Mount TBR #41

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Debacle – Emile Zola

During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, two soldiers befriend each other. Jean Macquart is the personification of rural values such as frugality, caution, and cool-headedness. Maurice Levasseur is an intellectual who has been educated enough to be anxious about a coming revolution that will sweep away a corrupt world. The reader follows them through the boredom and horrors of war until the Paris Commune incident affects their friendship that has been forged during their shared ordeal of battle.

But Zola’s intention, I think, was to write an epic about ordinary people and show us an entire nation – its people, their fields and works, the ecology – murdered by idiotic leaders. He juxtaposes scenes of military and civilian life, showing unedited all the sufferings of the human body and nature. He narrates the painful chronicle which will lead to the humiliation of the Battle of Sedan. Our protagonists run for their lives through a wood of despair and death being shelled:

A venerable oak, directly in Maurice's path, had its trunk shattered by a shell, and sank, with the stately grace of a mailed paladin, carrying down all before it, and even as the young man was leaping back the top of a gigantic ash on his left, struck by another shell, came crashing to the ground like some tall cathedral spire. Where could they fly? whither bend their steps? Everywhere the branches were falling; it was as one who should endeavor to fly from some vast edifice menaced with destruction, only to find himself in each room he enters in succession confronted with crumbling walls and ceilings. And when, in order to escape being crushed by the big trees, they took refuge in a thicket of bushes, Jean came near being killed by a projectile, only it fortunately failed to explode. They could no longer make any progress now on account of the dense growth of the shrubbery; the supple branches caught them around the shoulders, the rank, tough grass held them by the ankles, impenetrable walls of brambles rose before them and blocked their way, while all the time the foliage was fluttering down about them, clipped by the gigantic scythe that was mowing down the wood.

In this 1892 story to rank with the greatest war novels, Zola’s stance is that all war, whatever the lofty justifications from canting leaders, will result in the slaughter of the innocent and the destruction of their prosperity. Killing is not only acceptable but admired and required if dehumanized enemies are killed in war. As Seneca said of war, “Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret, are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out.”

Mount TBR #40

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything – Albert Ellis

I think it is reasonable to brush up on living skills so I keep and re-read self-help books by psychologist Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007) when I want to remind myself of the suggestions of cognitive behavioral therapy. With winter giving me more stress than usual, I thought it would do no harm to read this classic of self-help.

Ellis gives the ABC model. It helps me to calm down by understanding how my thoughts, feelings and behavior interact. Let’s say the activating event (A) is the onset of winter.

Next, I form B, my beliefs about winter. It’s so cold. My skin will dry out, my eyelids will itch. I gotta use extra face creams. The snow will cancel classes, breaking the rhythm of the term, and causing make-up sessions. What a hassle. Not to mention the danger of Dear Hearts and Gentle People in traffic driving too fast and too slow. Shoveling the white stuff will give me a damn coronary. The winter will last forever; February has nothing to recommend it. I get so sick of wearing all the damn clothes. It gets dark so damn early. And is grey the rest of the time.

Then, I get my C, the consequence, the result of my going over yet again my beliefs about the onset of winter. Oddly enough, I feel miserable and even panicky about this winter being the winter that will kill me.

Ellis argues that it is my own wretched beliefs about the agony of winter that leads to my distraught feelings, my agitated foreboding, my gloomy predictions about winter causing my cold, lonely death, shovel in hand, in the dark, in the middle of my long snowy driveway where nobody will discover my prostrate carcass until it is too late. Or they will resuscitate me and I will have brain damage, thank you very much.

With these pessimistic thoughts, I make myself upset, not other people crying about winter, not the climate which features winter five months in the year. Me, I'm the one responsible for my useless agitation.

Ellis would advise that I use D, disputing my irrational thoughts, by asking myself, Just what is the evidence that Mother Nature is planning to kill you this winter. There is no such evidence. I do not fit into the group that is at greatest risk of dying while shoveling snow. I am not habitually sedentary and I have no known or suspected coronary disease. Keep exercising. Resist sugar and carb cravings. Keep up the fish oil and Vitamin D.  I use reason (or what is reasonable to me) to develop and support my disputing ideas. And I focus on what I can control: my own responses, my own will, the one thing that I have power over, the one thing that cannot be taken from me.

