Six Years with the Texas Rangers by James B. Gillett

Larry McMurtry mentioned Gillett's excellent account in Sacagawea's Nickname, so I picked up a copy to at least pretend that I was doing legitimate research for Hunted.

Gillett served in the Texas Rangers, mostly E Company, from 1877 through 1883 and was involved in several famous encounters, from the capture of the outlaw Sam Bass to the resolution of the Salt Lake War in West Texas. Along the way, he chronicles the chases and arrests of a dozen or so badmen and Mexican bandits, the characteristics of two or three different Ranger commanders, the foibles of five or ten companions, and the discharge of a few thousand rounds of ammunition.

Gillett strikes a good balance between high adventure and a dusty chronicle of the day-to-day mundanities of camp life. Written in 1921, some forty years after the events recounted, one suspects that Mr. Gillett must engage in some of the old man's penchant for manufacturing details, else he missed his calling in life, since his recounting of names, locations and minutiae is impressively detailed. While the account occasionally delves into the realm of self-aggrandizing hyperbole, Gillett generally comes across as a reasonably humble fellow, and doesn't irritate. The account would not feel particularly dated at all were it not for the occasional remark which would provoke outrage from the modern NAACP. Political correctness was not in vogue in Texas in the 1920's.

This book is a fun piece of the historical record, with enough high action recounting to likely fall well short of actual scholarship. But it's a fun jaunt through late nineteenth century rangerdom in South Texas. Entertaining if you are interested in Texas history, priceless if you are looking for details of the doings of the Rangers in this particular time period.

-tf

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Leaves had skimmed its way across my radar a half dozen times in about two months, and someone kindly gave me a copy for Christmas. I’m thrilled that they did.

Danielewski’s novel is a sprawling, post-post-modern epic horror story. Sort of. There are several narratives rolled into one, which, in sum, deal with a collection of footage by a documentarian named Will Navidson. Two of our narrators, a dead man named Zampano, and another named Johnny Truant compile a collection of scraps of analysis on the footage, footnotes on the analysis of the footage, and notes and letters about the events described in the footnotes. There’s some further interesting content in the Appendixes which deal with Truant’s history, all of which suggest that one or both or our narrators are not being entirely honest with us about their identities, and may, in fact, be the same person.

There’s a horror story in this, I promise. But it’s one you only get brief, oblique glimpses into.

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention that some of the book’s more interesting features deal with it’s typesetting and page layout. First, the word “house” appears in blue ink every time it is used. Second, the text layout on pages is labyrinthine, frequently appearing sideways, in mirror-writing, and so one. Thirdly, the footnotes, the narrative, the appendixes, and the letters are a maze as well, frequently pointing back in upon themselves, leading to narrative dead ends, referring to exhibits which are not present, filled with sections damaged by fire, ink, blood, and so on.

I don’t want to say much more, because, honestly, I don’t want to give too much away. This book is a treat if you are the type of person who appreciates subtle disquiet as opposed to the Dean Koontz style of horror. If you are, or have ever been a grad student, or felt lost in footnotes; if you’ve ever enjoyed DFW’s linguistic high-jink re footnotes, or if the idea of getting lost in a sinister labyrinth of words, textual analysis, and theory sounds like fun.

Else, you might not care for this one. But I loved it.


Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine is a hard book to approach. Its focus is on two families of reservation Chippewa, and the ways in which they intermingle over the course of a century.

There are some heartbreaking stories here, some funny stories here, some dull stories here, and some confusing stories here. I like Erdrich’s language, which is spry without being particularly masterful. More interesting are the Indian words she peppers the narrative with, always being careful to let the reader know that she, like us, is outside the circle; that these are not her words, but the words of a people she views with love and disappointment.

If I were to reread this book, which would likely be a fruitful enterprise, since there’s too much good stuff here to get on the first time through, I would keep a family tree. See, the chapters ramble through time and relationships in such a way that it’s pretty hard to keep track of how each of these folks is related to one another. Couple this with the marriages and the multiple names several characters have, and a few unreliable narrators, and you’ve got a fun blend which can be a little hard to follow on occasion. I don’t doubt that Erdrich’s spiderweb is carefully designed to remind us how tangled, intertwined, and convoluted family relationships can get, especially on a reservation where few people leave and fewer still escape.

Love Medicine is a well written, beautiful book on the rich, damaged lives of Erdrich’s subjects. With this book, (published in 1984), Tracks, and, I’m told, The Beet Queen, Erdrich establishes herself in the tradition and company of other native writers like Leslie Marmon Silko. Would she be offended to be put in the company of “great American Indian writers” as opposed to the less bigoted category of “great writers?” Maybe. But alas, the bar to enter the great writers club is set far, far higher; it’s a height to which Love Medicine just can’t hope to aspire, despite the quality of its craftsmanship and the poignancy of it’s stories.


The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
I finally couldn’t resist any longer. I really wanted something fluffy for our weekend getaway to Tofino recently, so I grabbed a copy of Dan Brown’s treasure mine and headed for the beach.

This book was a fun, silly romp through tourist destinations of Paris and London. The constant double-crossing got a little tiresome, but Brown managed to make an improbably strung together sequence of pedantic lectures on art history fairly interesting. The Jason Bourne style plot was a silly collection of contrivances, and there’s little to speak of in the way of style, but the book is never dull, and you can read it in about four hours, so I didn’t feel like it was a very big waste of time. And it was certainly pleasant. A ‘page-turner’ as they say.

No more probably needs be said about this novel, since I believe every human on planet earth has purchased three copies at least, and Tom Hanks will be starring in a film version for the illiterates out there.

Oh yes, I should mention that the core mystery (the vilification of Jesus’ girlfriend, Mary Magdaline by the wicked, mean catholic church here is supposedly dealt with in much better capacity by Holy Blood, Holy Grail.) If I actually cared about this topic, or wanted to tilt the windmills of religious dogma further, I might read it, but since I don’t…


Esctasy by Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh wrote Trainspotting, as well as a half dozen other books dealing with Scottish lowlifes. Esctasy caught my eye at Half Price Books in Austin about five years ago, back when E was in. I guess maybe it’s still in with some, but the rave scene Welsh describes in this work is firmly anchored in the year 2000 or so.

This novel is really a collection of three novellas, connected through their geographic location (all in Edinburgh, I believe), and the presence of MDMA in the lives of their main characters.

The first tale is the worst, in my opinion; really more of a far-fetched, rambling fantasy in which a young nurse befriends an aging, obese author of romance novels. The two conspire to humiliate and dump the romance author’s husband, an insincere pervert who has treated the poor romance novelist badly. This story is filled with sexual deviance (not a term I apply lightly), and runs the gambit from zoophilla, to fisting, to some really unpleasant necrophilia. If the previous sentence makes you squirm even a little, this book is definitely NOT for you. The smut serves only to shock, the story fails to retain focus on its characters, and the transformation of the romance novelist, presumably through the discovery of a newfound self-confidence and joy de vivre brought on by taking ecstasy all happens off screen. This story is a failure, in my opinion.

The second tale deals with a hardcase and his amputee girlfriend, who go to great lengths to exact revenge on the marketing manager at a wicked pharmaceutical company which sold the product responsible for her deformity. Right.

The third story is actually pretty good. It’s a classic love story, with a dash of Kate Chopin, filtered through the eyes of a bright young woman who is fed up with her boring husband, and the Trainspotting type good-hearted down and out drug addict with whom she discovers true love (or at least sexual release.) It is in this third story, where Welsh keeps a relentless focus on the drugged out residents of Scotland’s garrets, that he succeeds most admirably. His descriptions of the sorts of mental and emotional alterations one undergoes when taking various drugs (Esctasy, general methamphetamines, cocaine, LSD, and marijuana) all seem to be right on. These will only be of interest to those who are steeped in the drug culture, but then, I can’t imagine anyone else would have even bought this novel. Where Welsh really shines though is in his unflinching ear for, and faithful reproduction of Scottish slang and dialect. Welsh is likely the premiere (only) person to have made so noteable an entry on the speech patters of this particular time subgroup in the linguistic annals. It’s a feat of dialog and voice which is every bit as compelling as Richard Wright or Elmore Leonard. Listen:

“Ah was sick with a dentist-drill headache and my lip was bust and swollen and ah had like a nasty smudged bit of purple black mascara under my right eye. This reminded me why ah took Class As instead of alcohol. Ah mind ay Nukes and me paggering. Fuck knows whether it was wi each other or some other fucker. Given the slightness of my wounds it was probably some other fucker cause Nukes is a hard cunt and would have done me a lot more damage.”

And that’s the narrative. The dialog is even less decipherable in many cases:

“-it’s no that, Lloyd, Vaugh mumps, -Aw ah’m tryin tae say is that you’re no a member here. Yir a guest. Yir the responsibility aye what cunts bring ye. That’s aw ah’m tryin tae say.”

The King’s English this ain’t. But it’s delightful to hear in your mind, or to try to wrap your tongue around when no one is listening.


Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Needed a little light reading, so…
This book is one of the Microsoft Press series of books dedicated to improving the professionalism of software development by helping educate leaders in the space on how to achieve higher quality more predictably. The first one of these I read was Debugging the Development Process, many, many years ago. I think that the level of consistency and quality put out by this press is fairly high. While I've been managing software development teams and projects for almost ten years now (gulp!), my formal methodology talking points were beyond rusty, so I decided to bone up on 'em a little.

This book is boring; mind numbingly boring unless you happen to be into ways to organize dev teams. Since I am, at least professionally, I found it pretty interesting. There are nine chapters and a few appendices, each dealing with a different element of Scrum development. For those who don't already know, Scrum is a subcategory of agile development, whose tenants involve bottom up scheduling, short development sprints, and empowering teams to make decisions on the fly.
I'm not gonna write much more about this one, except to point out that I did find it quite helpful in helping me get a lot of jargon straight. These are things you know if you work in the biz, but the different terms for them which are in vogue change every few months and differ widely at each organization, so it's always good when a book like this can help us settle on a common vocabulary.


Books of Blood Volume 1 by Clive Barker

After the joys of Scrum, and a grueling 8 hour discussion on game development practices last week in Austin, I was ready for some good ole fashion pulp horror. Barker's Books of Blood is (I believe) the collection of short stories which first brought him some attention, back in 1983. Books of Blood is a short collection, only about five stories here. But three of them are excellent horror, which I much enjoyed. (Pig Blood Blues, The Yattering and Jack, and The Midnight Meat Train.) One was a bit dated (collectivism as an ideology hardly needs to be railed against anymore), and one was pretty unoriginal, (Sex, Death & Starshine,) but overall, this was a fine and nasty little piece of work. Makes me wanna go read some more Barker, which I think I'll go ahead and add to the stack. Anyone got recommendations for his best book? I've read the Great and Secret Show, and Everville. Anything else stand out from his body of work?


The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Martel was given a Booker Prize for his charming little tale of a boy and a Tiger lost at sea. Anyone who reads this blog knows what a whore I am for Booker Prize winners, so you can imagine my excitement over this one. I waited for months, the way you’d save the tastiest bite of a meal until the end. And I don’t want to admit to being disappointed, but I was.

Martel’s novel is cute. It’s got a sufficiently parable (parabolic? ;) quality that one is inclined to give more credence to it than I suspect it really deserves.

Piscine Molitor Patel is a young Indian boy from the small backwater of Pondicherry. His father is a zookeeper. The most interesting thing about Pi is that he is simultaneously a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu. The novel’s most amusing moment details a meeting between his minister, his imam, and his umm… hindu spiritual leader (the term escapes me.) The tale starts out strong and beautiful, with a multi-layered framework story, the kind superlative writing one expects from the winner of so prestigious an award, and interesting characters.

Then all the interesting characters and the framework story all but disappear, and a series of (Lemony Snicket’s?) improbable events unfold. Then the novel is over, the framework story lost at sea, like most of the interesting characters, and any sense of closure or message. At 350 pages, the book is far, far too short to deliver on any of the interesting questions it poses. (What about this fascinating religious quandary?) But I do know a lot about how to tame a tiger, gut a sea turtle, and generally survive at sea now.

I enjoyed this book. A particularly nice passage early on about the degenerate behaviors of zoo animals tickled me (though it may have come across as too cutesy for some.) The writing was excellent, definitely A+ caliber work, but the structure of the novel, and those few occasions where the language stops soaring long enough to splash into the tedium of adventure tale like one of the flying fish on the cover of the paperback version, all ended up feeling like a bit of a disappointment from a Booker Prize winner.

Finally, I take a bit of issue with the novel’s conclusion. We are led to believe that Pi, our trusty narrator, is not entirely reliable. Fair enough, unreliable narrators are nearly a trope of the new literary masterpiece these days, but the clumsy reveal on the matter feels like the trick of an amateur illusionist.

Ultimately, I look very forward to Martel’s next work for this reason. He has in him the stuff to become among our best. But as delightful a treat as this work is, The Life of Pi lacks the finesse, the wordplay, and the delicacy of structure that would turn its cheap conjuring trick into a truly magical creation.

-tf

Shall I apologize for taking so long to post again? What would be the point? I'm the only one that ever looks at the site, except for the occasional student looking to plagarize thoughts on some book or another, I suppose. Did Google send you here? Drop me a line if you end up using anything I said here in your book report. That's about the quality of analysis and writing you'll be getting here, so hopefully it'll fit right in.

While I'm erratic on posting, I promise that I'm not erratic on consuming the books, nor have I forgotten any. Here are the ones which are getting posted tonight, on this cool evening in early May in Burnaby, BC:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Yeah, yeah, I know...)
Esctasy by Irvine Welsh
Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Books of Blood Volume 1 by Clive Barker
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I've got another two or three that I've finished, or almost finished, just haven't had time to jot down any thoughts on yet.

I'm off for the Great State of Texas next week, where I'll be celebrating the brilliance of my beloved Professor, as well as her inevitable aging, and the existance of my mother, and mothers everywhere, I suppose. Since plane rides are good for this sorta thing, expect more in the week or two after I return!

-tf

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I just finished Never Let Me Go in the car on the way back from lunch. The grey Burnaby day outside was blustery, blowing trash around just like in the dreary closing scene of the novel, supposedly somewhere in the fields outside of Norfolk.I was moved by this book, never quite to real tears, though the sentiment was there; but part of that might just have been my hangover.

Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005, and I'd heard a few good things about it, so last weekend while I was stranded at the Brentwood mall I picked up a copy. The novel is an elegaic look at the lives of three students of a special boarding school in England. It focuses on their adolescence and young adulthood. There's a subtle love triangle, and a lot of attention to the nuances of gestures, intonation, and other minute details of conversations. By honing in on this emotional minutae, Ishiguro keeps the real emotional punch of the novel always at a discreet arm's length. Because these children are not ordinary. They are clones, though the word is never specifically used, created to act as organ donors later in life. Eventually, they will each 'donate' enough organs that they 'complete' having sacrificed themselves to better the lives of a world that cloisters them away so it can pretend they don't exist.

The novel seldom directly spells out all of the above, choosing instead to perform a patient, carefully controlled reveal on the lives of Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy, the novel's protagonist. In practice this plays out like a cross between The Remains of the Day and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Ishiguro's novel is almost Victorian in it's sublimation of emotion and big picture details. It frequently reads like a drama of manners. It's no accident, in fact, that Kathy's school project is on "Victorian literature" - Ishiguro is likely the master of the modern form of this genre.

I thought several times about Lynn while reading this book, never quite sure why. It wasn’t until I finally asked her about it that she reminded me she'd read and posted a review of it on her fine site: On the Nightstand here http://onthenightstand.blogspot.com/ - in rereading her comments on the book, I find that I didn't necessarily agree with her rather cold assesment: "But it didn't grab me the way I thought it would. I wanted someone in this book to get angry at the situation, or at the hand that life had dealt them, and no one did. Which kinda implies that if you can't get excited about it, why should I?" I guess I was moved by the story, and impressed by it's use of subtlety and lack of emotional outburst. In some ways, it was these character's lack of awareness of the tragedy of their situation that made it all the sadder.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that behind the stage prop of clones and organ harvesting, this was basically a tale of love deferred. It could apply to any of us. Though the end of our lives aren't scheduled for termination in accordance with the needs of a public hungry for our innards, we are all on the same clock that Ruth, Tommy and Kathy are. Your life will tick away, you will watch the people you care about get sick and die before you can ever say to them everything you wanted to say, and eventually, you too will die either alone or leaving someone else alone. Don't ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you.

-tf

Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford's book isn't very good.

I try to balance out my appetites for fiction with the occasional how-to book on something dealing with my profession. Software design and Project Management books tend to be okay. Game Design books tend to suck. This one is an example of the latter camp.

Weighing in at around 500 pages and published by the king of this type of book, New Riders Press, this is another book designed to be sold to wannabe game designers, and people like myself who are always wondering if the old timers really have some secret knowledge the rest of us don’t. Crawford is a self-proclaimed Old Fart, having gotten his start in the late seventies, then spending time at Atari thereafter. He claims to have started the modern GDC (though I've heard the same claim from a few other old timers.) He has not shipped a product in almost fifteen years, and has very few commercial successes. This may not discount his ideas on Game Design, but as the industry has changed, it's no longer clear that the same rules or pattern apply; at least if they do, it's not in so direct a fashion. To be more explicit, just because Eastern Front 1941, published in 1981 may have been a "breakthrough", does not mean that there are many lessons to be learned from it now, twenty-five years later.

Crawford comes across as an arrogant grand-dame of computer gaming, tossing around broad generalities and flavoring them with inaccuricies. For example, "Wizardry, a straight copy of Moria was… since it's impossible to play Moria you'll now have to play Wizardry." Now, I realize this is a fine point of geekish nitpicking, but Crawford is just plain wrong on several points here. First, Wizardry is not a copy of Moria, the two are quite different. Second, Wizardry was quite noteable for other reasons, and thirdly, it's quite possible to play Moria now. I have a copy on my laptop.

