by Michael Parker
Years and years ago I took a creative writing course from Michael Parker. This was shortly before the release of his first novel, Hello Down There. Since then I’ve enjoyed watching the direction he’s taken his work, and I think If You Want Me to Stay is the best so far, a potent, sad story of a boy who is lost in the world, whose connection to the world of adults is mainly through his extensive knowledge of soul music.
Our main character, Joel Junior, received his education in soul music from his father, a man who suffers from episodic bouts of mental illness, which render him a danger to himself and his three sons. The novel starts when the father loses his grip on reality “the worst time.” Joel Junior runs away from home with his youngest brother, Tank, and is forced to come up with a plan to help the two of them survive and find their mother, who absconded a few years ago without warning, having lost patience with her husband’s madness.
We have an intimate look inside Joel Junior’s head. At first, I was apprehensive about the constant references to the music of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples and Curtis Mayfield. The idea of giving the novel a “soundtrack” seemed gimmicky, like a writing exercise good for only a few pages at most. But Parker manages to render the way that songs worm their way into the brain so well that it never felt like the musical framework was imposed from the outside. Joel Junior uses his lexicon of soul sounds and lyrics as a guide to help understand all the most adult aspects of loneliness, hope and frustration that he encounters as he wanders through this world, and his interior arguments about the real meaning of songs like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay give us a sense of his intelligence that it would be hard to get otherwise.
We also get a feeling of Joel Junior’s intelligence from his language, which is unorthodox but never sloppy. Joel Junior is the latest in a string of Michael Parker characters who is dangerously naïve and open to the world around him; unlike the other characters, Joel Junior’s mental eccentricity is built into the structure of every sentence.
I love Michael Parker’s writing best for its economy. In composing his words, he leaves little to chance. But like any good magician, Parker has to conceal his craft through misdirection. That’s why it works so well that Joel and Tank’s quixotic journey is littered with so many odd, understated little encounters: along their way they meet fishermen and church ladies, shop clerks and drunkards whose significance is as random as that of anyone we might meet by chance in real life, and yet in the mind of Joel Junior they all become signposts on the way to reaching an understanding of who he is, where he’s come from, and the path that his life is likely to take from here on out. By the end of the book, Michael Parker has achieved stunningly well in creating the sort of poetic landscape of memories and symbols that John Irving so desperately wanted to create for Hotel New Hampshire. The overall effect is so muted and subtle that it’s only afterward that we see the brilliance in the fact that Parker has used soul music as his compass to write a book that captures all the frightening and startling possibilities inherent in the depths of a single human soul.
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
by Christopher Moore. (1999) Published by Perennial. 304 pages.
Up to page 81; reviewed 1 June 2008.
Tokyo gets Godzilla; the rural California community of Pine Cove gets The Sea Beast, a five-thousand-year-old reptilian monster with a liberal libido who has no qualms about mounting the first gas truck he happens upon, believing it to be a coy, silver-skinned temptress. This is my first exposure to Christopher Moore, and what impresses me is not just that he’s funny, but that the humor doesn’t ever get in the way of the storytelling. Moore’s sense of comedy is closely related to Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoon, which seemed to be always drawing on the natural world for comedy; as a storyteller, he’s a lot like Stephen King: his world is populated by misfit eccentrics who are just real enough to be interesting but contemptibly twisted enough that we don’t mind too much when they get killed off in the most bizarre ways. Thankfully, Moore doesn’t seem to want to make the story drag on endlessly the way Stephen King likes to.
I especially like the way that Moore weaves in themes of sadness and chemical dependence: the hero of the book, constable Theo Crowe, is hopelessly addicted to marijuana; the people of his community are all unknowingly suffering withdrawal symptoms because their psychiatrist has replaced their antidepressants with sugar pills; and The Sea Beast brings with him an arsenal of disinhibiting pheromones that appear capable of drawing people into the worst kind of Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. And all of it’s rounded off by Catfish the Bluesman, whose story about trying to give the blues to his friend Smiley is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.
28 June; p 81 to end.
For a while, I was put off by the nasty and offhanded way Christopher Moore had some of his characters get killed off in this book (especially Les the handyman). I tend not to like stories that come from the philosophical perspective that most people are just trash. Of course, a lot of people might argue that it’s going too far to suggest that someone like Moore, whose titles include Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story). The Stupidest Angel (A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror) and Island of the Sequined Love Nun is “writing from” any sort of philosophical perspective whatsoever.
