Mark Twain and the Swiss Family Robinson

May’s theme for the classics was “Adventure”, as I paired Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain with The Swiss Family Robinson.     Twain’s former is  a collection more than a monograph, as he presents together his recollections of growing up on the Mississippi as a pilot in training,  parts of Huckleberry Finn, and a telling of a late re-visit to the river when he was an accomplished author.  It’s certainly educational, especially when read in conjunction with a tool like GoogleMaps.    Commenting on the mercurial nature of the river, Twain explains how often the river shifts its course, and points out that one town (“Delta”) which used to be a harbor town now sits inland.    Delta is now a ghost town, but a nearby oxbow lake  shows where the river once ran. (Just for curiosity, I traced the Mississippi all the way from the gulf to its headwaters in search of similar cases. I had to stop counting the oxbow lakes after a while.)    The demands placed upon pilots to memorize the river, its daily variances, its every crossing – are almost too much to believe, but Twain insists that it was so. By the time he visits as an adult, the pilot’s job has been made much easier through bouys and signals and the like. The second part is more forgettable.

On to The Swiss Family Robinson. Believe it or not, I have never seen any movies based on this, or read the book; beyond a family crashing on a remote island and building a treehouse, I knew nothing of the subject.    The book was penned in response to the popularity of Robinson Caruso,  hence the name; it follows a family  of survivors rather than a solitary outcast.  Although the family will spend over ten years on the island  before a ship encounters them, they’re extraordinarily lucky.  Not only were they able to salvage the holdings of a colony ship for their own use, but the “island” they land has such a staggering abundance of improbable life  (fauna from other hemispheres, even) that after a while one must conclude it was the private game reserve of some distant millionaire.    This south seas island does not merely have the usual suspects like colorful birds, monkeys, and turtles.  It has pretty much everything but a moose, and those in the mood for venison can just go after some of the buffalo.  The island is similarly well set for fauna and other resources, between the salt caves, the India rubber trees, and the potato fields. Even more lucky for the family, their father is a walking encyclopedia on animals and engineering, so not when  he's not building bridges, winches and the like, he’s  telling the children all about the wildlife.    It’s very informative, and would be enormously fun to read as a kid, I think,  but the amount  of creatures running around defies belief. 

Invisible Man and Everybody Lies

This week I've finished two books of interest, the first being a classics club entry (Invisible Man), and the other a book on big data and statistics.  Everybody Lies  played true to its title, opening with ways that analysis of data gleaned from Google searches and such shows that people lie to both one another and ourselves  (claiming one thing in surveys and demonstrating quite another in what we search for) before shifting to  the uses of 'big data' in general. Very amusing and interesting at first, but after it shifted I wasn't quite as enthused.

Invisible Man marked my first classic for the year, and follows an un-named narrator as he  moves from a southern college for promising young black students to 1950s Harlem. He is effectively forced out of college after giving a college trustee an inexplicable tour of local areas that the school administration would prefer weren't so close to the college, and becomes an activist in a generic movement in Harlem,  which fights for the mob's attention against a black nationalist group.  The narrator is constantly being manipulated by those he interacts with, and power, or influence, drives everyone. There's a fair bit of absurdism here, so much so that many of the characters seemed insane at times.  What stood out most was the tortured relationships between blacks and whites, laden as they were with conceits and psychological games.  For instance, one character urges the narrator that lies are always the best way to handle 'white folk' -- tell them what they want to hear.  It's not difficult to imagine circumstances where whites then regard blacks as inherently treacherous and use that to justify further marginalization. It's all incredibly unhealthy.

Classics Club Schedule, 2019

I have 21 months left to finish my Classics Club list, with 22 books remaining. I'm not sure what happens if one fails to complete the list -- perhaps it involves being attacked by moody English teachers, I'm not sure.   Anxious to avoid such a fate, I plan to make classics my priority this year, and have developed a tentative schedule for this year that will make 2020's classic requirements relatively light.  Most of the sets (save January's) have a paired connection, like Rome, travel,  and so on.  If I actually get this done, I'll  reward myself with a little bottle of scotch.

January:
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

February
The Aeneid, Virgil
The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar

March
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy

April
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1,  Edward Gibbon
The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith

May
Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann David Wyss

June
A Farewell to Arms,  Ernest Hemingway
Catch-22, Joseph Heller

July
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

August
The Education of Henry Adams,  Henry Adams
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas

September
The Histories, Herodotus

October 
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

November
War and Peace, Tolstoy

December
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoeyesky

This leaves The Federalist Papers as the odd man out for 2020.   I wanted to make it the September read (September 17 is Constitution Day, a date presumably unremarked on by anyone other than con-law professors), but The Histories seems formidable.  We'll see what happens!

The Arabian Nights

Tales from the Arabian Nights

“If you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely, little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:

Tales from The Arabian Nights proved an interesting challenge, because most collections of them in English are only selections, and their contents are highly variable. The first  set I started didn't mention Aladdin or Sinbad, the two stories which have the most name recognition in the west.  My reading of the Arabian nights was thus divided between two volumes, the respective translators being Hussein Hadaway and Edward William Lane.