There are plenty of these types of ridiculous generalities thrown about in the book: "There's no mystery why social reasoning is so weak in computer games: most game designers are socially incompetent geeks." Hmmm… Well, aside from playing to a silly stereotype, Crawford is sidestepping the more interesting problem here (how to I take something that is at heart an isolating experience due to the nature of the hardware and turn it into a social experience?), and ignoring mountains of great work done in this area by everyone from academic MUD designers to the superb work being done by the thousands of people now building MMORPGs.

Finally, the mechanics of writing are just plain weak here. The style is lecturing and cantankerous, sentences periodically lack a subject, and so on. The basic writer's toolkit that one expects people to bring to the table is missing here, or was ignored in favor of pithy "truths" and weak analysis. (For example, the extended mediation on "drugs" and video games, concluding with the advice to not own stock in a video game company once people realize how similarly to "drugs" they affect brain activity. WTF?) Also irritating is the "Random Sour Observations" chapter, just because Crawford uses it as another chance for self-aggrandizing put-downs of the work of various projects and designs. While he may be correct to skewer some of these old, dead mistakes, an analysis of some of the more interesting experimental successes of the recent past might have been more useful.

Anyway, I'm sorry that I spent time on this book, and I hope that would be game designers out there pass on this one in favor of something more useful.

-tf

Count Zero by William Gibson

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in Delhi… begins CZ. From there the tale is off and it’s just the sort of dark dystopian futurism that I admire in William Gibson. No, it doesn’t have the linguistic sizzle of Neuromancer, and by the time it was published, only a few years later, there were already a huge crowd of fast-follower cyberpunk writers.

I’ve read this one before, but it seemed to fit perfectly in the world of dark corporate zaibatsu and elite machine-gun samaurai that I’m thinking about these days. So I read it again.

Still cool. If this kind of action sci-fi is your thing, you’ll probably enjoy this. But, if weird Haitian Voodoo AI turns you off you should probably stay away.

-tf

Ah-ha! Catching up!

It occurs to me that since this blog is really only updated when there's nothing else going on that it's sort of a chronicle of the lulls in my life. But, since it's focus is solely on my one sided little ramblings on the books I read, I guess that's okay.

It's a rainy spring night in Burnaby. I'm in the basement thinking about the government with Dylan and Mouse.


Golden Days by Carolyn See

Golden Days was recommended (and loaned) to me by someone whose taste in most things I admire quite a bit. Typically, her appreciation for books is no exception. Throughout my life there’s no doubt that this person has given me more influential books than has almost anyone else. So I approached Golden Days with a lot of excitement.

A hundred pages in, a little puzzled, I was still excited, hoping that the goodness would start anytime soon. But, alas, no. This book didn’t deliver what I expected it to ever, and, in fact, never delivered anything I even thought was very good.

Golden Days is the story of a young to middle-aged mother of two living in the California Hills. In the tumultuous months before nuclear annihilation she goes about her life, getting involved in romances, self-help cults, investment groups, and all the other hallmarks of late seventies era Californian upper-class WASP entertainment.

Then again. I wasn’t ever there. So I might have it all wrong. I give her credit for being true to time and place. I believe this is what it was like there and then. But for whatever reason, it didn’t work for me as sci-fi and didn’t work for me as social drama. The feminism [am I still allowed to use the word?] seems archaic in our post post post everything world. (For example, the nuclear missiles as male dominated cock fantasty thing has already been beaten to death by 2006. Already even a rock & roll cliché by 1985.)

And maybe that’s my biggest complaint. It’s an apocalypse where everything pretty much just continues as normal. I think. Hints of distant war, then a vague description of it’s aftermath through the same consumerist, middle-aged sunglasses. I understand Updike does the same thing in Towards the End of Time? Anyone?

A few months ago I might have had some details more clearly. And again, maybe it’s just a chronicle of a city I’ve never much liked in a time period too flaky to be retro, with no real payoff at the end.

A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin

This one should be easy. If you're already hooked on Martin's depraved and long winded fantasy epic then you've already bought and read this book, despite only being able to purchase it in hardback for a staggering $35 Canadian. If you aren't already into the adventures of this troubled kingdom, then you're probably not interested in this one.

A Feast for Crows is half of a book according to Martin's website. Apparently, there's a point at which it's simply too unprofitable to publish too big a tome. Cost of goods and services gets out of control, and even pulp fantasy readers won't tackle a book that's bigger than Tolkien's (non)trilogy by itself.

Given this, that the story is only half tols by the time you reach the end, I suppose A Feast for Crows isn't too terribly unsatisfying. Does it feature the characters you've come to love (and hate) in the past? Yes, but only peripherally. Is it filled with the cool mystic action sequences that tantalized you in his previous three books? No, not really. Is it filled with despicable people, sadistic misogyny, and lots of dull court intrigue? Yep.

So did I like this book? No. Not really. I thought it was weak; trading on the same currency Martin had already established with readers, without any of the freshness of his previous works. Will I buy the next one when it comes out? Yes. Of course. I'm a sucker like that. Hell, at least I finally threw in the towel on Robert Jordan's dairy farm.

Ooh. I'm embarassed that this one will be at the top of the index in the right frame. Oh well. Guess I'll have to find something better that starts with A. Perhaps there's Aardvark Adventure out there somewhere...


-tf

Sacagawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry

Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West is the most recent book of essays published by McMurtry, released in 2001 by the New York Review of books. In it, LMM reminds the reader that he is absolutely still keen in his wit, still thirsty to delve, discuss and debate, and still focused on the high plains, swollen rivers, and the deep canyons of the American West.

Indeed, much of the spirit of Sacagawea's Nickname is derived from a sort of metatextual discussion in which McMurtry engages with the reader to determine where the real American West is. He concludes as have scholars before him, that the real West is that of the imagination, existing somewhere between the dusty frontier towns of Oklahoma, the problem of erosion, and the mythic high-adventure West of John Wayne, Tombstone, and Louis L'amour.

McMurtry starts this short and lively discussion by examining a recent version of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, which he finds to be a pandering, lacking attempt at broad coverage of the west. In addition to an entry for "chili" about which McMurtry quips: "In this increasingly secular age, what to put in chili-- or what to exclude-- provokes the nearest thing to religious argument to be heard in the modern West, while the great chili cookout held annually in Terlingua, Texas, is a loose equivalent of the Council of Nicea, in which many heresies are defined and many schismatics cast out." McMurtry believes that good writers and historians of the American West are given short shrift in the Encyclopedia. This belief gives the book its central purpose, as LMM sets out to discuss, berate, and honor a staggering number of historians who have treated his native land as their subjects.

Across these twelve essays, largely unrelated, save for their shared concern with the theme described above, LMM displays a breadth and depth of knowledge on the topic that would do any emeritus professor proud. He is, as already described in my coverage of Roads, a fearsome collector of anecdotes, names, places, and book titles. At least in these works, LMM comes across as the kind of self-taught scholar that should give us all cause to despair. How on earth can we work for a living, lead lives filled with romance, friends, children, and all the rest, and still master such a body of knowledge as he has demonstrated? I do not know the way, but will keep trying to get there.

Despite tipping the scales at only one hundred and seventy two pages, Sacagawea's Nickname is loaded with information, sly commentary, and LMM's usual dry humor for both comedy of situations and for wordplay.

I'd love to write more, but Mouse the Impatient is threatening to unplug me, and in any case, I've got a few thousand more books to read before I'll be a worthy judge of a book like this. Back to the stacks.

-tf

In the interest of full disclosure:

Yes, Mike & I did make a replica of the sign in Lonesome Dove which was so convincing a forgery that Vic was worried we'd stolen it from the museum at SWT.

Yes, I do know what Uva Uvam Vivendo Varia Fit means. I think about it often.

-tf

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

In my war-torn paperback copy of Lonesome Dove there is a purple flower crushed flat. The flower is a Bauhinia, a species of orchid, which is the official flower of Hong Kong. It was on the flag there until the British gave the place up officially in, I wanna say, 1999. I brought the flower back with me crushed in the book and didn’t find it again until the 2005 Thanksgiving holidays when I reread this one. I remember the young woman I was travelling with there complaining to me one twilight as I sat outside reading. She had just taken a picture and was laughing at me. She said, “Tim this whole amazing city is just waking up for the night, and you’re missing all of it cause you’re too busy reading about Texas.” I put the book away that night and explored the streets of that strange place with a friend I’ll always remember kindly.

I don’t know where she is now, but I’ve got my copy of Larry McMurtry’s epic right here, along with my smuggled crushed orchid bookmarker.

To say that the made for television adaptation of this book is my father’s favorite film would be an understatement. He loves the movie, as do my brother and I. It is, amazingly, almost as good as the book.

And that’s really saying something, because I love this novel. Gus, Coll, Laurie-darling, Dish Boggett, and all the rest are friends who, like that young woman of a decade ago, I’ll never forget.

LMM tells the story of a cattle drive from the Texas-Mexico border, near present day Piedras Negras, to Montana, north of the Milk River. This is an epic in every sense of the word. It weighs in at a little over 900 pages, contains approximately sixty characters, and spans the length of the American West, both geographical and fictional.

