King Kubrick Cage Match

I recently just reread Stephen King’s The Shining. Way back in February of this year, I watched Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of it (I wrote about it here).

As I mentioned in my blog about the film, King and Kubrick did not like each other. Notoriously, in the film, Kubrick shows a crushed VW bug as kind of a fuck you to King (King’s Torrance family drives a VW bug to the Overlook Hotel).

For his part, King did not hold back his opinion. You can reference interviews that go back over the decades where King trashes Kubrick’s vision and execution.

The brouhaha between the two is kind of amusing because the novel is considered one of the great examples of horror fiction and the film is considered one of the great horror films of all time. You’d think that maybe the two of them could have just acknowledged their respective greatness and moved on? Well, apparently not.

What was Kubrick’s problem with King? Well, it’s hard to say since Kubrick was famously media shy. Their respective approach to horror was different is one theory. It could just be that Kubrick, notoriously an obsessive nitpicky film maker, just didn’t want a world famous author messing around with his film.

King, since he is a writer, is quite voluble on his criticisms of the film. He didn’t like the casting of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. He was looking for a more restrained performance. He thought that Nicholson overacted from the outset, making the transition to his later insanity seem less horrifying (since he was already a little nuts to start with). In the film, King thought that the portrayal of Wendy made her look weak. He thought that the role was misogynist.

Having now just finished the novel and fairly recently watched the film, what do I think?

Well, in regards to Stephen King, to quote that great twenty-first century American philosopher, Taylor Swift, “You need to calm down / You’re being too loud”.

First of all, the novel is somewhere around 500 pages. The film runs around 140 minutes. If you follow the rule of thumb that one page equals one minute of film time, well, it’s pretty obvious that choices have to be made.

So, yes, it’s true that much of Jack Torrance’s back story was lost. His descent into alcoholism and his gritty attempts to achieve sobriety were given short shrift in the film. I’m not sure that I agree with King’s description of Jack as being a basically good man driven insane by the Overlook. Even a sane Jack has a violent temper that he barely keeps under control. In the novel’s outset, Jack’s interview with the Overlook’s manager reveals an anger and contempt that he barely manages to keep under the surface. When we first meet Jack, he seems like he’s an already ticking time bomb.

Regarding Wendy, it’s a fair assessment. Even so, I don’t think that I’d call the role misogynist. In the beginning she does appears weak and bends to Jack’s will. As the depth of Jack’s insanity reveals itself, Wendy proves to be a resourceful heroine regularly thwarting Jack’s murderous rages. While in the novel the fellow shiner Halloran helps to save the day, in the film Halloran is killed by Jack. It is all up to Wendy to save Danny.

In many ways, I think Kubrick captures the essence of the novel. It is a legitimately creepy film. The twins, which are not featured in the novel, are a great visual. The bartender Lloyd and the caretaker Grady are great visual characterizations of the characters in the novel.

Although King wasn’t impressed by Nicholson’s performance, I think that his descent into madness is compelling and frightening. Nicholson brings a menace to the role that is a terrifying counter to the performances of Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd).

To sum up, I agree with the critical consensus. I think that both the novel and the film are pretty terrific. When I reviewed the film, I gave it five stars. On Goodreads, I gave the novel four stars. I stand by that. I think that the film is a horror classic. On the other hand, although I think it’s a great novel, as with many of King’s novels, he could probably have used a slightly more aggressive editor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not quite as egregious as It or, even worse, his writer’s cut of The Stand (which is like 1200 pages), but still King is a maximalist writer and sometimes that can become a chore to read.

Chill out Steve, it’s a good film.

Keeping Up With The Joneses

I’ve written about this before, but under most definitions, being born in 1963, I am aligned with the Baby Boomer generation. Even though this is true, I have never really felt like I belonged with that cohort. I’m not just saying that because the Boomer generation seems dead set on consuming the world before they all die, leaving behind an empty, polluted, corrupt, warming dystopian hellscape.

After all, when you think of a Baby Boomer, what kind of person do you visualize?

Boomers were all about free love, right? Birth control became widespread in the 1960s. It was all about teenagers having wild, hedonist sex. I was six years old when Woodstock happened. For someone in my birth year, the cultural sexual highlights were the rise of the incurable STD herpes and, of course, the scourge of AIDS. Have sex and maybe die is a bit different message than what the early Boomers experienced.

Boomers had inspirational leaders that often had tragically short lives that somehow made their spirits burn even brighter. Think about Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X. Although because of Vietnam, they ended up loathing him, Lyndon Johnson took dramatic sincere steps to address racism and poverty.

Who were the leaders of my time? Let’s start with Richard Nixon. I was eleven when he resigned in disgrace because of Watergate. He was followed by the inept Jimmy Carter, the first sitting President to lose reelection in over 40 years. That ushered in the age of the movie star cowboy, the septuagenarian Ronald Reagan. He was a lot of things, but unless you wore Brooks Brothers to your university finance courses, he wasn’t exactly inspiring to the teenagers and early twenties of that time.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’ve always felt more of an infinity to the Generation X cohort than with the Boomers.

I’ve recently discovered that I’m not the only one that thinks this. In fact, my little sub cohort of the Boomer generation has a name, Generation Jones. This cohort is defined by the years 1954 through 1965.

