Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Bury Me Deep

Bury Me Deep – Harold Q. Masur

Woo-hoo, this 1947 mystery has a humdinger of an opening scene. Returning from a business trip in Florida, lawyer Scott Jordan enters his New York City apartment. On his couch he finds a bodacious and scantily-clad blonde, listening to his radio and sipping his brandy from his snifter. But Scott smells a rat and bundles the boozy beauty into a taxi. The honey turns up dead, embroiling Scott with iffy lawyers, snarky cops, dense bully boys, a rich girl that wants to be a Broadway star and her sleazy singing coach, a drunken bon vivant and his angry wife, a smooth villain, and a snow bunny. Scott also finds the love of his life. As if the cast of scores was not enough to grab and hold our interest, the episodic action includes poisoning, a fatal car accident, shootings, and assorted fisticuffs.

A contemporary critic summed up this novel with this telegram of a review, “Fast and tough by rote but played so effectively that it slips past the eyes.” This is true. Like a noir movie from the same period, this mystery is simultaneously realistic and implausible. The hard-boiled characters strike the same old poses and their capers are pretty zany. The reader gets the feeling that in this first novel, the writer is jamming in every character and plot twist he can think of, in the most shiny prose possible. It’s appealing as a glittering, fast-moving story. I won’t remember it after a month.

I felt Raymond Chandler’s influence on Masur. For example, Masur describes in dazzling expressions  - “Broadway had pulsed into neon-glaring night life. Swollen throngs milled restlessly with a rapacious appetite for pleasure. Box-office windows spawned long queues, and the traffic din was a steady roar in your ears.”

Released in the same year as the notorious I, The Jury, this best-selling novel is regarded as “a cut above many of the American detective novels churned out at the end of the Second World War.”  Masur later wrote nine mysteries starring lawyer Scott Jordan. Masur once described Jordan: “The series character, Scott Jordan, a New York attorney, was first conceived to fall somewhere between Perry Mason and Archie Goodwin . . . with the dash and insouciance of Rex Stout’s Archie.” Therefore, readers that like the novels of Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner would like Masur’s work.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Mount TBR #47

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Big Knockover and Other Stories – Dashiell Hammett

Hammet was a master of PI fiction in the 1920s. These long stories star The Continental Operative, the nameless detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency. The writing is lucid, the tone hard-boiled and the settings realistic.

The Gutting of Couffignal (1925). The Op is employed by a rich dude to guard the presents at the wedding reception of the rich dude’s daughter.  An audacious attack by a gang of robbers nets millions in booty. His attempt to recruit the locals on the exclusive island fails since "You can't fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists."

Fly Paper (1929). A debutante hangs out with the wrong people and finds that living on the edge with violence-prone knuckle-walkers is to her taste. The Op lands right in the middle of four marriages that are all rotten in unique ways. This story also shows Hammett’s penchant and supreme ability to set a large number of characters to bounce off each other.

The Scorched Face (1925). The Op is assigned to find two missing daughters. He uncovers evidence that connects a many socialite suicides and disappearances. The subtext of unbridled sex and its unfortunate consequences for vulnerable people – especially women - reflect an unease many people felt in the 1920s as Victorian mores were discarded.

This King Business (1928). The Op is sent to a Balkan country to extricate the wayward son of a rich guy. The son has found himself bankrolling a revolution for a crew of wily Slavs. The treatment of freebooting – i.e., funding coups out of sheer ignorance and misguided adventure and idealism – holds powerful interest in this story.

The Gatewood Caper (1923). Another wayward daughter case. It’s good, but feels half-done, as if its writing were rushed, that the writer should’ve revised a couple more times.. The setting of the Pacific Northwest – lumbering land – is persuasive.

Dead Yellow Women (1925). Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Op and a Master Chinese Tong Boss match wits. In places it feels like a satire of a Yellow Peril story. The description of the maze-like interior of the criminal mastermind’s mansion is a tour de force.

Corkscrew (1925). The Op is a fish out of water when he assigned to clean up remote Corkscrew, Arizona. This ought to remind the astute reader of the masterwork Red Harvest. A gunslinger remarks, “A hombre might guess that you was playing the Circle H. A. R. against Bardell’s crew, encouraging each side to eat up the other, and save you the trouble.” The Op replies, “You could be either right or wrong. Do you think that’d be a dumb play?”

Tulip (1952) is a fragment of an autobiographical novel Hammett attempted near the end of life. Not consistently convincing as fiction, it at least presents Hammett’s ideas about literary form and content.

The Big Knockover (1927). Another audacious crime – the robbery of two banks at the same time. Unlikely that such an operation could be planned as carefully as the story would have it, but it has a lot of action and witty dialogue.

