.
With the Old Breed (1981/2007) is the finest combat memoir by an enlisted man that I have ever read, and this is merely a brief note on it after I finished reading it today. The “Old Breed,” of course, is the First Marine Division (1st MarDiv), first activated in WWII to fight at Guadalcanal, the first US ground offensive against the Empire of Japan. This book was one of the main primary sources used for the great HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), which is quite true to the book.
.
The 1st MarDiv went on to fight at Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Peleliu (the ferocious but “forgotten” battle), and finally on Okinawa at war’s end. E.B. Sledge joined the division in time to see action on both Peleliu and Okinawa; my father joined them in time to see action on Okinawa (see the photo on p.77 of a 75mm “pack” howitzer like one my father crewed); and I joined the Old Breed in 1969 in Da Nang to see action in Quang Nam Province, RVN.
.
Sledge was a fine writer and a sensitive soul whose horrific personal experiences in the meat-grinder battles of Peleliu and Okinawa are given to us honestly, starkly and humanely. He does not glorify war. Rather, he gives the reader the actual realities: the terror, stink, brutality, inhumanity, soul-killing fatigue and madness of it. The American and Japanese casualty statistics he gives are sobering; but the experiences, sights, sounds, smells and emotions he personally relates are horrifying.
.
-Zenwind.
.
23 April 2011
Book Review: The Earthsea sagas, by Ursula K. Le Guin
.
This is a wonderful cycle of five fantasy novels (plus a short story or two) which Le Guin wrote over a period of three decades. She is a very fine writer, and I seek out anything else that she wrote. At this time, my review will only be a short note on the Earthsea novels, because I feel that I really cannot do justice to them by reviewing them yet. I need to come back to them much later to re-read and re-absorb them. Hopefully, I will update this someday into a full review.
.
Earthsea is a fantasy world of islands with rich cultures, and various types of religion, non-religion and magic are practiced there. There are dragons, too. Some of the beloved key characters – such as Ged and Tenar – are traced through the series of novels from their youth to older age. The novels should be read in their proper order to best understand the sweep of the tales. The novels and major stories, in order, are:
.
* A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
* The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
* The Farthest Shore (1972)
* Tehanu (1990)
* “Dragonfly” (1997) short story from collection, Tales From Earthsea (2001)
* The Other Wind (2001).
.
-Zenwind.
.
This is a wonderful cycle of five fantasy novels (plus a short story or two) which Le Guin wrote over a period of three decades. She is a very fine writer, and I seek out anything else that she wrote. At this time, my review will only be a short note on the Earthsea novels, because I feel that I really cannot do justice to them by reviewing them yet. I need to come back to them much later to re-read and re-absorb them. Hopefully, I will update this someday into a full review.
.
Earthsea is a fantasy world of islands with rich cultures, and various types of religion, non-religion and magic are practiced there. There are dragons, too. Some of the beloved key characters – such as Ged and Tenar – are traced through the series of novels from their youth to older age. The novels should be read in their proper order to best understand the sweep of the tales. The novels and major stories, in order, are:
.
* A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
* The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
* The Farthest Shore (1972)
* Tehanu (1990)
* “Dragonfly” (1997) short story from collection, Tales From Earthsea (2001)
* The Other Wind (2001).
.
-Zenwind.
.
26 February 2011
Book Review: Black Hills by Dan Simmons
.
Black Hills (2010) is yet another great Dan Simmons novel. He continually amazes me with his variety of genres, subject matter and his deep research. This is historical fiction with a fantastic twist, and I loved it. The action starts immediately in 1876 as an 11-year-old Sioux boy happens to be on the battlefield at Little Big Horn during Custer’s Last Stand just as Custer dies in front of him, and Custer’s ghost enters into him and haunts him for decades, providing insightful dialogue between the two personalities/cultures. The boy’s Sioux name is Paha Sapa (meaning “Black Hills”), and it is his story that we follow – with Custer’s ghost trailing along. Native American Indian worldviews, mythologies, visions, sentiments and complex histories are well-respected and well-represented throughout this story.