I’d counter that the author’s philosophy plays a huge role in even the dumbest of books; it’s responsible for the aftertaste we take away from reading, for the fact that even a brutal and tragic tale can leave us feeling stronger and wiser whereas an overly sentimental story can leave us feeling not only sickened but downright misanthropic.
By the end of the book, I thought Moore’s philosophy is not so much that people are trash as that we’re all just animals, all subject to the stresses and carnage of the natural world, and any attempt to place ourselves as a species of as individuals above this level is a feat of embarrassing pomposity. This is why one of my favorite characters in the book was Skinner, the dog, who always thinks of his “master,” Gabe, as “The Food Guy.” I think Moore would agree with me that Skinner is probably the smartest character in the book, and that all the other, human characters, would benefit a lot from giving up their obsessions with status, money, fulfillment and fame. It would be much more sensible to be concerned primarily with the joy of a bowl of kibbles, a friendly scratch behind the ears and an afternoon nap.
So it’s with a firmly biological perspective, driven by pheromones and predatory urges that Christopher Moore turns out a plot that seems somehow naturally absurd, a world in which there’s nothing more logical than a pharmacist’s hidden lust for sex with dolphins and manatees or a session of sexual intercourse between a schizophrenic B-movie actress and a giant sea lizard aided by a weed whacker. The book never gets bogged down in circumspection, but as I reader I could tell that Moore really did take the time to do some homework about themes as diverse as psychopharmacology, reptilian life and the manufacture of crack cocaine. I even learned a few things, like what a “gill tree” is. I got to appreciate the way a really clever author can stack his own deck of cards so that at the end of the book it feels like events really are unfolding faster than you’re able to take them in.
There are some weak points; the group of cultists drawn to worship the giant sea monster in the nude never really seem to have a lot to do, and the community of Pine Cove, though given lots of hormonal incentive, never really erupts into the sort of orgy of misbehavior worthy of Moore’s talent. Still, this was a really fun book to read.
Up to page 81; reviewed 1 June 2008.
Tokyo gets Godzilla; the rural California community of Pine Cove gets The Sea Beast, a five-thousand-year-old reptilian monster with a liberal libido who has no qualms about mounting the first gas truck he happens upon, believing it to be a coy, silver-skinned temptress. This is my first exposure to Christopher Moore, and what impresses me is not just that he’s funny, but that the humor doesn’t ever get in the way of the storytelling. Moore’s sense of comedy is closely related to Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoon, which seemed to be always drawing on the natural world for comedy; as a storyteller, he’s a lot like Stephen King: his world is populated by misfit eccentrics who are just real enough to be interesting but contemptibly twisted enough that we don’t mind too much when they get killed off in the most bizarre ways. Thankfully, Moore doesn’t seem to want to make the story drag on endlessly the way Stephen King likes to.
I especially like the way that Moore weaves in themes of sadness and chemical dependence: the hero of the book, constable Theo Crowe, is hopelessly addicted to marijuana; the people of his community are all unknowingly suffering withdrawal symptoms because their psychiatrist has replaced their antidepressants with sugar pills; and The Sea Beast brings with him an arsenal of disinhibiting pheromones that appear capable of drawing people into the worst kind of Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. And all of it’s rounded off by Catfish the Bluesman, whose story about trying to give the blues to his friend Smiley is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.
28 June; p 81 to end.
For a while, I was put off by the nasty and offhanded way Christopher Moore had some of his characters get killed off in this book (especially Les the handyman). I tend not to like stories that come from the philosophical perspective that most people are just trash. Of course, a lot of people might argue that it’s going too far to suggest that someone like Moore, whose titles include Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story). The Stupidest Angel (A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror) and Island of the Sequined Love Nun is “writing from” any sort of philosophical perspective whatsoever.
I’d counter that the author’s philosophy plays a huge role in even the dumbest of books; it’s responsible for the aftertaste we take away from reading, for the fact that even a brutal and tragic tale can leave us feeling stronger and wiser whereas an overly sentimental story can leave us feeling not only sickened but downright misanthropic.