106,000 Blood Money (1927). This presents the sequelae The Big Knockover. Like many aftermath stories, it is less satisfying than the original, because the characters are made of cardboard. With hinges.


Thursday, September 21, 2017

Mount TBR #46

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene (editor)

In 1956, Grove Books published this collection, which gives an excellent overview of Japanese literature from the Meiji era to just after WWII. Donald Keene was the editor and translators include luminaries such Ivan Morris, Edward Seidensticker, Howard Hibbett, and Keene himself.

Kanagaki Robun’s “The Beefeater” exemplifies the wariness of Meiji era intellectuals about Westerners and Western ways. Traditional Japanese people were influenced by Buddhism which prohibited eating beef so Kanagaki Robun mocked the beefeaters in this story as reprehensible and corrupt.

Hattori Busho’s The Western Peep Show gives an incongruous feeling because it treats a gaudy Western product in ponderous Chinesey prose. It must have been a bear to translate, but I think it comes off believably.
               
Kawatake Mokuami’s The Thieves is the last act of a Kabuki play. Despite the tried and true theme of “virtue praised and vice castigated” this is interesting for its rarity value. How often do we read Kabuki plays?
               
Keene includes translations of belles lettres such as waka, haiku, modern poetry in Chinese, and critic Tsubouchi Shoyo’s essay The Essence of the Novel.

Included is a wonderful excerpt from Futabatei Shimei’s unfinished novel The Drifting Cloud. Described as Japan’s first modern novel, it follows the adventures of four characters. Bunzo is an immature 23-year-old who is canned from his cushy government job because he doesn’t kowtow to his bosses. His landlady Omasa castigates him for his job woes because she wanted her daughter Osei to marry him. Like a hapless neurotic in a Natsume Soseki novel, Bunzo wants Osei but does not do anything to attract her because he just wants her to fall into this lap. But he hates it when she seems to favor the dynamic Noboru, a hearty colleague of Bunzo.             

Combining slice of life proletarian themed and coming of age story is Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up. A long story set in the late 1890s in Asakusa and the Yoshiwara, the main characters are teens growing up, gradually losing their liberty to the grind of the adult working class world.

Kunikida Doppo’s Old Gen is the saddest story I’ve read in a year that has included Chekhov. 'Old Gen, set in the countryside abutting on the sea, portrays the tragedy of a ferryman doomed to lose his family, both natural and adopted.
               
The excerpt from Natsume Soseki’s novel Botchan has our unlikely hero, the titular character who’s the narrator, taking his leave from his too-loyal maid and worshipper. He is hilariously clueless about other people, a narcissist for whom other people are just weird shadows. This classic novel ought to be read by anybody into Japan. So beloved was Soseki that he was pictured on the thousand-yen note for years and years.
               
Shimazaki Toson wrote the 1906 novel The Broken Commandment about a young teacher whose outcast father made him promise to keep his burakumin origins secret.The excerpt, a moving one, covers the teacher’s attendance at his father’s funeral back in the old hometown. Written in the naturalist style, it is both persuasive in tone (sadness) and vivid in setting. This makes the reader want to hunt up the entire novel.

Tayama Katai’s One Soldier is another example valuable for not only for its literary merit but its scarcity. Where else can read war stories, written from a different point of view, about a war faraway in time (the late 19th century), place (Manchuria), and origins (The Russo-Japanese war)? It sums up the experience of the infantry soldier, “It hurts! It hurts! It hurts.”

Nagai Kafu’s The River Sumida is a novella that captures his characteristic elegiac tone. At first the usual sad sack protagonist put me off, thus reminding us the reader should be the right state of mind (e.g., openness, tolerance for ambiguity) for Nagai Kafu and Natsume Soseki. But I was eventually quite taken with the mood and theme. In very few pages considering the writer’s large ambition, Nagai Kafu shows changes in a teenager and in society itself. 
               
Ishikawa Takuboku, in The Romaji Diary, explores a writer’s introspection concerning his failure to create as an artist and his failure to fulfill the responsibilities of a wife, husband, and son. An interesting personal document, but I wonder if it’s really literature, given all the “poor poor pitiful me” stuff.
               
The Wild Goose is an excerpt from the novel of the same name by the very serious Mori Ogai. Bored with his sour wife and moneylending business, Suezo takes Otama as a mistress. Otama feels responsible for her aging widower father so her need for money to do so forces her into being a kept woman. This excerpt covers her painful realization that the neighborhood knows the situation and is scandalized.

