivial. For example, he leaves a whole chapter to the tale of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and friend, who survived being stuck in the Libyan desert. Not that it’s essential to the story, but it was my friend who reminded me later, as I told him the story, that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry went on to write “The Little Prince.” You’d think that would at least deserve a mention.
And in a final story about a woman whose plane crashed into a cliff in the Sierra Nevadas, he uses a photo of her “with Blair Brown, the actress who portrayed her in the movie version of her story.” Wouldn’t you like to know what movie that was? Well, Leslie doesn’t tell us.
(But I will: it was a TV-movie from 1978 called And I Alone Survived, a title that kind of ruins the suspense when she starts off with two other people.)
Also, by the end, Leslie is jamming in as many 20th century survival tales as he can. Somebody needed to edit this book a bit more. In fact, someone else should have written it. Leslie doesn’t have the black humor to pull off these tales of human misery. My candidate: John Marr, who used to write a great zine called Murder Can Be Fun, whose gleefully wrote about themes such as postal worker shootings without sounding cold-hearted or callous. I think you can still find some of his writings online that may pertain to our subject.

Oxford University Press, 1993
Originally subtitled “The Fraying of America” for the hardbound first edition that I just read (the one currently is called “A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of America,” and I’d be curious why and when this changed.) Ten years later, how does Hughes criticism of America hold up?
The Victimhood Culture is still with us, though as it applies to feminism and on campus, I think this has mutated into what Hughes would probably term “un-PC.” Debates over what to call people, places, and things don’t really exist now. Either they’ve been accepted and subsumed into culture (gender based job titles seem a thing of the past) or they’ve been dropped from simple unweildiness. Yet, America is full of victims, and from out of that comes costly litigation. The current lawsuits against big tobacco for causing cancer and against fast food chains for causing obesity are just two examples. (Myself, despite my distrust of big business, consider most of these suits completely frivolous. I still believe in free will, and I don’t believe that people 50 years ago had no ideas of the dangers of smoking. Maybe they didn’t know all the dangers, but I don’t think they thought it was good for you. Still, those same people no doubt thought alcohol was nothing but trouble, yet here’s doctors telling us today a little tipple keeps you healthy.) Victimhood is tied into exploitation and big business (drug companies) and shows no sign of going away.
Many of the worries that Hughes was concerned about were based upon a country where the concept of free speech was being debated in context to art movements (his chapter on Mapplethorpe, Serano’s “Piss Christ”, and the NEA scandal seems so very long ago; when was the last time art made headlines except for earning milllions at auction?). Now free speech itself is threatened by Christian fascists such as Ashcroft, nobody’s really worried about whether a photograph is rude or not.
Hughes wrote and published this just as Clinton was being inaugurated, and part of the book is taking stock of 12 years of Reaganism. He’s not too sure about Clinton, but he has little of anything good to say about Bush. Again, how long ago it feels.
Hughes also sees the dumbing down of American education as a result of anti-elitism, cultivated by the Right, enacted by the Left. Here I think he’s still correct. The basics are not being taught, and students are coming to college knowing nothing (and this is based on my experience working with them). On the other hand, there’s free will: if you really want to learn more and keep on learning, you can do it.
There’s a nice section where Hughes talks a little bit about his education and life growing up in Australia, which taught me a thing or two. It wasn’t too long ago, either.

In those days we had a small, 95 percent white, Anglo-Irish society, in whose public schools you could learn Latiin but not Italian, ancient but not modern Greek. What we learned of the world in school came through the great tradition (and I use the word without irony) of English letters and English history. We were taught little Australian history. Of the world’s great religions other than Christianity–Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam–we were as perfectly ignorant as a row of cats looking at a TV set; or would have been, if Australia had had television in 1955, which, luckily, it did not.

