"Shut the F.. Hell Up!"

Sounded to me like he almost said it.

Today's Must Read

Charlie Pierce on Barack Obama in Esquire.

To War Is Human

The following review appeared today in the Houston Chronicle:

PEACE
By Richard Bausch
Knopf, 171 pp., $19.95

If war didn’t exist, novelists would have to invent it. What other pursuit reduces humanity to a raw essence and brings into question the nature of civilization?

Richard Bausch’s Peace is a very short novel. Some would call it a novella, but that diminutive doesn’t do the book justice. For with a kind of magical economy, Bausch packs more into 171 pages than some novelists do with three times that number. He has written 10 previous novels, and he has learned how to propel a story, to lay traps for the reader, to entice one into turning the page. In his latest novel, he not only tells a story, but he also gives his characters back-stories, illumines their inner lives, and even finds room for a couple of subplots. But the book owes equally as much to his work in short fiction – he has seven volumes of stories. He knows the importance of placing the right word, the right image, in the right place.

The main plot is a familiar one: a patrol goes out on reconnaissance; some of them kill, and some of them are killed. The three principal characters are straight out of the melting-pot cast of a Hollywood World War II movie: a Catholic, a Jew, and a foul-mouthed bigot from the Midwest. And of course the great precursor Hemingway haunts any tale of grace under pressure, sometimes creeping into the prose itself: “They all stood silent and did not look at one another, or at Glick, and the only sound was the rain.”

It is the winter of 1944. Italy has fallen, but the retreating German army is still very much a lethal force, hidden in the mountains near Cassino. When an American patrol encounters an old Italian on the road, he agrees to lead them to where the Germans are. So Robert Marson, a corporal, is put in charge of two other soldiers, Saul Asch and Benny Joyner, to follow the old man into the hills.

It is a miserable climb. Freezing rain turns to snow as they go higher. Marson, the novel’s central character, suffers the agony of a blistered foot. Asch and Joyner bicker constantly. And when they find where the Germans are – or have been – a sniper attacks.

Has the old man led them into a trap? For the enigmatic Italian, who understands – or claims to understand – only a few words of English, was once their enemy, as Joyner keeps reminding them. “Non sono fascista,” the old man insists, every time Joyner utters the word “Fascist.” But from the moment we first see him driving his cart along the road, the man evokes the traditional image of Death: “A crooked shape in brown, a hooded man with dark thin hands, held the reins. Under the hood was only the suggestion of a gaunt face in shadow.”

Thus Bausch gives us a story with the resonance of a fable, but permeated with psychological realism. Here is Marson, alone, undertaking a crucial mission: “Not quite gradually, but with a slow widening of himself, he felt a lessening of tension, as if something had been released in his blood, a drug, preventing him from feeling what he had felt only seconds before.” And after he has completed his mission, “He had the sense, again without words, that life – all life, the life he had led and the life he had come to – had never been so suffused with clarity, a terrible inhuman clarity, made utterly out of precision, like the precision of gear and tackle in a machine. Except that he understood, in a sick wave, that this was utterly and only human.”

For that is Bausch’s point: War is human. And recognizing the moral implications of that fact can be shattering.

Or Maybe Betting on the Wrong Tree?

"Everybody was barking at the wrong horse."

--UC-Berkeley engineering professor Leon Chua on the development of a new circuit called the memristor.

While I'm Away ...

I know, I know. I haven't been keeping things up over here. But I should have some new stuff soon. In the meantime, I have kept up that little sidebar box headed "Stuff worth reading" because ... you know, because it's really stuff worth reading.

Poll Tactics

The pollsters seem to have got my number. Since I first posted about being surveyed a couple of months ago, I've been called by a poll asking questions about the candidates for the California Assembly from my district, and then last night I got a call from the Rasmussen pollers.

It was a robopoll -- press one if you're a Republican, two if you're a Democrat, and so on. So since I had nothing better to do at the time, I sat there beeping out my answers to a variety of questions having to do with the election. It started with my opinion of George W. Bush, which I was happy to give -- even though I wished there was something more emphatic than a number five ("highly unfavorable") I could punch in. Something like 911.