McMurtry is not a stylist. Let’s get that out of the way here, and it won’t need to concern us further.

What he is good at is creating memorable characters, who’ve become almost archtypes inside his own work at this point. Are Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Coll not the same young men we met in Leaving Cheyenne so long ago? Doesn’t Newt resemble in some way that young man we came to love in Horseman, Pass By? No matter. If McMurtry tends to repeat himself, that’s fine. The lonesome winds of Archer City must weigh on a man, as we learn in The Last Picture Show.

I’m proud that McMurtry is from Texas. I’m proud that Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer Prize. I’m proud of all the scholarship he’s accomplished in his four books of essays, even if they all feel a little too much like he’s trying to make up for the Ivory Tower education he never completed. It’s a feeling I can certainly understand. I’m proud that he won a—what’s the award—Oscar—for his work on Brokeback Mountain, though I’ve not seen the film.

I read last summer that he’s giving up the bookstore in West Texas and moving to Florence, just the way Duane does when it’s time to die at the end of the Thalia trilogy. I’m sad that he’s giving up on Texas, if he is. I’m sad that it’s time for him to go, if it is. Texas needs people like McMurty to counter the terrible reputation we have for illiteracy in the rest of the world.

Solomon David said, “The old masters are dying. Or giving up, which will amount to the same thing. It’s left to us to carry on their work, however ill-suited to the task we may feel.”

To which Robert Cogburn responded, “That’s a pretty big burden to place on yourself. How do you know you won’t fail?”

Solomon replied, “Oh, I’m certain to fail ultimately. But I hope to succeed, in those things I try at, for a little while at least. I believe that may be the best any of us can hope for.”

I offer these lines only as poor tribute in this review to a work I admire, from a man I admire. When Larry McMurtry is dead and gone to Florence it’ll be up to those Texas writers and would-be writers who remain to carry on his legacy as best we are able with those poor gifts we have.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Beautiful if dull epic tale of immigrant pioneer life in Nebraska around the 1870s. Upon this re-reading of Cather’s book I was struck by how much less touching the story was for me this time. I suspect that a lot of this has to do with the romantic elements in my personality being so much more subdued than they once were. Specifically, I remember the narrator’s return to meet Antonia as a matron to be a heartbreaking commentary on the passage of time and it’s effect on unrequieted romance. I believe I’d mentally filed it alongside Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. Cather’s story does not really concern itself with any interaction between Antonia and the narrator which is not platonic. Still quite moving though is the chapter dealing with the death of Antonia’s father and his burial at the crossroads. Also, great embedded story about the marriage in Russia gone horribly awry, in which the wolves eat everyone.

Good book, useful if you are looking for some good details on the period, or want to muse on the fate of immigrant customs and beliefs in the face of progress and Americanization. Also, if you are looking for an ode to the strength of will and character of those hearty women who helped bring domesticity to the American West, this is the book for you.

I’d like to spend a little time reading a few of Cather’s other novels. I know that Sherry really enjoyed Death Comes for the Archbishop. But for now, other stories and other voices are of greater interest.

Read this one back before '05 turned into '06. Still a few more to get through-- each of which deserves more time than I'm likely to put in.

Since when do you have to feel guilty about neglecting a hobby for Christsakes?

-tf

One step forward, two back, as the saying goes...

My Antonia by Willa Cather
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Sakajawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry
A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin
Golden Days by Carolyn See
Count Zero by William Gibson

Have a little discipline, will ya?

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Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

I first attempted this book while attending the University of Texas as an undergraduate. At the time, its style and horrific violence turned me off sufficiently that I abandoned it and did not expect to ever return. But as McCarthy is considered one of the only stylists working in the realm of Western fiction at present, and as his Borderlands trilogy has garnered such respect, I decided I’d give it another try. I’m certainly glad that I did. Blood Meridian is an incredible work of fiction. It’s the most graphically blood-soaked novel I’ve ever read, and it manages to sustain a uniquely neo-biblical style and hellish intensity that puts most writers I’ve ever read to shame.

Blood Meridian is the story of a young man named simply the Kid, who falls in with Captain Glanton, a renegade officer of the US Army who is conducting his own private depredations against Mexico in the wake of the war. Glanton, his dragoons, The Judge, and the Kid go on a murderous spree through the badlands of Mexico, raping, butchering and slaughtering everyone in their path. Sound unpleasant? It is.

But it’s not the graphic violence of the acts which are portrayed that give the novel it’s power. There are instead two notable stylistic achievements in Blood Meridian which make it such an incredible work.

The first of these is McCarthy’s satanic figure: The Judge. Giant, bald, semi-omnipotent and seemingly immortal, the Judge is a figure who is oft compared to Milton’s Satan, or Conrad’s Kurtz. He is a powerful and depraved child molester whose goal is to wipe knowledge from the face of the earth. In several of the novel’s most interesting passages, the Judge finds artifacts of lost civilizations, only to record them in his private journal, then destroy them so that no man may ever understand them. He views “the freedom of birds as an insult,” he regularly kills puppies and children, at one point he discharges a pistol into the maw of a volcano, and often appears immune to fire. Judge Holden is among the most fascinating and demonic characters I’ve ever encountered in fiction.

The second, and more important of McCarthy’s accomplishments is a sustained tone which reads like an unfolding Hieronymus Bosch painting. Every page is drenched with skeletal remains, blood, the dead and dying. All landscapes are beyond hellish, and McCarthy’s vocabulary is stunningly suited to this task. By way of example:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredible elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.”

Or this:

“On the day that followed they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no track upon it. The riders wore masks of boneblack smeared about their eyes and some had blackened the eyes of their horses. The sun reflected off the pan burned the underside of their faces and shadow of horse and rider alike were painted upon the fine white powder in purest indigo. Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augured the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?”

Wow. Yes, the entire book is written in this fashion. Yes, this does make it a bit challenging to read. But it also makes for an incredibly powerful tale, and gives me newfound respect for its author. A man who can write prose such as this deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the very best of writers: Nabokov, Rushdie, and other wordsmiths of their ilk.

Fantastic, powerful, sickening, impressive piece of work, Mr. McCarthy. Thanks.

More than two months without an update. Terrible, Lazy Tim...

Since I last blogged, I've read a few books and written quite a few chapters of the western. In an effort to not lose the books I've read, on which I promise to opine before the end of the year:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Sakajawea's Nickname by Larry McMurtry
A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin

I hope to take care of these this week... All but the last one are really good...

-tf

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

As predicted, I was unable to just cherry pick this book for a few scenes I was interested in. Once started, it was impossible to put down. So I read Steinbeck’s fine novel in the few days before our trip to Austin, finishing it on the plane ride home, while done up on diazepam, exhaustion and worry.

This is a tremendous book. It’s a sprawling epic tale of two families and the nation from the American Civil War to World War I. It’s also a study of the fable of Cain and Abel, which poses a number of insightful queries on the topic. Since Abel was killed, and we are all in fact offspring of Cain, what does that say about evil inherent in us? Why would God cast one son aside? Can man triumph over the evil in his own nature, etc. The Hebrew word “Timshel” is the answer, but like “42” it probably won’t do you much good without a much better understanding of the question.

The characters in this novel are old friends to me, as this is the third time I’ve read the book in the last fifteen years. Lee the cook-philosopher, Samuel, the beloved pater familias of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, mercurial Tom and his sister Lizze, Abra, Olive, Charles, Cathy, and all the rest are an unforgettable cast, whom I miss very much be the novel’s conclusion. It’s the kind of book which saddens you to finish, because you lose friends the minute you close it. This sounds cheesy, juvenile, and stupid, and if you’ve never finished the last page of Tolkien’s epic only to open again to the first page, then you probably have no idea what I mean.

Steinbeck’s language and style are haphazard, elegiac, filled with soaring truths and a love of landscape. On his style much has already been written elsewhere, with critics falling out of the proverbial woodwork to issue comment. He is not the brilliant and flashy stylist who garners so much acclaim in literary circles. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that his language, while still superb, is not what makes him a great American writer. It’s his sense for characters, motivations, and the poignant vignettes the laces the novel with. If you’ve ever read The Chrysanthemums, Tortilla Flat, or any of the shorts from The Long Valley, then you know what I mean.

The book did have some weaknesses that I’d never noticed before. The main one I take issue with is the character of Cathy, and the generally weakly written women in the book. With the exception of a few passages which describe his mother, Olive, one that deals with Lizzie, and one dealing with his Aunt, Steinbeck falls fairly short with women characters. I believe this is generally regarded as one of his shortcomings, and I’m sure he was chewed up and spit out by the seventies feminist lit circle for having his Eve (Cathy) a monstrous incarnation of original sin. He doesn’t bother to question this particular parable in the slightest, but then, his biblical analysis is restricted to only seventeen stanzas, so maybe that’s okay.

In re-reading the above, it bugs me how poorly written it is. But it’s been a few weeks since I finished the book, and this is scribbled for me alone. So, it’ll have to do.

In the time since I started this book I have: Finished SSX On Tour, visited home, returned, read much, and written much. Today is a grey and drizzly Saturday in Burnaby.