.
Custer’s history is well researched. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are part of the story, and their histories are presented well. We are swept along through general American history, all within Paha Sapa’s experiences, as the Indians’ day is over and the white man’s story is ascendant. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed far to the east. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is an important setting in the plot, along with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The ambitious 20th century project of carving Mt. Rushmore by the visionary Gutzon Borglum is also integral to Paha Sapa’s story.
.
Simmons’ vision of Native American Indians is extremely sympathetic and respectful, but it is not mindless or politically correct (thank the Great Spirit!) because he is not afraid to be historically accurate rather than just being a wishful thinker about it. Many well-established historical points may not be so easily accepted by primitivist mythologizers: i.e., when Simmons writes of the “fun” of war for Plains Indians, and of the Sioux as “a ruthless, relentless invasion machine,” attacking other Indian tribes and pushing them off their traditional lands (p.429). (It is also noted that the whites are just as bad with their own relentless warfare, soon becoming worldwide.) It is admitted that the Plains Indians often stampeded buffalo herds over cliffs (buffalo drops), killing them by the hundreds, just to cut out a select liver (or tongue) from the top layer of carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. It was not just the Euro-Americans who wasted natural resources that seemed to be without limit. No race or culture is promoted over another here; instead we find a common, complex, understandable human history, weird as it may turn out to be.
.
One thing extra I like about this novel – besides its usual Simmons genius – is the appreciation for wilderness and natural settings, which Simmons describes so well. That speaks to me personally in a powerful way. Paha Sapa sees the ever-encroaching growth of human settlement and development as a grim inevitability, but he still sees the spirit of natural beauty left. And in the end he can still say: “This is a good day to live.”
.
-Zenwind.
.
Black Hills (2010) is yet another great Dan Simmons novel. He continually amazes me with his variety of genres, subject matter and his deep research. This is historical fiction with a fantastic twist, and I loved it. The action starts immediately in 1876 as an 11-year-old Sioux boy happens to be on the battlefield at Little Big Horn during Custer’s Last Stand just as Custer dies in front of him, and Custer’s ghost enters into him and haunts him for decades, providing insightful dialogue between the two personalities/cultures. The boy’s Sioux name is Paha Sapa (meaning “Black Hills”), and it is his story that we follow – with Custer’s ghost trailing along. Native American Indian worldviews, mythologies, visions, sentiments and complex histories are well-respected and well-represented throughout this story.
.
Custer’s history is well researched. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the massacre at Wounded Knee are part of the story, and their histories are presented well. We are swept along through general American history, all within Paha Sapa’s experiences, as the Indians’ day is over and the white man’s story is ascendant. The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed far to the east. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair is an important setting in the plot, along with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The ambitious 20th century project of carving Mt. Rushmore by the visionary Gutzon Borglum is also integral to Paha Sapa’s story.
.
Simmons’ vision of Native American Indians is extremely sympathetic and respectful, but it is not mindless or politically correct (thank the Great Spirit!) because he is not afraid to be historically accurate rather than just being a wishful thinker about it. Many well-established historical points may not be so easily accepted by primitivist mythologizers: i.e., when Simmons writes of the “fun” of war for Plains Indians, and of the Sioux as “a ruthless, relentless invasion machine,” attacking other Indian tribes and pushing them off their traditional lands (p.429). (It is also noted that the whites are just as bad with their own relentless warfare, soon becoming worldwide.) It is admitted that the Plains Indians often stampeded buffalo herds over cliffs (buffalo drops), killing them by the hundreds, just to cut out a select liver (or tongue) from the top layer of carcasses and leaving the rest to rot. It was not just the Euro-Americans who wasted natural resources that seemed to be without limit. No race or culture is promoted over another here; instead we find a common, complex, understandable human history, weird as it may turn out to be.
.
One thing extra I like about this novel – besides its usual Simmons genius – is the appreciation for wilderness and natural settings, which Simmons describes so well. That speaks to me personally in a powerful way. Paha Sapa sees the ever-encroaching growth of human settlement and development as a grim inevitability, but he still sees the spirit of natural beauty left. And in the end he can still say: “This is a good day to live.”