The Arabian nights open with the framing story of two brother-kings in Persia and India visiting one another and discovering that both of their wives are cheating on them.  After retreating into the country to think things over,  they spy a demon who keeps his human wife locked in a box buried in the desert in an effort to keep her faithful,  only to have his efforts spoiled by her finding other men to sleep with  anyway. The brothers sleep with her before lamenting the unfaithfulness of womankind, and return to their respective realms, where one resolves to never keep a wife. Instead, each day he marries a virgin, sleeps with her, and then kills her after the fact. This goes on for quite some time until his vizier's daughter, Shahrahzad,  volunteers herself for marriage with a plan in mind.  Using her extensive knowledge of literature and poetry,  on her wedding night she begins telling a story that so ensnares the mind of her husband that he begs her to continue, and night after night puts the thought  of killing her away until he can hear the end.

The tales of the Arabian nights are not one long story with many chapters like War and Peace; instead, one story will unfold to have many stories inside it, or a character introduced in one story will then be followed in another story, ensnaring the reader in a multitude of threads.  They're replete with magic, of course; demons are as common as cattle, but I suspect the translation of that particular word  is awkward because the demons are not necessarily servants of a great evil power. The first one we meet is just a fellow burying his bride in a glass box in the middle of the wilderness, nothing diabolical there.  In the first collection I read, once the caliph Harun al-Rashid shows up in a story, most of the stories that follow involve his court.  (al-Rashid threatens his vizier Jafar with death every time they discover something untoward going on in the kingdom. Not exactly the happy little man from Disney's Aladdin.)  There are a lot of surprises here: Aladdin is set in China, of all places, but I suppose he could have been one of China's distant western minorities, like a Muslim  Uyghur.  Some of the stories are also far more salacious than I would have expected, given the image of Islam as straitlaced, but these stories emerge from popular culture which eludes heavy state censorship by its oral nature.

The Arabian Nights will probably rank among my favorite, or at least the most memorable, books in this Classics Club challenge.  The stories are rich in odd scenarios and characters, like the chance meeting of three one-eyed dervishes, or the discovery that the colorful fish in a pond introduced in one story are actually the citizens of a town which was cursed, and the stories-within-stories trick gets amusing, almost like a running joke. Of course each dervish, characters in a story, has to tell how they got there, and one of them has another story inside that story -- Shahrazad's ability to weave all these together is amazing.

Related:
The Canterbury Tales, G. Chaucer

The Prince

The Prince
© 1532 Niccolo Machiavelli
100 pages

Italy, circa 1500, was a rough neighborhood. Divided between powerful city-centered states and frequently threatened by outside empires,  few rulers could rest on their laurels and enjoy a prolonged peace. Even if someone outside didn't want to take over, someone inside might want to effect a little regime change.  In such an environment, Nichola Machiavelli chose to present his newly-acclaimed ruler with a gift of advice. The Prince is a brief, grimly realistic review of how states work and how best to manipulate them, drawing on Italian or Mediterranean  history for case studies.

I've grown up to associate the term Machiavellian with sinister calculation, usually of the wheels-within-wheels kind, and especially with cold-blooded calculation that doesn't hesitate to burn bridges, step on toes, and secure pointy knives in the back of friends who have outlived their use.  The Prince doesn't quite do that reputation justice,  but it's easy to see where it lies.   Most of the beginning advice is analytical, as Machiavelli reviews different types of states and ways to rise to power --   He argues that a feudal state like France is relatively easy to compromise and invade, but nearly impossible to consolidate because of the heavy local  basis of government.. An autocratic regime, on the other hand, where the weight of the state is on the ruler's shoulders and not supported or drawn from civil society, is harder to invade  because of the central power but relatively easy to subdue thereafter.   He appraises different sources of effective defense, from the best (a native, professional army) to the worst (foreign auxiliaries).   It's later on, though, that things get....interesting.

Machiavelli argues that morality has little place in politics;  politics is about what is rather than what should be. He does not equivocate: men are wicked. You cannot account on their affection, because it evaporates quickly. You cannot count on loyalty, because  everyone looks instinctively to their own interest  in the pursuit of power and wealth.   It is better, then, to be feared rather than loved -- so long as one is not hated.   Rulers should make and break their word with the same ease of a mechanic breaking down equipment to replace or mend its parts.  This should not done flippantly or obviously -- it's always important to maintain the appearance of virtue if not the substance of it --  but a prince is judged by his results and nothing else.  The best way for a prince to solidify his power,  in fact, is for him to make himself indispensable, a man whose fall would cause more trouble  than his continuing in office.  In weighing the virtues of generosity and parsimony,  Machiavelli concludes that it is far better for a prince to be faulted for stinginess than liberality:  recipients of gifts are never as grateful as they should be, and  the giving of gifts and favors only spurs resentment among those who do not benefit,  induces greater expectations for future, more fulsome giving, and empties the state's coffers. In a worst case scenario, the liberally-giving prince can earn the hatred of the people by taxing them to give them gifts they do not regard as favors but rather as entitlements. All  this advice is not intuitive: while one might expect advice to a dictator to urge disarming the rabble so they don't protest, Machiavelli instead maintains that keeping the population armed is a wiser choice. A ruler who disarms his subjects broadcasts his distrust of the people, and so cultivates their contempt. The strength of the ruler lays in his ability to defend against threats, and an armed populace is the best means of doing so.