Izumi Kyoka’s A Tale of Three Who Were Blind is a supernatural story written in a romantic and florid style. Again, for pure novelty, it’s worth reading as an example of a kind of tale popular in the Edo period, with elements of Chinese ghost stories and native Japanese puritanism. Very gothic, well worth reading for people wondering about the roots of Japanese horror stories.
               
Naka Kansuke’s Sanctuary is an excerpt from his well-regarded memoir of growing up in Meiji era Japan, The Silver Spoon. This author was known for his depictions of childhood.
               
Shiga Naoya’s 1913 story Han’s Crime calls to mind to mind the theme of ambiguity and the futility of ever knowing what really happened in a complex incident, similar to the theme of Rashomon by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. A psychologically acute story.
               
Shiga Naoya’s At Kinosaki is another probe into the psychological state of a man who stays in the country to recover from a traffic accident. He comes to the patient realization that death is just a natural part of life, not something to be feared but prepared for.

In Kikuchi Kan’s The Madman on the Roof, from 1916, all kinds of Japanese tensions make an appearance: ambivalent attitudes toward the cognitively disabled and ancient versus modern attitudes toward supernatural explanations. I grant a lot is packed into a short short story, but to me, Kan is overwrought.
               
Kume Masao’s The Tiger, I gather, is an example of the touching heart-warming story that made him popular in his time. I really liked the Asakusa setting, but the tone is blubbery.

The two stories in this collection by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Kesa and Morito, and Hell Screen, are fine examples of this great writer’s work. Both are grim and gloomy and macabre as all get-out. His writing is so intense and odd that a reader has to wonder if he really did inherit his mother’s mental disturbances and if writing relieved or released his personal devils.

Kobayashi Takiji’s The Cannery Boat is a grim story of proletarians exploited out of greed and sadism. As literature, it doesn’t work, but as document of how modernization and capitalist socio-economics has worked common people over not only Japan but just about everywhere, it works. In 1933, for his union activities, Kobayashi was yanked out of rally to unionize fishery workers, taken to Tsukiji Police Station, and tortured to death by the secret police.

Yokomitsu Riichi: Time. Powerfully written quest story filled with misery and suffused with Buddhist sense of life as suffering. Awful things happen to a group of stranded players as they escape paying a lodging bill, such that when you figure nothing could be worse, it gets worse.      

Hino Ashihei’s Earth and Soldiers an encouragement of the gratitude the reader should feel at the sacrifices of soldiers implementing Japan’s plan to convert China into a vast slave labor camp. As I’ve said above, where else are we going to read something so unusual? It also confirms us in our dark suspicion that some writers feel they have to put literature to dubious purposes, like persuading people aggressive war against a weak neighbor is a commendable thing.

Kawabata Yasunari’s The Mole refers neither to a spy nor to a burrowing animal but to, as readers familiar with Kawabata’s thing about skin will readily guess, the blemish or birthmark kind of mole. Sigh. Since 1980, I’ve read most of his novels and more short stories than I can count, and next to his themes of modernity vs. traditional, desire and regret, there’s always something about female skin. Always.

The Firefly Hunt is a pretty excerpt from Tanizaki Junichiro’s beautiful novel Sasameyuki a.k.a The Makioka Sisters. People seriously into Japan must find a comfy position with good light and enter the world of The Makioka Sisters.

Tanizaki Junichiro’s The Mother of Captain Shigemoto reminds us that Tanizaki had a macabre and decadent streak as wide as Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s. It takes place in Genji-era Kyoto, but its graveyards and corpses are a far cry from Murasaki’s pretty rooms and Niou’s ritzy palaces. It reminds us of the Zen/Stoic thing that such extremes naturally occur in the word. I sternly warn squeamish readers off, like Mr. Halloran warning Danny not to enter Room 237. But this is heady stuff:

Those who have not seen the truth are stirred to the deepest covetousness by that which seems of good quality, and their resentment is not small at the rag that seems the opposite; the fine and the base may change, but that from which arises the cycle of birth and rebirth is eternal. … How pitiful, how profitless are worldly illusions. One can but think that only the trivia of a dream cause men to look with dread on resting in the eternal.

Dazai Osamu: Villon’s Wife. Another exploration of artist as brute, along the lines of Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Nabokhov’s Humbert Humbert, and lots of Japanese modernists.         

Hayashi Fumiko’s Tokyo . Again with Shitamachi and Asakusa as the setting, a WW2 widow struggles to not actually have to starve. A moving story.  She died too young at 47, in 1951.

Omi is an excerpt from Mishima Yukio’s gay novel Confessions of a Mask. Kochan narrates an incident in which his love object, the rugged Omi, senses that something is odd about the schoolboy adoration of the weakling Kochan. That Mishima could write like a barn afire in only his early twenties boggles the mind.