I’m not exactly in love with the name. It has a couple different connotations. Jones is a generic name, so it can identify a large anonymous cohort. It can mean “keeping up with the Joneses”, implying a certain competitive streak that coming of age in our time drove. Or finally, it can mean “jonseing”, which is slang for craving. I guess that means that we were jealous of and craving all of the benefits of the earlier Boomer generation cohort.

People talk, legitimately, about the struggles of the Millennial and Gen Z generations. For instance, while in the 1960s, early Boomers could pay for college by working a summer job. Those days are over. The housing crisis is real. My own mother, a member of the Silent Generation, can’t seem to understand that having a house and a child when she was 21 years old just is not, in any way, a viable option for generations coming of age now.

As true as that is, it could be said that a historical look at Generation Jones could have given today’s young generations some idea of what might be coming their way.

After all, as I’ve said, Generation Jones had, starting with Nixon, twenty years of corrupt, feckless, uncaring leaders. We were disillusioned by the political shenanigans of Watergate. Under Carter, we had stagflation, which is high unemployment, high inflation, and slow growth. Under classic economic theory, this was supposed to be impossible.

Under Reagan, we had a tremendous shift in government policies. Instead of a belief that the government had a growing responsibility to provide a safety net for those that are most in need, the government shifted into some semi-libertarian, greed is good mindset that, by allowing individuals (including corporations) to pursue their most ruthlessly selfish aims, everyone would somehow end up prospering.

That, of course, proved to be nonsense. It led to many things, nearly all of them negative. There were unprecedented budget deficits (which drove conservative politicians to demand more cuts to fray the safety net), a great increase in wealth inequality, and the death of manufacturing jobs in many previously healthy small cities, which in turn led to the rise of lower paying service jobs.

People today complain when the inflation rate rises above five percent. In the years 1976 to 1982, inflation was never below six percent and was in double digits from 1979 through 1981. Mortgage rates are around seven percent now. From 1979 to 1986, the mortgage rate was never below ten percent. I bought my first house in 1991 and was thrilled to get a mortgage rate of 8 5/8.

Due to all of this, according to people that have studied Generation Jones, the prevailing attitude among that cohort is pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.

Don’t get me wrong. This post isn’t about how times were so much harder when I was younger. The point is that not all Boomers are created equal. As the Millennial and Generation Z cohort bemoan the world left behind for them, I hope that they can understand that there is a smaller cohort of older people that empathize and can relate their own experiences to today’s struggles.

A Director Dies For His Art

Title: L’Atalante

Rating: 4 Stars

Although I haven’t written much about it, I am continuing down the BFI Sight and Sounds greatest films list. I’ve recently watched A Portrait of a Woman on Fire and Mirror. I didn’t feel any particular desire to write about either film. A Portrait is a well made film that didn’t move me all that much. What impressed me the most about the film was its cinematography. Since the film is about an artist, it seemed to only make sense that many of the scenes seemed to have had the appearance of an oil painting. Mirror, on the other hand, is one of those nonlinear, nearly plotless films that art house critics seem to love so much. I get that it’s an important film. I just didn’t find it interesting.

So, I’ve been on a bit of a losing streak with the list. Although I wasn’t blown away by L’Atalante, I liked it enough to at least be inspired to write about it.

L’Atalante is the name of a barge. At the beginning of the film, the skipper (Jean) marries Juliette. Juliette is from what appears to be a small, provincial village. She dreams of a better, bigger life and she thinks that life aboard the barge might be her ticket out. Also on board is the mate, Pere Jules, and the cabin boy.

At first, life is good. Juliette and Jean seem to be passionately in love. Trouble starts when the barge arrives in Paris. Eager to see Paris, Juliette is angered when Jules and the cabin boy both leave the boat. Not able to leave the boat unattended, Jean and Juliette have to stay behind.

Later, Jean’s heretofore latent jealously begins to emerge. Captivated by some of the trinkets that Jules has acquired in his journeys, Juliette sits charmed in Jules’ room. Barging in, assuming they are in the midst of a romantic tryst, Jean makes a mess of Jules’ room. Later, Jules and Jean do manage to go into Paris. However, Jean becomes jealous of a street peddler.

Juliette, still wanting to see Paris, steals away just to window shop. Jean, infuriated when he discovers her missing, casts off the barge and leaves her behind. Juliette’s purse is stolen, leaving her in desperate straits.

Later, Jean cools down and regrets his actions. Juliette once told him that if he dunks his head in water, then he’ll be able to see his true love. In a surreal sequence, Jean jumps overboard and swims underwater. Opening his eyes, he sees Juliette.

They go back for her. Jules finds her and returns her to the barge. There, Jean and Juliette rekindle their love for each other.

All in all, a pretty basic story. As I was watching it, I would find my attention fading. So, what’s the big deal?

There’s a couple of things. First of all, it was made in 1934, so a lot of things that I saw as somewhat trite were actually being done for just about the first time. I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to apply this term to cinema, but to me it felt naturalistic. In this sense, I refer to the naturalist movement, as exemplified by the novelist Emile Zola. He told brutally honest stories about working class people. Before this movement, this was not considered a topic for literature.

In film, poverty was certainly previously represented. Check Charlie Chaplin as exhibit number one. However, even the Tramp’s poverty had a certain movie falseness to it. You are always aware that these are actors acting on a sound stage of some sort.

Here, you don’t get the sense that the actors are acting. They simply seem to be existing. As you watch, you almost feel like you’re not so much watching a film as eavesdropping on real events.

