People who write in the margins of books.

Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia carries the subtitle Notes In The Margin Of My Time. Scribbling in the margins is a metaphor that recurs throughout the book, and I’m not sure metaphor is the right word because it seems to be literally true that James has built these essays around passages he has marked, and comments he has pencilled into the margins, of his prodigious library over a half century of reading.* For instance, in his essay on Egon Friedell he writes:

I own three copies of the handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love.

I have just received a vivid lesson in the benefits of writing in the margins, as I spent most of an evening hunting through the 851 pages of Cultural Amnesia for a half-remembered line about (to paraphrase) a lengthy book made still longer by all the notes the reader inevitably finds himself making in the endpapers. I couldn’t find it.

I never write in books, and I detest those who do. In another essay – I won’t try and search for it – James attempts to extrapolate, from notes in the margins, the politics of the previous owner of a certain German-language book he has acquired secondhand. The only thing I’ve ever gleaned from a marginal note is that the previous owner was too lazy to reach for a bookmark. But perhaps James frequents used bookshops with a more erudite clientele.

If you must write in the margins, you might as well do all your note-taking there; once the text has been violated, no amount of gentlemanly self-restraint can restore it to innocence. The lowest form of book-defacer is the one who marks a single passage in a book, then stops; this mark can easily be missed by the future browser as he riffles the pages prior to purchasing.

I own two books like this. One is Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful Of Dust. In an otherwise virgin copy, some fool has used a pen to bracket this paragraph, in which a character passes the time with a game of solitaire – “patience”, as the Brits call it:

Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backwards and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated.

I assume the defacer was an English student; this passage is pregnant with symbolic possibilities, containing as it does the actual word “symbols”. But its significance to the larger story is obscure. Mrs. Rattery is a minor character, a bluff American aviatrix who wanders in at a vital juncture in the plot, then soon wanders out again. Her elaborate game of patience has no bearing on her relationship to the other characters; she’s not a schemer or an organizer. Nor is “order [growing] out of chaos” a theme of A Handful Of Dust – quite the opposite; like most of Waugh’s novels, it’s about the breakdown of the old social hierarchies. Perhaps my hypothetical English student intended to use Mrs. Rattery and her game of patience as a metaphor for Waugh-as-writer, although that would make for a rather generic essay; all writers, except the bad ones, establish “sequence and precedence”.

I also have a copy of Graham Greene’s The Ministry Of Fear in which someone has singled out this observation:

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of the nose and mouth, and yet we protest: This isn’t me…

The mark was made in pencil, so I might attempt to erase it, though I’m sure a shadow will remain. Oddly enough, half-erased marginal jottings play a part in the story of The Ministry Of Fear. The hero, who stumbles into a Nazi espionage plot, spends some time in an asylum run by a pacifist doctor. On a bookshelf the hero finds a book of Tolstoy’s, and notices some rubbed-out pencil marks beside the following sentiment:

Remembering all I have done, suffered, and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one’s country…

The “ignoble” attempt to erase his approving checkmarks is enough to make the doctor a suspect: “This was an opinion to be held openly if at all,” thinks the hero. I wonder if some future owner of my copy of The Ministry Of Fear will think I’ve ignobly repudiated my opinion on the inaccuracy of police photographs?

M.

* This is an awkwardly constructed sentence which I’ve chosen not to rewrite. Let it serve as an inside joke for those who’ve enjoyed James’ riff on Edward Gibbon, where he excoriates that learned figure for sentences even more awkward than this one.

Flipapalooza & LUGO.

Here’s what’s happening with the band. A few days ago Andrew and I filmed some footage for our upcoming time-lapse binder video shoot. I’m in the process of breaking the video into thousands of still black-and-white images like the one on the left, which will be printed and assembled into binders. This Saturday we’ll prop the binders in front of a camera and flip through the pages at the rate of four seconds per page. Then when the video is sped up, if I’ve done my math correctly, the flipping pages will synch up with our song Clowns.

The flipapalooza will kick off at around 8 PM on Saturday Nov. 28th in the back room at Sig’s Place in Vonda, forty minutes east of Saskatoon. If you’re in the area, please feel free to drop by. If you ask nicely we might even let you flip a binder for us.

LUGO! (…whatever that means.)

I’ve also signed us up for an “arts happening” in January at the Mendel Art Gallery. Local folksy girl Carrie Catherine is organizing this shindig, which is called LUGO. (As of Wednesday morning the website wasn’t up yet, but it should be soon.)

