Reliving Your Life Over and Over Endlessly

Reddit, or somewhere, told me that I had to read The First 15 Lives of Harry August by Claire North. So I downloaded a copy to my Kindle. And it stayed there for a while. Somewhere along the way, I also downloaded Recursion by Blake Crouch. And about this same time, I kept coming across mentions of Nietzche’s idea that you should live your life so that if you had to live it over again and again forever, you wouldn’t hate it, or worse, be bored or embarassed by it.

And then I started reading Harry August. What a coincidence with that whole Nietzche thing! After Harry dies, he’s immediately reborn back into his original life, but doesn’t start recalling things till he’s about 4 years old. So after just a few lifetimes, he’s learned a whole lot about everthing. And he meets up with other people like himself and discovers their rules. And then whole thing turns into a kind a James Bond thriller.

It was a wild ride, never going where I expected, and it was wonderful.

When I started Recursion, I was apprehensive. I’ve written programs in Prolog. Don’t tell me about recursion. Most people get it all wrong. But that’s not what this is about at all. And here again, folks keep reliving their lives over and again. Another coincidence. Like the previous book, it’s traumatic and surprising. And then it goes James Bond on you again. Sort of. I liked it. Although the two books have a lot of similarities, they are competely different.

In both books the mega-villains are perfectly reasonable in their world-ending intentions. They’re just trying to make their lives worthwhile and meaningful, living up to their mega-abilities. Ultimately the other humans in the world will be better off too. Except things never go to plan, as the mega-villains never seem to realize.

Just because you think you can, that doesn’t mean you should. And maybe the point that Nietzche was trying to make that everybody misses is that anybody who thinks they’re a superman is just a bad human being, broken and twisted and maybe on fire around the edges. I mean, it’s more than OK to be bored or embarassed by your life, if the alternative is massive destruction of everything and everyone all around you. That would actually be even more embarassing, if you were at all capable of being embarassed by such bad behavior or of ever learning from it.

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A 1904 Odyssey

For over three months now, I’ve been reading Ulysses by James Joyce.

I gave it four out of five stars. It could use a good editor. It’s a fascinating book, but there’s just too much of it.

The first three or four chapters start off well enough. But then Joyce starts getting a little oblique. There’s lots of stream of consciousness going on, but sometimes you can’t tell whom it’s coming from. And sometimes you can’t tell if it’s stream of consiousness, or the actual narrator. Some people claim that there’s a Narrator, but also an Arranger. I wouldn’t know about that. Part of it is written as a play. Part of it as catchism. The last chapter has no punctuation. And yet some people really love this book.

I didn’t read it by myself. I had help. A lot of people really love this book. They write their own books about it. Which is great because without them I would have had no idea whatsoever was going on. It’s supposed to be a difficult book, and it succeeds grandly.

Overall, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Patrick Hastings was the best help. It started as a website and grew from there. Each chapter of Ulysses is dissected, translated into sub-genius English, and explained as need be. It’s a little on the scholarly side, but not painfully so.

What got me started with this was hearing ambassador Daniel Mulhall talk about his book, Ulysses: a Reader’s Odyssey on the radio. It sounded like a swell book. He’s been reading Joyce’s book for years, and has put his own feelings and ideas about it into his own book. There was one particular chapter of his that is much better at explaining Joyce’s chapter than Hastings’ is.

Half-way through Ulysses, I bought a copy of Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford because I thought that I was still missing out on too much. As it turns out, I wasn’t missing out on too much that mattered. Gifford’s notes are really impressive, and often quite interesting, but they are not so very much essential.

The brothel chapter was definitely not my favorite. I almost gave up reading the book at that point. I decided I would just skip over the part that was bothering me, and continue on. By then I’d already passed through all the troubling bits, though, so I ended up skipping not a single word.

You end up knowing more about Leopold than you know about anyone else in the world, probably even more than you know about yourself. Which is a pretty good trick. But some of the things that I know about old Poldy, I’d prefer not to know.