As part of the naturalism, the emotions somehow seem more real in this film compared to other films of that era. Especially in the first scenes of love between Jean and Juliette, I didn’t pick up on some stagey overly emotive expression of love but what appeared to be an authentic joie de vivre.

For someone used to Hays Code American films from that era, the frank sexuality of this film was also interesting to me. There are nudie pictures on the wall. There’s a picture of Jules with what seem to be pretty obviously prostitutes. Although they are not even in the same room, there’s a sexual charge to a shared dream sequence of Jean and Juliette.

The film also had an impact on a future generation of filmmakers. Auteurs of the French New Wave Movement were inspired by this film. Watching this film, I could see a pretty direct line between it and such films as Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Understanding that the French New Wave directors later inspired 1970 filmmakers like Scorsese, it’s pretty easy to see the impact that this film has had over the decades.

Finally, its back story is tragic. The director was Jean Vigo. Only twenty-nine, this was his first full length film. Chronically sick from tuberculosis, he worked tirelessly filming in cold, damp conditions, endangering his health. In fact, as he was making his final edits, he died.

As often happens, the studio took over and released a truncated, much derided version. It was only decades later that a more complete vision of Vigo’s work was restored.

If you’re only going to make one full length film, it might as well be one that has had such a long lasting impact.

Ghostwriting A Story In Response To A Story In A Story

Title: Trust

Rating: 5 Stars

This year, for the first time (I believe) in its history, there was a tie in the Pulitzer Prize fiction category. Trust and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperfield both won this year. I haven’t read Demon Copperfield yet. Having just finished Trust, I have to say that Demon Copperfield has a pretty high bar to clear to be in the same class as Trust.

Trust is told in four parts. Three of the parts are stories in the story. The first part is a novel called Bonds, by the author Harold Vanner. Bonds tells the fictional story of Benjamin Rask.

Born to wealth, Rask is kind of an odd person that turns out to be an investment genius. It seems that he can see around corners before all other investors. Over the decades, including the stock market crash that presaged The Great Depression, he is able to generate tremendous amounts of wealth. In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, the financial industry essentially shuns him because he prioritized his personal wealth over the public good.

Bonds also tells the tale of Helen Brevoot. Born to old school New York money, the family is now struggling. By the time Helen is a young adult, they are trapped in Europe in the beginnings of World War I and her father has gone mad.

Once Helen’s mother manages to coerce a matchup between Rask and Helen, Helen knows that she must do her duty and marry Rask to save her family.

Although both Helen and Rask are introverted loners, they do manage to make their marriage work by giving each other space. Helen makes a name for herself by championing burgeoning artists and making charitable contributions.

After the 1929 crash, the negative attention given to Rask is reflected back on Helen. She is now ostracized in her world just as Rask is in hers. In her case, unfortunately, she begins to manifest the same insanity as her father. She is committed to the same sanitorium where her father was and she dies there.

Rask shoulders on but appears to have lost his magic investment touch. Even though still obscenely rich, he’s now considered to be an veritable nonentity on Wall Street.

The next section of Trust is My Life, the autobiography of Andrew Bevel. Bevel is apparently convinced that Vanner’s novel, Bonds, is a thinly veiled fictionalized biography of his life. Determined to set the record straight, he tells his story.

The autobiography is unfinished. Parts of his story is only in outline form. Other parts include memory prompts for him to fill in later.

Unsurprisingly, he’s the hero in his story. Coming from generations of wealth, he combines the genius and tenacity of his forebears to dominate the market. Years ahead of his time, he makes use of analysis and mathematics to detect patterns invisible to other investors. At the same time that he’s making a tremendous fortune with his unique genius, he is singlehandedly keeping the market healthy and vibrant. His investment windfall from the 1929 crash was a needful purge of the rampant speculation of that time. His actions were not just unselfish but were desperately required.

He meets his future wife, Mildred, while she is trapped in World War I Europe. Her father has died from tuberculosis. Once he marries her, they settle into a happy, tranquil life together. She knows her place and is content living a domestic life. They have quiet, enjoyable dinners. Mildred gets involved in philanthropy but does not have a head for numbers, so Bevel has to, behind the scenes, make sure that her charities are funded and that her bills are paid.

She later gets sick and dies of cancer. Although bereft at the loss of his domestic muse, Bevel shoulders on.

The third part is A Memoir, Remembered, the story of Ida Partenza. It turns out that Bevel didn’t actually write his autobiography. As a young, struggling office worker in 1938, Ida interviews and gets a job as clerical worker for Bevel. However, Bevel doesn’t need a typical office worker. Incensed at Vanner’s novel, he is determined to get his truth out in the form of an autobiography. He’s hired Ida to take down his dictation and organize it into an autobiography.

Unfortunately, although he’s full of confidence, Bevel doesn’t really haven’t a way with words. He spews out a few facts and stories from his life and then expects Ida to come up with the narrative. She struggles to come up with his voice until she reads a number of similar autobiographies. By merging a number of different business autobiographies into one, she creates the tone that Bevel thinks shows himself off best.

At nearly every step, Bevel minimizes the impact that Mildred had on his past. He’s always trying to push her out of the way. In fact, he can barely come up with any stories about his wife that describes their relationship. Ida resorts to including stories from her life to artificially bring Mildred to life. Not only does Bevel approve of this, but he takes on her stories as his own and even begins to tweak them. This makes Ida suspicious of the real relationship between Bevel and Mildred. Ida begins to search for Mildred’s journal to discover her truth.