The provenance of the word “lugo” has not been explained to us, but it seems to summon images of an Italian street festival, which isn’t too far off the mark. In addition to music, Lugo will include video, drama, dance, and all things artsy and fartsy. I’m not sure yet exactly what kind of casserole Andrew and I will be bringing to this pot-luck, but you can be sure that it will be lumpy.

M.

Dream journal: The vending machine.

I’m wandering through a shopping mall with Bender, the robot from Futurama, who at some point changes without explanation into my friend Stu, currently residing in Austria. Bender-Stu spies a vending machine that dispenses toy battleships and decides he wants one. The machine has four chunky buttons depicting four progressively more elaborate and expensive models of battleship. Bender-Stu chooses the most expensive one, priced at forty-two dollars. He feeds three twenty-dollar bills into the machine.

The machine whirs and trembles and a toy battleship clatters down into the dispensing tray, along with eighteen bucks of change in loonies and toonies. The battleship is about a foot long, made of cast iron and die-molded plastic, with googly eyes glued on either side of the bridge. Before we can remove it from the tray, a strange man walks up, reaches between us, grabs the battleship, and bolts.

Bender-Stu, who by this time has morphed permanently into Stu, takes off after the thief. I hesitate. Should I join the chase? There’s still eighteen bucks sitting in the vending machine, and I don’t want to abandon it. Moreover I don’t really expect Stu to catch the guy. Still, I have a niggling sense of cowardice as I scrape the coins one by one from the shallow dispensing tray.

Another stranger approaches. “Your friend is asking for you,” he says, pointing. Coins clinking in my jacket pockets, I jog through the mall in the direction of the chase. Stu is lying in the middle of the corridor. “You bailed on me,” he says, as I pull him to his feet. He has no injuries but he’s been roughed up.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I wasn’t sure what to do.” There’s no point trying to explain. I scoop a handful of coins from my left and then my right pocket into his cupped hands.

M.

–

Previous dream journals have featured Barnaby Rudge, Tom Cruise, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Catch-22: Not as great as remembered.

If any time in the last fifteen years you’d asked my opinion of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, I would have replied without reservation that it was a great book. Fifteen years is how long it’s been since I read Catch-22 as a teenager.

Picture my disillusionment when I picked it up again this week and came across writing like this:

The swarthy, middle-aged lieutenant colonel with the rimless, icy glasses and faceted, bald, domelike pate that he was always touching sensitively with the tips of his splayed fingers disliked the chaplain and was impolite to him frequently. He kept the chaplain in a constant state of terror with his curt, derisive tongue and his knowing, cynical eyes that the chaplain was never brave enough to meet for more than an accidental second.

Heller occasionally falls into this narcotizing pattern of adjective-adjective-noun, adjective-adjective-noun, which I assume signifies a lapse of his self-editing faculties. Why do we need faceted, bald, and domelike? Why curt and derisive, knowing and cynical? It’s not so much the redundancy – after all, none of these twinned or tripleted adjective are quite synonymous, although they’re often close enough to suggest a simple failure of decisiveness on the author’s part. The problem is the rhythm. Good writing modulates, syncopates, takes a pause then skips across the room. Too much of Heller’s prose just clops along like a three-legged horse.

Still, I can’t dismiss Catch-22. For every ungainly passage there are two inspired ones; the story of Major Major Major Major’s swift and humiliating rise through the ranks, for instance, or this description of the “soldier in white”, a plaster-encased mummy in the casualty ward:

Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that stuff could drip back into him.

Heller can’t help but use more than the necessary number of words (a silent zinc pipe?), but that’s okay. The soldier in white, a helpless conduit for the recycling of clear fluid, is the perfect emblem for a book of paradoxes, circular arguments, and self-negating statements. The term “catch-22″ is now used rather too vaguely to mean something like Hobson’s choice. The vagueness was inevitable; in the novel, the regulation is brought in whenever the author is in want of a bureaucratic absurdity, paradoxical or not. The elegant recursiveness of the term as it ought to be used is demonstrated in this  scene where Yossarian goes to his squadron’s flight surgeon to get his reckless tentmate grounded:

“Is Orr crazy?”

“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.

“Can you ground him?”

“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”

“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”

“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”

“That’s all he has to do?”

“That’s all. Let him ask me.”

“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.

“No. Then I can’t ground him.”