One of the characters in the book is a younger version of the author. And he’s a genius idiot. So Joyce was pretty self-aware. He knew what he was doing as he put the book together, and I’m sure that he got exactly what he wanted. People are going to talk and think about this book as long as folks can read English, I would guess. But I didn’t enjoy the book.

Of course, you don’t have to enjoy something in order to appreciate it. You get the stream of consciousness of four characters in the book: Leopold, his wife Molly, Joyce’s younger self Stephen, and Gerty who’s just a girl at the beach. You get to know each of their humanity. It’s pretty impressive. Kind of depressing too.

I fear that I’ll think about parts of this book for the rest of my life. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just that many of the thoughts will be sad. For instance, one of my permanent memories from reading Dubliners 40 years ago (!) is of the old woman whose nose and chin touch at the tips when she smiles. My heart breaks just a little more each time that I recall it.

Long ago, I tried to read Finnegan’s Wake. If you read it aloud with your best Leinster accent, you can almost see through the homophones and puns and actually understand what’s going on. But my voice gives out before very long. I bet I didn’t ever get past sixty pages. All for the best, I wager.

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A Goodby That Was Pretty Long

I once found Dashell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon in a used book store for a quarter. It was an old paperback, apparently printed to be distributed to soldiers during World War II. It was a thin book and I read it in a night. It seemed to me to follow the movie really closely. In fact, when I read along with the book while watching Humphrey Bogart, the dialog is almost exactly the same for most of it. A couple of scenes are missing in the movie. It’s really amazing how little they seemed to change.

But I’d never read any Raymond Chandler, though I’d tried sitting thru a different Bogart movie on occasion. The movie didn’t make any sense to me. It must have been The Big Sleep. That’s probably the one that I should have read. There’s another movie version of it starring Robert Mitchum.

But The Long Goodbye was on sale for a dollar ninety-nine. Apparenlty it’s the longest Philip Marlowe book written by Chandler. What a deal! It seemed pretty long to me. It seemed like two different books with Marlowe bounding back and forth from here to there and here again. And then the books collide. Which, since it’s only one book, makes total sense and doesn’t seem contrived at all.

It’s not what I would call noir. It takes place in Southern California, with lots of sunshine, usually in daylight. Things seem clean. Everyone has a car, and there are freeways. There’s a lot of diving around. Seems pretty modern. There’s a bunch of different characters to meet. One doctor is a heroin junky. There’s a rich drunk. Lots of folks are crooked or trying to use other folks. The police chief is a manchild dufus. So it’s not really noir at all; is just modern day.

Robert Altman made a movie from this book, right around the time he made MASH. Elliot Gould plays Marlowe, which is not what you’d expect, but he does a great job making it his own. Altman films usually feel like a carousel that’s spinning too fast, but this one never loses its center, and it gets rid of most of the extra back and forth that goes on in the novel. Ends exactly the same, but completely differently.

One of the great things is that the theme song keeps getting played over and over, each time in a different musical style. Like all the music in this mysterious little world is all the same, only the types of music can change. Joni Mitchell would have been living down the road from Marlowe in this one. I have no idea what her version of the theme song would’ve sounded like.

So it’s a good movie, that captures the hight spots of the book, without the excessive fullness, like too much stuffed grape leaves.

Anyway, none of these movies nor the book makes a whole lot of sense. You’re just supposed to enjoy the individual scenes, and not really worry about how you got there. I mean, there’s a reason for being there, but maybe not the best of reasons. So enjoy the scenery.

And what does it all mean? Life doesn’t make sense, and there are different levels of bad people.

Maybe I need to read the Big Sleep and see how that one fits with the movie…

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Oatmeal Sleepover

I want to talk about overnight oats.

By eating oats every other day, I’ve lowered my cholesterol amazingly. And don’t get me started about the fiber!

But once I got into the habit, I began using more and more ingredients, and it became a really fancy dish.

Grains.
Instant oats might turn to mush overnight. (that’s a joke) Or not. I like the extra toothiness, so I used Old Fashioned Rolled Oats. But only 1/4 cup . The other 1/4 cup I use Steel Cut Oats. Overnight the steel cut oats give up all their crunchiness, but still have a chewy bite.