.
-Zenwind.
.
12 January 2011
Nightmares of War & the Sense of Smell
.
(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
.
This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
.
I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
.
On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
.
Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
.
I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
.
Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
.
I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
.
Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
.
Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
.
So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
.
I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
.
It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
.
-Zenwind.
.
(Do not read this too close to mealtime.)
.
This incident took place in northwestern Pennsylvania USA in April, May or June sometime in the mid-1990s, in the first really consistently hot days of the year. This is the time of the year when the remains of animals that had been road-killed by cars during winter and left along the roads smell most rank. My many walks along highways and back-roads have always confirmed this.
.
I was living at Wilderness Park high up on the Allegheny Plateau and hiking often out on the back trails in the Allegheny National Forest, which was just out my back door. One section of my favorite trail paralleled a back-road for a brief while at a distance of several hundred yards across a quite wild forested area, but if the wind was right you could occasionally hear motor vehicles on the road across that stretch of woods.
.
On this one particularly hot day as I was hiking this trail, the wind was blowing from the direction of this back-road, and I caught a couple of different whiffs of road-kill from that direction. One of the smells was extra strong, and I was sure that it must be a very big animal such as a deer or even a bear.
.
Immediately after this time I started to have very vivid, extremely violent and disturbing nightmares that involved stark images and memories of the Vietnam War. They went on for a week or two. I had not had nightmares like this for a long time, so I could not account for it.
.
I have had other war-related nightmares that could be easily explained, before and after this episode. Back in 1986 after seeing the very authentic movie “Platoon” in the theater, I immediately had nightmares and disturbed sleep for a two week period.
.
Also, a number of years later – long after this incident at Wilderness Park that I am presently describing had occurred – I again had disturbed sleep for a period, and I am sure that this latter episode was because at that time I was teaching US Military History for two semesters. As a brand-new course preparation for me, I was reading about and thinking of war all of the time, and I was especially thinking of it last of all before sleep-time. (I gladly handed over this course to a teacher both well-qualified and very eager to teach it, because it pleased him very much and contributed to his morale as a history teacher on our team, it strengthened our history department’s program, and it got the nightmares out of my head.) But these two episodes, the one before and the one after the Wilderness Park one, were not as disturbing as the one I now describe in the mid-1990s.
.
I could not explain why I was having these vivid nightmares at this particular time, so I just assumed it was the hot humid weather triggering memories of tropical Vietnam. I turned up the a/c at night but still had the horrific nightmares.
.
Then I belatedly got the community gossip. It was not road-kill that I had smelled after all. Two neighborhood boys on their bicycles had discovered a woman dead in her car on an obscure turn-off dead-end lane off from that back-road that paralleled my hiking trail. She had committed suicide in her car with the windows down earlier on one of those fine days of spring, and she was not discovered until a while after the fact, and this along with the extreme hot weather put her into a bad state of decomposition. The location of her body was exactly upwind of the place on my hiking trail where I had smelled on that day what I thought was a big animal road-kill, and the timeframe was an exact match – i.e., I had smelled the scent before her discovery. It had never occurred to my conscious mind that it was not the smell of a regular road-kill of a forest animal.
.
Dead mammals have a particular smell, but dead humans have a unique one. The best descriptions will usually tell you that a human’s decomposition smell is a sickeningly “sweet” smell. The only time I smelled this smell intensely was in Vietnam. In the tropical heat, decomposition worked fast. Our own dead were zipped into body bags and brought out as quickly as possible, but sometimes not quick enough. Enemy dead were often neglected, especially in more remote areas, and you were reminded of them by the smell whenever you went back through that area. It was a smell that you wished at the time that you could somehow flush and cleanse out of your nostrils, sinuses and skull, but it stayed with you. By the 1990s I had completely forgotten about all of this through the years, especially the fact of the uniqueness of the smell of human decomposition.
.