Finally, E are the cognitive and emotional effects of my revised beliefs. By being rational, by thinking things through, I feel better. Quit plaguing myself with the gloomy thoughts, idiotic inventions of fear, hobgoblins of anxiety. Shake my head, clear the cobwebs and move on.

Ellis’ advice is that I had better replace irrational self-talk with more realistic and evidence-based self-talk. A statement like "I’m stressed about winter " can be acknowledged as true enough, but I can follow this up with, "But I will nevertheless deal with it and I will probably do OK. I've done so in past." This leads to a calmer, more rational assessment of the situation and a healthier response to what happens.

Mount TBR #39

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French Title: Trois chambres à Manhattan

Year: 1946

Englished: 1964

Three Beds in Manhattan – Georges Simenon

He is a middle-aged male whose life has come to a halt after a painful divorce. Nothing like a wife deserting with a younger gigolo to force a forty-nine-year-old into painful introspection and an existential tailspin.  She has become homeless because the marriage of the friends she had been living with got stormy. They are French-speaking Europeans adrift in a grey New York City just after WWII. They meet in a creepy bar:

On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone.

… The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

They will cling to each other, hang out in bars, wander Manhattan to repel loneliness. They find a hotel, spend a night in desperate love-making, then another. They will discover each other and themselves with an aching lucidness, with no illusions.

However, though neither of them seems to be able to move away, the past steals up and taps them on the shoulder, forcing them to separate and threatening the frail balance that had been established between them. He feels jealousy, she likes to tell him dubious adventures riddled with contradictions in time and logic.

He goes to a hang-out of expatriate Frenchmen to tangle with a cynical old friend, a hollow worldling  who throws a temptation in our hero’s way. On her trip, she will be confronted with her relatives, with her old life. However, each of their mistakes will eventually bring them closer.

Like The Little Saint, this existential novel stands alone in its tender description of the discovery of middle-aged love and the fear of losing it. Not to mention the fear of oneself too, one’s own cowardly backsliding. If the psychological probing doesn’t sound appealing, read it for the snapshot of New York City right after WWII. Simenon is always good with place and atmosphere.

The Ides of Perry Mason 6

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Daring Decoy – Erle Stanley Gardner

It is 1957. Oil Man Jerry Conway is embroiled in a proxy fight with an ex-employee Gifford Farrell. We know Farrell is a cad because he has a debonair manner and a pencil-thin moustache. Jerry stumbles into a trap involving a room in a threadbare hotel, a beautiful woman dressed in not much more than a mudpack. Hubba - as they used to say - hubba.

She coughs up a recently fired .38 to Conway before he hustles the heck out of there. Later in the same room Perry and Paul Drake discover the body of another comely woman with a bullet in her chest, fired – of course - by the same gun.

Is the frame-up of Jerry perfectamundo? Will DA Hamilton Burger hang a rap of accessory to murder on Perry?

One distinguishing point is that Della Street appears in only a couple of scenes but one with a chivalrous Perry is a humdinger.

Mount TBR #38

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

More Work for the Undertaker  – Margery Allingham

I had to put down Stuart Kaminsky’s mystery The Fala Factor because the mood and period touches of the 1940s didn’t work for me at all. I impatiently wondered when the frickin’ plot was going to get any forwarder despite all the “it was a simpler more innocent time” jazz. This quitting concerned me because for me lots of mystery writers – Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, to name just two – atmosphere is the draw. If for me as a mystery reader briskness of plot trumps atmosphere, I’m cooked.

Thank heaven for this whodunit from 1948.

Taking a page out of Dickens, Allingham describes Apron Street. Though the blitz has left its scars, Apron Street still features street arabs, poky shops purveying archaic products, and horse-drawn hearses.