Ida’s work comes to an abrupt end when Bevel unexpectedly dies. The autobiography remains unfinished and unpublished. Decades later, she visits a museum and unexpectedly discovers, hidden among other papers, Mildred’s journal.

The final part of Trust is Futures, a transcription of Mildred’s journal. Taken from the months and days while she is dying at a sanitarium, it tells a very different story. Mildred is not a docile domestic wife. She is a sophisticated, erudite woman with a wide and varying interest in modern art.

Even more shocking, it is Mildred that has mastered investing. Using her own ingenious methods, she gives instructions to Bevel. He follows her advice and becomes fabulously rich even as he resents having to follow her direction. Even as she lays dying, Bevel has to come to her for advice. It’s pretty clear that Bevel will only be marginally successful without her.

One of the things that’s great about Trust is that, even though it’s a complex, post modern novel, it is quite accessible. Many times when reading a modern author, I get the idea that they’re intentionally making the novel difficult to read just as an intellectual exercise. For me, a great example of such a novel is Book of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen (written about here).

There are several themes here. One is the nature of truth. Trust has a Rashomon like structure. What is truth? Is it the fictionized biography? The ghostwritten autobiography? The journal of a dying woman being dosed with morphine?

Another obvious one is the patriarchy. In the first two parts, you see men claiming credit for their genius while minimizing the work of the women in their lives. Even the self-aggrandizing autobiography is the stolen work of a woman. The only way that Mildred, the true investing genius, can make her trades is by using her husband as her beard.

Finance as a calling takes a beating here. We all like to talk about the invisible hand of the free market or the wisdom of the market or the market representing our collective wisdom, but it turns out that the market can be artificially manipulated by the mechanisms of a very few. All of Bevel’s talk about, by getting rich, that he is also somehow serving some greater good is nonsense.

This was one of the most enjoyable and thought provoking Pulitzer Prize winners that I’ve read in some time.

A Meta-Fiction Locked Room History Lesson

Title: West Heart Kill

Rating: 5 Stars

I originally wasn’t going to write about this novel. After all, it’s a fairly slight (< 300 pages) modern detective / murder mystery novel. I read several a year but rarely write about them. They’re kind of my comfort food. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they are more like carnival rides. I get on them with a clear expectation of what’s going to happen. There might be thrills and chills, but I have confidence that, by the time I disembark, that I will have arrived safely.

Midway through reading it, I changed my mind and decided to write an article. First of all, it actually is quite clever. I don’t think it’s quite as clever as maybe the author thinks it is. If you want your mind exploded by a genre murder mystery novel, check out 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardwick (I wrote about it here). Be that as it may, it definitely stands out in comparison to other run of the mill mysteries.

Another reason to write this was because of the amount of hatred that it gets on Goodreads. On the one hand, I get it. If you come into it expecting Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett or Sue Grafton, well, it’s going to be a rough ride. It’s written in a nontraditional style that could be discomforting. At times, the author will come across as a smarmy know it all with a look ma no hands style of writing.

That is true. However, as someone who by now has read several hundred murder mysteries, I find myself to be very forgiving of creative innovation, even if at the cost of occasional smugness.

At its heart is a deceptively simple plot. A private detective has been invited by his old college friend to his family’s hunting lodge for the US bicentennial weekend. A small number of families have owned this lodge for generations.

Over the next couple of days, the bodies begin to pile up. Worse, a major storm has passed through and left the club cut off from the nearby town. For iconoclastic mysteries such as this one, it would be a serious disservice to future possible readers if I divulge much more of the plot than that. I can say that the detective immediately steps up and takes charge of the investigation. As the investigation unfolds, family secrets are unveiled. Motivations are unearthed. The detective finds connections to, among others, Henry Ford, Nazis, and the mafia.

That’s pretty conventional stuff. There are several things that mark it as innovative. Even the title is bit of trickery. The word kill appears in the title. That’s a pretty clear intention of murder. However, in this sense, the word comes from the Dutch, meaning stream.

There’s an omniscient narrator. It’s really not correct to even call this voice a narrator. It’s more like it’s a fellow reader, much more erudite than you in the murder mystery genre, reading along with you. As the novel progresses, this voice will occasionally chime in with thoughts on the importance of the latest plot point and how it compares to other, more conventional murder mysteries.

As the novel progresses, at various points, sections are inserted that are essentially history lessons on the mystery genre. These apparently annoy the crap out of some readers, but I found them interesting. Agatha Christie, although now, if thought of at all, as some kind of writer of mysteries favored by little old ladies, was actually a quite innovative writer. It even spent time discussing the time, near the top of her fame, when she mysteriously went missing for eleven days and then then the scandalous aftermath when she reappeared.

As you can imagine, famous mystery novelists from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to G K Chesterton to Ellery Queen are discussed. McDorman does not stop there. Edgar Allan Poe’s mysteries are discussed. He doesn’t stop there, either. The great post modern writer, Jorge Luis Borges, gets a call out. An argument can be made that nearly all of his short stories have the quality of a mystery to them, but a couple of them are clearly from the mystery genre. He doesn’t even stop there. He references Dante and Aristotle in these sections as well.

In fact, he makes an argument that Sophocles’ Oedipus is the first mystery novel. Oedipus is on the hunt to find the murderer of his father and, twist!, it’s him! The first murder mystery and already the formula is getting subverted!

