I was quite pleased when we moved to rural France to discover a quality Tai Chi course offered locally and at an astonishingly reasonable price. For the past three years I’ve been working with our instructor on the Yang style long form, and have learned almost the entirety, up to near the end of part 3, “The Sky.”
I’ve found during this time that I’ve become much more limber and more sensible about my movements and my balance. For nearly the entire three years I’ve had as my morning activity a round of Qi Gong followed by the Tai Chi form, outside by the river weather permitting or in our event space. My instructor wanted to push me a bit so he leant me a copy of this book, which was written by an American, but I read the French edition because of course here we are.
It was a good time to read a book about the internal focus of Tai Chi, because due to a few injuries (right knee, right shoulder, a recurrence of a previously repaired umbilical hernia) I’ve not been keeping up with my practice. In fact I’ve not done the form or even any Qi Gong exercises for two months. My body as a consequence feels its age for the first time in ages.
But I have tried nonetheless to bring the internal practice of Tai Chi into my daily life as I heal and get stronger. Sieh’s book is not revelatory or ground-breaking, but it is clear about topics which are often presented in tedious and confounding ways by overly technical writers. While physically sidelined I found it edifying and quite useful, and I hope to bring Sieh’s wisdom to bear when I get back in form.
It’s funny how much of Sieh’s book about the internal practice of Tai Chi relies on training with partners. It’s not easy to find someone to practice push hands with in the middle of nowhere.
It was just over a year ago that I read Rosson’s Fever House. I really enjoyed that novel and the way it reformatted the familiar zombie apocalypse trope.
I’m sad to report however that volume 2 of the duology is less satisfying. The Devil by Name mostly moves characters around in order to get them in the right place at the right time for the climax. And the climax is sort of Clive Barker rewriting The Stand. Lots of gothic horror and special effects, but a bit rote and too tidy a means of tying up multiple loose ends.
If you read the Game of Thrones novels, you may recall that the fifth novel felt as though Mr. Martin had lost the plot, and was sort of moving an enormous cast of characters around aimlessly as he tried to figure out how to resolve the enormous series of events he’d unfolded, while introducing new characters, cultures, and armies along the way. I think a lack of resolution is in some cases better, and Fever House could have stood alone.
That said, I will read more of Keith Rosson. He’s got skills, and won the Shirley Jackson award for a short fiction collection which sounds right up my alley.
I saw Wings of Desire way back when Netflix used to mail DVDs in envelopes. Later I saw Paris, Texas. These are the Wenders films I heard about back when I was first exploring the renowned auteurs of cinema, and I’ve seen them both a few times. Recently I also saw The American Friend.
Kings of the Road is superior to the other Wenders films I’ve seen. It has the loose plotting and crazy energy of the superior Fellini films, but also the rich raw aesthetics of Herzog or Pasolini. Though it clocks in at nearly 3 hours in length, I found it breezy and entirely captivating on multiple levels.
The two main characters are perhaps not the best most noble people, but they are resilient and imaginative and do their best to be kind in a completely mad society. And though the narrative is loose and a bit naive there is some profound meaning in the dialogue and imagery. There is for example a subtle but inisistent critique of US influence in West Germany with as much context and as many exemplars as a good Tony Judt essay.
So it made me feel deep feels, it made me laugh, and it made me think. Someday I’ll be glad to revisit Im Lauf der Zeit.
It’s autumn and a young man’s fancy turns to…well I’m too old to remember what young men fancy at any time of year. But I fancy reading horror and ghost stories as Halloween looms.
The Elementals is surprisingly well-crafted for an early ’80s mass market horror novel. It’s got a Southern Gothic flair, and without its supernatural elements the book could have succeeded as pop fiction with a literary bent. The families portrayed are Faulknerian, and the individual characters are Flannery O’Connor cute with their humorous quirks and tragic blindnesses. The setting is vivid and swampy and humid, rendered with evocative and stylish description.
The horror however is a bit silly, and didn’t ring true. I prefer subtlety with my haunts and spirits, and the chills here are far too garish and carnivalesque. It’s annoying to see well-rounded and sympathetic characters who do obviously stupid and pointless things contrary to who they are when faced with a crisis. And there is no suspension of disbelief possible with this sort of cartoonish creature. Using a scale likely familiar to those who know Stephen King novels, I’d rate The Elementals as closer in quality to The Tommyknockers than it is to The Dead Zone. But I must also note that McDowell’s prose is superior to King’s.
An Echo of Children has similarites with The Elementals, though they were written 45 years apart. Ramsey Campbell’s latest is also primarily a novel about a family in crisis, and its one of his best from the past two decades. Campbell is a personal favorite of mine, but many of the novels from the second half of his career have been interesting failures. I found this one compellkng enough to read nearly straight through.