Along the way I’ve occasionally thrown in Rolled Rye or Barley. I don’t notice any flavor differences. The Barley is supposed to be better with the cholesterol than the Oats!

Now I throw in a handful of Quinoa Flakes. Maybe it’s really Rolled Quinoa. They’re complete protein, so they gotta be good for you right?

Seeds.
I throw in a handful each of Sunflower Seeds and Pumpkin Seeds. Sometimes they’re roasted or raw. If one of them is covered in Tamari then I’m getting a little salt in my diet too.

There’s a yellow package of Hemphearts, Milled Flaxseed, and Chia that I throw in a 1/4 cup of to round things out. The Flax has Omegas. The Chia makes everything gel even if you use too much fluid.

And I throw in a handful of Walnuts, mostly for more Omegas.

I’m going to lose a bunch of you here. I drop a handful of Red Lentils into the bowl. Yes, I know that brown lentils taste like dirt. Don’t worry, though, because the red ones don’t. The protein from these pulses or legumes combines with the grain proteins to become Complete Protein. So now you don’t have to eat bacon in the morning for your protein. Don’t use green lentils because their flavor is too bright. I haven’t tried black ones yet.

I’ve tried Sesame Seeds too. I can take ’em or leave ’em.

Fruits.
I get these Organic Raisins and they are so flavorful. Much better than the box with the FruitMaid on it. I also grab a handful of Dried Cranberries. I’d like to find some that didn’t have added sugar, but those are too expensive. Finally, I carefully place five or six dried Tart Cherries. I’d use more, but they’re far to expensive. Just a taste every now and then will do.

Spices.
I put ground Cayenne Pepper into everything. I also shake a bunch of cinnamon, because it’s good for you. But my secret ingredient is Trinidadian Curry Powder by Chief Brand. It makes everythign good. And then I pour in a dollop of vanilla extract because that makes everything better.

Liquids.
First I pour a round of unflavored Kefir. This isn’t really enough to make the oats moist. So I add several gurgles of Oatmilk (which seems redundant) or one of Good Kharma’s Flax or Plant milks, unflavored and unsweetened, and with Pea Protein if possible. You can get the kind that needs refridgeration, or that doesn’t. Flax has those magic Omegas, doesn’t require lots of water to grow like Almonds, and makes a perfectly fine milk. I don’t know why anybody uses any other kind really. It’s great!

My cabinet had several containers of Instant Dry Milk that were approaching expiry. I’ve been adding 1/8 cup into my bowl lately, and it adds an extra layer of sweetness or somehting. Once I’ve used these old containers all up though, I may not keep up the practice.

All these ingreadients go into an insulated bowl with a l lid that I bought at my local Indian Food Market. I give them a good stir and leave the whole mess on the table overnight.

That’s right, I don’t put my overnight oats in the fridge. And it hasn’t killed me yet. In fact, after more than a year, I don’t recall having any stomach troubles associated with this. I’m thinking that the cultures in the Kefir are winning out over any intruders. Not that I notice any extra tanginess. I’ll let you know if I end up having difficulties with this though.


.25 Cup Rolled Oats
.25 Cup Steel Cut Oats
Quinoa
Rye Flakes or Pearled Barley ?
Sunflower Seeds
Pumplin Seeds
Walnuts
.25 Cup Hemp Hearts/Ground Flax/Chia Seeds
Red Lentils
Sesame Seeds ?
Raisins
Dried Cranberries
Dried Tart Cherries
Cayenne Pepper
Cinnamon
Chief Curry Powder of Trinidad
Kefir
Good Karma Flax Milk, Plain, Unsweetened
.125 Cup Instant Milk Powder ?

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My Darling Frankenstein

This was not the book that I’d thought it’d be

40 pages in, I was thinking that there’d been some error and I was reading the wrong book.

There is no Dr Frankenstein, no monster, no big frights, no hordes of peasants carrying pitchforks and tires and torches. Mr Frankenstein is well learned, in both science and alchemy, but at the time they apparently didn’t award doctorates. Officially his creation is called the creature, although it is of monstrous size at about 8 feet tall. The creature isn’t even afraid of fire, and he speaks more artfully than I do.

