Something for the Both of You

I'd never seen this before: Bruce Lee playing ping pong with nunchaku (and then some other stuff).

"Gould's Book of Fish" Impressions

First thing: I really enjoyed this book.

After that, I'm not really sure where to start. The brutality, barbarism and oppression that you mention, dad, was probably less shocking and more muted for me, as the book I'd read previously was Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads. That book has a more realistically rendered fantasy world of dehumanizing brutality, with the added "benefit" that the brutality was both more often and more vivid. Here, though, they seemed more a symptom, that feeling that when facing the great unknown, the only way Englishmen know how to react is with some good ol' brutality. Those settings for me just represent the archetype of violent, oppressive control, the need for it...its just the way the West reacts initially to vast tracts of wilderness: it brings out the worst fears, and therefore, the worst reactions...that, and we're talking about Australians here (but of course in 1830 they'd still be mostly Englishmen).

I dunno. Sometimes I get the feeling that vast wilderness and unknown being met by early colonists of from the West are met with fear, which translates into "those stupid trees and natives will know we're the boss" style brutality. They just go together for me.

Australians, like Americans, have a nice colorful history to look back upon.

The speed with which readers are thrust into something mesmerizing in that opening chapter is crazy. We're introduced to a narrator, a petty swindler and criminal, in and out of the system, and he and his probation officer and some friends make a nice buck selling false antiques to tourists on Tasmania. The narrator makes the distinction that it's the story that they're selling more than the junk. From there he finds an old book while out shopping for other things he and his pals can distress and sell.

I was explaining to Corrie the setup in slightly more detail than here, and she stopped me and asked How far have you read? and I honestly answered Just the first chapter. It goes from making you smirk to making you wonder to being weird to gripping you all before it spends the next 300+ pages in some of the most outlandish settings put to paper. The years: the late 1820s. The place: Van Diemen's Land, later renamed Tasmania, and specifically, the very real and horrific prison colony on Sarah Island, a square mile of rock in Macquarie Harbor. Many bits of Australian lore are woven in as well, like Matt Brady, an infamous bushranger.

A book is being scribbled in secret using fish bone quills and whatever coloring can be mustered (urchin; blood; feces) by a man in a cell that floods with the tides everyday. At some point everyday this prisoner is floating at the top of his room. That's how the old timey part starts.

We get all sorts of shenanigans from our new narrator, the forger and fake painter calling himself Gould. In the real world there was a prisoner named William Buelow Gould, and he was really commissioned to paint fish during his time at a prison colony, and, in reality, the book of fish he painted does exist in the same museum where our first narrator visits in the first chapter. This novel is like an imagined story of this man Gould's imagined life. Pardon the redundancy.

Each chapter is named for a fish, and that fish represents one of the characters prominent in that chapter's shenanigans. Each edition of Flanagan's novel uses actual Gould paintings, on the cover and throughout.

Dad, did you know the character Capois Death is based on a real person (mostly)? I had to look it up.

Norm, if you get to this post, there is definitely a strain of Pynchon running through, but it's flavored differently, and not just a Tasmanian styled Pynchon. Recognizable as from the same spectrum of Out There Lit. You know who you are... But it is written in a similar fashion to Mason & Dixon in that it uses contemporary 1820s phrasing, slang, and punctuation. Of course it's not as densely constructed as M&D.

Gould's Book of Fish will be with me for a very long time. It pulls together many threads dealing with reality, history and connections, the power of animals, and the power of words. That, and the scenarios and scenes are so engaging and bizarre that someone like me, an aspiring writer who's working on a long piece of fiction, can only be inspired that my own bizarre scenarios and scenes might actually work, and maybe even be well received.

I really enjoyed this book.

As Threatened: 2012 Election Musings

Not to worry, mes juenes hommes, this won't be a (particularly) partisan post. Maybe my politics don't scare you, or basically make any difference. However, as a long-term observer of things political (if not a very active guy, except for voting), I'm going to rush in  with a couple of observations.