Allan and Coral Clarendon move with their young son Dean from a crime-ridden neighborhood into a brand new house near the shore. Once they are installed in the new place, both sets of Dean’s grandparents arrive to visit for a weekend. Allan’s parents Jude and Thom note that Dean’s creativity and freedom is severely constrained in ways they find objectionable as parents and former teachers. Dean has an “imaginary” friend called Heady who promises to protect Dean from harm. All four grandparents are charmed by Dean and his friend until Jude and Thom experience Heady’s presence first-hand.
After a few interections with neighbors, a memory Thom has repressed returns, leading Jude to do some internet research. What Jude finds out about the neighborhood’s history, and in particular about Allan and Coral’s house, convinces her that Dean is in immediate danger. There is evidence that Carol and Allan are perhaps doing more than limiting Dean’s potential with helicopter parenting, and have strayed into psychological and physical abuse. They have pulled him from school and begin indoctrinating him with a dour form of Christianity which they’d never followed before. Jude commits herself to rescuing her young grandson, but is what she’s uncovered the truth? Or is her paranoid imagination coupled with senility the source of the horror?
Campbell is a fine writer and perhaps the greatest prose stylist in modern horror. He has the skills to keep the reader on edge as Jude’s potential unreliability competes with the possibility of an actual haunting in the reader’s mind. This one was more to my taste.
I’d thought as a long-time fan of horror that I was at least aware of all the classics of the genre. Until a few months ago I’d never heard of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and what I read about it intrigued me sufficiently that when I was able to score a digital version for under 2 bucks I jumped at the chance. The novel was quite an unpleasant surprise.
There’s something particularly disturbing about a child who is pure evil. And when it’s a twin the creepiness is dialed up a few notches.
Niles and Holland Perry lead a bucolic life on a rural estate in New England. They play together and put on dramatic shows and do magic tricks. There’s something off about Holland however; he is more than mischievous, and his behavior descends from adolescent rabble-rousing to cruel and reprehensible acts. Their grandmother Ada is a Russian immigrant who fled the Bolsheviks. She tells them folk tales and bits of family lore from the old country–and introduces them to The Game, which is a sort of hypnotic regression wherein the observer becomes entangled mystically with the observed. Needless to say, The Game comes to have dire consequences for the boys.
Tryon has skills. He writes elegant and sophisticated prose. I’d place him based on this one novel right up with Shirley Jackson and M. R. James as a writer of literary merit beyond genre category. The structure of the novel has a few layers of narrative, and it took a bit of sussing out to realize the clever and unreliable games Tryon was playing. Very Turn of the Screw trickiness afoot here.
But despite its merits as a work of literature, this is still a horror novel, and it delivers the goods. I didn’t see The Twist until it came, which was a great surprise, and I was floored by the utterly appalling climax.
Richard Powers’ latest is another complex and tightly structured novel spanning nearly a century. There are two primary narrative strands woven together like a double helix, one first-person stream relayed by Todd Keane, an early social media and AI innovator from Chicago, and the other a third-person tale focused on Evelyn Beaulieu, a French Canadian whose father develops early deep diving technology and who becomes herself a famous deep sea explorer and renowned scientist. We jump back and forward a bit in time between these two strands as the characters each end up based in California for their work and eventually they find themselves meeting in Makatea, a tiny island in French Polynesia.
It is a credit to Powers’ strengths as a novelist that he can manage to hold all this together geographically and temporally. Despite the weight of its themes and its saturation with multiple branches of scientific inquiry, Playgroundmanages to be a pure delight, an engaging and thoroughly breezy read.
Todd Keanes comes from wealth. His father is a hardscrabble financier and trader who builds a fortune. Todd ends up at the elite Jesuit private school from which his father graduated, and there he meets Rafi Young, a brilliant and militant young Black scholar and poet who won a scholarship endowed by Todd’s father. The first-person narration by Todd is our window on Rafi’s world–his tragic family situation, his financial struggles, his absolutely unique genius. The two challenge each other intellectually and play chess at first and then Go. It is their interest in games and gaming that give Todd the inspiration for his eventual social media platform Playground, which makes him a billionaire. Rafi’s burning creativity provides a lot of the ideation behind Todd’s innovations, and Rafi’s interest in a Russian philosopher who believed humans would inevitably discover or invent a technology of immortality is hugely influential on Todd’s eventual AI push. But as often happens to intense youthful friendships, Todd’s and Rafi’s falls apart as they head off on different paths–Todd to Silicon Valley, Rafi into graduate work in the Humanities. Rafi also meets and falls in love with a young artist from Makatea.