The Bride of Frankenstein is actually a closer adaption of the book.

But horrible things happen. All sorts of folks meet untimely ends because of the monster, but it’s more shocking and frightening.

Something that I found weird was that the story is 3 frames deep at one point. The entire story is in a letter written by the captain of a ship caught in the ice near the north pole, so that’s one level deep. Then Mr Frankenstein starts telling his story, and that is frame #2. Finally Mr. Frankenstein is listening to the creature tell his part of the story, making level #3.

You are 40% through the story before the creature really shows up.

Now if you accept that Frankenstein is projecting, then it could be that the creature is really just his own subconscious, and Mr. Frankenstein is in fact the murderer of all these folks. But the first frame voids that possibility because Frankenstein had a witness to the creature.

So maybe the real horror story is the captain freezing to death at the north pole, writing a goodbye letter to his sister that steadily goes farther off the tracks. He even imagines that he escaped the ice! He must have died there.

That’s a little scary.

Mary Shelley wrote the book. Everyone is obligated to mention that her mom, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an early feminist who claimed marriage was just a tool of the patriarchy. She died, unmarried, after giving birth to her own creature, after several days of agony that a handful of satiric poets made fun of in a poetic justice sort of way.

That’s the scariest bit of all.

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Bicycling Stuff

I ride a bicycle for exercise, around residential streets and the loop around the park. The bike is nearly 20 years old. I paid $300 for it at a bike shop, and they did a pretty good job of setting it up to fit me. It has 21 gears, but I only use 4: #1 granny gear for going up hills, #8 for starting up, #13 for most tooling around, and #19 when I’m going downhill or have a tailwind. All those other gears are wasted.
I’ve got LED blinklenights on the front and back. It’s a white one in front, but not a headlight. The one in back is red. By blinking, I hope to warn people that I’ll ruin the paint on thieir vehicle if they hit me.
I’ve also got a bell that I use to warn pedestrians that I’m not going to run over them. I also ringading-ding it when passing parallel-parked cars, so maybe they won’t open ther doors just in time for me to crash into them. It’s happened to me once. And they blamed me!
I wear a backpack with a reflective strappy vest on it. Hopefully it’s not so obnoxious that folks actually want to hit me.
My helmet has a knob on it so the size can be adjusted. My head doesn’t change size much, but I still find that knob comes in handy. I have a friend who hit a hole in the road that stopped his bike dead. He flew over the handlebars. On impact his helmet didn’t just shatter, it exploded. It’s supposed to do that to get rid of the extra kinetic energy. He had brain surgery and several shoulder surgeries. Months later, talking with the brain surgeon, he’s wondering why the doctor is just staring at him wide-eyed. So he asks. The surgeon says, “I’ve never had one of my patients able to talk to me after their surgery.” So always wear your helmet, kids.
I really like to have a rear-view mirror. I tried the ones that go on the handlebars, but it’s too hard seeing where behind you that you want to see, and they seem to bounce a lot too.
So I wear a mirror on my helmet. They attach with some sticky sided velcro. I used to have a plain flat mirror. At some point the sticky stuff on it’s velcro gave up. It feel on during a ride. I have no idea where the mirror got to.
What I like about helmet mirrors is that once you have it set up so you can just barely see your earlobe, you can see anywhere behind you that you want just by barely moving your head. That way I can see the car coming before it hits me.
I bought a replacement mirror, and it’s con…cave. Yeah, it’s concave and wide-angly. And kinda shaped like a fish scale. When I first opened the packaging, I was disappointed. I didn’t think that I would like this sideshow mirror distorting thing on my helmet. But my eyes got used to it in about 15 minutes, and the extra view really comes in handy. I like it more than flat mirrors now. At least for riding a bike.