-tf

Interesting article which gnaws at Friedman's newest book: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154

-tf

It has been my practice over the last several years to restrict myself from posting any comments on books I do not finish. I implimented this rule as a way of forcing myself to break a habit that I dislike, of starting many books but finishing few. As anyone who has ever lived with or slept with me knows, I've got a bit of ADD when it comes to focus. As a rule there are at least two or three books by my bedside table, and often I'll read a few pages of each before I go to bed.

Then there are those that I WANT to read, but just can't make myself finish. For the record, here's a list of books I'm either in the middle of, or have abandoned somewhere along the trail this week:

The Shadow Knows by Diane Johnson - (too neurotic, too boring, too self-absorbed)
Lust by Elfriede Jelinek - (too hateful in it's depection of sexuality)
Discipline & Punish by Michael Foucault - (I lack the background in psycho-analytic theory I fear, though I love the premise of this one)
Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan - (just sucks too bad to waste more time on)
Everything's Eventual by Stephen King -(already read it once, but wanted to re-read his tale of a haunted hotel room, as an interesting look at the single setting short story)
Collapse by Jared Diamond - (wonderful, just dense and requires focus. Can't read it while tipsy or stoned, or with music on.)
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pyncheon (brillant but too insane and too long to take in one sitting, or even a hundred)

Then beyond these, which are all on the nightstand, there are the books I look at for research. I tend to keep these by my computer, where I write or work. Right now, since I'm working on a western, I've pulled out and re-skimmed some of the better fiction that I think falls into the category. I've read all of these before, but am interested in looking at how these diverse authors use language, density, structure, etc.

The ones I've looked at and read at least in part this week are:

The Ox-Bow Incident by Walten Van Tilburn Clark - (a classic, but nothing stylistically very interesting here)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - (fascinating, beautiful, horrific, too overly stylized to ever be widely read. Try for literature, miss out on the mainstream.)
The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan - (really fun, mass-market historical fiction.)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck - (so beautifully written it makes me want to cry. I love this book and am working hard to resist it's siren song... I want to re-read it all again, but am trying to prohibit myself from doing so until I finish my current project, since I'm afraid it will "kill my self-confidence after posioning me with words.")
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - (In re-reading parts this week I am struck by LMMs ability to render epic through volume and character those stories which would otherwise fall into the stylistic realm of pure pulp.)
My Antonia by Willa Cather - (Loved this when I first read it, still think it's beautiful. It differs greatly from the rest of these mentioned for several reasons. First, though it is a western, it concerns itself with only small-group social themes, second, it it told in first person, thirdly, it is such a tragic bildungsroman that on this list only East of Eden can compete with it for epic beauty.)
Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver by J. Frank Dobie - (I wanted to go back and see how the original Texas folklorist wrote. Turns out it's more in the nature of campfire yarn spinning than in the vein of modern fiction. No wonder I loved this book as a kid in Colorado.)

All of these books when taken as a blend, a few pages from here and from there comprise a pretty delightful salad of "western fiction" -- does anyone but me care about the above? No, I don't think so. It would have been a fun undergraduate course-load in western fiction though.

This is how I spent my time this warm September in Burnaby, British Columbia.

-tf

The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell

Y-Man, now departed for the rugged frontier of Tuscon loaned me his copy of this book after an interesting conversation we had about the nature of 'influencers' in society. What C. Wright Mills did for our concept of elite players in government, Y-Man maintained that Gladwell did for our understanding of social connectors.

Turns out that Gladwell's book is a more general case look at the was social movement follow the same patterns as epidemics. He looks at teen smoking, suicide in Micronesia, the spread of syphillis, the fashion predominance of Hush-puppies, and a few dozen other social trends and concludes that each of these follows a pattern which is nothing new to the CDC. Interestingly, he goes a step further and analyzes the types of people who are involved in the spread of social epidemics (mavens, connectors, etc.) and determines that certain 'key influencers' and salesmen "connector" types weild disproportionate amounts of influce over the shape of society.

The book is fascinating, actually, and certainly thought provoking. The statistical analysis of these trends, at the point at which each goes from being something that is isolated to being a bona-fide social epidemic gives the book it's title. The Tipping Point is that moment when someing, anything really, goes mainstream.

Gladwell's observations are acute, if somewhat simplistic. The studies he quotes are interesting. The writing is sloppy. Stylistically, obviously there's nothing here; it isn't that kind of book. But that's not what bothered me. My issue with the book is how ill-documented most of his research was and how quickly he jumped over the logical 'proof' required to draw a conclusion. Gladwell will off-handedly mention a study, breeze through it's conclusions, draw his own, assume they are fact, then build his argument atop this house of cards. It's sloppy writing, and it's certainly sloppy social science.

Compared to, for example, Jared Diamond's fantastically argued, agonizingly researched 'Collapse' which I'm reading concurrently, Gladwell comes across as a bright sociology undergrad, with some cool ideas and a penchant for pointing out neat factoids that support his basic thesis.

This isn't science, and it isn't research. It's not academic writing at all, but instead one of those interesting over-the-counter-at-the-airport pieces of non-fiction which coins a phrase and lets people with a shaky grasp of social trends throw around some smart sounding ideas about how these trends work.

Interesting but deeply flawed.

-tf

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price by J.K. Rowling

I really enjoy J.K. Rowlin's saga of good natured wizards and comicly sinister villians. After reading the first four over a week while soaking up beach-sun in Guantacaste, I was hooked. So of course when the Half-Blood Prince was annouced, the Professor preordered me a copy right away. Now, I'm a fan, but not the kind of person who was going to wait in line at midnight holding a broom or anything. So when Amazon fucked up and didn't deliver the book until a full week after it was availible in our local grocery store, I wasn't really all that distraught, especially 'cause I was still hip deep in Collapse. I'm still hip deep in Collapse, the newest Harry Potter book wasn't more than a 2 day blip on the radar.

Enough has been said about this book everywhere else, so just a few comments:
Thoughts on the Half Blood Prince
Fun. If you liked the others, you'll probably like this one, though not as much.
Rushed. She could have made this book 200 pages longer and tied up a number of loose ends.
Shoddy construction. She eschews the structure of the previous books; not self-contained.

I'm making this one short, because I want to dedicate a little more time to Margret Atwood's beautiful book The Blind Assassin, and to Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point, both of which I thought were fascinating, albiet in very different ways.

Also, as most who know me know, we're crunching to final the game right now, which means I've been putting in about 70-80 hours per week here at the pixel factory for the last month. The game, for those who care, is actually shaping up to be vastly better than I'd hoped. I've learned a few things, and had a small amount of fun working on it. It's a project I can be proud of, but one I won't be sad to see in the rearview mirror. I'm very much looking forward to getting a little time to actually explore this cool city we've moved to, and getting a little more time to read. Each night now, I get home and my eyes are bloodshot from staring at monitors for 12+ hours. The professor actually asked if I was stoned when I got home the other night, cause they were so red! All of this means that I've had little time to update the blog and less time for reading.

But soon it will all be at an end, and I hope to do lots of reading, relaxing, and exploring Vancouver in the coming months!

-tf

I have never worked on a project where the an-evolved process worked so hard to choke out actual work on the game. The legal, compliance, & localization hoops that this team has had to jump through are well beyond anything I've ever seen. We've spent the majority of the last two weeks fighting fires that have nothing to do with shipping a high quality product and everything to do with being part of a too-large corporate entity; which is remarkable for a company less than 10% of the size of the last one I worked for.

Deeply frustrated right now.

-tf

The Blind Assassin by Margret Atwood

Margret Atwood is a first class writer. And she's Canadian, which makes her eligible for the Booker Prize. See, it turns out that only Brits, or citizens of former British Colonies (which, for some reason doesn't include the US of A) are able to recieve this award. As all of you know, I was so completely blown away by the adventures of Saleem Sanai in Midnight's Children that I have vowed to read as many of the Booker Prize winners as I can get my hands on.

Particularly sleuthful readers of this blog will recall that this book has been mentioned before, when it arrived with an armful of books I got the Professor for Valentine's Day a few years ago.

So I took it with me on a whirlwind trip to Europe. The trip was 3 countries, 3 days, which is a pretty brutal schedule when you START over here on the other side of the world. I believe Mongolia is actually closer to where I sit currently than Munich. (Yep, Google Maps confirms.) I had a lot of reading time on planes and the surreality of serious jetlag, exhaustion and travel lent through circumstance an ever greater psychological impact of this book on me.

Language useage is first class. Among the finest novels I've read for wordplay & cleverness with structure on many levels. Atwood always has the right verb to bring her characters to life. She also interjects enough of her own authorial love of langage to her protaganist that the teller of the tale is usually in on the linguistic high-jinx.

Four separate frameworks make up the action and narrative. There's 'The Blind Assassin', a novel which features in the novel. There's a private journal, in which the narrator gives us excruciatingly personal day to day account of the aftermath of events. There is an autobiographical relating of the lives of the main chracters, leading up to the central event. And then there are newpaper clippings detailing the public percepion of all of the above.