One of Todd’s earliest passions was the ocean, said passion first fired when he read a book by Evelyn Beaulieu called “Clearly it is Ocean.” Evelyn’s story begins when her father tests out a deep diving apparatus by putting her inside of it and throwing her into a deep pool at an engineering facility. After this she begins using his gear to explore the ocean and becomes many firsts: first woman accepted into an exclusive graduate oceanography program, first woman to join a months-long diving expedition, one of the first women to live in an underwater facility run by NASA. Like Jacques Cousteau, she is a lyrical documenter of the deep. And like Richard Attenborough, she sees in her lifetime the dire impact of humans on the environment and creatures she loves. We see her struggle with being a wife and a mother when her primary motive is her work, and how challenging it is to escape the traditional boundaries set on her gender by centuries of patriarchal thinking. It is one of Evelyne’s great realisations through her decades of diving and close observation that sea creatures spend a lot of time playing. Play recurs over and over as a major theme in the book, and for Evelyn and Todd their work is more play or a challenging game than it is drudgery.
I won’t go into the profound final fifth of the novel to avoid spoilers, but there are some surprises and interesting ambiguities. If you’re familiar with Ray Kurzweil a few strange and confounding discrepencies in the novel, nearly along the lines of magical realism, might become more clear. These involve the dates characters died, and whether they are actually alive in a traditional sense of being alive during parts of the story. Also, if you’ve read any Philip K. Dick, particularly the novel Ubik, you may grasp what is implied about some of the characters and indeed the setting of Playground’s climax. Also there are some Doctor Frankenstein allusions when we discover exactly to whom–or to what–Todd Keane has been narrating his tale.
There is some truly gorgeous writing about the ocean in this novel. One sequence about a cuttlefish is particularly lovely. It struck me as familiar, and sure enough Powers lists in his sources Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds as the genesis of that scene. I read the book a decade back, and can’t recommend it enough. I should also note that this novel is the second I’ve read lately featuring the astonishing development in AI and its ability to defeat the best human players of chess and Go, the first being Benjamin Labutut’s The Maniac. Sign of the times, I guess?
I’m also pleased to note that Playground features a female scientist, as did Powers’ previous masterpiece The Overstory. At a time when dark forces in the USA are insisting that women in leadership or highly skilled professional roles must be “DEI hires,” and that women should focus instead on birthing and raising children and stay at home, it is important that writers continue to show otherwise.
I’ve read a handful of Burroughs novels and also Casey Rae’s entertaining and informative William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n Roll. I think this is easily my favorite novel by the Beat icon. It is ridiculous, absurd, wholly pointless, unrepentently filthy, and a great deal of fun.
In Casey Rae’s examination of Burroughs I learned about his “cut-up” method of creation, splicing and collaging multiple texts and ideas together from disparate sources to forge something new. Cities of the Red Night samples deep cuts from across the 20th century: we get Crowley sex magic, pulp noir and sci-fi and horror, Mexican archaeology, chasms of time and ancient gods and civilizations borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft, political chicanary and revolutionary rhetoric, lots of guns and cannons and far-out weaponry, drugs, viruses, and oodles of hot gay sex featuring an asphyxiation fetish.
What is the novel about? Well, there is a doctor fighting a viral outbreak, and then a private dick investigating the disappearance of a young lad whose head ends up in a crate bound for Peru, a pirate revolution in Colombia and Panama, a war between humans and mutants in ancient vanished cities, conspiring conspirators doing conspiracies…it’s about so much it’s practically about nothing. Some of the characters shift from modern era New York to thousands of years ago and then to the jungles of 18th century South America before suddenly getting onto a starship in the distant future. At one point a main character wakes up in a rehab clinic and it appears the entire novel was a hallucination; but it might actually be that he could access actual reality in his comatose state and he’s only waking up into the shared illusion we call reality.
I mean it doesn’t matter what it means or if it means anything at all. Enjoy the ride!
I will note that I’ve likely read a couple thousand novels, and that this one has more ejaculations than all of the other novels I’ve read combined. And that includes a couple long books by the Marquis de Sade, so it’s an impressive number of money shots. So the novel could perhaps be classed as a sort of cartoonish pornography. Keep that in mind if you choose to read it.
Woke a bit before 6 am this morning. Drank coffee outside on the porch and read an essay in Harper’s by Lydia Davis. She’s an author I’ve encountered many times in journals and magazines, and I’m pretty sure I have a story collection or two of hers somewhere? At any rate she’s writing about observation and the compulsion to write about her observations. She’s got a singular style and voice in her fiction and non-fiction, and does a lot of translation from the French–in fact I’m sure I read an essay by her about French translation at some point. I’m distracted while reading and observing our two cats who are climbing on me one minute, then chasing lizards the next. Lydia Davis is observing cows in her essay, and while I’m reading I hear a horrible guttural stegasaurus groan which I can assume is one of our goats even though it’s a new sound. The male has climbed along a narrow ledge atop a wall which has a metal chain-link fence built into it, at the top of which is a kiwi vine. While standing stretched out full length on his hind hooves to nibble kiwi leaves his hooves slipped off the wall. I rush over to find him being strangled by the kiwi vines with his horns stuck in the fence. I free his horns as he re-positions his hooves on the wall and immediately he is contentedly munching kiwi leaves again as if nothing happened.