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Magarita Master

Amazon has been telling me to buy this book for ages, much as it did with Wind Up Bird Chronicles. Then I noticed folks on Reddit recomending it, although to be honest folks on Reddit end up recomending everything to read. Eventually I bought it. On a trip I noticed that my wife’s neice had a copy, so I asked her about it. She’d only read a bit of it so far. Mumble mumble mumble.
I’ve been meaning to read it for all these years now, so I finally did. It’s kind of a satire. The trouble with that is you must be aware of the thing that is being satirised or you just don’t get it. The Master and Margarita takes place in ~1930 Soviet Moscow. I’ve seen a couple different Dr Zhivago movies, so I know that housing was crazy after the revolution. Multiple families lived in a single aparment. Multiple unrelated families. But you know what, that’s about the limit of my knowledge.
I didn’t find most of the book to be funny, or even coherent. There are some very interesting parts, and images, and phrases that stick with me, but the whole was very confusing. The main story takes place when the devil comes to Moscow, and the mayhem that insues. I didn’t realize that most of the folks deserved the mayhem that they got. A lot of them were Party toadies doing toady things to people.
A major part of the book is a retelling of Jesus and Pilot and that whole crucifixion thing. But because the USSR as an atheist country, Jesus’ name is a little different, as well as Jerusalem’s and Matthew’s and Judas’s. But Pilot’s name is right on. This is the not so satirical portion of the book.
So a few pages later, back in Moscow, somebody gets their head cut off. Oh, I know! I know this part! This is a metaphor for John the Baptist, right? Nope. Apparently not. I was getting it all wrong, all of it.
One of the quirks of the book is that a lot of the Russian characters are named after classical composers. While I know these composer’s names and some of their works, I really never had a face for their names. So I was just confusing all the characters with each other, because they were all “that composer guy”.
I also misunderstood the part where Pilot is trying to warn Judas that someone wants to kill him. So it’s not just the Russian names that confounded me.
By the time I got to the end it was coming together for me. But I really had to struggle through the book. And I really couldn’t tell you why it’s considered to be such a great book.
So I bought another book, called A Reader’s Companion to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. And boy did this help! ONe of the last things it told me was that the translation that I’d chose, by Pevear and Volokhonsky, was one to be avoided. It suggested the Burgin and O’Connor version or the one by Hugh Aplin. So I could blame it all on that, if I wished.
Honestly, though, I just think that you had to be there. If you knew about Soviet Russia, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s story and the folks he hung out with, then it is an amazing book! It’s amazing that it got written during Stalin’s reign. It’s amazing that it got published in 1970. It’s amazing that we got any more-or-less complete manuscripts at all!
And once you know what’s going on, it’s worth reading for sure. I wouldn’t read the Reader’s Companion first though, as it ruins all the plot surprises. So, if I were me, I’d read the book, then the Companion, then read the book again right away to get the full effect.But I’m not that version of me, and I seldom read books a second time, especially not soon after reading them the first time. So maybe sometime I’ll give it a second try, and maybe I’ll remember enough of the background information to make it more worth it.
And maybe I’ll write down their names, so I can keep track of who is who. I’ve seen character lists in old Ellery Queen books, I think. You keep flipping back to the page to figure out who is whom. I tell myself all the time to do this, but never do.
So my last point about the Master and Magarita: The guy writes a book that is different than the accepted version, and gets the girl. This is incredibly like The History of the Seige of Lisbon by Jose Saramago, but not really.

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Coffee in Your Dreams

One way or another, all coffee is made with a strainer. I recall my parent’s percolator. It’s still sitting on top of my refrigerator. It’s a white Corningware pitcher with blue flowers painted on it, and insides made out of stainless steel sheets and tubing. The stuff of magic. Somehow the water boils and forces itself to pour over a strainer cup of coffee grounds, over and over and over.  Paper filters were optional. And somehow people thought that this made a drink good enough to  actually drink. Maxwell House, my folks used the blue can of stuff that Mrs. Olson talked about for 20 years in the TV commercials.

At some point, my mom briefly had a home-style espresso machine. She called it eXpresso. That tasted even worse to me, but we were still using Maxwelll House so maybe that was part of the problem…

Later I met folks who used weird ceramic cones with paper filters, and they’d take a long time dripping water into it. They also had coffee grinders, loud and obnoxiously pompous. About the same time, I saw Mr Coffee machines that seemed to automate the dripping process.