By the end of the book, I thought Moore’s philosophy is not so much that people are trash as that we’re all just animals, all subject to the stresses and carnage of the natural world, and any attempt to place ourselves as a species of as individuals above this level is a feat of embarrassing pomposity. This is why one of my favorite characters in the book was Skinner, the dog, who always thinks of his “master,” Gabe, as “The Food Guy.” I think Moore would agree with me that Skinner is probably the smartest character in the book, and that all the other, human characters, would benefit a lot from giving up their obsessions with status, money, fulfillment and fame. It would be much more sensible to be concerned primarily with the joy of a bowl of kibbles, a friendly scratch behind the ears and an afternoon nap.
So it’s with a firmly biological perspective, driven by pheromones and predatory urges that Christopher Moore turns out a plot that seems somehow naturally absurd, a world in which there’s nothing more logical than a pharmacist’s hidden lust for sex with dolphins and manatees or a session of sexual intercourse between a schizophrenic B-movie actress and a giant sea lizard aided by a weed whacker. The book never gets bogged down in circumspection, but as I reader I could tell that Moore really did take the time to do some homework about themes as diverse as psychopharmacology, reptilian life and the manufacture of crack cocaine. I even learned a few things, like what a “gill tree” is. I got to appreciate the way a really clever author can stack his own deck of cards so that at the end of the book it feels like events really are unfolding faster than you’re able to take them in.
There are some weak points; the group of cultists drawn to worship the giant sea monster in the nude never really seem to have a lot to do, and the community of Pine Cove, though given lots of hormonal incentive, never really erupts into the sort of orgy of misbehavior worthy of Moore’s talent. Still, this was a really fun book to read.
Isaac Newton
by James Gleick. (2003) Published by Vintage. 191 pages. Reviewed 26 May 2008
I always feel a little cheated by James Gleick’s books, which seem heavy on biographical data and low on the science Gleick is supposedly so good at describing. Still, I really enjoyed this book, especially because it did such a good job at showing how Newton was frustrated early on with his attempts to come to grips with physical problems using written language as a tool. Gleick does a great job at showing what a muddle the state of thinking and especially the terminology in regards to physics was at the outset of Newton’s career, and there’s a sense of real excitement when Newton finally takes charge of the language in writing his Principia and selects the amazing handful of concepts (mass, force, velocity) that are still so useful to us now in understanding the world. Also, it was really enlightening to learn about the way Newton’s vast output of private writings was neglected after his death all the way into the 20th Century. This explains a lot about why there are so many questions that still linger about a man you’d expect to be better understood. I do wish that Gleick had lingered as long over Newton’s geometrical demonstrations as he did over the feud with Robert Hooke. Still, I think Gleick’s writing has improved incredibly since he wrote Chaos, and I learned a lot about Newton’s world and thinking process from this book.
I always feel a little cheated by James Gleick’s books, which seem heavy on biographical data and low on the science Gleick is supposedly so good at describing. Still, I really enjoyed this book, especially because it did such a good job at showing how Newton was frustrated early on with his attempts to come to grips with physical problems using written language as a tool. Gleick does a great job at showing what a muddle the state of thinking and especially the terminology in regards to physics was at the outset of Newton’s career, and there’s a sense of real excitement when Newton finally takes charge of the language in writing his Principia and selects the amazing handful of concepts (mass, force, velocity) that are still so useful to us now in understanding the world. Also, it was really enlightening to learn about the way Newton’s vast output of private writings was neglected after his death all the way into the 20th Century. This explains a lot about why there are so many questions that still linger about a man you’d expect to be better understood. I do wish that Gleick had lingered as long over Newton’s geometrical demonstrations as he did over the feud with Robert Hooke. Still, I think Gleick’s writing has improved incredibly since he wrote Chaos, and I learned a lot about Newton’s world and thinking process from this book.
The Hotel New Hampshire
by John Irving. (1981). Reader’s Circle Edition, published by Ballantine Books (2001). 401 pages.
Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.
This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.
p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008
At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.
Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.
This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.
p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008
At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.
Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps
written and performed by Scott Turner Schoefield, performed at Out North. Reviewed 30 March 2008
I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.
I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.
Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry, with Introduction by Stephen Spender. (1947). Printed by Plume Fiction in 1965. 376 pages.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March
This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.
p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008
My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.
pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007
It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.
p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008
I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.
Gentlemen of the Road
by Michael Chabon. (2007) Published by Del Rey. 204 pages.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008
Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.
Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008
107 to end.
At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