Does all of this discussion have a place in a murder mystery? Probably not and this is probably one of the reasons why reviewers think that the author is showboating his knowledge of literature, but I still think that it’s cool and interesting.

I’d argue that this history is in service of what he’s trying to do. I think that he’s taking a deconstructionist, postmodern swing at the murder mystery genre. With his knowing narrator and his references to the past, he is, within the confines of the novel, exposing the skeleton of that very novel.

As the novel progresses, the omniscient narrator informs us that, in a murder mystery, that there are certain rules that must not be violated. By the end of the novel, many of these rules have, in fact, been violated. That also might be another reason for the reviewers’ distaste.

After all of that, there is the classic denouement. Much like a conventional murder mystery, all of the suspects are gathered in one place, at which point the detective fingers the culprit. Here, the novel structure is completely abandoned and it’s presented as a play. Without going into the details why, it’s not even the detective that does the accusing.

It finally ends with a authorial confession. Within this confession is a discussion of the relationship between the author and the characters that they create and their relationship to the audience.

Even more impressively, it manages to do all of this in less than 300 pages.

I found all of this to be interesting, entertaining, and thought provoking. This is probably one of those very rare cases where I’m being too soft on my grading. It probably was just a four star read, but I threw on a bonus star for the audacity of what the author was attempting.

He Shot The Singer, But He Didn’t Shoot No Manager

Title: A Brief History of Seven Killings

Rating: 4 Stars

For those too young not to know, Bob Marley was a huge reggae star. He was a giant celebrity in Jamaica. On the eve of a planned peace concert, on December 3rd, 1976, men broke into Marley’s house and shot several people. Bob Marley was himself shot twice. Although one of the bullets was near his heart, he recovered enough to perform at the concert as planned. No one was killed but several were injured.

What was the purpose of this attack? There were two prominent political parties in Jamaica vying for power at that time. The People’s National Party (PNP) was a democratic socialist party that the CIA feared had ties to Castro’s Cuba. The second was the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), which despite having the word labor in its party name was actually the conservative party.

Although Marley was publicly neutral, he seemed to lean towards the PNP. So, did the JLP attempt to assassinate Marley because they thought he was too dangerous to their cause? Or, if you really want to dive into a conspiracy theory, was this actually orchestrated by the PNP to cast a shadow on the JLP or to even create a martyr for their cause? After all, although seven gunman fired over fifty bullets, no one was actually killed in the attack.

Based upon my quite limited research, this mystery was never solved. Interestingly, Marley’s manager, Don Taylor (also shot in the attack), claimed that he and Marley were present at some underground kangaroo court in which the gunmen accused of trying to kill Marley were tried and convicted. Taylor claimed that one of the shooters, before his execution, confessed and claimed that the CIA ordered the murder and paid them with drugs and guns.

All of this is fascinating, and if you’re a Jamaican writer, grist for a novel begging to be written. Marlon James is the writer that decided to take it on.

It’s a sprawling, ambitious novel. Spanning decades, it takes place everywhere from Kingston slums to Montego Bay to Miami to New York. Told from multiple viewpoints, major sections of the novel are written in Jamaican patois. The sex and violence is brutal and graphic. Spanning nearly 700 pages, it’s a difficult and challenging novel.

Although it’s based upon history, it’s clearly a work of fiction. Names of characters have been changed, presumably both to protect the innocent and the guilty. Marley is never referred to by name. He’s always referred to as the Singer. Organized crime figures that dominate the Kingston slums have names like Papa-Lo, Josey Wales, Shotta Sherrif, and Funnyboy. As the ambition of these criminals grow, you see them begin to become the main US distributors for the Columbian drug cartels. A couple of CIA officers, intent upon preventing Jamaica from coming under the thumb of Castro, make appearances on the pages. Jamaican political leaders work with the organized crime slum leaders to gain power.

Although there are many voices in this novel, there are two that dominate. One is Nina. Having had a brief fling with the Singer, she is hanging around outside his estate hoping to get back in. While doing so, she witnesses the attack and comes face to face with the principal gunman. Terrified, she takes on a new identity and flees from Kingston to Montego Bay. Even there she does not feel safe. She ultimately changes her identity several more times before ending up as a nurse in New York. As she changes her identity, she sheds more and more of her Jamaican roots until finally she has managed to even get rid of her accent. Will she always be running or will she be able to at some point find some peace and reembrace her heritage?

The other is Josey Wales. At the onset of the novel, he is second in command for one of the street gangs in Kingston (in the Copenhagen City slum, apparently a stand-in for the real Tivoli Gardens). He is ruthlessly brutal. When younger, a bus driver, not knowing who he is, insults him. The bus driver, now enlightened, flees to the local police station in terror. There, Wales and his posse drag him out of the police station and beat him to death in front of the station. Wales is based upon the real life Lester Cooke, known as Jim Brown (who actually did kill a bus driver in front of a police station after dragging him out of it).  As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Wales is at the center of both the attempted murder of the Singer and the crack cocaine expansion into the Eastern United States.

It is a long, challenging novel to read. It is leavened by surprising moments of humor. If you persevere, I think you’ll find it a worthwhile and enjoyable read.

An Asian Woman Writing About A White Woman Committing Asian Appropriation

Title: Yellowface

Rating: 4 Stars

For good reason, Yellowface is getting a lot of publicity. It is smartly written and darkly humorous. It centers around cultural appropriation, a very hot topic at the moment. It’s full of inside baseball about the publishing industry. That is one of many ways that this book is meta / self referential. In other words, it ticks off a lot of boxes for a hot, bestselling, zeitgeist type of novel.