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

At its best, Catch-22 reads like the kind of bleak farce Kafka might’ve cooked up in collaboration with the Marx Brothers. At its worst it’s just frantic and amateurish (like the Marx Brothers at their worst). Here’s an example of Heller at his best and worst, just after Kid Sampson meets his messy end on a raft offshore:

Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for their things in a panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind. Kid Sampson had rained all over.

I’m not sure if a “biting wind” is a good metaphor for the resistance of the sea; wind pushes, it doesn’t pull. And once again Heller’s twinned adjectives (“gentle, knee-high”; “viscous, clinging”), tend to weaken rather than reinforce one another. But Heller catches the right details; the bathers cringing from the tainted waves, those in the ocean “forgetting in their haste to swim” as they lumber to shore, everyone fleeing yet unable to look away from the scene of the tragedy. Later the lower half of Kid Sampson’s body washes ashore “like a purple twisted wishbone”, and the men of the squadron, unwilling to touch it, creep down to the beach to peek at it through the bushes.

Overall, I still think Catch-22 is a pretty great book. I can grudgingly forgive its prolix, overlong, redundant excesses. But it’s a relief to escape at last from Joseph Heller’s world to one where the author has scrupulously considered each word and set it in its proper place in relation to the others; I’m now reading J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. Heller’s voice drifts too often to that prophetic pitch that appeals to intelligent eighteen-year-olds but wears the patience of grown-ups less certain of their intelligence. Give me an author with the humility to scratch out a line.

M.

The Sexy Mathematics origin story.

In 2006, my band recorded a CD. We spent the better part of a year and the price of a decent used car, and at the end of the tortuous process I took the six boxes of completed CDs and piled them up into a little pyramid in the middle of my living room floor. “Now what?” I said.

Three and a half of those boxes are still in my possession, tucked into a corner of my hall closet. The truth is, we never really thought about what we would do with the CDs once we’d finished making them. I guess we figured we’d sell them to somebody. But since the recording of our CD coincided with the effective end of our public performing career, it became increasingly difficult to find customers. If it weren’t for the popularity of a few animated cartoons I posted on YouTube, we wouldn’t have sold a single disc to anyone outside our immediate families and friends.

I work with a guy named Chris whose band, Sexy Mathematics, just finished recording their first EP. Unlike me, Chris isn’t willing to hang onto his boxes of CDs forever. He has a plan for unloading them. The first step of his plan was to come to me. “Hey, you’re in the marketing biz,” he said. “Would you write some promotional copy for our press kit?”

“Pshh, that sounds boring,” I said. “Why don’t I make you a promotional comic instead?”

So that’s what I did. Oddly, this is far more work than I ever undertook to promote my own band. It’s easier, somehow, to motivate myself to do things like this for other people than it is to do them for myself.

Perhaps someday I’ll create a promotional comic for the band known as Sea Water Bliss. But probably not. I hate repeating myself.

The Origin of Sexy Mathematics

George Orwell is not like you or me.

Here’s George Orwell’s description of Barcelona early in the Spanish Civil War:

Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal … Almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy … Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night … I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side.

Orwell goes on to say that “There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

It’s lucky Orwell is such a compelling storyteller, or I would have been obliged to stop reading Homage To Catalonia right there. This state of affairs, this chaotic, violent, graffiti-stained shambles, a half-wrecked city lorded over by Puritans with guns who’ve driven out (or worse) the priests and the “bourgeoisie” – this Orwell sees as “worth fighting for”? I understand that he was keen to fight fascism, and that in 1936 Spain was the one front where fascists could be fought. But who could blame an idealistic young leftist for arriving in Barcelona, taking a look around at the filth and the madness and the thuggish sloganeering, and concluding, “Not my fight”?

But this was the middle of the 1930s; one of those occasions when capitalism had managed to make itself look very bad – bad enough, perhaps, that it was possible for an intelligent person to convince himself that,

It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois “democracy”. Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control.

(This is Orwell paraphrasing, semi-approvingly, the position of POUM, the Marxist faction whose militia he joined on arriving in Spain.)

Times were different. One clue is the business about the tips. (After being lectured for the sin of having tipped an elevator-boy, Orwell on his second visit to Barcelona months later, after the revolutionary fervor had faded, noticed that “[i]n a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back.”) Seventy years on, it’s hard to grasp a mindset where tipping is seen as a symbol of capitalist exploitation. I was raised to believe that in certain encounters, tipping was the correct thing to do; and I’ve always tipped waiters, taxi-drivers, and barbers, even when I was unemployed, even when, as has often been the case, the person receiving the tip was undoubtedly better off than I was. I recognise that the custom of tipping is nonsensical – why do we tip waiters in fancy restaurants but not the underpaid drones behind the counter at Wendy’s? But I can’t see how it would help the working poor if tipping were eliminated altogether; indeed, I doubt that unlucky elevator-boy at Orwell’s hotel was grateful for his manager’s intervention.