So now I became convinced that, 25 years after being in Vietnam, the ripe death-smell of this unfortunate woman near Wilderness Park triggered memories of the war somewhere inside my subconscious and completely without my conscious knowledge, thus producing unexplained nightmares. It made me a believer that memories can reside in the mind closely linked to the sense of smell.
.
I began writing this document when I read (on 18 September 2008) the following article in Science Daily online. The linked article is named, “Emotion and Scent Create Lasting Memories – Even in a Sleeping Brain,” and describes experiments on the brain chemistry of mice at the Duke University Medical Center and is published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Implications for other mammals such as humans are clear.
.
It all falls into place and makes perfect sense to me.
.
[Addendum (12 Dec. 2013): Here is a link to news of a new study, reported in Science
Daily online, Sniffing Out Danger: Fearful Memories Can Trigger Heightened Sense of Smell. The original journal article was
published in Science and titled, “Fear Learning Enhances
Neural Responses to Threat-Predictive Sensory Stimuli.”]
.-Zenwind.
.
10 November 2010
Movie Review: The US Marine Corps, Avatar (2009), Aliens (1986), and James Cameron
.
[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
.
I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
.
Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
.
“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
.
Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
.
The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
.
When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
.
When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
.
The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
.
Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
.
Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
.
Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
.
-Zenwind.
.
[This is posted on the Marine Corps Birthday 2010.]
.
I was starting to wonder: what is it with James Cameron and his ongoing respect for the US Marine Corps? He is native Canadian with no military experience, but he has written rather good portrayals of Marines in at least two of his great films. Then I find out that Cameron’s younger brother, David, was in the Corps, and James has the highest respect for Leathernecks (aka, Gyrenes, Jarheads).
.
Cameron was screenwriter/director for Aliens (1986), the second and perhaps best film in that series, and which had Colonial Marines of the future. Al Matthews, the actor that played the Colonial Marine sergeant in this film, was actually a Marine Vietnam War vet. So his dialogue to his Marines after they all come out of cryo-sleep came naturally, namely when he said:
.
“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? … Another glorious day in the Corps! A day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm! Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Corps!”
.
Maybe it is Cameron’s temperament that also makes him feel akin to the Marines – Cameron is an infamous hard-ass on set who demands that things are done with complete perfection. I was particularly impressed with his treatment of Marines in the science fiction film Avatar (2009) in which he was the writer/director.
.
The protagonist of Avatar, Jake Sully, is a disabled veteran Recon Marine whose combat injuries confine him permanently to a wheelchair. He has a chance to join the Avatar Program on the planet Pandora only because an avatar driver’s body (a hybrid of a human mind inside a Pandoran-native humanoid Na’vi body) had been prepared from the DNA of his twin brother. His twin was a Program scientist who just died, and his avatar body had been prepared at great cost, so Jake’s genetic identity with his brother makes him uniquely able to use it. And in an avatar body Jake will be able to walk again. So he is a misplaced warrior thrown into a science program, and yet the wild and dangerous world of Pandora might demand such a warrior spirit.
.
When in his human body in the wheelchair, Jake always wears a T-shirt with the USMC’s Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem. He’s proud. In an early voice-over narrative monologue that defines who he is, he says: “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine; you may be out, but you never lose the attitude.” Ooh rah!
.
When Jake, in his avatar Na’vi body, is brought before the Na’vi tribal leaders, they ask him what he was before as a human, if he was not a scientist. He replies with pride, “I was a Marine,” and then, to further explain this concept to them, he continues, “a … uh … a warrior … of the Jarhead clan.” That was the moment I became a really big fan of James Cameron’s writing.
.
The villain, Col. Quaritch, is Security Director of the Pandora mining operation, heading what is really a mercenary force of tough guys. He is also a veteran Recon Marine, and he is tougher than nails. His dialogue and delivery are priceless. (He is played perfectly by Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals, I thought Lang should have gotten an award for movie “villain of the year” for his performance in Avatar.)
.