The protagonist is a young white woman named June Hayward. Armed with a degree from Yale and with dreams of becoming a major literary figure, things have not turned out as she planned. She does get one novel published to desultory reviews and low sales. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in the publishing world for a second novel.

Contrast that with her friend Athena Liu. An Asian woman that June met at Yale, she has experienced spectacular success. Getting her first book contract while still at Yale, her debut novel was a smashing success. The years since have been equally successful. Everything seems to be going her way.

Even though their careers are going in different directions, Athena and June have managed to still maintain a somewhat stilted friendship. Athena seems to like lording her success over June while June secretly seethes with jealousy.

One night, they end up at Athena’s apartment for drinks. June manages to discover Athena’s latest novel about Chinese labor camps in Europe during World War I and realizes that it’s quite good. Later that night, in an unfortunate pancake eating contest tragedy, Athena begins to choke in front of June. June, horrified, tries to save her and calls the authorities but to no avail. Athena dies. June, distraught, leaves Athena’s apartment. However, she’s not so distraught that she doesn’t manage to purloin the manuscript of Athena’s new novel as she leaves.

It’s just a first draft, so the novel still needs a lot of work. At first, June begins work on the manuscript in memory of Athena. However, as she progresses, she begins to assume more ownership of the novel and begins to think of it as hers. By the time that she’s completed the final draft, she submits it to her agent as her own original work, albeit inspired by her friendship with Athena.

Her agent is blown away by the novel and institutes a publishing bidding war. The firm that wins it immediately begins preparing it for a major release. Among other things, they want to publish it under a different name, Juniper Song. Granted Juniper is June’s real name and Song is her middle name (her parents were hippies), but the new name lends her a more Asian flavor.

The novel is a sensation when it is released. Suddenly, June is living the life of a successful author. Royalties are flowing. She’s being nominated for several awards. Conferences ask her to speak.

The blowback begins. Several Asian influencers begin to question the appropriateness of a white woman writing a novel like this. Asian book clubs are disappointed once they realize that June is a white woman. June’s friendship with Athena is well known. Suspicion begins to build that June stole the novel from Athena.

June decides to write a follow up hoping that will quell the criticism. Unfortunately, she experiences severe writer’s block. She stumbles across one of Athena’s old paragraphs. From that one paragraph, June is inspired to write an entire novella. She feels vindicated. However, it turns out that Athena had actually used that paragraph in a previous writer’s workshop. Instead of vindicating her, this second novel ends up making her look like even more of a plagiarist.

As the scandal continues to unfold, June begins to fall apart. She begins to see Athena on the streets, even though she saw her die. Even worse, Athena’s Instagram account, heretofore dormant since her death, begins to send her DM’s.

Has Athena come back from the dead? Will June get away with all that she’s done?

Yellowface is classified as literary fiction. The author, R F Kuang, comes from a background of writing genre fiction (ie fantasy). You see this as you read the novel. Often, literary fiction is much more about character than plot, but in Yellowface the plot propels the novel forward. It’s an interesting (maybe even refreshing) departure from the more typical literary fiction fare.

Yellowface brings you into the publishing world. It shows both the struggling side and the successful side of getting a novel published. At least from the viewpoint of this novel, the actual quality of the writing seems to be a less critical factor to the success of a novel than other aspects that the author has zero control over. There’s a feeling that the publishing world just kind of coalesces around some novels and decrees that they will be successful. For a struggling writer that can see that their work is just as good as other, significantly more successful writers, that must be a frustrating, agonizing experience.

Yellowface also does a good job describing the always on social media world of 2023. June finds herself constantly online. She exults at the outstanding reviews while trenchant negative reviews sends her spiraling. When the plagiarization scandal metastasizes, it quickly erupts into a feeding frenzy that no amount of PR crisis control can manage. All June can do is to turn off all of her devices and hide in her apartment.

From the plot summary, it’s easy to understand that cultural appropriation is a major theme of this work. Even if you put aside the plagiarization, it’s a dicey proposition for a white woman to venture into such a sensitive subject as Chinese prison camps. Although June, while rewriting the novel, actually does do the same research that Athena did, is this June’s story to tell? This becomes even trickier because there’s some Asian controversy in Athena’s background as well, which earns her somewhat of a post death cancellation.

And then there’s Kuang herself. She is an Asian woman writing about a white woman that is appropriating from an Asian woman. According to the rules of cultural appropriation, is it kosher for an Asian woman to write about a white female protagonist? As a white cishet male, I think that I can only shrug my shoulders on questions like these.

The final point is again about Kuang. I’m sure that she must be self aware enough to know that the character Athena Liu bears a very strong resemblance to herself. Kuang, an Asian woman, apparently received her first book contract while still attending Georgetown. She is twenty-seven years old, has already published five novels, and is working on her sixth. Her books have been nominated for and/or won several literary prizes and have appeared on year end best of lists. They have been New York Times bestsellers. Her author’s photo shows a young, attractive woman.

I can only imagine that she had fun writing the character of Athena. Being able to create an annoying version of yourself and then die in an embarrassing matter must have been really enjoyable to imagine.