Similarly, when in my life waiters have failed to treat me as an equal, it has usually been because they saw me as beneath their station, not above it; and while many “shop-walkers” have introduced themselves to me by first name, I can’t think of any who’ve cringed before me, unless the empty politesse of greeting me with “Sir” is seen as a mark of subservience. I’m not crazy enough to say that class distinctions have disappeared, only that without benefit of revolution, we’ve reached a state in the development of our bourgeois democracy where class is far more fluid and complicated than Orwell and his contemporaries were capable of imagining.

So I’ve decided to cut Orwell some slack, as I finish off Homage To Catalonia. The world of 1936 was very different from our own, and it’s a testament to the vitality and immediacy of his writing that we can forget for a minute how very different Orwell is from us.

***

In May of 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona between pro-Communist policemen and their nominal allies in the Marxist POUM and the anarchist CNT. Orwell describes an American doctor running up to him on the street:

“Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcón … The POUM chaps will be meeting there. The trouble’s starting. We must hang together.”

On the evidence of these lines (“chaps”, “we must hang together”), one might conclude that Orwell had never actually conversed with a living American. At any rate he had no feeling for how Americans talked. I’m guessing he rarely went to the movies.

M.

My new thing.

I haven’t been blogging much since summer began. Every time I finish a book or see a movie I’ll try and come up with something to say about it, but usually I decide after a few paragraphs that whatever point I’m trying to make is too trite or muddled to bother putting into words. This is a self-defeating atttitude for a blogger to have, obviously. Isn’t the primary symptom of the modern neurosis the conviction that every stray thought you have is worthy of broadcast, preferably at top volume? Am I cured of modernity?

Not likely, because here I am tapping away, having decided to once again break my rule against pimping for the company that employs me. Please direct your gaze to my other blog, which I maintain in my capacity as marketing weenie for a local internet startup, and where yesterday I posted a brief comic-style ad poking fun at Microsoft’s new “Windows 7 Launch Party” video campaign. Esoteric, I know. The ad turned out pretty well, although it was a rush job – I conceived and assembled it over a single Sunday, one eye cocked on the scurrying zeitgeist. When I posted the ad Monday morning the zeitgeist gave it a brief glance, then squeezed under a loose floorboard and was gone.

Lately at my job I’ve drifted away from animation. It pains me, but I can’t blame my employers for concluding that the investment of time in any single cartoon far outweighs the likely return. But it turns out that a lot of the skills I’ve been honing in the animation realm are easily transferable to the medium of comics. Now that I’ve overcome the psychological obstacle of not knowing how to draw – that is, I’ve learned to live with the guilt of accepting payment for doing something that by rights I shouldn’t be doing at all – I might experiment a bit more with non-moving cartoons. They offer fewer technical obstacles – I don’t have to worry about sound synchronisation or frame rates or video compression – which means I can devote more of my attention to the actual drawing, Or, in my case, the tracing.

M.

Tiny humiliations.

#1

I’m in a local convenience store buying a single-serving carton of milk. The clerk silently rings through my milk and the total appears on a little display next to the cash register. I glance at the total and give the guy a toonie. As he counts the change into my hand he says, “Dime and two pennies.”

Ordinarily I don’t pay attention to small change, but the clerk’s unusual choice of words makes me pause. “Shouldn’t that be a penny and two dimes?” I say.

The clerk looks at me blankly. “No…” he says, and hits a series of buttons on the cash register, causing the receipt to print out and the total to reappear on the little screen. I look at the screen. $1.79, it reads.

He’s squinting at the printed receipt. “No, $1.88, that’s right,” he says.

“But your screen says $1.79.”

He leans across the counter so that he can see the display. “No, that’s the subtotal,” he says. “The total after tax is down here, in red.”

He’s right. The total is bright red and in a much larger font, but somehow I’d missed it. “Sorry,” I mutter, and lug my single-serving carton of milk toward the door.

#2

I’m in the little drugstore downstairs, buying a few groceries and renting a movie. It’s late in the evening and there are no other customers, but there are two people behind the counter. One is an attractive girl in her late teens. The other is a woman in her sixties.