These four threads play across the span of one woman's lifetime. They are beautiful, historical, troubling, titilating, lurid, poetic and powerful.

And there's a damn cool twisted sci-fi tale related post coitally throughout. Yep. Sex. Usually a little kinky. Followed by sci-fi. And the sci-fi is worthy of it's own mention, particularly for the style:

'The Blind Assassin' novel-within-a-novel is one part Amazing Stories, one part Conan the Barbarian and one part Gene Wolf. As a work of period piece sci-fi 'The Blind Assassin' is a loving look back at the golden days of American science fiction, with a raised eyebrow towards the psycho-analytical content and gender politics of the genre. Atwood knows old science fiction and can nicely play mimic while issuing subtle comment.

Too long. Too much Word. Move on.

One helluva a fine book, she definiely deserves a prize for this one.

-tf

It's a beautiful sunday here in Burnaby. I'm awaiting The Professor & Weezel to come and rescue me from work.

In the meantime, I have to urge any readers of this blog to look into the absolutely shameful case of Time magazine and Judy Miller's imprisonment. Do not buy Time magazine. If you can help it, do not support Time-Warner. This is a further troubling erosion of the once very important separation of government, entertainment and journalism. These three each serve important functions, and the collapse of the separation of powers between these three faces of the Ministry of Truth is one of the most alarming casualties of our current dark night in US politics.

Up here in Canada, me, The Professor & The Weezel are heading off to the beach to let the sun melt away the last dregs of this hangover.

-tf

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Gotta say, I didn’t care for this one.

Chuck P impressed me deeply with Fight Club, then again with Lullaby and Choke. But Haunted is just plain gross. Worse still, the writing is a poor mimicry of the style of his previous works. It’s almost self-parody, but isn’t that clever.

This book feels like a novel designed by a misinterpreted focus group of Palahniuk readers. It slogs through his usual nihilistic ethos and crawls along shining a flashlight into the depraved corners of modern North American life. But there’s no point to it (the empowering characteristics of masochism have already been suitably covered in his previous works), his use of technical details and medical jargon to sharpen the edge of his descriptions of the horrific, and his repeated reuse of clever phraseology have all been deeply mined in other places. Worse still, the novel really falls apart by the end, as do most of his. But while Lullaby, Survivor, and Invisible Monsters all suck by the end, Haunted just becomes incoherent. In fact, I have no idea how the novel resolves itself, and I just finished it on the beach yesterday.

In addition, the wallowing in the profane and downright repulsive is taken to whole new levels here. Every sexual deviance and cultural taboo is taken three steps too far in this book. From boys who have to gnaw through their own intestines, to dolls gang-banged by police squadrons, to human veal, to… even worse stuff, this book has it all. And by it I mean all the stuff you don’t want.

If you want to read Chuck P, read Choke, Lullaby, or Fight Club. Put this book just below Invisible Monsters and Diary in your list. It just isn’t very good, and it doesn’t take you anywhere you want to be. No more time or words will be wasted on this one.

Chuck, you’ve let me down. If you’ve got nothing else to explore, then quit writing and enjoy your money. If you want to try again, make sure it’s good.

Chronicles Volume One by Bob Dylan

I think the person in my life who has gotten the most irritated with my long term obsession with Bob Dylan must have been our old landlady, Victoria. “Can’t we listen to something else, just for a few minutes, please,” complaining one time. Needless to say, she didn’t ever become anyone important in the pantheon. I’ve told people that the first cassette tape I ever owned was Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. That wasn’t entirely true, as I believe that my father may have given me a Simon & Garfunkel tape a few months earlier. But I vividly recall a Friday night after dinner where Vic handed B & I a tape of Highway 61 Revisited, and we listened to it many times over the course of the weekend. I remember that we were also playing The Bard’s Tale 3 at the same time. I’ve heard a lot of Dylan since then, but Desolation Row is still my favorite. There were times back there at theWARWICK (& Placid Place too) where Dylan still set the beat for most of the weekend’s soundtracks. I remember too when B began an even more serious study of folk music, ranging pretty deeply into Guthrie, Phil Ochs & Leadbelly.

Just before leaving Austin I remember thumbing through a copy of Chronicle that B had received for Christmas as a gift, likely from one of his brothers. The observant Professor noticed my interest I suppose, and picked up a copy for my birthday a few months ago. I finished it late last night in bed, here in Vancouver, smelling the night air coming in from a window, with a cat curled up between the two of us.

Dylan’s autobiography is fast, fun and rambling. It restricts itself to a few non-chronological segments of Dylan’s life, and steers clear of most of the most personal events. (Weddings, kids, divorces, motorcycle accident, money, etc.) Instead, it concerns itself mostly with Dylan’s early years before he signed with Columbia Records, with a brief period in which he recorded a forgettable early nineties album in New Orleans, and the early years of his life between adolescence and his move to New York.

I suspect that Dylan’s editors (I don’t think the book was ghost written, a concern I had at first glance) had a helluva time determining how to cobble these diverse memoirs into a coherent narrative. The book is a bit of a disappointment as a stand alone work, because it skips over those times in his career in which most Dylan fans are likely to be the most interested. Specifically, there’s no discussion here of the time between his first record and the mid seventies. This is a decade when Dylan was at the top of his game; prolific and powerful. There’s no mention of the time period involving Woodstock, his notorious Albert Hall show, or any of his protest period. Presumably that’s all being held back for a sequel, though the only suggestion of this is the inconspicuous “Volume One” subtitle.

By way of style:

“The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds – the cemeteries – and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sheep. Greek, Roman, sepulchers – palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, sign and symbols of hidden decay—ghosts of women and men who have died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing—spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades to aid them in some way. You can’t see it, but you know it’s here. Somebody is always sinking.

He goes on this way for quite some time, and the entire passage, too long to quote here, evokes perfectly what I remember feeling on a warm summer day in this city of tombs, with good friends and a hangover, many years ago…

The bio really picks up a lot of steam and fuerte in the last fifty pages, where Dylan returns to a discussion of his inspirations:

“Folk music was really more of a brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each ragged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified. Folk music was all I needed to exist.”

And of course, Dylan’s biggest hero, Woody Guthrie, he saves for near the very end, saying:

“I felt connected to [Guthrie’s] songs on every level. They were cosmic. One thing for sure. Woody Guthrie had never seen or heard of me, but it felt like he was saying, ‘I’ll be going away but I’m leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you.’”

This one comes at the end of a long section on Guthrie, and a lot of other interesting people besides. (Like Richard Farina, who I spent some time researching, and whom I determined I think was sort of a jerk.) The section mentions several other bios, Positively 4th Street, for one which deals with a lot of these people, and Guthrie’s Bound For Glory, for another, both of which I’d like to take a look at. But I think somehow that Dylan’s poem, Last Thoughts On Woodie Guthrie, somehow would close out this entry best of all. I remember how much this fascinated B & I the first time we heard it. Here it is for the non-existant reader now:

There's this book comin' out, an' they asked me to write something about Woody...
Sort of like "What does Woody Guthrie mean to you?" in twenty-five words...

And I couldn't do it -- I wrote out five pages and... I have it here, it's...
Have it here by accident, actually... but I'd like to say this out loud...
So... if you can sort of roll along with this thing here, this is called
"Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie."

When your head gets twisted and your mind grows numb
When you think you're too old, too young, too smart or too dumb
When you're laggin' behind an' losin' your pace
In the slow-motion crawl or life's busy race
No matter whatcha doin' if you start givin' up
If the wine don't come to the top of your cup
If the wind got you sideways it's one hand holdin' on
And the other starts slippin' and the feelin' is gone
And your train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it
And the wood's easy findin' but you're lazy to fetch it
And your sidewalk starts curlin' and the street gets too long
And you start walkin' backwards though you know that it's wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow's mornin' seems so far away
And you feel the reins from your pony are slippin'
And your rope is a-slidin' 'cause your hands are a-drippin'
And your sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys
Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys
And your sky cries water and your drain pipe's a-pourin'
And the lightnin's a-flashin' and the thunder's a-crashin'
The windows are rattlin' and breakin' and the roof tops are shakin'
And your whole world's a-slammin' and bangin'
And your minutes of sun turn to hours of storm
An' to yourself you sometimes say
"I never knew it was gonna be this way
Why didn't they tell me the day I was born?"