In conclusion, I urge readers to read short stories and give them their due. That is, read one and then do something that will space you out and give you room to think about it. Read one, do dishes, think about the story. Read one, get on the elliptical, think about the story. Read one, sit and do nothing but think about the story. Read one, watch grass grow, water evaporate, laundry spin, and think about the story. Note that worthwhile spacing out activities disengage you from screens. To paraphrase Manoush Zomorodi, you have to go through pain and discomfort and boredom to get to get to your imagination, your dreams, your mystery that’s only yours, that “whatever it is” which will help you fathom the story beyond what happened, beyond empathy, to what the story means to you. 

Saturday, September 16, 2017

The Eighties: Best Tunes

Kids these days are forever being snarky about music in the 1980s.

They can get lost.

The early 1980s had me janitoring, the middle saw me in grad school, and from 1986 to 1992 I was teaching English in Okinawa and listening to the Far East Network, a much more diverse station than the armed forces radio service in Tokyo. When I think of the 1980s, I think of these songs. 

·         Hold Me Now – Thompson Twins. Hypnotic hook.
·         Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant. Dance, I told you, Dance!
·         Sweet Dreams – Eurythmics. Dubious generalizations re human nature but compelling song.
·         White Wedding - Billy Idol. I'm told Billy was a nice guy until two hours before show time and then he'd start sneering a lot, putting on his show face.
·         Flying in a Blue Dream - Joe Satriani. Whadda hook, stay in your frickin’ head all day.
·         West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys. Languid boredom but peppy, an odd combo.
·         Kyrie - Mr. Mister. Another hypnotic hook which saves kind of a lame song. How do the English do it?
·         Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung. Everybody up-chuck tonight! At the end of the working day by the elevators to get the hell out,  I sometimes ask people if they're going to wang chung tonight. Yeah, I get stared at.
·         Sweet Child O' Mine - Guns N' Roses. No escaping this song the year it was released.
·         She Drives Me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals. Intense, calling to mind Motown but better.
·         Walk Like An Egyptian – Bangles. Fun.
·         Never Gonna Give You Up – Rick Astley. Never had a big problem with this groovy little tune until y’all made it so ironic and all.
·         Circle in the Sand - Belinda Carlisle. A guilty pleasure.
·         You Make Heaven a Place on Earth - Belinda Carlisle. The only artist here twice. I feel really guilty now. But there's no denying the Abba-type wall of sound
·         How Will I Know - Whitney Houston. Lotsa energy and she's so pretty too.
·         Material Girl - Madonna. She says it's the bucks but she still leaves with the poor producer Keith Carradine who wins her with a little romancing.
·         Little Lies - Fleetwood Mac. Only cuz it reminded me of Rumours.
·         Heat of the Moment – Asia. Another ditty from which there was no escape.
·         Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears. More dubious generalizations, but haunting. A good song to shoot baskets by.
·         Girls Just Want to Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper. In grad school, I knew a guy that looked just like the dude with the moustache and glasses. 
·         Dancing in the Dark - Bruce Springsteen. A good song to spin by nowadays.
·         Sharp Dressed Man – ZZ Top. Classic video, classic guy's song.
·         Addicted to Love - Robert Palmer. Still hear this one at least once a week somewhere.
·         Human - The Human League. Cool synth pop. Still works for me but I'm a romantic.
·         Call Me – Blondie. Early Eighties, yes? A rocker.
·         Harden My Heart - Quarterflash. Lotsa style.
·         Take On Me - a-ha. Best video ever; both leads very 1980s good-looking. So how this song became a joke is beyond me. I don’t even want to know why. I don't want to understand people who weren't around at the time!

No Duran Duran is not an oversight. So shoot me.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic

This is a unique travel book by Redmond O'Hanlon, who is famous for his books about Borneo and the Amazon. The dangers faced by miners make the news, but we don't hear often about the hazards in a day's work of loggers and commercial fishermen on trawlers. Without really knowing what he was getting into (as usual), O'Hanlon starts the trip with descriptions of evolution and fish, his main interests. But soon it becomes an account of pain, fright, and anxiety. Redmond and the crew suffer from sleep deprivation, which leads to mood swings, mean spiritedness, delusions, and a profound sense of claustrophobia. During the huge storms, the physical risk is braining yourself after being tossed against a wall or down stairs. The last part is told in a stream of consciousness style that cannot be read easily. Recommended.     