I ended up using plastic cones with paper filters for a long time. But I always dreamed of something better. My hopes seemed to come true when I discovered the French Press. But it’s so messy and didn’t seem to make the drink taste any better.

I really like half and half in  my coffee. Lots and lots of it. No sugar, though, that makes it taste like bad cough syrup. And definitely no Cremora or other type of powdered creamifier. That’s just gross.

So the pour-over cones were my go-to java maker of choice. There are stainless steel ones with screens so you don’t need to use paper filters. Save a tree. But you end up using a lot of water to clean it. So maybe lose a fish… One good trick is to pour water over the grounds, just enough to soak them, and then let it wait for thirty seconds or so, so the grounds have a chance to bloom. Think of it as pre-dissolving the coffee before you hurry the water through it.

And then all the coffee snobs started talking about the Aeropress. It makes “espresso” shots. I tried it. It was messy and tasted like burnt vinegar. It was also made out of plastic, so was probably giving me just as many carcinogens as my cone. And it lied about making “espresso.” Not that I really care. I don’t particularly like espresso. It tastes like burnt Brussels sprouts.

I don’t like dark roast coffee. The medium roast is usually burnt enough. Starbucks is not a good word to me. But Dunkin is swell. It’s pretty consistently OK coffee. Even at home, it’s difficult to ruin it.

And then I tried the Aeropress again, but this time with a steel strainer and a little valve on the bottom, so you can soak your grounds a little and let them stew without having to turn the whole thing upside down and risk coffee grounds exploding everywhere. And because the valve at the bottom turns the dripping coffee into a jet, if you put your half and half into the cup first, it gets all frothy as the coffee sprays in.  Yummy.

Everybody has their own recipe for making coffee with the Aeropress. Here’s mine. Use the stainless strainer with the valve. Put your half and half into the cup. Swirl the Aeropress as you pour the 185 F water over the grounds. Fill it halfway. After a minute, stir the grounds back in because they’ve all floated to the top. Top it off with water, leaving just about a half inch of empty space at the top. Do something to kill the time. Or sing “one-thousand and two-thousand” till you get to thirty-one-thousand. My wife tells me I’m not allowed to sing until after she’s had her coffee. Or rather, she says, “I haven’t had enough coffee for this yet.” So I have to sing it in my head. Then smoothly smoosh the plunger down and listen to the cool jet sound blast coffee into the bottom of your mug. Then top off the mug with more water. It’s frothy. Take a sip. Now take the Aeropress apart, and dump the grounds into the trash or compost bin. If you’ve used the paper filter too, the cleaning is all done. Without a filter, I have to wipe things down with a tissue paper or give it a quick rinse. It’s sort of a self-cleaning device. They’re making an XL size one for the USA crowd.

Then I found out about Moka Pots. The bottom part gets hot, and forces steamy moisture through the coffee grounds at pressure, making something quite like espresso. It works best on a gas stove so you can fine-tune the temperature. Some Moka Pots can be used on an induction stove, so that might be good too. I have a regular electric stove. Moka Pots are worthless on them. Everything tastes like burnt TV Guide. 

There’s also this thing called a Vacuum or maybe a Siphon Coffee maker. They’re made of blown glass, cost a lot, break easily, and the seals fail quickly. But it’s supposed to be great! For $700 you can get an electric one from Amazon. I probably won’t.

Vietnam and SE Asia have some groovy-looking coffee brewers, which I would really like to try someday. The Vietnamese coffee I’ve had was really strong. And they used burned beans so it tasted like pan-fried shredded tires.

Bottom Line: Dunkin. Cone or splurge for the Aeropress. Either way, soak the coffee for like 30 seconds before pouring the rest of the water in, to give the grounds time to “bloom”. 