And then, curiously, the robovoice asked my opinion of "Governor Brian Schweitzer." At first I thought I had misheard, and that the voice was having trouble pronouncing "Arnold Schwarzenegger," but I was pretty sure that there was a Brian Schweitzer who was governor somewhere (turns out, it's Montana -- I don't read Daily Kos for nothing), so I punched in "no opinion." So now I wonder if Rasmussen got its wires crossed somewhere and really thought they were calling Montana, or if the question was just thrown in to see if I was paying attention.

Anyway, I got to choose between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and then between Obama and McCain, and then the questions turned to hot button issues, like whether I was "pro-choice" or "pro-life." I bristled a little at this one, since I don't think that to be pro-choice is to be "anti-life." And sure enough, the poll asked if, knowing that McCain is "pro-life" and Obama is "pro-choice," I still wanted to vote for Obama. I did.

And then the pollvoice asked whether I thought "illegal" -- i.e., undocumented -- immigrants should have driver's licenses. I do. I don't want anyone who hasn't passed a driving test out there on the roads where I'm driving or walking. McCain, the poll informed me, opposes such licenses, and Obama favors them. Do I still want to vote for Obama? Well, sure.

The whole business left me wondering if Rasmussen -- which I gather is not a particularly highly regarded poll -- was twisting the questions toward McCain. Early in the survey, I was asked which of several issues (e.g., the economy, immigration, moral values, etc.) was of most importance to me. I beeped that the war was uppermost. But there were no "McCain favors staying in Iraq, Obama wants to get out" questions.

So was I being push-polled? I don't know, but it sure felt like it.

I'm Back. Did You Miss Me?

Sheesh! I didn't realize it had been that long since I posted. Truth is, I've been working on the infrastructure of my other blog and neglecting this one. Plus, I haven't published any new reviews lately. And, well, my life isn't exactly crowded with incident, and I don't have anything new to say about politics. (Other folks have, and I've provided some links to it in the "Stuff worth reading" box.)

I did notice today that Jane Smiley's novel Ten Days in the Hills has just come out in paper. So here's my review of it that ran when the book first appeared.

TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS
By Jane Smiley
Anchor, 544 pp., $14.95 paperback

It’s an old trick: You put together a group of people in a semi-isolated setting such as a country house or a vacation retreat and see what happens. It’s worked in everything from Chekhov’s plays to Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game to Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (and its source, Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night).

Jane Smiley also has something even older in mind: Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten Florentines escape the plague-threatened city for ten days. She seems to have approached her new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, as a kind of “thought experiment,” letting the story grow out of the characters. What would happen if a pair of lovers, Max and Elena, were joined at his home by Max’s daughter and Elena’s son, plus Max’s ex-wife, Zoe, and her current lover? And what if you added in Zoe’s mother and three more of their friends? And set the novel at a time of political and social tension?

And what if you made Max a movie director, Elena a successful writer of how-to books and Zoe a famous movie star? And what if you put Max’s house in a spectacular hillside setting in Pacific Palisades? And instead of plague, made the threatening event the Iraq war, setting the novel at its beginning in March 2003? And made Elena a staunch opponent of the war, and one of Max’s friends just as strongly in favor of it?

What would you get? You know already: a lot of talk and a lot of sex. Something for everyone.

Or not. The trouble with the talk is that so much of it is predictable. It’s Hollywood, so they talk about movies and food and real estate and the quest for eternal youth. But Smiley has been an outspoken critic of the war and the Bush administration, blogging on both at Huffingtonpost.com, and the passages of debate between Elena and Max’s old boyhood friend Charlie are so filled with the by now too-familiar pros and cons of the Iraq misadventure that they bring the novel to an eye-glazing halt.

At least there’s the sex, which Smiley is generous with. Max is having a little dysfunction problem, brought about in part by the standstill in his career, so Elena is solicitous in her attempts to arouse him. Zoe is nearing the end of her relationship with Paul, a New Agey “healer,” so she checks out Elena’s son, Simon, a handsome and sexually adventurous young slacker who has recently shaved his head so he can play the role of a phallus in a student film. Simon is happy to get it on with anyone, female or male, who’s willing. As for Max and Zoe’s daughter, Isabel, she’s been having a secret affair with Max’s agent, Stoney, since she was a teenager.