I shop here all the time, so both women know me by sight. As the computer prints out the receipt that I’ll have to sign in order to rent the movie, the older woman makes small talk with me. Then, silently, someone farts.

When I catch a whiff of it I stop in the middle of a word and my eyes bug out. But I don’t say anything. Neither do the two women. We just stand there smiling at each other, holding our breath, wondering who did it.

If a stranger walked into the store at this moment and smelled the fart, sizing up the three possible perpetrators, there’s no doubt as to whom he would mentally assign responsibility. With my beard and shaggy hair and generally rumpled appearance I’m by far the likeliest farter.

Knowing that I’m innocent, I pin the blame on the next likeliest farter – the old woman. But the attractive teenage girl (assuming that she didn’t do it) has no way of knowing that I’m innocent. She’s going to pin the blame on me.

As I sign the receipt I’m thinking, now every time I come into the store this good-looking girl is going to think of me as that disgusting slob who couldn’t wait thirty seconds to get outside before uncorking this monumental fart.

Still holding my breath, I tuck the DVD and groceries under my arm and head for fresh air, silently cursing the old woman.

#3

This anecdote can best be explained with the help of a diagram.

The situation I’m describing takes place at the door to my apartment building, but the diagram applies to any door through which large numbers of mutual strangers pass. The diagram defines your obligations if you pass through the door first and someone is coming up behind you.

If the follower is in zone A, you’re expected to hold the door open for him or her. If the follower is in zone C, there is no such requirement – in fact, it would look odd if you were to stand there holding the door waiting for the follower to catch up.

(Obviously the distances involved vary, depending on the amount of foot traffic, whether or not the door has a lock, whether or not the follower is carrying groceries, and so forth.)

This story concerns zone B, which is the awkward area where it’s unclear whether you’re expected to hold the door or not. I reached the door just as one of my neighbours was getting out of her car on the far side of the parking lot. As I passed through I glanced back and saw that she was on the further edge of zone B – that is, she was just barely within the range where she might reasonably expect me to hold the door for her. I hesitated.

Then I thought, in the time I’m waiting for her to catch up, I can cross the lobby to my mailbox and check my mail, and be back to the door in time to open it for her. So I stepped inside and let the door fall closed.

Then I realised that I was being unrealistic. There was no way I could fish the key out of my pocket and unlock, open, close, and re-lock the mailbox, in the five seconds remaining before my neighbour arrived at the door. Shaking my head at my own stupidity, I turned around and opened the door. My neighbour passed through and gave me a “thank you” and a funny look.

From her point of view it must have looked like I’d deliberately decided to close the door in her face, reconsidered, and with a shake of my head, reluctantly reversed myself.

Even if I were the kind of person who struck up random weird conversations with my neighbours, there’s no way I could have explained my ill-considered feint toward the mailbox. So I just nodded and let her pass.

Things could have turned out worse. At least I came back and opened the door.

M.

Dream journal: Swimming to Filmbodia.

I’m visiting a small Southeast Asian nation which has lately recovered from a civil war and genocide. I’m friends with a local husband-and-wife filmmaking team who are currently in post-production on a film documenting the national tragedy. I meet them in an outdoor café near the airport, where they describe the government interference they’ve endured trying to get their new film made.

“I thought things were much more open here now,” I say.

“It’s easy for you Westerners,” says the wife. “Here the government sees its citizens as machines for breeding more tiny factory workers.”

As it happens, I’m a writer who moonlights as an actor in Hollywood pictures. Not long ago I wrote and starred in a Killing Fields-like dramatisation of the country’s recent history, called (for some reason) O Canada. My filmmaking friends haven’t seen my movie and they ask me to describe it.

“It’s hard to explain,” I say. “I play myself, a writer, and the movie is full of these postmodern games where I comment on events in the movie as they’re happening. Then there are these kind of recursive feedback loops where I comment on my own commentary.”

“But,” I continue, “I’m not sure if my commentaries were sincere or whether I was just writing to mimic a preconceived idea of what constitutes an ‘art’ film.”

I ask my friends what the budget is on their new movie. “$279 million,” the wife tells me.

“Wow,” I say. “Most Hollywood productions are less than half that.”

“Yes,” she says. “And I bet they’re a lot more fun to work on, too. Like that Hollywood classic, Barnaby Rudge. Two months on a ship in the South Seas, and what funny jokes!” She smiles at the memory of it. I smile too. For some reason I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never seen (or read) Barnaby Rudge.

