The History of Pleasure, the Pleasure of History ... and stuff
John Keegan, Daniel Handler, Smallville tie-in, The Recruit, and Evanescence’s Fallen coming up. Then I get myself in trouble. If you want better-thought-out words, just stop reading after the reviews.
John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: This is a beautifully written, engaging book about the campaign that won WWII in Europe. Somehow, Keegan takes paragraph-long sentences and makes them roll like the green hills of England. With well-chosen quotes and extended descriptions, he brings to life the parachutists who, like medieval knights, wore so much equipment that they couldn’t right themselves without assistance and who died in droves when they landed, as per their training, on their sides and rolling, only they did that in three feet of water.
This is not a work of academic history. For one thing, it lacks the footnotes. For another, it reports these events, and others of the battlefield, without questioning the human sources. Did an American sergeant really abandon his troops when they wouldn’t follow his orders and go house to house in a small village, killing Germans as he went until two men worked up the courage to follow him, one of them only to be immediately shot? Probably something like that happened - Keegan’s casual description of the wounds of the close-quarters warrior, cuts and bruises from slamming into the sides of doors and buildings, is typically evocative - but maybe not what the survivors said, exactly, though we’ll never know for certain.
Z. suggests that a work of academic history will problematize its sources, asking what they didn’t know, didn’t remember, or weren’t saying. I take the point, and Keegan’s The Face of Battle does that very well, but this omission bothered me not at all in Six Armies. In part that’s because Keegan begins the book by telling readers what a good war he had. He was an schoolboy in the English countryside with the rest of his family, and he always knew that Britain would win the war. This lyrical prologue, clearly describing a childhood remembered, true in theme rather than in specific incident, implicitly casts what follows in a similar light: this is what people said about the war they fought, at the time or later; the war they fought, well, that might be something different.
Highly recommended, both for the writing and the fascinating content.
Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight: I didn’t much like Shut Your Mouth, Handler’s second non-Lemony Snicket novel, as I said earlier, although there’s some very nice writing in it. This, Handler’s first novel, is much, much better - far less intrusively stylized, far less exploitatively explicit, and with far more likable characters. (The plot’s also not as baroque as that of Shut Your Mouth, though that’s not saying much, as Gone With the Wind and The Sound and the Fury combined weren’t as baroque as Shut Your Mouth.)
Flannery Culp - the jacket compares her to Holden Caulfield, but I hear the echoes of Quentin Compson - is a high school senior, part of an exclusive group that calls themselves the Basic Eight. As the book opens, she’s apparently in prison for something the group did, rewriting her diaries for publication. This allows for significant authorial intrusion and heavy-handed but still somehow mysterious foreshadowing. Her point of view makes sense for a girl her age, ironic and not yet realizing that irony is no protection from the cruelties of the world. A notable thing about the book is the near-complete absence of parents, except for one who’s also a teacher. Flannery exists in a hermetically sealed bubble with her age cohort and her high school teachers, and That’s Not Good, as both the book and the book’s ably-mocked authority figures insist. Flannery, unlike Holden, doesn’t even notice the absence, which makes her seem both more pathetic and more sociopathic. I liked this one. If you liked Heathers, you might, too.
Dean Wesley Smith, Whodunnit (Smallville tie-in): Boring. It’s not just that Clark & Lex spend about two pages together, though it’s a lot that. But Smith seems especially constrained by the need to push the reset button and therefore say nothing of any interest about any character, and I didn’t think anybody could make kidnapped, conscious Lionel boring. Series tie-ins can’t advance plot or allow characters to change (with the possible exception of Star Wars tie-ins, and how do you think Alan Dean Foster feels about the Luke/Leia UST in Splinter in the Mind’s Eye these days, eh?), but that doesn’t mean you can’t do a good old-fashioned adventure, as some of the ST tie-ins prove. Smith has actually written some ST tie-ins, but none I remember. Thumbs down.
The Recruit: I liked this movie much more than I expected to. It’s a CIA caper flick about Colin Farrell (the recruit), Bridget Moynahan (another one), and Al Pacino (the old hand and trainer). Betrayals pile on betrayals, everything’s a test, and nothing is what it seems. While, unfortunately, those last two phrases are repeated several times in the film, the plot almost works, once you accept the preposterous idea behind the MacGuffin, which I won’t spoil. There’s only one Evil Overlord-type stupidity at the very end. Colin Farrell is moderately attractive, though I hate hate hate the five-day stubble. Aside from messing up his face, it must be like kissing a cheese grater. He and Moynahan have sparks of actual chemistry, and the question of whether a spy’s disloyalties have to go all the way down to the bone is an interesting one. Matinee material, at least.
Evanescence, Fallen: Completely off topic, Fallen is, I think, a spectacularly creepy Denzel Washington movie, and I don’t know why people didn’t like it better.
