King of Comedy

King of Comedy – Mack Sennett

I like Hollywood autobiographies, ghostwritten or not, because the funny stories are easy to read. The stories might even be true, but I don’t care as long as they make me laugh. Sometimes, however, there are provocative nuggets such as this, slapstick king Sennett quoting James Cagney:

It’s the naïve people who become the true artists. First, they have to be naïve enough to believe in themselves. Then, a performer – especially an actor or an actress – must be naïve enough to keep on trying, using his talent, in spite of any kind of discouragement or double-cross. He doesn’t pay attention to setbacks. In his ingenuousness he doesn’t know a setback when it smites him. Money doesn’t concern him.

I think parts of this apply to athletes too. Who would be a quarterback but a guy who assumes he’ll never be hurt and coolly looks past the linebacker who only wants to tear off his head? To be a hockey goalie, you’d have to be so naïve as to think “I’m gonna stop that puck even if it travels  at 150 miles an hour. “

Anyway, film buffs, historians of comedy, and Hollywood mavens would enjoy this book, first published in 1954. It’s coarse in places, rubbing our 2013 sensibilities a bit raw, but then so are the transcendent shorts of Roscoe Arbuckle. What would be really be interesting is an edited version of this book, telling us where Sennett is misremembering, misrepresenting, mischaracterizing, and getting it plain wrong, for whatever reason.

Ghostly Christmas

Merry Christmas. The Victorians loved to tell ghost stories at Christmas time.


Victorian Ghost Stories: An Oxford Anthology (0192829998)

The 1993 anthology is introduced by the editors. As their academic training taught them to do, Cox and Gilbert in their introduction assert that the Victorian ghost stories reveal ambivalent nostalgia for the looser rowdier 17^th and 18^th centuries and latent anxieties about the future of their industrializing society. They also give props to women who had to write to provide for their families such Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret) and Charlotte Riddell (The Haunted House at Latchford).

Surprising us post-modern readers by writing in a less serious genre than usual are Charles Dickens, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, R.L. Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling. Also included are writers known primarily for ghost stories, such as J.S. Le Fanu, M.R. James, and Algernon Blackwood. The tone of the stories varies. The somber tale “John Charrington's Wedding” is made all the more horrible because it occurs on a wedding day, a day that ought to the happiest for bride and groom. However, the humorist Jerome K. Jerome gives a lighter touch in “The Man of Science.”

The stories range in time, from 1852 for "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South; Cranford) to 1908 for “Thurnley Abbey" by Perceval Landon. The stories , therefore, , represent a range of period styles. Here’s a sample of light, from Mrs. Molesworth’s "The Story of the Rippling Train:"

"'Smoke,' was my first idea. 'Can there be anything on fire?' But I dismissed the notion almost as soon as it suggested itself. The something, faint and shadowy, that came slowly rippling itself in as it were beyond the dark wood of the open door, was yet too material for 'smoke.' My next idea was a curious one. 'It looks like soapy water,' I said to myself; 'can one of the housemaids have been scrubbing, and upset a pail on the stairs?' For the stair to the next floor almost faced the library door. But—no; I rubbed my eyes and looked again; the soapy water theory gave way. The wavy something that kept gliding, rippling in, gradually assumed a more substantial appearance. It was—yes, I suddenly became convinced of it—it was ripples of soft silken stuff, creeping in as if in some mysterious way unfolded or unrolled, not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly, like little wavelets on the sea-shore.

Only a couple of the stories are so ornate as to be unreadable. Readers in the market for a variety of haints, spirits, and specters that dog unwary families that rent weird houses and travelers in lonely districts should check out this anthology.

Classics 2013

Notable Classics of 2013

For a reading challenge I read about 15 classics. The most notable were the following

Playback by Raymond Chandler.  This novel does not belong to the highest rank in terms of the mystery genre or the writer’s own work. However, it was the first Chandler I’ve read in about 40 years and it made me revise my previous hasty and callow opinion of Chandler.

The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy. This is a classic because its theme (actions have unforeseen consequences) has lasting significance and worth. Plus, the narrative vitality and coherence is model story-telling.

The Master andMargarita by Mixail Bulgakov. This is a work recognized as definitive in its genre of fantasy and satire. I can’t decide if the political and social satire is more powerful than the sheer art of the prose. In the end, I will opt for art, I think.