First, this election is in fact, a case of the Republicans' getting their asses handed to them (silver platter optional. From my graphic, so apparently are Alaska and Hawaii). Here's how I see it: as a party, the GOP has a basic conflict. They raise funds like crazy by sucking up to ultra-conservative moneyed interests, who see the world a certain way. To quote an observation in yesterday's Denver Post, "Republicans have shrunk to becoming a regional party of older, Southern white male evangelicals, neither reflective nor representative of the nation as a whole." The conflict arises when they try to translate all this money into votes. The tactics that work to build war chests do not help them get votes. They marginalize themselves in the process.

A very logical, not to say absolutely essential, question arises in the wake of the thrashing. What will the GOP take away from 2012? A couple of Republican politicians, former members of the Colorado state Legislature, weighed in with a reaction of their own. Here is a pertinent quote (to save you the trouble of following the link:

It's time to bury the hatchet and forge bipartisan agreement on immigration reform. It's also time to approach cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion with humility, humanity, and common sense.

So it's apparent that there are Reeps out there who can form a thought and express it. Does the GOP have the guts to risk changing its approach on basic issues that (they think) its rank and file feel strongly about?

I'll tell you guys (here's the partisan part). I was a Republican for a long time, right up until the religious right wing took over. I always thought the Reeps had the better idea on how to provide for the poor and sick and elderly - the most efficient way was to let private enterprise work through the market, with maybe a nudge from the government to encourage investment here and there. That (to fatally date myself) was Nelson Rockefeller's  thrust. He was a moderate guy on social issues, and wanted the government to work best where it worked least.

Well, ol' Dubya screwed that pooch, maybe forever. His hands-off policy toward investment banking and mortgage-based securities trading plunged this country into a fuckin' mess that could have been completely avoided. Bush's botching of the economy - a once-in-a-lifetime fuckup for a President - actually bought Obama a lot of time and indulgence.

It'll be interesting to watch. I'll wait and I'll watch. It'll be a major miracle if the Republican Party can move from its stance on abortion, immigration, and gay rights. But that's what it'll have to do if it wants any chance at the White House.

Couple Things...

Hey guys...I had a few random things I wanted to share

Dad, I finished Gould's Book of Fish, and I'll add a write up here in a day or two. Also, I discovered a Chandler Brossard novel, The Bold Saboteurs, and have a little write up about it here.

Dan, I grabbed a pair of pictures that'll make you go, eh, ahem (or yikes):

Less cartoony, except for the voice:

And, for both of you guys, a comparison that brings back memories of helmet catches and perfect season ruination:

Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah...

Hey dad: let me represent all the erstwhile and current heads in thanking you wonderful Coloradans for the just passed decrim law, Colorado Amendment 64. That kind of thing warms the heart (you too, Washington State).

A Belated Hollow Weenie Treat from Tod Browning

I dunno if either of you have ever looked into this feature. Pat, I seem to recall you mentioning it somewhere, some time, but I could be completely off my nut. It's been many years, but I watched this in the comfort of home on VHS. I can't remember whether either of you guys were with me and your mom, but it seems unlikely given your ages at the time.

Its main attraction is that all the freaks in the movie are real freaks. There is a very famous sequence where a guy with no arms and no legs in lying under a cart or wagon, and he gets a cigarette out and lights it and begins to smoke. It's about a traveling sideshow with, you guessed it, freaks. There are some women in it with severely limited cranial development, and they look like they were the models for Homer Simpson's head. They're called "pinheads."

I learned about it from your Uncle Tom, who admired and recommended it. I looked it up a few minutes ago, and saw that the complete movie is available on Youtube, but I don't think I'd watch it that way. It's on our Netflix streaming queue and I've built it up a little bit with Cin, who's afraid of what it might be like.

In fact, it isn't a horror movie, or really very scary. The owner/manager of the touring show is good to his freaks, because, after all, they make him money. What could be wrong with that?