And you start gettin' chills and you're jumpin' from sweat
And you're lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet
And you're knee-deep in dark water with your hands in the air
And the whole world's watchin' with a window peek stare
And your good gal leaves and she's long gone a-flyin'
And your heart feels sick like fish when they're fryin'
And your jackhammer falls from your hands to your feet
But you need it badly an' it lays on the street
And your bell's bangin' loudly but you can't hear its beat
And you think your ears mighta been hurt
Your eyes've turned filthy from the sight-blindin' dirt
And you figured you failed in yesterday's rush
When you were faked out an' fooled while facin' a four flush
And all the time you were holdin' three queens
It's makin you mad, it's makin' you mean
Like in the middle of Life magazine
Bouncin' around a pinball machine
And there's something on your mind that you wanna be sayin'
That somebody someplace oughta be hearin'
But it's trapped on your tongue, sealed in your head
And it bothers you badly when your layin' in bed
And no matter how you try you just can't say it
And you're scared to your soul you just might forget it
And your eyes get swimmy from the tears in your head
An' your pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead
And the lion's mouth opens and you're starin' at his teeth
And his jaws start closin' with you underneath
And you're flat on your belly with your hands tied behind
And you wish you'd never taken that last detour sign
You say to yourself just what am I doin'
On this road I'm walkin', on this trail I'm turnin'
On this curve I'm hangin'
On this pathway I'm strollin', this space I'm taking
And this air I'm inhaling?
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I'm playing, on this banjo I'm frailing
On this mandolin I'm strumming, in the song I'm singing,
In the tune I'm humming, in the words that I'm thinking
In the words I'm writing
In this ocean of hours I'm all the time drinking
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking?
But you try with your whole soul best
Never to think these thoughts and never to let
Them kind of thoughts gain ground
Or make your heart pound
But then again you know when they're around
Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down
'Cause sometimes you hear 'em when the night time come creeping
And you fear they might catch you sleeping
And you jump from your bed, from the last chapter of dreamin'
And you can't remember for the best of your thinkin'
If that was you in the dream that was screaming
And you know that's somethin' special you're needin'
And you know there's no drug that'll do for the healing
And no liquor in the land to stop your brain from bleeding

You need somethin' special
You need somethin' special, all right
You need a fast flyin' train on a tornado track
To shoot you someplace and shoot you back
You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler
That's been banging and booming and blowing forever
That knows your troubles a hundred times over
You need a Greyhound bus that don't bar no race
That won't laugh at your looks
Your voice or your face
And by any number of bets in the book
Will be rolling long after the bubblegum craze
You need something to open up a new door
To show you something you seen before
But overlooked a hundred times or more
You need something to open your eyes
You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that you're standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many times you might get kicked
You need something special, all right
You need something special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said, maybe you heard
On some windy corner 'round a wide-angled curve

But that's what you need man, and you need it bad
And your trouble is you know it too good
'Cause you look an' you start gettin' the chills
'Cause you can't find it on a dollar bill
And it ain't on Macy's window sill
And it ain't on no rich kid's road map
And it ain't in no fat kid's fraternity house
And it ain't made in no Hollywood wheat germ
And it ain't on that dim-lit stage
With that half-wit comedian on it
Rantin' and ravin' and takin' your money
And you thinks it's funny
No, you can't find it neither in no night club, no yacht club
And it ain't in the seats of a supper club
And sure as hell you're bound to tell
No matter how hard you rub
You just ain't a-gonna find it on your ticket stub
No, it ain't in the rumors people're tellin' you
And it ain't in the pimple-lotion people are sellin' you
And it ain't in a cardboard-box house
Or down any movie star's blouse
And you can't find it on the golf course
And Uncle Remus can't tell you and neither can Santa Claus
And it ain't in the cream puff hairdo or cotton candy clothes
Ain't in the dime store dummies an' bubblegum goons
And it ain't in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices
That come knocking and tapping in Christmas wrapping
Sayin' ain't I pretty and ain't I cute, look at my skin,
Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow,
Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry,
When you can't even sense if they got any insides
These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows
No, you'll not now or no other day
Find it on the doorsteps made of paper maché
And inside of the people made of molasses
That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses
And it ain't in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies
Who'd turn you in for a tenth of a penny
Who breathe and burp and bend and crack
And before you can count from one to ten
Do it all over again but this time behind your back, my friend,
The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl
And play games with each other in their sand-box world
And you can't find it either in the no-talent fools
That run around gallant
And make all the rules for the ones that got talent
And it ain't in the ones that ain't got any talent but think they do
And think they're fooling you
The ones that jump on the wagon
Just for a while 'cause they know it's in style
To get their kicks, get out of it quick
And make all kinds of rnoney and chicks
And you yell to yourself and you throw down your hat
Saying, "Christ, do I gotta be like that?
Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at
Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel
Good God Almighty, that stuff ain't real":

No, but that ain't your game, it ain't your race
You can't hear your name, you can't see your face
You gotta look some other place
And where do you look for this hope that you're seekin'
Where do you look for this lamp that's a-burnin'
Where do you look for this oil well gushin'
Where do you look for this candle that's glowin'
Where do you look for this hope that you know is there
And out there somewhere
And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads
Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows
Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways
You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You find God in the church of your choice
You find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it's only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You'll find them both
In Grand Canyon
Sundown

Or this one: Song for Woody, written by Dylan “in Mills Bar on Bleeker [sic] Street in New York City on the 14th day of February.”

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men gone down,
Seein' your world of places and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's comin' along,
Sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn,
It looks like it's a-dyin' an' never been born.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things I'm a-sayin' an' a-many a times more.
I'm a-singin' you this song, but I can't sing enough,
'Cause there's not many men who done the things that you done.

Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too,
An' to all good people that traveled with you.
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I'm leavin' tomorrow, but I could leave today,
Somewhere down the road someday.
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I been hittin' some hard travelin' too.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

There was so much I wanted to write about this book. I know that the right, left, and center all take issue with Friedman, but I admire his columns a great deal. In fact, I've never been so irritated by a newspaper as I was by the NYT when they moved he and Maureen Dowd's regular op-ed pieces from Sunday to Wednesday… Who reads the paper on Wednesday?

I've got volumes of correspondence on The World is Flat -- with my father in Texas, the Senator in Qatar, big bosses to whom I sent the book, and of course, with my beloved Professor. I wanted to take the time to go through each of these, mine the gems and present them here for Lynn & Weezel, my only two readers. But as the good man says, "these clouds keep on rollin by and I don't know why" - so of course, the time has passed. I'm six books behind again, but all of them have been written about…

I don't want the past to drag on the present until it is stale too, so I'm going to post only a brief overview of Friedman's fascinating look at our modern global economy. Besides, after about 30 weeks on the non-fiction best seller's list, most everyone has apparently bought a copy of this book already, so I guess me reviewing it is hardly a scoop.

Friedman tells us that the world has been flattened. What he means by this is that, essentially, globalization has come weather we like it or not, and that we are now all part of a deeply interconnected global economy and culture, with an incredibly fast rate of evolution. The first portion of the book addresses the recent history of how we got here. The middle portion describes in endless detail those companies and countries which stand to benefit the most from having taken advantage of this new world order. The end poses a series of challenges, familiar to readers to Friedman's columns, which face the modern United States and her citizens.

The book is fascinating, if not exactly a page-turner. Stylistically, I'm forced to indight Friedman for having become too accustomed to rely upon economy of words in his columns. As a result, this book frequently feels redundant. He'll make the point in four paragraphs, then keep running over the same ground for another 50 pages.

Most importantly though, Tom Friedman is probably RIGHT. And that makes this book worth the time.

The Great Gatbsy by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books, you’re very well read it’s well known,” Bob Dylan snidely croons in Ballad of a Thin Man.

I’m not sure that there really is too much Fitzgerald that has withstood any test of time other than TGG. If any of the readers of this site have any suggestions for other works of his that are good (Tender is the Night doesn't count), please lemme know.

I wish I could go back and find whatever essay I wrote on this book back in tenth grade when I last read it. Whatever themes I regurgitated from my high school English class, I doubt I really got this book in any way. Ultimately now, I don’t see this as much more than a mild rebuke of the decadent partyin’ lifestyles of the upper middle class in the nineteen twenties, and a tale of someone who wanted one thing to the exclusion of all else.

Fitzgerald’s novella would likely have completely slipped beneath the waves of decade were it not for three things:

First, the book is short enough to be assigned as reading in high school and has lots of clumsy, overt symbolism that make it easy to teach.

Second, Fitzgerald kept good company, as is well documented in better books, like A Moveable Feast.

Third, his style is descriptive, but concerns itself so overly with unearthing what appear to be pearls of timeless wisdom that it’s easy to think this is a great book with lots to say. For example, the book’s closing line, impressively quoted to me from memory my Y-man when he saw me reading the book “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Sounds pretty deep. But for a book that addresses the way the past shapes the present and limits the future, try Robert Penn Warren’s fantastic novel, All the Kings Men.

In rereading the above, and skimming the battered HPB copy of Gatsby here on my desk it strikes me that the above comes across as a bit cynical, and probably unfair. Fitzgerald writes well. It isn’t his fault that his beautifully written little tragedy has acquired stature far beyond it’s desserts. It’s a good story. If it weren’t famous, I’d likely be raving about how much I enjoyed it, because I did.

Tangentially, if I were to bother to look any more deeply into Fitzgerald, I think I might want to start by focusing on what I’ve always heard rumored but never seen in print, that his wife, Zelda went crazy and completely fucked over his life. I think it might be fun to take a look at he and old Hank Williams and see if one could find some parallels between their creations and their damaged marital lives. I wonder if there are other good examples of this in the last century. Considering how screwed up so many relationships are, it seems likely. So reader, any artists whose crazy wives ended up becoming a dominant force in their careers?