His defence of multiculturalism as an addition to culture, not as a separate or “better” culture is particularly well argued and written, and says what I’ve always thought. Increase knowledge, not replace it.
His last chapter on art makes the case against people who believe art shoud somehow been “good” for you, like a curative. Hughes traces this thought back to the Puritans, and the early Americans first shocking encounter (a few generations on) with European culture. (This brought me back to a SBCC class I had years ago (maybe it was just a onetime lecture) about American art, pre-20th century. Oh, how achingly dull I found it.) If America had been founded by Catholics who somehow had broken from Rome, but kept all the artistic stuff (painting, architecture, the lot), how different America would have been…perhaps.
Anyway, 1993 sounds like a time when the culture was being debated. Now we’re watching our entire country be destroyed and petty artistic or linguistic squabbles are not on the table. Still, it’s a worthwhile book. Hughes is certainly no friend of the ultra-left, and he loathes the right, yet he isn’t a middlebrow. He’s just an independent thinker who calls America his home. I wonder what he’s been thinking recently?
Lastly, while reading the book I sent this thought to my friend Chris a week ago.:

“The situation that Hughes writes about in the CofC, esp. on the Left, has
largely disappeared. I don’t think there’s a hysteria anymore on what to
call somebody or something (even if the hysteria was media created,
perhaps). What *has* happened, and what Hughes and the Left didn’t see
coming, was that PC talk, and the things it tries to hide, has been taken
and adapted by the Right. How else could they use the phrase “class warfare”
and get away with it?”

All right, class, now discuss.

Hackett Publishing, 1997
At long last finished the Iliad last night, after months of just being too busy to read. After reading Stanley Lombardo’s excellent translation, I think I’m spoiled for the rest of Greek Literature in English (barring of course Lombardo’s Odyssey, which I’m tempted to pick up next.) I read the Iliad back in college in one of those dry prose versions (probably Martin Hammond or Samuel Butler) and I never could figure out why this rambling repetitive narrative was a cornerstone of Western Lit. With Lombardo’s translation-in modern English, heavily colloquial, and in verse-that’s all suddenly apparent, and my memory of the first reading seems to have vanished.
There were moments when I had to stop and remind myself that what I was reading was thousands of years old. Lombardo makes you feel like it was yesterday (and seeing I started reading it during the beginning of the second Iraqi Boffo Oil Grab and Civilian Massacre, it probably was yesterday), and Homer’s techniques and style shine through.
Lombardo sets apart the lengthy metaphors that are part of Homer’s technique in italic mini poems; these “asides” heighten the poetic effect by taking you out of the action for a line or ten and then spinning you right back into the thick of battle. And who wouldn’t groove on the gory and inventive detail that Homer invests in the damage a bronze-tipped spear can do to the human body. We get enter and exit wounds, popping eyeballs, crushed skulls, spraying blood and intestines, all in gratuitous slo-mo. Somebody call the Minister for Worrying Over Children and have this book banned immediately!
Two main things interested me throughout The Iliad. One was the even-handed approach that Homer gives to both sides: war is hell, but war also seems to be the social interaction of two equal units (which you can’t say for most of the wars of the 20th Century). Imagine a Gulf War narrative that quickly sketched the family background of both American and Iraqi soldier just before both were killed, making the losses equal, and equally sad.
The other interest was the rather complex conception of fate as it applied to the mortals and the gods that took their sides. The hierarchy on Mount Olympus complicates things to start with. Zeus has determined that Troy will fall, but within these plans there’s much room to plot. Fate and predetermination are of a much looser quality than in Christianity, and I’m sure much has been written about it. I guess it boils down to this: a Christian would see getting hit by a car as God’s will, with the reason kept mysterious. A Greek would see it as Zeus’s will, but the reason would be based up several factors, one being that a few years ago you displeased Hera by not burning an ox in supplication, which led to a fight among the gods, and also there was that time when you picked on your brother, who, you always suspected, was favored by a goddess, and she put in a good word for him. Or something like that.
My final question: Why on earth does this action-packed, spear-and-shield epic end with a major sporting event (the “funeral games”)? I didn’t see that coming, but I’m sure Zeus knew.

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