Fulcrums In US History

Title: 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America

Rating: 4 Stars

I read this book because of its title. It’s an interesting question. Are there ten specific days that had such a significant impact that afterwards the US was somehow substantially different? The title is a bit misleading. For most of their dates, not everything happened on the specific day in question. Usually, the day in question was a starting point for events that unfolded over days, if not longer.

Something else that I found interesting was how my local library classified it. They cataloged the book as Young Adult. I do understand why they did. This is not a complex book. It covers ten discrete dates but is only about 260 pages. Due to its somewhat modest size, the events in question are not covered in depth. Therefore, I can understand why a young adult with a historical bent might find the book’s structure digestible.

However, the fact that it is classified as Young Adult will probably make some culture warriors’ heads explode. Such people are only interested in having a vanilla, patriotic version of history taught to children. They want our youth to read about shining cities on the hill, George Washington leading us to victory over the evil British, and Abraham Lincoln freeing all of the slaves.

They get disturbed when morally challenging US history is taught. Somehow, they think that children can’t handle messy historical truths. Well, this book is full of messy historical truths, including everything from Native American massacres to Civil Rights murders to government supported corporate thuggery. I’m here for all of it but I can imagine that some might not be so amused.

Here are their list of days (I’m actually just calling out the events) and their, at times unexpected, impact on the US.

Massacre at Mystic (1637): In this battle, Puritans snuck up on a Pequot village and murdered everyone in it, including women and children. This marked a turning point in European settlers’ treatment of Native Americans. Before there was an uneasy peace and working relationship. Starting from this point, Native Americans were largely seen as hindrances that needed to be removed, if not eradicated.

Shays’ Rebellion (1787): This rebellion was led primarily by farmers and small businessmen that were being driven into bankruptcy and prison by bankers and wealthy merchants. At the same time that they were being hounded by the merchants, the Massachusetts government dramatically raised their taxes. Feeling that these elite were betraying the ideals of the revolution, these debtors organized and rose up in rebellion. The Governor raised a mercenary army, sent it against the rebels, and scattered them. Several of the rebel leaders were executed. If there was ever any question, this demonstrated that the interests of the moneyed elite will always outweigh those of the working class. Although the rebels were defeated, their actions exposed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation and was part of the rationale for establishing the Constitutional Convention that produced our Constitution that is still in use today.

California Gold Rush (1848): The discovery of gold in California sparked an unprecedented population migration across the country to the West Coast. This, more than anything else, truly made the idea of Manifest Destiny real. Since so many people also came from other countries, it created a diverse society that still is a hallmark of California today. Also, California’s demands to be entered as a non-slaveholding state put tremendous stress upon the national government. Stressors like this led to the Civil War.

Antietam (1862): Fought during the Civil War, this is the bloodiest one day battle in US history. It was a tactical Union victory (that could have been turned into a Confederate disaster if not for McClellan’s paralyzing caution). It was a clear enough Union victory for Lincoln to release the Emancipation Proclamation. Even though the Proclamation did not free any slaves (it only applied to slaves in the Confederate states), it turned the war into a battle over slavery. Since neither country wanted to be explicitly linked to slavery, this effectively kept Britain and France from supporting the Confederacy for the war’s duration. Because the size of the federal government grew so substantially during the Civil War, the successful completion of the Civil War left the federal government much larger, much stronger, and much more active.

Homestead Strike (1892): Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick were determined to destroy the power of the steel workers’ union. After the union refused Frick’s insulting contract offer, Frick proceeded to close the plant. Knowing that the company was going to bring in strikebreakers, the workers kept a watch. When they spotted Pinkerton operatives coming in on a barge, a pitched battle commenced. The strikers emerged victorious. Unperturbed, Frick went to the state governor. The governor agreed to support the corporation and sent in the militia. The militia declared martial law and broke the strike. The plant reopened with scab labor. This cemented the relationship between big business and government that still exists today. Ever since, property rights have been deemed more important than individual rights and public good.

McKinley Assassination (1901): The assassination of William McKinley elevated Teddy Roosevelt to the Presidency. McKinley was a man of the nineteenth century while Roosevelt was a man of the twentieth. Full of action, Roosevelt’s progressive agenda instituted dramatic change in the size, scope, and responsibilities of the federal government. I kind of question if McKinley’s assassination actually caused this. After all, there was a good chance that Roosevelt (a young man) was going to be elected in 1904 anyway.

Scopes Trial (1925): Tennessee passed a law outlawing the teaching of evolution. Looking for a chance to raise the profile of Dayton, a local teacher was convinced to admit that he taught evolution in the class. The ensuing court case pitted the secular Clarence Darrow against the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. Although Darrow humiliated Bryan on the stand, an argument can be made that this trial actually dramatically increased the fundamentalist movement in the US.

Einstein’s Letter (1939): Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt describing the possibilities and danger of atomic weapons. This letter was arguably the spark that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of two atomic weapons on Japan. With other countries also developing atomic capabilities, the US was forced to abandon its previous intra-war isolationist tendencies. Also, the Manhattan Project ended the concept of the individual inventor working in their garage. It ushered in huge scientific projects requiring thousands of workers (think the Apollo program). Eisenhower called the ensuing bureaucracy the military-industrial complex.

Elvis on Ed Sullivan (1956): Elvis and the birth of rock and roll created the concept of the youth culture. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the term teenager came into being. With rock and roll having roots in so-called ‘race music’, it helped to bring about cultural desegregation.