Too, the characters are Dickensy in their comicalness and over-the-topitude. Charlie Luke, a new young policeman, is a human dynamo. The Palionode family, though on hard times, pursue obscure scholarly interests as if it were still the wealthy indolent 1890s. The fawning yet sinister funeral director Jas Bowels has the motto “Courtesy, Sympathy, Comfort in Transit.”

The suspicious death of Ruth Palinode brings in series hero Albert Campion to investigate poison pen letters and an elaborate criminal enterprise. The story borders on a parody of a whodunit with nutty wills, an enormous coffin, young misunderstood lovers, shares in a defunct mine, and the government anxious to squelch public knowledge of dodgy business.

Highly recommended. For me the professional finesse of her writing, her delicate wit, her lively imagination put Allingham in the first rank of mystery writers.

Veteran's Day 2019

“I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” (from a WWII enlisted man's letter in Letters Home by Mina Curtis, 1944)

Mount TBR #37

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: L’Ours en peluche

Year: 1960

Englished: 1972, tr. Henry Clay

Teddy Bear – Georges Simenon

Our parents and society impose three rules on us. Be sane. Be heterosexual. Be gainfully employed. Hardcore readers like us, because reading has turned our brains, have long had suspicions that the world did not in fact work the way adults would have it and doubting most things we had better be ready for anything. And we always knew that most people go through life following the basic rules not mindfully. And when they have a crisis, they have no answer.  Life questions them when somebody dies, a relationship blows up, or something terrible happens and they stamp their foot. “I followed the damn rules. Why is this happening to me? This! To me!”

And this foot-stamping is what most of Simenon’s non-Maigret existential novels are about.

In this short novel, Professor Chabot, a renowned gynecologist who runs his own obstetrics clinic, is a pillar of Parisian society, counting among his patients the rich and famous. Loyal women return to him confinement after confinement for support.

Yet this doctor, at forty-nine years old, has become weary of an exhausting existence. Life has come to a halt. Both family and professional life are nothing but routine, as he feels lonely and isolated all the while constantly surrounded by patients, colleagues, nurses, and clerks who are depending on him for a stream of opinions and decisions. The doctor is being questioned by life - daily and hourly – how’s this endless work for things you don’t even want working out for you? In what sense is being on automatic all the time showing fairness and respect to people? How is it you have no relationship with your own kids? What's with this secret drinking of copious amounts of brandy?

And he is doing his damnedest to avoid the responsibility of identifying how he feels about those questions. Distracting himself with work and affairs and dopey parties.

His love affair with a simple country girl, the Alsatian Emma, is sabotaged by his mistress. After Emma is fished out of the Seine, the miserable Chabot starts to feel alarming symptoms like anxiety, irritability, confusion, and a loss of sharpness in his professional focus and powers. The eagle-eyed patients and nurses see the cracks in his professional mask. But he feels the need to escape his duties, while, however, remaining the all-powerful decision-maker, the center of attention. He feels aggrieved that he is the one that is always giving care and never getting anything in return from all the voracious takers around him. Anger sometimes drives people to reform – but it also gets them to foot-stamping, making irrational demands of other people, of the world, of himself. 

Simenon shows his usual power in evoking backdrops: Chabot’s too-large apartment and the luxury clinic are described superbly. He also includes a great party scene of soulless wealthy people and idle celebrities and an aside in which Chabot’s mother expresses her contempt for the rich and all their pretentious trappings.

But central to the story, as usual, is his depiction of the psychology of a middle-aged guy - provoked by an accident, illness, or chance human encounter - who realizes he’s been living all wrong, evading the duty to answer life’s hard questions, and feeling he has to escape his shame, self-disgust, and hopelessness.

Mount TBR #36

I bought this book in October 1979 in the Umeda branch of the Kinokuniya Bookstore in Osaka. In the last 40 years, I moved it and stored it over three residences in three cities and have been looking at it on a shelf since 1998. I guess I didn’t read it because I figured it would always be there to finally get to one of these days.