The album of the same title is pretty good too. “Bring Me to Life” is featured on the Daredevil soundtrack, and if you’ve heard that, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the whole gothy disc sounds like, though the angry male vocalist on “Bring Me to Life” doesn’t show up in the rest of the songs. Instead, it’s just the female vocalist, whose voice isn’t as distinctive as Siouxsie’s but is definitely in that black-cobwebs-and-lipstick tradition. If you know October Project, they sound a lot alike to me. I think the best song on the album is “Everybody’s Fool,” which is a nice twist on the world-of-hurt lyrics typical of the genre. Hmm, I just realized that it’s the angriest song, further confirming that I like angry women and sad men singing. If you want to hear “Bring Me to Life” and have a Windows machine, you can play the video at Launch.
Now, trouble and troubled thoughts:
Some fans resist ideas of “rules” or standards for participating in fandom. While I don’t want to get into the general melee, there is a certain type of argument that really saddens me, about the so-called pretentiousness of dictating to others that fandom should exist on a high-falutin’ level. I think (I-statements only!) that sometimes, when literature geeks or academically-minded folks like me analyze our texts or our fandoms, some people read that as “Your simple-minded, visceral pleasure in the text/fandom is not as good as my sophisticated pleasure.” Sometimes, maybe, that’s what’s being said, but less often than it’s received that way.
The thing is, for me at least, analytical pleasure is just as visceral as the pleasure of looking at a well-turned arm. When I figured out that the relevant statute on its face simply didn’t allow the government to charge the appellant with what it charged him with (long story; statute required events A, B, C, D in that order and appellant had A, C, D, B and the gov’t confessed error, yay me); when I finally fixed the relevant statistical principles in my head so that I could understand why the opposing expert’s report was bullshit; when I read Catharine MacKinnon on equality or ”thamiris” on mirroring and pretty boys fucking - I felt those all in my gut. It’s all pleasure. It’s all good.
Maybe that inevitably sounds like “I get two levels of pleasure out of fandom and you, simpletons, only get one,” but pleasure can’t be measured like that. It’s not quality or quantity I’m after, it’s intensity, and John Stuart Mill can make me swoon too, for all that he’s worm food. And yes, I do wish everyone else loved JSM as I do, because it’s fun and he’s right about a lot of things, but my love is no more rarefied and refined than my actual beating heart is. Is it pretentiousness if it’s not pretend? I hope it isn’t.
There endeth the incoherence. At least for now.
John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: This is a beautifully written, engaging book about the campaign that won WWII in Europe. Somehow, Keegan takes paragraph-long sentences and makes them roll like the green hills of England. With well-chosen quotes and extended descriptions, he brings to life the parachutists who, like medieval knights, wore so much equipment that they couldn’t right themselves without assistance and who died in droves when they landed, as per their training, on their sides and rolling, only they did that in three feet of water.
This is not a work of academic history. For one thing, it lacks the footnotes. For another, it reports these events, and others of the battlefield, without questioning the human sources. Did an American sergeant really abandon his troops when they wouldn’t follow his orders and go house to house in a small village, killing Germans as he went until two men worked up the courage to follow him, one of them only to be immediately shot? Probably something like that happened - Keegan’s casual description of the wounds of the close-quarters warrior, cuts and bruises from slamming into the sides of doors and buildings, is typically evocative - but maybe not what the survivors said, exactly, though we’ll never know for certain.
Z. suggests that a work of academic history will problematize its sources, asking what they didn’t know, didn’t remember, or weren’t saying. I take the point, and Keegan’s The Face of Battle does that very well, but this omission bothered me not at all in Six Armies. In part that’s because Keegan begins the book by telling readers what a good war he had. He was an schoolboy in the English countryside with the rest of his family, and he always knew that Britain would win the war. This lyrical prologue, clearly describing a childhood remembered, true in theme rather than in specific incident, implicitly casts what follows in a similar light: this is what people said about the war they fought, at the time or later; the war they fought, well, that might be something different.
Highly recommended, both for the writing and the fascinating content.
Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight: I didn’t much like Shut Your Mouth, Handler’s second non-Lemony Snicket novel, as I said earlier, although there’s some very nice writing in it. This, Handler’s first novel, is much, much better - far less intrusively stylized, far less exploitatively explicit, and with far more likable characters. (The plot’s also not as baroque as that of Shut Your Mouth, though that’s not saying much, as Gone With the Wind and The Sound and the Fury combined weren’t as baroque as Shut Your Mouth.)