At the midpoint of the ten days that these ten characters spend together, the whole ensemble is invited to the fabulous but somewhat sinister home -- Shangri-la crossed with the Hearst Castle -- of a Russian entrepreneur (read: gangster). The Bel-Air estate is filled with secret treasures, including a hitherto unknown Vermeer and what may just be the actual Amber Room that vanished after being looted from the Russians by the Nazis.

The Russian proposes to bankroll a film version of Gogol’s Taras Bulba that would be more faithful to the story than the 1962 Yul Brynner/Tony Curtis clunker. Max is trying to decide between directing this epic, to be filmed on the steppes of Ukraine, and a two-character movie about a man and woman talking and making love -- a kind of NC-17-rated version of My Dinner With Andre.

The satiric potential is obvious, and Smiley exploits it. Yet she also gives her characters depth and plausibility, which works against merely using them to lampoon Hollywood fads, excesses and attitudes. All of them, even the movie star and her guru, are smarter and more self-aware than we expect them to be, which makes it harder to poke fun at them. The ten days we spend in the hills with them aren’t wasted, and there are some brightly comic moments, some poignant ones (as well as too many dull ones). But as the saying goes, “fish and visitors begin to smell after three days.” Like the characters themselves, we’re glad when the visit’s over and we can get on with our lives.

The Prophet

This review appeared today in the Houston Chronicle:

SONG YET SUNG
By James McBride
Riverhead, 368 pp., $25.95

This a novel in which people say things like:

“-- With all I seen, I don’t know that I believe in God anymore….

“-- Don’t matter…. He believes in you.”

And:

“-- Every truth is a lie. I heard that said. Only tomorrow is truthful.”

But Song Yet Sung rises above its author’s sometimes clumsy attempts at profundity, because James McBride knows how to tell a story. His earlier novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is being filmed by Spike Lee, and his memoir, The Color of Water, about growing up in an interracial family, is widely read in schools.

Song Yet Sung is set in 1850 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a place of swamps and oysters, where watermen navigate the inlets of Chesapeake Bay and a handful of farmers try to control their restive slaves. The central character is a beautiful slave, Liz Spocott. When we first meet her, however, she’s not so beautiful: She has been shot in the face and is being held captive with other runaway slaves.

In her delirium, Liz has one of her prophetic dreams, “of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed … of colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards – every bit of pride, decency, and morality squeezed clean out of them.”

Liz is known, for obvious reasons, as “the Dreamer,” and what she dreams about the future of black Americans is for the moment not hopeful, though much later she will dream about Martin Luther King Jr. – “he speaks to a magic pipe that carries his voice for miles. … And the people, colored and white, red and yellow, man and woman, they hold hands and weep at his words.”

As she recovers from her wound she discovers that she’s being kept in an attic with a dozen other captives. One of them is an old woman who tells her bits of “the code” – a secret method that slaves have developed to communicate over long distances. But the woman doesn’t tell her the parts of the code outright; instead, she couches them in gnomic utterances: “the coach wrench turns the wagon wheel. … Scratch a line in the dirt to make a friend. … Use double wedding rings when you marry. Tie the wedding knot five times. … And find the blacksmith if you’re gonna marry.” And so on. Liz will decipher much of the code after she and the others break out of their confinement and scatter.

Liz and the others have been trapped by Patty Cannon, who makes a living by snatching up runaways and stealing slaves, then selling them south. Patty Cannon was a real person, although McBride has fudged the facts: She died in 1829 and her house, where Liz is held captive, was torn down in 1848. Patty was said to be a large, handsome woman who could out-wrestle any man and delighted in doing so. In addition to Patty, Liz is also being tracked by Denwood Long, a man known as “the Gimp” because of his bad leg, who has been hired by her owner to bring her back.