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Cowboy Books

I was at my brothers one day, and his TV was on as always. It was John Wayne’s next-to-last movie ( I think) The Cowboys. There was the movie back in the 70s, and a brief TV show. Some of the child stars are still in the business! And then my brother made a rude comment about the schoolmarm and added, “At least that’s how it is in the book.” I had never realized that John Wayne movies were based on books. I thought they just burst out of his forehead. And then I find out that so many of his movies were adaptions. I don’t know why that’s so shocking for me.

Growing up, I watched a lot of Westerns on TV. Bonanza was a staple. Alias Smith and Jones. High Chapparal was one of my favorites. Paul McCartney mentions it in that Get Back movie. I recall trying to out-talk my dad from watching The Cisco Kid one Saturday morning because I wanted to watch cartoons.  And there was the Lone Ranger.  I don’t recall ever watching Rawhide, Wagon Train, Big Valley, nor The Virginian

And The Virginian, written by Owen Wister around 1902, was the first Western book adapted to the screen ever! By that I mean, it was the first Western book! And all the cliches are there, where once they were fresh and new: School Marms, cattle rustlers, Indian raids, rattlesnakes, train rides, card games in the saloon turning into shootouts, and for a big finish, the big gunfight on main street at noon. It’s all there.  There’s even a primitive version of “Smile when you say that, stranger.”

And it’s been made into movies since 1914,  directed by Cecil B. DeMille or Victor Fleming and starring Gary Cooper or Joel McCrae. And there were 9 years of a TV series with Doug McClure back in 1971. And there are newer versions. Having just watched Cecil’s silent version, I can say that just about the only part that he leaves out is the impressionable kid with the pony that gets beat by the abusive rancher.  Silently.

So I had to get around to reading it. It’s OK. The narrator gets in the way a lot because he keeps wanting to be a character in the story even though he’s a tenderfoot city boy and is only occasionally anywhere near the action. There’s a lot of hearsay in the storytelling. It seems very clumsily Victorian. 

I find it unbelievable how thoroughly mined out every idea in the book has become. It didn’t start out as a list of cliches. People had to keep copying from it over and over for decades before the ideas wore out and only cliches remained.

Now I’ve got to read other famous Westerns to see how they got around this whole problem.

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Lincoln vs The Bardo

Fancy, award-winning books can be very hit-or-miss. Sometimes they win the award for the wrong thing, like because the story is timely or the storytelling is stylized. Sometimes a book wins an award because another one didn’t, and somebody thought this one would make up for it. I tend to choose books from either side of the award-winning book if I don’t know the author, just in case. I hate being diappointed.
But I’d already read George Saunders’ A Swim In a Pond In the Rain, so Lincoln In the Bardo‘s Booker Prize didn’t influence me at all. The rainy, pond-swimming book showed how well Russian storytellers storytell. It was like a seminar in a book. I read a bunch of good Russian stories that I never would have got around to reading in my entire life. And I understood them better than I had any right to, because the whole point of the book is to explain every drop of those stories.
The Lincoln book is a little different, though. It’s got fiction and non-fiction like the other, but it’s all part of the storytelling. And it’s got some really stylized storytelling. It’s narrated by hundreds of people, both in reality and imagined. Snippets of quotes or thoughts. It tells the story of President Lincoln’s son dying, and Lincoln travelling to the graveyard one night to say his last goodbyes. What Abe doesn’t know is that all the ghosts in the cemetery are tyring to get him to help his kid accept his own death, so he won’t end up earthbound ghost like them, only even worse off because he’s a dead kid and they don’t tend to fare well.
Folks who haven’t lost a child themselves can only imagine what it’s like. Saunders does a good job imagining. Once you grab the crest of the wave of the story, it’s a great ride. I felt not just sorrow, but outrage, sublime fear, pity, and more.
Just to make sure that I’d understood what I’d read, I bought a study guide to this book. Maybe I bought the wrong study guide. They didn’t point out anything interesting that I hadn’t noticed all by myself. And they really beat dead ponies on a few points. So, even though it’s a little weird, it’s an approachable novel. You don’t actually have to keep up with who is narrating. Not usually. You already have a pretty guide idea any time it’s important.
There’s bound to be a movie. I bet Eddie Murphy is going to be in it.

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