M.

–

Previous dream journals have featured Tom Cruise, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the novels of Thomas Hardy.

The Great Railway Bazaar (Paul Theroux).

Sometimes I finish a book and, as much as I enjoyed it, I find I have nothing to say about it. Empty of useful insights, but wishing to draw attention to the book’s greatness (and also, maybe, to prove to the world that I’ve read it?), I resort to quoting from it at length.

So here are some highlights from The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux’s 1975 account of his 24-country grand tour of Europe and Asia.

***

After travelling by train from London to the eastern frontier of Iran, Theroux finds himself forced to cross rail-less Afghanistan. This is just after the end of the monarchy, but a few years before the communist takeover which inaugurated the current and ongoing round of civil wars:

Afghanistan is a nuisance. Formerly it was cheap and barbarous, and people went there to buy lumps of hashish – they would spend weeks in the filthy hotels of Herat and Kabul, staying high. But there was a military coup in 1973, and the king (who was sunning himself in Italy) was deposed. Now Afghanistan is expensive but just as barbarous as before. Even the hippies have begun to find it intolerable. The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent.

In Burma, Theroux watches savage stray dogs fighting for scraps of food thrown from the windows of the moving train:

“Why don’t they shoot those dogs?” I asked a man at Toungou.

“Burmese think it is wrong to kill animals.”

“Why not feed them then?”

He was silent. I was questioning one of the cardinal precepts of Buddhism, the principle of neglect. Because no animals are killed all animals look as if they are starving to death, and so the rats, which are numerous in Burma, co-exist with the dogs, which have eliminated cats from the country. The Burmese – removing their shoes and socks for sacred temple floors where they will spit and flick cigar ashes – see no contradiction. How could they? Burma is a socialist country with a notorious bureaucracy. But it is a bureaucracy that is Buddhist in nature, for not only is it necessary to be a Buddhist in order to tolerate it, but the Burmese bureaucratic delays are a consistent encouragement to a kind of traditional piety – the commissar and the monk meeting as equals on the common ground of indolent and smiling unhelpfulness. Nothing happens in Burma, but then nothing is expected to happen.

Theroux arrives in Vietnam in late 1973, during a moderately sedate interval between the Paris Peace Accord (which ended direct U.S. involvement in the war) and the start of the North Vietnamese offensive which will capture Saigon a year and a half later. Reflecting on America’s pathetic entanglement in the conflict, he writes:

The conventional view was that the Americans had been imperialists; but that is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power – road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings… Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren’t many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren’t pledged to maintain.
…
Some [soldiers] watched the train, with their rifles at their shoulders, in those oversize uniforms – a metaphor of mismatching that never failed to remind me that these men – these boys – had been dressed and armed by much larger Americans. With the Americans gone, the war looked too big, an uncalled-for size, really, like those shirts whose cuffs reached to the soldiers’ knuckles and the helmets that fell over their eyes.
…
[T]he Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and from the beginning, had not planned to stay.

(The parallels with more recent events in Iraq are too obvious to bother commenting on. I’ll mention that the people who use terms like “imperialism” when discussing American overseas adventurism are also apt to toss out words like “hubris” and “arrogance”. That’s wrong. Theroux reminds us that America’s empire-builders are actually rather diffident: they don’t put up statues or grand buildings to commemorate their victories; they have no desire to stick around and lord it over the natives; their fondest wish is to pacify whatever goddamn foreign muckhole they find themselves stuck in and get back home to Paducah. The besieged forces of liberalism – or of pro-Western despotism – should always keep in mind before calling Washington for reinforcements: you’ll get five, maybe six years, tops, to wrap up your little war, before the Americans get sick of it all and scoot.)

And finally, on riding the Super Express between Tokyo and Kyoto:

[T]he conductor came by, and when he had finished punching everyone’s ticket he walked backwards up the aisle, bowing and saying, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” until he reached the door. The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

***

On a Russian ship crossing the Sea of Japan, Theroux meets an American man and wife who claim to be “into the occult” and proceed to describe a number of supposed supernatural encounters. Theroux, in his turn, narrates M.R. James’ “The Mezzotint” – “the most frightening story I know.” I wasn’t familiar with the story, but it’s available online: a very creepy setup, I found, but the ending is a bit meh. Maybe I’m just jaded.

M.

–

The last time I read one of Paul Theroux’s travel books, back in 2006, it inspired me to speculate about another of America’s botched nation-building attempts.