There are killings and kidnappings and betrayals in this involving tale of flight and pursuit. Patty Cannon is a marvelously evil villain, and the Gimp turns out to be a man in search of redemption. There’s also a giant, mute, mysterious fugitive slave called the Woolman, who hides in the depths of the forest, having learned how to blend with it. There are so many characters, in fact, that Liz the Dreamer recedes into the background – she’s the cause of the action but not much of a participant in it. But along Liz’s journey, the reader discovers some of the secrets of “the code”: a system of communication based on patterns in quilts, knots in ropes, the way crates are stacked on a wharf, and the rhythms clanged out by a blacksmith on an anvil.

The chief problem with the novel is that Liz’s visions of the future often go way over the top, as in this prophetic image: “his body was adorned with shiny jewelry – around his neck, his fingers, even in his mouth. A thousand drums seemed to play behind him, and as he spoke with the rat-tat-tat speed of a telegraph machine, he preached murder, and larceny, cursing women savagely and promising to kill, maim, and destroy.” McBride, who studied music composition at Oberlin, has let his distaste for the commercialized culture of hip-hop betray him into a sour, moralizing didacticism.

For the truth is, his novel doesn’t need contemporary references, or even Liz’s clairvoyant dreams, to make its point. For he has a great and durable theme: the quest for freedom. Even his white characters are hemmed in by the peculiar institution of slavery, unable to free themselves from the constant anxiety and guilt in which it traps them. On this theme, the dialogue he gives his characters is occasionally eloquent. Here, Liz has told an old man about her vision of the preacher we recognize as King:

“-- If that preacher you seen in your dream was hollering ’bout being free … well, then, he wasn’t free, now, was he? How long that gonna take? What time of tomorrow was you dreaming about?

“-- I don’t know, she said. I said I would tell you of tomorrow. I didn’t say tomorrow wasn’t gonna hurt.”

Words Fail Me

Damn the New York Times! They just made my work harder.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Politics

I don't get it. Less than a week after Barack Obama's candid speech about race, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been caught in ... misstatements. (I'm not being candid, either.) Hillary claims she "misspoke" when she talked about being under sniper fire in Bosnia -- after videotape shows her sauntering across the tarmac with Chelsea to accept some flowers from a little girl. And McCain blames a slip of the tongue for his assertion that Iran is training Al-Qaida insurgents -- even though video shows that his tongue slipped at least four times.

What's going on here? Have these guys never heard of YouTube? It led me to imagine this scenario:

A conference room with two tables set up with computers. Both monitors are displaying the home page for YouTube. Barack Obama enters, and ushers Hillary Clinton and John McCain to the chairs in front of the computers.

Obama: Hillary, John, thanks for coming. I know how busy you are, but I really felt we needed to have this session.

McCain: Not a problem. I'm not doing anything much but watching you guys slug it out.

Clinton: Thank you, Barack.

Obama: The reason I asked you here, is that I think the campaign has gone off track. We're not getting our messages across about the issues. We're spending too much time apologizing for misspeaking.

Clinton: Right. You and your "typical white person." (She giggles.)

Obama: (Irritably.) Not quite what I had in mind, Hillary. You see, I don't think you're aware of what an influence YouTube is having on politics.

Clinton: YouTube? Oh, right. Chelsea showed me the scary hamster.

McCain: Hamster? I had to eat one of those when I was a P.O.W. in Iran.

Obama: Vietnam.

McCain: Pardon?

Obama: You were a P.O.W. in Vietnam, John. Not Iran.

McCain: If you say so. Maybe I misspoke.

Obama: Well, that's the point. Every time you or Hillary or I say something, millions of people go to YouTube and check it out to see if we're lying. Everything we say or do in public winds up there. And so does everything our friends and supporters say and do.

Hillary: Everything? (She turns to the computer with interest.)

Obama: Yes, including Rev. Wright's sermons. That's how they got me in trouble.

McCain: (Chuckles.) Really got your tail in a crack there, didn't you, son? Imagine I'll get some mileage out of that this fall.

Clinton: He wasn't my pastor. You'll be running against me.

Obama: Oh, lay off it, Hillary. Anyway, I thought you might want to know about this YouTube thing. I mean, it's really important: It helped Jim Webb defeat George Allen after the "macaca" incident.

Clinton: So you say everything's on here? How do I check up on Bill?

McCain: I want to see the scary hamster.