Flannery Culp - the jacket compares her to Holden Caulfield, but I hear the echoes of Quentin Compson - is a high school senior, part of an exclusive group that calls themselves the Basic Eight. As the book opens, she’s apparently in prison for something the group did, rewriting her diaries for publication. This allows for significant authorial intrusion and heavy-handed but still somehow mysterious foreshadowing. Her point of view makes sense for a girl her age, ironic and not yet realizing that irony is no protection from the cruelties of the world. A notable thing about the book is the near-complete absence of parents, except for one who’s also a teacher. Flannery exists in a hermetically sealed bubble with her age cohort and her high school teachers, and That’s Not Good, as both the book and the book’s ably-mocked authority figures insist. Flannery, unlike Holden, doesn’t even notice the absence, which makes her seem both more pathetic and more sociopathic. I liked this one. If you liked Heathers, you might, too.
Dean Wesley Smith, Whodunnit (Smallville tie-in): Boring. It’s not just that Clark & Lex spend about two pages together, though it’s a lot that. But Smith seems especially constrained by the need to push the reset button and therefore say nothing of any interest about any character, and I didn’t think anybody could make kidnapped, conscious Lionel boring. Series tie-ins can’t advance plot or allow characters to change (with the possible exception of Star Wars tie-ins, and how do you think Alan Dean Foster feels about the Luke/Leia UST in Splinter in the Mind’s Eye these days, eh?), but that doesn’t mean you can’t do a good old-fashioned adventure, as some of the ST tie-ins prove. Smith has actually written some ST tie-ins, but none I remember. Thumbs down.
The Recruit: I liked this movie much more than I expected to. It’s a CIA caper flick about Colin Farrell (the recruit), Bridget Moynahan (another one), and Al Pacino (the old hand and trainer). Betrayals pile on betrayals, everything’s a test, and nothing is what it seems. While, unfortunately, those last two phrases are repeated several times in the film, the plot almost works, once you accept the preposterous idea behind the MacGuffin, which I won’t spoil. There’s only one Evil Overlord-type stupidity at the very end. Colin Farrell is moderately attractive, though I hate hate hate the five-day stubble. Aside from messing up his face, it must be like kissing a cheese grater. He and Moynahan have sparks of actual chemistry, and the question of whether a spy’s disloyalties have to go all the way down to the bone is an interesting one. Matinee material, at least.
Evanescence, Fallen: Completely off topic, Fallen is, I think, a spectacularly creepy Denzel Washington movie, and I don’t know why people didn’t like it better.
The album of the same title is pretty good too. “Bring Me to Life” is featured on the Daredevil soundtrack, and if you’ve heard that, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the whole gothy disc sounds like, though the angry male vocalist on “Bring Me to Life” doesn’t show up in the rest of the songs. Instead, it’s just the female vocalist, whose voice isn’t as distinctive as Siouxsie’s but is definitely in that black-cobwebs-and-lipstick tradition. If you know October Project, they sound a lot alike to me. I think the best song on the album is “Everybody’s Fool,” which is a nice twist on the world-of-hurt lyrics typical of the genre. Hmm, I just realized that it’s the angriest song, further confirming that I like angry women and sad men singing. If you want to hear “Bring Me to Life” and have a Windows machine, you can play the video at Launch.
Now, trouble and troubled thoughts:
Some fans resist ideas of “rules” or standards for participating in fandom. While I don’t want to get into the general melee, there is a certain type of argument that really saddens me, about the so-called pretentiousness of dictating to others that fandom should exist on a high-falutin’ level. I think (I-statements only!) that sometimes, when literature geeks or academically-minded folks like me analyze our texts or our fandoms, some people read that as “Your simple-minded, visceral pleasure in the text/fandom is not as good as my sophisticated pleasure.” Sometimes, maybe, that’s what’s being said, but less often than it’s received that way.
The thing is, for me at least, analytical pleasure is just as visceral as the pleasure of looking at a well-turned arm. When I figured out that the relevant statute on its face simply didn’t allow the government to charge the appellant with what it charged him with (long story; statute required events A, B, C, D in that order and appellant had A, C, D, B and the gov’t confessed error, yay me); when I finally fixed the relevant statistical principles in my head so that I could understand why the opposing expert’s report was bullshit; when I read Catharine MacKinnon on equality or ”thamiris” on mirroring and pretty boys fucking - I felt those all in my gut. It’s all pleasure. It’s all good.
Maybe that inevitably sounds like “I get two levels of pleasure out of fandom and you, simpletons, only get one,” but pleasure can’t be measured like that. It’s not quality or quantity I’m after, it’s intensity, and John Stuart Mill can make me swoon too, for all that he’s worm food. And yes, I do wish everyone else loved JSM as I do, because it’s fun and he’s right about a lot of things, but my love is no more rarefied and refined than my actual beating heart is. Is it pretentiousness if it’s not pretend? I hope it isn’t.
There endeth the incoherence. At least for now.