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Mount TBR #45

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Money from Holme – Michael Innes

Up and coming painter Sebastian Holme was killed in an African revolution. So says the catalogue for the exhibition and sale of his paintings on behalf of the widow, Hedda Holme. The art dealer is Hildebert Braunkopf, whose “injured innocence” act is a hoot. Readers of One Man Show (an Appleby mystery) will be pleased by more examples of the scamp Braunkopf’s malaprops: “Aha, with this authentink criminous fraud, you have met your Paddington, my friend.”

Holme, however, turns up at the sale disguised in a beard. Mervyn Cheel spots him and forces him into a conspiracy.  Cheel, as failed painter of abstract pointillist pictures, has taken to writing art criticism for provincial papers. Cheel is cunning and devious besides being an entitled Tory and bottom pincher. He totally gets what he deserves by the end at the hands of hustlers about as bad as himself.

This 1964 novel is not really a mystery but rather a crime novel. It’s slim, good reading for a plane, a hotel room, or waiting room. The vocabulary is erudite, the allusions right up the alley of an English major. If a reader liked the Michael Innes novels listed below, she’ll like this one.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Mount TBR #44

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Who Killed Zebedee? – Wilkie Collins

This volume collects an 1881 short story “Who Killed Zebedee?” and an 1874 novella “John Jago’s Ghost” a.k.a. “The Dead Alive.” Both are examples of detective fiction pioneered by Collins in his more well-known long novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White. These are well-worth reading for fans of Collins who enjoy his realistic settings and dialogue, melodramatic plots, sympathetic treatment of women and vulnerable members of society, and jabs and thrusts against hypocritical conventions.

Where to find them:

Monday, September 4, 2017

Labor Day, 2017

It's Labor Day, a holiday. Let's loaf around. Be idle.

Chuang Tzu – translated by Burton Watson (0231105959); by Martin Palmer and Elizabeth Breuilly (014045537X); and by Lin Yutang

The world has looked sick, sad, and falling down a rabbit hole from time immemorial. In traditional China, Confucius advised people who were into examining life to adapt ways to achieve morality in private and public relationships. In his practical and utilitarian philosophy, he recommended developing one’s sense of righteousness and benevolence by performing rites and ceremonies in the correct manner.

Lao-tse founded Taoism. He granted the importance of righteousness but derided Confucian rites and ceremonies as useless wastes of time. Some assert that it was a Taoist monk who coined the maxim popularized by Reinhold Niebuhr "Strive to develop the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Another Taoist, Chuang Tzu, seconded the idea that we have to accept people, places, events and situations that have no remedy. The ideal life revolves around simple pleasures, whatever we take them to be, but pursued in such a way that they don’t shorten our allotted span of years. Writing for scholars who were either fed up with running petty fiefs or drummed out of their administrative jobs in disgrace, Chuang Tzu advocated keeping a low profile in order to avoid trouble with fame, the vexations of office, and arbitrary superiors , since all of these (and more, endlessly) tend to upset self-control and level-headedness.

Anticipating Carl Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive self-regard and Albert Ellis’ concept of unconditional self-acceptance, Chuang Tzu suggests that we go easy on ourselves and quit demanding that life be anything other than what it is or that other people be smarter or more ethical than they can possibly be. If there were such a thing as ethics between human beings, said mystery writer Craig Rice, there would be no need for lawyers. Chuang Tzu has such cynical expectations about human behavior that he feels profound compassion for us people that can’t help being what we are, especially in terms of greed, lust, and anger. Not so much "Forgive them for they know not what they do," but "Bless their little hearts for they know not what they do."

It’s fun to read Chuang Tzu. He’s got a sense of humor, which makes him a rarity like Epictetus, i.e, a funny philosopher. He is irreverent about the limitations of logic and language, and power and the nitwit bullies attracted to ruling and leadership. He deflates the pompousness of the Confucians. He feels a merry derision for conventional wisdom and received opinions. He also bluntly advises us outsiders, misfits, floaters, nonconformists, seekers, malcontents, beatniks, and grouches to be slackers: "Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely."  One of his translators into English, Lin Yutang, said:

Culture . . . is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture is therefore essentially the art of loafing.  From the Chinese point of view, the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic contradiction between being busy and being wise. Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.  The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully.

Sure, so-called realists could argue, “Yeah, well, who the hell are you, you taker, to hold our makers and leaders in such low esteem? What if everybody just shrugged and said, ‘How the hell does all this work do me good? Who cares and what’s it to me?’” I too wonder who will do the dishes when the party’s over. But somehow I think in the US at least the driven, the obsessed, and the ambitious are hardly on the endangered species list.

Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic, Thomas Merton says: “I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or anyone else.”