At about 8 am guests who’ve rented one of our gite appartements–The Studio–check out. They are two cyclists off to their next destination after a one-night stay in Treignac. I pause my reading to strip down the bed and turnover the apartment for the next guests. Just as I finish hanging the clean sheets and towels from the washer our next guests arrive. They’ve rented The Loft gite for a daytime sleep-over as they are driveing some horrid 24-hour route. They check in at 8:05 and are planning to leave at 5pm. I wonder if they are actually going to sleep or if they are going to fuck. It’s our first overday stay as opposed to overnight stay. And, to complictate things we have a check-in in the same apartment 45 minutes after they are planning to leave. Things will be tight. We are used to it, however, as business has been brisk this year since January.
After checking in the new guests I hear the guttural scream again, and the male goat is once more dangling in the air with his throat tangled in kiwi vines. I free him once more.
I sit again and finish the Lydia Davis piece and then polish off the rest of the magazine. I realize I rarely write about day-to-day stuff anymore the way I used to on a previous and much more successful blog. Has my Muse deserted me? Have I lost interest? On the desk in my office is a pile of language books I put out back in February–I was adamant that I was going to do a daily study/writing routine and that immediately fell apart. Perhaps I’ll get it back together in the fall after tourist season quiets down.
I wanted to refresh my general knowledge of French history before focusing in detail on a few eras, regions, and personalities. A History of France seemed a good place to start. John Julius Norwich had written quite readable histories of Byzantium and European monarchs, and his father Duff Cooper was Churchill’s liason with the Free French during WW2, and later was Ambassador to France from the UK. I thought this book merited a try.
There is way too much history in this short and readable history. We start with Julius Ceasar and his campaigns in Gaul, and progress through 2000 years up to Charles DeGaulle. But this is a fun read, written by a lifelong Francophile, and it did what I hoped it would–reminded me of the proper sequencing of early monarchs and refreshed my knowledge of the 100 years war and 30 years war and the long deeply intertwined relationship of France and England. The cast of characters is immense of course, and Norwich is particularly good at bringing them to life, from Eleanor of Acquitaine and her sons to Joan of Arc to Napolean 3.
I must say that even immediately upon finishing the book I can’t differentiate all the King Louises and King Charleses. There are too many of them to remember. But Norwich brings them to life and situates them in the context of their times and analyzes their impact on the entirety of French and European history.
Like many English (and Americans) of his era he seems to truly admire but also to have not inconsiderable contempt for Charles de Gaulle. But a historian worth his or her salt can hold two contrary opinions in his or her mind at once and still manage to get the job done. I had to laugh out loud when De Gaulle tells Churchill that the French people regard him as a reincarnation of Joan of Arc, and Churchill says “we had to burn the first one.” History is so much fun, except when you have to live through it.
Brian Aspinwall becomes at age 27 a teacher at a prestigious private boys’ school in New England. He is recruited suddenly in 1939 to fill in for a master who has gone off to Canada to enlist in the RAF. It is primarily through Brian’s diary that we learn about the school Justin Martyr and its famous founder Reverend Francis Prescott. Immediately Aspinwall is awestruck by Prescott and comes to admire him and his accomplishments. He seeks to understand what makes Prescott and his world-class upper crust school tick, and The Rector of Justin takes off.
Aspinwall seems surprised to learn that Prescott is an intellectual and a progressive given the focus on sports, strict discipline, and religious tradition at the school. But many more surprises await. As the novel unspools we learn from other sources who come into Aspinwall’s orbit. Eventually Aspinwall is given files and documents by others and he takes on the task of possibly writing Prescott’s biography.
The book is breezy and warmly inviting, despite its substantial and ethically weighty themes. I found it an absolute pleasure. The characters are all interesting, and in particular the Rector himself. There are hints that Justin Martyr was founded out of some dark repressed desires. The WASP identity of the school proves problematic later on as Prescott has an epiphany about the kind of people running the board at his school, and the true values of the wealthy and influential class who send their kids to Justin Martyr. I could in fact trace many of the concerns Reverend Prescott has about his students and their morals down to the ethical catastrophe in current US politics.
Because the novel is from the 60s but set in the 30s and 40s we get groovy stuff intellectuals were into at the time, like Freud. The novel is saturated by Henry James but is not as dense and soupy as The Master’s.
I’d previously read only one other novel by Auchincloss–The Book Class. I remember quite liking that one but nothing about it has stuck with me after 3 decades. I do recall that both novels were given to me by Dan Bouchard in a box of remainders in perhaps ’94? I still have one more book by Auchincloss on the shelf–a collection of short fiction. I look forward to it.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 