Here in the real world of movie critics there has been some misplaced controversy about Cameron’s treatment of the USMC in Avatar, with many people thinking that he is making the Corps look bad through the former-Marine villains such as Col. Quaritch and many of his mercenary thugs. This argument goes thus: the actual USMC strategic doctrine for over a century has been to win over the “hearts and minds” of the indigenous people. To truly win them over. This strategic vision came from the Marine experience of always being a small force landed in hostile places a long way from home, and it evolved into the Small Wars Manual, the bible of counter-insurgency operations. (The Small Wars Manual has consistently been ignored by the Pentagon until it is too late.)
.
Critics of Cameron say that the official policy of villain Col. Quaritch – which is a hostile contempt for the indigenous Na’vi of Pandora – disrespects this USMC vision. But the critics completely miss the point. Hero Jake Sully fully redeems the story in two ways: First, he serves the just cause within this story’s context. Second, he actually is devoted to a Marine-like vision of understanding and working with the indigenous Na’vi. And as a Marine, Jake is solidly brave, wonderfully true, and always faithful.
.
Semper Fi. Enough said right there.
.
-Zenwind.
.
31 October 2010
Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon
.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
.
-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
*
[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
.
-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
*
[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
.
14 October 2010
Book Review: Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination, by Robert Macfarlane (2003)
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
.
Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
.
Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
.
The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
.
In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
.
Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
.
(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
.
Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
.
In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
.
For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
.
Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
.
Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
.
Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
.
Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
.
“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
.
I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
.
Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
.
Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
.
The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
.
In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
.
Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
.
(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
.
Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
.
In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
.
For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
.
Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
.
Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
.
Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
.
Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
.
“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
.
I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
.
-Zenwind.
.
03 August 2010
Book Review: The Terror, by Dan Simmons
.
The Terror (2007) is my favorite Dan Simmons novel and one of my favorite novels ever. (See earlier intro post about Simmons here.) This is historical fiction and horror. It is based on the historic lost Franklin Expedition, a British expedition of two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, sent to look for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic in 1845 under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.
.
Historically, the two ships and all hands were lost without a trace except for the graves of three crewmen and a note left behind. It is still one of the great arctic mysteries. Simmons researched the case, as well as arctic exploration in that age, and then added his own imaginary spin to it. As we read, we experience the deep cold of the six-month arctic night as the ships are frozen into the icepack. Added to this is Eskimo mythology and the associated terrors of the Far North.
.
One reason that I like this book is because of its authentic descriptions of true cold. I have bivouacked out in the cold down to 40-below-zero but never in the amazing deeper cold experienced by these men. While I had lived outside at minus-40 for a week in 1970s gear, these guys had inadequate clothing and gear, and they were starving to death over a long, long time. It gives you the shivers, and this might be a good book to read on oppressively hot summer days. If you read it during a long northern winter, it will take you into a long dark tunnel of terror.
.
I also like the main character, Captain Francis Crozier, historic captain of the HMS Terror and second-in-command of the expedition under Franklin. Crozier was an Irishman, and thus an outsider in the mainly English naval establishment. He was also a melancholic and a substance abuser – much like me in my younger military days.
.
Simmons also gives Crozier memories of alienation from his earliest days, of standing alone outside a village on a winter’s night, looking at the village lights but feeling completely estranged from his community. I had this same winter experience – many, many times while growing up – e.g., standing alone in a frozen pasture, or a wood lot, or on a snowy hilltop above my own native village after dark, watching the snowstorm against the town’s lights, feeling apart from all humanity. The character of Crozier really touched me, and my own experience of expatriate re-birth outside of my native culture makes me appreciate him and the destiny Simmons gives him even more.
.
The only previous literary background required to enrich the reading of this novel is just a minor familiarity with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – and I can provide the context you need right here. The few references in the novel are more of an inside joke. Hobbes was an extreme pessimist and an advocate of completely authoritarian political rule. His most famous work was Leviathan (1651) in which he argued for an extremely strong government because human nature is perversely wild and dangerous.
.
Caveat: I do not agree with Hobbes about human nature, and I am completely opposite him in politics. I advocate little or no government while Hobbes wants absolutism.
.