Murder of Civil Rights Workers (1964): In the early 1960s, Mississippi was the state that oppressed its Black citizens the most. Knowing that crimes of violence against Black civil rights workers did not generate publicity, Robert Moses, a Black civil rights leader, encouraged white students to join the movement. Two white civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, joined a Black civil rights worker named James Earl Chaney. On the first full day that the three were in the town of Meridian they were arrested. They were held until it was dark and then released. On their way back, after a high speed chase, they were run off the road. All three were murdered and buried under a dam. Sadly, Moses’ theory that violence against white civil rights worker would dramatically raise the profile of the Mississippi civil rights struggle proved exactly correct. Among other things, in the aftermath the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted. As a result, the percentage of Black voters in Mississippi dramatically increased.

What do you think? Do these dates qualify? Can you think of others? I came up with a couple of my own ideas. Maybe if I get some motivation, I’ll write a post describing my dates that unexpectedly changed the US.

Did You Want To Kill My Mom?

Title: The Insurrectionist Next Door

Rating: 4 Stars

I approached this film with trepidation. I didn’t really want to watch a film about the January 6th insurrection. I started watching it for two reasons. One was that it wasn’t a film about the insurrection leaders. This was not a film about the Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes or the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio or even the ultimate leader Donald Trump. I don’t think that I could stomach hearing those blowhards trying to justify their actions. Instead the film focused on the foot soldiers (as in, the insurrectionist next door). The second reason was that the film was directed by Alexandra Pelosi, as in the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, who had to hide from the January 6th mob or she could very well have come to serious harm.

You’d think that Alexandra Pelosi might have come into this film with a chip on her shoulder. After all, her mother nearly came under attack. She clearly shares her mom’s political beliefs. However, the film was an exercise in empathy. She probably talked to around a dozen people or so. Although she challenged them, she did give them leeway to express their beliefs.

Nearly all of these people have been convicted of some crime resulting from the insurrection. Some have already done their jail time. Others, you actually see them heading off to jail. The first surprise is how little remorse is expressed. Nearly all of them are still ardent Trump supporters. One has a Trump themed Christmas tree and has an extensive collection of Trump tchotchkes. Nearly all of them still believe that the election is fraudulent. One person tried to use video evidence from the insurrection to prove that the insurrection was a false flag operation led by Antifa. The fact that over two years later they are still true believers simply amazes me.

The second surprise maybe shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Several of the people, I hate to say it and I know that it sounds elitist of me to say it, aren’t very smart. In this context, when I say smart, I mean analytical. Many of them seemed easily swayed by other people’s actions. To some extent, all of us are, but most of the people interviewed seemed particularly susceptible.

One person in particular left me feeling sad. He admitted that his schooling was mostly special ed. He talked about how the insurrection was like 1776 but had no idea what happened, even in general terms, in that year. He was heavily influenced by his sister. She told him that they were going on a road trip to Washington DC. Although she claimed no knowledge of any insurrectionist groups, it was pretty clear that she was lying. The brother just basically followed along with his sister and is now facing years in prison.

When I was in high school, one of my friends was significantly older (maybe five years older). We all called him The Gapper. The Gapper basically had no life plans other than to drive around in his Camaro and buy beer for his underage friends. Of course, being underaged and in need of beer, we loved him. However, some twenty years later or so, I heard that he was basically still the same guy. He was still driving a muscle car and was still hanging around with people much younger than him. It’s like he was trapped in some time loop.

Well, there was a guy interviewed by Pelosi that reminded me pretty exactly of The Gapper. He was a single man with no discernible interests. He was a retired semi-pro wrestler. He just seemed lost and directionless. As far as I can tell, the primary reason why he decided to join the insurrectionists was to try to impress his prostitute girlfriend that had just dumped him. Again, that episode, if anything, left me feeling sad.

Another man clearly had a rough life. He was a former gang member. He’d done time in prison. He was covered in tattoos, several of which he now regretted. He had apparently gotten his life in order. He was married with three children. Still, it’s apparent that he was missing some of the camaraderie that he received from his gang life. He was a member of The Proud Boys. In fact, he is so devoted to them that he had a large Proud Boys tattoo across his forehead. He tried to tell Pelosi that The Proud Boys is actually an organization of love. It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that he’s a rapper that records songs like Fuck Joe Biden that contained actual threats of violence. Once again, the insurrection seemed to draw men that are lost, directionless, and missing something from their lives.

Possibly the most tragic was a young woman. She was twenty-one years old when her uncle asked her if she wanted to go to the insurrection. Without holding any political beliefs of her own but under the influence of her uncle, she agreed. She was recorded, with her uncle, invading Nancy Pelosi’s office. For that crime, she was going to be sentenced. However, before then, she descended into a cycle of drugs and alcohol. On the first anniversary of the insurrection, while under the influence, she drove on the wrong side of a highway and got in a collision that resulted in the death of others. She is now waiting to see what her sentence for that crime will be.

It was this woman whom Alexandra asked, “Did you want to kill my mom?”. She looked shocked and said of course not. She clearly didn’t even have that thought, even though there were so many others that day that would have answered differently.

Of all of the people that she interviewed, only one person expressed remorse and understood that his actions were wrong. Still in prison with his fellow insurrectionists, expressing those thoughts had left him ostracized.

Other than getting a deeper understanding of some of the yelling, frenzied mob trying to stop a duly elected president from being certified, I’m not sure how I feel about the state of our country. The fact that, after all of this time, there are so many believers in the lie is pretty depressing.