My Bondage and MyFreedom by Frederick Douglass. Of course, it is a classic because it is a traditional example of a slave narrative, but the sheer power of his prose I didn’t expect.

V. by Thomas Pynchon. 2013 was the 50^th anniversary of this novel. Turning 50, then, it becomes a classic because it established a standard for post-modern prose, as powerful and exasperating as that can be.

Greenmantle

Greenmantle - John Buchan

Our hero Richard Hannay, recovering from a wound taken in the trenches, volunteers for an espionage assignment. His must find out more information about a suspected German plot to stir up the Middle East and break lines of communication and transportation between Great Britain and its eastern empire.

The American eccentric John Blenkiron (a master if dyspeptic spy) and school-mate Sandy Arbuthnot (a Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy) add their unique talents to the mission. Making his way to Turkey, Hannay meets his South African pard Peter, the archetypal faithful retainer and pale noble savage.

The action rocks in the old-fashioned way of an adventure story for boys from the early part of the twentieth century. Written in 1916, it suffers from both wartime xenophobia of The Enemy and misogynistic, homophobic, jinigoistic, racist asides that have become breath-taking in our year 2013. In the Sixties, I grew up in white working class suburb where the N-word was flung about freely, but even I had to roll my eyes when the hero finished a work-out and observed, “I felt like a white man again.”

Making allowances for unfortunate attitudes of the past, I would say that of the five Hannay novels, Greenmantle is the best one, slightly edging the better-known The Thirty-Nine Steps. It is certainly better than Mr. Standfast, which is flawed in execution, and way better than the nearly worthless The Three Hostages and The Island of Sheep.

Sign Up 2104 War Challenge with a Twist

2104 War Challenge with a Twist at the reading challenge blog War Through the Generations

Click the title for a review on my blog.

Gulf War, Iraq

1.       Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War -- Jeffrey Record

2.       The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq -- Patrick Cockburn

3.       The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising inIslam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda  - Yaroslav Trofimov

French and Indian War

1.       Shadowbrook : ANovel of Love, War, and the Birthof America - Beverly Swerling

Korean War

1. This Kind of War: A Study of Unpreparedness - T. R. Fehrenbach
2. The River and the Gauntlet - S. L. A. Marshall
3. Broken Soldiers - Raymond B. Lech
4. The Last Parallel - Martin Russ

WWI

1.       The Soldier's Song - Alan Monaghan

2.       The Ravi Lancers - John Masters

3. A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry

WWII

1.       The Cruel Sea – Nicholas Monsarrat

2.       The Road to Stalingrad - Benno Zieser

3. Night Soldiers - Alan Furst

Vietnam War

1. Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat - James R. McDonough
2. Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey - John Douglas Marshall 
3. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brian

Passionate Sage

Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams – Joseph J. Ellis

After reading a biography of obscure Albert Gallatin, I turned to whom I thought would be the less obscure John Adams. Imagine my surprise upon encountering Ellis’ persuasive argument that in fact Adams has been overlooked by both political thinkers and historians much less the general public. This book centers on Adams’ retirement years – after he left the Presidency in 1801 he lived, to my surprise, another 25 years in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Adams loved to read, but he also loved to write. Ellis examines Adams’ huge correspondence not only with Jefferson (a topic he returned to in Founding Brothers and American Sphinx) but with Benjamin Rush (who sounds a wonderful eccentric ) and political thinker and slave owner John Taylor (to whom Adams told home truths about slavery and slave-owners that he didn’t inflict on Jefferson). Ellis takes a few backward glances to Adams’ youth and political activism.

Adams believed in popular sovereignty and equality before the law but he thought that equality of talent and drive was a myth, that there would always be powerful people who sought riches and fame on the backs and sweat of other people. In contrast to Jeffersonian “individualism” and “freedom” Adams emphasized “balance” and “public duties.” To Adams, the main role of government was to restrain the natural ambition and wealth-seeking of unfettered individualism among society's elite.

This is an engaging book about a moderate Federalist that could not steer the country between Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism. On June 7, 1826, less than a month before his death, Adams wrote that American independence would be "a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped by the human mind."

Such realism is why, Ellis argues, Adams’ character and legacy faded from American memory while Jefferson’s “Everyday a new morning in America” goopy buncombe is relished right down to this day. "The glass was always half-full at Monticello and half-empty at Quincy," Ellis concludes. And we know how we Americans feel about realists and skeptics and pessimists.