One of Hobbes’ primary arguments is that the horrible religious warfare of his times was because of too much freedom of religion – too much choice – and that one absolute ruler or ruling group should dictate one religion for all to follow in order to stop the fighting between sects. (But I would say that, while a large amount of religious freedom did encourage the flowering of countless religious sects, it was precisely the mix of government power with religion that caused the insane wars within Christianity in Hobbes' day.)
.
When Crozier is assigned, against his inclination, to conduct a Sunday religious service on his ship, he announces that he will read from “The Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve,” and he reads from the very cynical Hobbes on historical religious flights of fancy from the most ancient of days. That whole episode is – to me – a philosophical joke, one of my favorite passages in the book.
.
In addition to the above, certainly the most famous quote of all from Hobbes’ Leviathan is that, without an absolute government to intimidate and control people, man’s life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Keep that quote in mind, as it identifies Crozier's attitude before his redemption.
.
A final note on this book. I was reading it while waiting for supper at The Saxophone pub in Bangkok and listening to a good jazz band, and I came upon its description of a bonfire on the ice as a “Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.” I checked my calendar, and indeed it was 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, that very night. (“A penny for the old guy.”)
.
I love this book.
.
-Zenwind.
.
The Terror (2007) is my favorite Dan Simmons novel and one of my favorite novels ever. (See earlier intro post about Simmons here.) This is historical fiction and horror. It is based on the historic lost Franklin Expedition, a British expedition of two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, sent to look for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic in 1845 under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin.
.
Historically, the two ships and all hands were lost without a trace except for the graves of three crewmen and a note left behind. It is still one of the great arctic mysteries. Simmons researched the case, as well as arctic exploration in that age, and then added his own imaginary spin to it. As we read, we experience the deep cold of the six-month arctic night as the ships are frozen into the icepack. Added to this is Eskimo mythology and the associated terrors of the Far North.
.
One reason that I like this book is because of its authentic descriptions of true cold. I have bivouacked out in the cold down to 40-below-zero but never in the amazing deeper cold experienced by these men. While I had lived outside at minus-40 for a week in 1970s gear, these guys had inadequate clothing and gear, and they were starving to death over a long, long time. It gives you the shivers, and this might be a good book to read on oppressively hot summer days. If you read it during a long northern winter, it will take you into a long dark tunnel of terror.
.
I also like the main character, Captain Francis Crozier, historic captain of the HMS Terror and second-in-command of the expedition under Franklin. Crozier was an Irishman, and thus an outsider in the mainly English naval establishment. He was also a melancholic and a substance abuser – much like me in my younger military days.
.
Simmons also gives Crozier memories of alienation from his earliest days, of standing alone outside a village on a winter’s night, looking at the village lights but feeling completely estranged from his community. I had this same winter experience – many, many times while growing up – e.g., standing alone in a frozen pasture, or a wood lot, or on a snowy hilltop above my own native village after dark, watching the snowstorm against the town’s lights, feeling apart from all humanity. The character of Crozier really touched me, and my own experience of expatriate re-birth outside of my native culture makes me appreciate him and the destiny Simmons gives him even more.
.
The only previous literary background required to enrich the reading of this novel is just a minor familiarity with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – and I can provide the context you need right here. The few references in the novel are more of an inside joke. Hobbes was an extreme pessimist and an advocate of completely authoritarian political rule. His most famous work was Leviathan (1651) in which he argued for an extremely strong government because human nature is perversely wild and dangerous.
.
Caveat: I do not agree with Hobbes about human nature, and I am completely opposite him in politics. I advocate little or no government while Hobbes wants absolutism.
.
One of Hobbes’ primary arguments is that the horrible religious warfare of his times was because of too much freedom of religion – too much choice – and that one absolute ruler or ruling group should dictate one religion for all to follow in order to stop the fighting between sects. (But I would say that, while a large amount of religious freedom did encourage the flowering of countless religious sects, it was precisely the mix of government power with religion that caused the insane wars within Christianity in Hobbes' day.)
.