I just noticed that on 5/29 of this year, George RR Martin updated his website and mentioned that A Feast For Crows, the next book in the series I just reviewed is now complete, at least the first draft. He also mentioned that it weighed in at about 1300 pages. That's greater than the length of Tolkien's entire (non)trilogy! No word on a publication date, but I'm sure Drew will be happy to know that he didn'e keel over from a heart attack before finishing.

Here at work today, waiting for a build to complete. I'm also almost finished writing up my notes on the first volume of Dylan's autobiography. They're not 1300 pages, but still a bit too long right now... Of course, it'll be a few more days before I post them, since I'm still several books behind. But the gap is closing! From a worst moment, when there were 14 in the waiting-to-be-reviewed stack, we're down to only about 4 missing posts.

I expect I'll be here twiddling my thumbs a lot this weekend, so I'll try to get completely caught up soon, then stay caught up if possible.

Three part update describing the first three novels in an ongoing fantasy series. I read these in February and March.


A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
If you aren’t interested in pulp fantasy novels, skip this review. Ultimately, that’s all this series of books will ever be.

Okay, now that the snobs are gone. If you ARE into pulp fantasy—if names like Raistlin, The Forsaken, Rand al’Thor, Thomas Covenant, Belgarath, Severis, Drizz’t, Tanis, Tad Williams or Robert Jordan provoke an emotional response from you—then you should probably read George RR Martin. His is a new look at fantasy, an R (X really) rated re-invention of Tolkien’s sanitized magical spaces. His books are epic, violent, complicated, and a lot more fun to read than are Jordan’s extended meditations on teen angst.

A Game of Thrones chronicles the beginning of a power struggle for control of a particular Kingdom. This Kingdom, which has no real name, exists on the southern tip of a continent in what might be described as a low-magic world. Due to some planetary axial issues which are (thankfully) never deeply explored, this kingdom enjoys years or decades of summer, followed by an equally long and difficult winter. When winter arrives, undead evil arrives with it. Unfortunately, since these seasonal shifts usually only occur once per lifetime, none of the petty kinglets who are busy tearing their kingdom apart really pay much attention to the onset of winter.

In this first novel in a planned series of five, Martin introduces us to many of the characters from whose perspectives we will see the war (and presumeably the darker events which will follow once winter arrives) unfold. Unlike most fantasy authors, Martin seems more than willing to spend hundreds of pages writing from over the shoulder of a particular character, get the reader emotionally involved, then wreck their life and kill them off.

This book mostly introduces the reader to the world, some major characters, and sets up the events that will unfold in the second novel.


A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin
If you aren’t interested in pulp fantasy novels, skip this review. Ultimately, that’s all this series of books will ever be.

Clash is longer, meaner, and much cooler than its predecessor, A Game of Thrones. In this 900 page installment of Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice we see many of the young characters who watched their disintegrating world with eyeswide start to grow up. But make no mistake, this is not the little-boy-becomes-hero novel which so pollutes this genre. I’m not sure there are any heroes here, and mostly the little boys in this story get killed off in gristly ways.

A Clash of Kings and deals with the fallout of the events set in motion by the first novel. The magic component of the world gets ramped up a bit, and we start to get our first real look at some of the cooler characters (Dagenerys, Jon Snow, Tyrion). Martin also continues his trend of rewarding no one, and punishing anyone who even tries to act out of principle. In fact, any attempt at honorable behavior is, without exception, punished severely, usually fatally, for their lapse. This is not a world in which it pays to be good.


A Storm of Swords by George RR Martin
Again, if you aren’t interested in pulp fantasy novels, skip this review. Ultimately, that’s all this series of books will ever be.

By this point, all of the social structures which defined society in the first two books have so fallen in upon themselves that all is basically chaos. Some of the characters you love are dead. Many others are heading that way. A few of the ones you didn’t care much about start to grow in prominence (Bran, for example). The violence, sadism, and depravity all get ratcheted up a notch, as do the big battle sequences.

By the end of this novel, no one is still innocent, and the tide of evil is just about to break over all the conflicts which, while they seemed important at first, are about to be reduced to petty squabbles. Winter is coming, and I for one am looking forward to the rest of the series.

It should go without saying that there is no real style or interesting usage of language here. These are pulp. If you like fantasy, and are NOT squeamish about sadism and depravity, read these books. Else, pass.

It's a fine and lazy holiday here. I've been relaxing, reading, talking to the family.

I also took the time last night to finally update the booklist on the rhs, and properly link each title to it's corresponding review.


Vancouver & Victoria 2004 by Frommer's
While a travelogue isn’t quite in my usual reading list, this one was a well timed Christmas present. I read it all the way through in the week surrounding our exmigration to Canadia.

This book is a well written treasure trove of information on Vancouver and Victoria. The scattergun approach it takes to describing something as complex as a city of this size is largely effective. I knew a lot more about the city after reading it than I did beforehand. What else can you ask?

These travel books, especially when supplemented with a solid diet of web browsing, are a great way to get a primer on an area before you visit for a while. Regardless of the length of your stay, a week or a year, there’s little better way to get a sampling of what a city is about than reading a travelguide.

Not much else to say about this one.

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Galapagos is a fun romp, recommended to be by the esteemed PWatt. It’s a cool look at evolution told with Vonnegut’s usual tongue in cheek humor and mobid cynicism.

“Thanks a lot, big brain,” is the phrase that sticks in my head the most.

This is a fast and fun ride with all the usual Vonnegut trappings. Well worth the time; a good plane trip novel, only barely dated by it’s thirty year history.

Lots of updates today, beacuse it's a lazy overcast Sunday out here in Burnaby. While the order in which these entries are complicated because they are posted from bottom to top (like most blogs), these are even more achrononistic because I'm still playing catch up. In an effort to maintain the order in which I read these books, I sometimes sit on a writeup for some period of time until I'm caught up on past entries. The below entry on Crazy Horse is one of these, read in January, written up in February, and posted now in May.





Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry

And there it was! Another LMM book I hadn't read! Imagine my excitement!

I started Crazy Horse a few days before New Years back in Austin, then
got distracted and it fell into a coat pocket. I finished it this
afternoon in a coffee shop in Vancouver while waiting for The
Professor to check her email.

One of the things I regret about leaving Texas was that Vic & I never
found the time to go up to Archer City and visit McMurtry in his
bookstore there. He will likely be dead before I return to the Lone
Star State, and I will have missed the chance to meet the only living
Texas man of letters whom I have studied or of whom I am aware.

Crazy Horse is a biography. It is a work of non-fiction which is so
speculative as to resemble fiction. McMurtry is upfront about this,
criticizing those scholars who have come before for inventing much of
the so-called history upon which he draws. The simple truth seems to
be that little is known about the life of Crazy Horse, a warrior of
the Ogallala & Sioux, and a symbol of the final years of the plains
Indians.

Crazy Horse was not an Indian chief like Sitting Bull. He was not a
butcher like Geranamo. He really wasn't a particularly influential
figure in the so called Indian Wars. He seems to have been more
notable as a martyr, whose betrayal and death at the hands of Little
Big Man and a white general (whose name escapes me, between the Buffy,
the sounds of sirens, and the constant but pleasant interruptions from
the Professor) turned him into something of a legend and a resistance
talisman.

More later… too distracting here…

One of the characteristics of the narrative in this book that casts
some doubt in my mind on it's historical accuracy is how closely it
tracks to a number of McMurtry's lifelong themes. Consider, for
example the lifelong love triangle between the stoic Crazy Horse, the
more socially adept No Water and Black Buffalo woman. The parallels
with the love triangle in Leaving Cheyenne, in The Last Picture Show,
and other LMM works can't be missed. The lifelong friendship between
Crazy Horse and his best friend has shades of the Lonesome Dove
sequence (as well as LPS and LC), and some of the tales LMM tells are
reflected elsewhere in his works, from the Gus-like personification of
Lt. Crook to Geronomo's headfirst dive out of a jailhouse window, sure
to remind any reader of the final flight of Blue Duck. Were McMurtry's
fictional events in his last 30 years of novel writing influenced by
these historical events? Certainly. Is his historical scholarship
tainted by his years of yarn spinning? Assuredly. Does he recognize
this? Without a doubt.

On balance, Crazy Horse is an engaging, short look at a man who is
more legend than a meaningful historical figure. As a work of
scholarship it is likely lacking (not saying any of the other scholars
who have approached this have done better, just that there is precious
little real data to draw from when trying to describe these events)
but LMM is acutely aware of the tension between imagination and
description of the facts. This book is fun, a must for any LMM
scholar, and a fun diversion for any Western fan or anyone with
interest in the Plains Indians. I should mention that while KM in
Houston things highly of the Penguin Lives series, I found the editing
in this book to be lacking; it was rife with mild errors, both
typographic and otherwise.

As an aside, I'd like to apologize for the poor quality of writing in
this entry. City Confidential and other murder shows have been
screaming at me from the television a few feet away, and I'm having a
hard time regaining the level of concentration I'd come to enjoy while
writing in my private study at Kingfisher Creek. This is an obvious
downside to the tiny condo downtown living we are enjoying so much in
other ways….