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures  – George Sansom

This history covers from the 17^th century to the late 19^th century. The first part is an examination of the contact the influences between Europe and India and China. The Portuguese, for example, were determined to disrupt the trading relationships between what is now known as the Arab world and India. Through superior technology, drive, and ruthlessness, they did so, but cultural influences tended to flow in only one direction: from Asia to Europe. Members of ancient cultures saw no need for European products and held European ideas in low esteem.

The second, greater part of the history covers the waning days of the closed country policy of the Tokugawa regime and the Meiji era from its inception in 1868 to about 1894, the year of the First Chino-Japanese War. Sansom judiciously covers the political ideas and machinations of the major factions of the time, giving the reader the sense that Japan was lucky to avoided a bloody civil war. The examination of trends in journalism and literature is masterly in content and style.

Sansom is writing for specialists, but his writing is pleasant in tone and pace for the thinking reader that is committed to the topic. Granted, there are statements that make one’s teeth grind. For example, in discussing what distinguishes East from West in the late 1940s, Sansom writes of “the restless energy that impelled Hellenic culture to expand. . . . There are dark and silent intervals, and sometimes the Hellenic spirit seems to be in danger of extinction; but it reasserts itself and continues to exert upon the Eastern as well as the Western world an influence that cannot be permanently resisted.” 

We shall see. It's not like the Hellenic Spirit is exactly thriving in the Western World these days.

Mount TBR #35

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Lennon Remembers - Jann Wenner

I listened to a recording while reading the text of the long interview John Lennon gave to the founder and chief editor the counter-culture weekly Rolling Stone in 1970. The Beatles were breaking up and the future of the Beatles as a business enterprise was unclear.

Generally speaking, Lennon expresses his feeling stuck. He’s exasperated at being tethered to weird expectations about what the four hard-pressed members of the Beatles should be. He feels angry at the racist and misogynist attacks on his Japanese wife Yoko Ono from business associates, fans, and reporters. He’s condescending and hurtful about George Harrison, aims thrusts at Paul McCartney, and get in digs at George Martin. And other times he just goes off against the whole obtuse unappreciative world:

John: That’s what makes me what I am. It comes out, the people I meet have to say it themselves, because we get fuckin’ kicked. Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me, a genius, for fuck’s sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don’t dare, don’t you dare fuckin’ dare criticize my work like that. You, who don’t know anything about it.

Fuckin’ bullshit!

I know what Zappa is going through, and a half. I’m just coming out of it. I just have been in school again. I’ve had teachers ticking me off and marking my work. If nobody can recognize what I am then fuck ’em, it’s the same for Yoko . . .

Yoko: That’s why it’s an amazing thing: after somebody has done something like the Beatles, they think that he’s sort of satisfied, where actually the Beatles . . .

John: The Beatles was nothing.

Yoko: It was like cutting him down to a smaller size than he is.

John: I learned lots from Paul and George, in many ways, but they learned a damned sight lot from me – they learned a fucking lot from me.

It’s not reasonable to expect that he would provide insights into his own experience. Do any of us have the tools to examine our lives coolly ad objectively, especially in the midst of trying times and transitions? We need hindsight to realize what felt like failure turned into a bullet dodged; what looked like a golden opportunity became a calamity.

Lennon had a fatherless childhood filled with adversity. Maybe all of us carry around that inner kid that is still miffed at the adult world not being more caring and supportive than it was. Till we remember that it’s irrational to demand of a fickle world patience and indulgence. And that the adults at the time had their own foibles, troubles and torments to deal with, of which we kids only had hints or if we were unlucky had to bear the brunt of.

Lennon had brought in Phil Spector to overhaul George Martin's production on Let It Be and then continued to work with Spector on projects such as the album with the now-neglected Jealous Guy and  the Christmas single which we are still hearing today at the end of the year. So, Lennon and Martin were estranged in the 1970s, meeting each other face to face only once before Lennon’s killing in late 1980. Legend has it Martin asked about the interview, “What was all that shit about, John,” and Lennon replied “Out of me head, wasn’t I?”