When Crozier is assigned, against his inclination, to conduct a Sunday religious service on his ship, he announces that he will read from “The Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve,” and he reads from the very cynical Hobbes on historical religious flights of fancy from the most ancient of days. That whole episode is – to me – a philosophical joke, one of my favorite passages in the book.
.
In addition to the above, certainly the most famous quote of all from Hobbes’ Leviathan is that, without an absolute government to intimidate and control people, man’s life will be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Keep that quote in mind, as it identifies Crozier's attitude before his redemption.
.
A final note on this book. I was reading it while waiting for supper at The Saxophone pub in Bangkok and listening to a good jazz band, and I came upon its description of a bonfire on the ice as a “Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.” I checked my calendar, and indeed it was 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, that very night. (“A penny for the old guy.”)
.
I love this book.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Review: Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
.
The first Dan Simmons works I read were the four big science fiction novels making up his Hyperion Cantos series. This had a lot of background involving the English Romantic poet John Keats. Keats – or a clone of Keats – even appears as a minor character. I had always been a great fan of Keats’ shorter poems, but I had never read his slightly longer attempts at epic poetry in his poems “Hyperion” and “Endymion.” The four novels of this Cantos series are Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Read them in order.
.
The narrative style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also figures into to the beginning of this series, as various characters give their backgrounds during a long journey. One is also reminded of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where everyone tells their tales.
.
Before I started those four books I did some major homework, finding a volume of Keats’ complete poems with biography, extensive commentaries on the poems, selected letters of his, etc. I read his drafts of the epics “Hyperion” and “Endymion” for the first time, and I immersed myself in the world of Keats, ending with his young death of TB in Rome near the Spanish Steps. With this background I enjoyed the Simmons’ novels more. When the Keats clone is in his room near the Spanish Steps, I already know what it looks like. Reading it, homework and all, was a major project which I really enjoyed.
.
The first Dan Simmons works I read were the four big science fiction novels making up his Hyperion Cantos series. This had a lot of background involving the English Romantic poet John Keats. Keats – or a clone of Keats – even appears as a minor character. I had always been a great fan of Keats’ shorter poems, but I had never read his slightly longer attempts at epic poetry in his poems “Hyperion” and “Endymion.” The four novels of this Cantos series are Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Read them in order.
.
The narrative style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also figures into to the beginning of this series, as various characters give their backgrounds during a long journey. One is also reminded of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where everyone tells their tales.
.
Before I started those four books I did some major homework, finding a volume of Keats’ complete poems with biography, extensive commentaries on the poems, selected letters of his, etc. I read his drafts of the epics “Hyperion” and “Endymion” for the first time, and I immersed myself in the world of Keats, ending with his young death of TB in Rome near the Spanish Steps. With this background I enjoyed the Simmons’ novels more. When the Keats clone is in his room near the Spanish Steps, I already know what it looks like. Reading it, homework and all, was a major project which I really enjoyed.
.
01 August 2010
Book Review: Ilium / Olympos, by Dan Simmons
.
One of Dan Simmons’ best is the science fiction double novel, Ilium and Olympos, in which the Greek gods are reincarnated or duplicated as characters on the planet Mars of the future. Mons Olympus, the old volcanic cone on Mars is the highest mountain in the solar system, and a lot of action will happen there in a new Olympos. Action on the battlefield at ancient Troy is featured, with all the Homeric heroes there in this revised story. There are anomalies of time and space in the story, so that over 5,000 years in time and the entire reach of the solar system are involved. You simply will not believe how the stories of both Achilles and Odysseus end up.
.
The background literary context of these two huge books is Homer, most especially The Iliad, but also to some extent The Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Those are the most important sources and are most important to read as background, but Simmons also refers to Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle and to Proust’s multi-volume work In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past. Since certain literary/mythic characters and their stories pop up in these novels, I first refreshed my readings of some of those classics, re-reading The Iliad, The Tempest and surveys of classical mythology. However, I passed on perusing Proust, and I never got a chance to acquire the Nabokov novel. I really enjoyed Ilium and Olympos and recommend them. Read the two in their proper order.
.
One of Dan Simmons’ best is the science fiction double novel, Ilium and Olympos, in which the Greek gods are reincarnated or duplicated as characters on the planet Mars of the future. Mons Olympus, the old volcanic cone on Mars is the highest mountain in the solar system, and a lot of action will happen there in a new Olympos. Action on the battlefield at ancient Troy is featured, with all the Homeric heroes there in this revised story. There are anomalies of time and space in the story, so that over 5,000 years in time and the entire reach of the solar system are involved. You simply will not believe how the stories of both Achilles and Odysseus end up.
.
The background literary context of these two huge books is Homer, most especially The Iliad, but also to some extent The Odyssey, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Those are the most important sources and are most important to read as background, but Simmons also refers to Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ador: A Family Chronicle and to Proust’s multi-volume work In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past. Since certain literary/mythic characters and their stories pop up in these novels, I first refreshed my readings of some of those classics, re-reading The Iliad, The Tempest and surveys of classical mythology. However, I passed on perusing Proust, and I never got a chance to acquire the Nabokov novel. I really enjoyed Ilium and Olympos and recommend them. Read the two in their proper order.
.
Reviews: Dan Simmons' novels
.
Dan Simmons is one hell of a fiction writer and one of my favorites. (I thank Jeff Riggenbach for pointing out his works many years ago.) Simmons writes in many genres: science fiction, historical fiction, horror, fantasy, mysteries and thrillers – and he sometimes mixes several genres in one book. Some of his works stand alone while others are part of larger series, and most of the individual novels are huge. I have only yet read a fraction of his voluminous body of work, but I’ve never been disappointed.
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Simmons excels in “intertexuality,” where his stories and characters often refer back to other works of literature such as Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, etc. I had heard about this aspect of his work, so I have always made sure to first do my homework – i.e., to find out which authors/works are referenced in any one book, and then to try reading those works – before beginning a new Simmons novel. He is richly versed in literature. When he often delves into themes of Classical Antiquity, it is wise to have a reference work on Greek and Roman mythology close by, such as the ones by Bulfinch or Edith Hamilton.
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I will soon review here, separately, some of Simmons’ novels that I’ve read: The Terror, which is my personal favorite; The Hyperion Cantos, consisting of four novels; and Ilium and Olympos, a set of two.
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(About his first novel, The Song of Kali, I’ll only say this here: Don’t read this one unless you have a perversely excessive taste for true horror; Simmons may have gone way over the line with it. One of Simmons' latest novels is Drood, which is concerned with Dickens' last and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It is told from the viewpoint of Wilkie Collins, a friend of and frequent collaborator with Dickens.)
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-Zenwind.
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Dan Simmons is one hell of a fiction writer and one of my favorites. (I thank Jeff Riggenbach for pointing out his works many years ago.) Simmons writes in many genres: science fiction, historical fiction, horror, fantasy, mysteries and thrillers – and he sometimes mixes several genres in one book. Some of his works stand alone while others are part of larger series, and most of the individual novels are huge. I have only yet read a fraction of his voluminous body of work, but I’ve never been disappointed.
.
Simmons excels in “intertexuality,” where his stories and characters often refer back to other works of literature such as Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, etc. I had heard about this aspect of his work, so I have always made sure to first do my homework – i.e., to find out which authors/works are referenced in any one book, and then to try reading those works – before beginning a new Simmons novel. He is richly versed in literature. When he often delves into themes of Classical Antiquity, it is wise to have a reference work on Greek and Roman mythology close by, such as the ones by Bulfinch or Edith Hamilton.
.
I will soon review here, separately, some of Simmons’ novels that I’ve read: The Terror, which is my personal favorite; The Hyperion Cantos, consisting of four novels; and Ilium and Olympos, a set of two.
.
(About his first novel, The Song of Kali, I’ll only say this here: Don’t read this one unless you have a perversely excessive taste for true horror; Simmons may have gone way over the line with it. One of Simmons' latest novels is Drood, which is concerned with Dickens' last and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It is told from the viewpoint of Wilkie Collins, a friend of and frequent collaborator with Dickens.)
.
-Zenwind.
.
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