The Prince has all kinds of related advice in it, from choosing wise-but-not-too-wise counsel, to squelching conspiracies. Some of the advice has modern application which anyone would applaud, like the avoidance of  sycophants and foreign auxiliaries (how much money did DC waste in Afghanistan trying to create a native security force?).  Some of this is material which I think we all suspect but rarely want to admit -- like the necessity for leaders to appear decisive and strong even if they are internally conflicted.  That can easily lead us into folly if leaders focus too much on appearances rather than reality, but it is possible to change one's mind in light of growing evidence and still appear decisive.  None of us would want to live in states where leaders lie and manipulate the people, but judging by the popularity of shows like House of Cards,  we suspect we do already.   Although I would not advocate The Prince as a way to government -- I put personal stock in virtue, honor, truth, all that dated and impolitic stuff --    I suspect even good, well-intentioned people who come into power find themselves enacting its lessons as they settle into office.  The Prince has enormous value for me in its naked view of man the political creature, admitting as it does the limitations of building societies from the crooked timber of humanity.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist
© 1837 Charles Dickens
447 pages

"Please, sir, I want some more."   I had never read or otherwise encountered Oliver Twist before this month, but I immediately recognized that quote. Something about little Oliver sticks in the minds of other readers, just as it stuck in the mind of many characters who encountered him.  Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan who seems to escape and again from the clutches of uncaring or malicious adults, only to find himself right back in trouble. It was trouble that started before his birth, for as this narrative follows young Oliver's birth until he is about eleven or twelve,  its happenings eventually reveal a more elaborate family drama.  While Oliver is passing in and out of the hands of hostile adults -- first uncaring taskmasters, then criminals, who capture him after he escapes --  the arrival of a man with a mysterious past heightens the mortal danger to the boy, far beyond that of ordinary neglect and abuse.  The novel is replete with memorable characters, particularly Nancy --  a teenage girl associated with a gang of criminals, who helps them kidnap him for labor but regrets her actions, later laboring to atone for them.  Although this story is more grim than anything else I've read of Dickens, I appreciated the earn-your-happy-ending type conclusion, in which Oliver finally finds happiness but at the cost of a dear friend.

The Hiding Place

The Hiding Place
© 1971 Corrie ten Boom,  John and Elizabeth Sherrill
241 PAGES

You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance.

Psalms 32

When Corrie ten Boom turned in her family radio to the Nazi officials who had taken control of her town and her country and was asked if anyone else in the home had another set, she looked him square in the face and said "No".  As she departed, she shuddered -- not from the fear of encountering an agent of tyranny, but from how easy it was to lie.    The ten Booms were a deeply religious family whose watchmaking business opened and closed it day with the reading of Scripture, and even lying for the good did not come easy to the ten Boom sisters.  But it would have to, because as the Nazi consolidation of power in the Netherlands began, and their Jewish friends fell under duress, the tiny watchmaking-shop became the hiding place for a group of resistance fighters and Jewish citizens seeking refuge from the government.    It was last until late 1944, but even when the family had been seized by the SS and imprisoned in camps, there still remained one hiding place more.  The Hiding Place is both a wartime memoir and a work of Christian testimony, declaring and demonstrating that light can shine in the darkness.

From the beginning, the hiding place was not a great secret. The hidden compartment was physically well-concealed, but  no one could miss the sheer amount of people entering and exiting the building, and the neighbors had to ask (very quietly)  if they couldn't keep the Hanukkah singing down just a little bit.  The local police also knew, but had no interest in helping their grey-uniformed bosses in persecuting the innocents.   Someone did want to help the Germans, however,  as the family was betrayed and imprisoned. (Their wards, however, escaped notice!)  Eventually Corrie herself would travel to  Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp.  But that's where the memoir comes something else altogether, as the ten Boom sisters are isolated from one another and forced to rely on nothing but their faith to keep them sane -- and not just sane, but human.  The Gospel stories kept hope alive in the face of brutality -- and kept  them from sinking into despair and deadened souls. The camps destroyed many who survived, inflicting long-lasting psychological trauma, but ten Boom emerged from the war as a more fervent Christian missionary.   Remarkably, she and her sister refused to hate those who abused and humiliated them, and killed their father; they constantly expressed thanks for whatever small mercies they can see, and even when Corrie is being interrogated by an SS official, his skull-and-crossbones staring her down,  she urges him to turn away from the darkness and look to the light.   

In their darkest hours, the ten Boom sisters shared hope for the future -- dreams of what they would do when they were released.  They wanted to turn their home into a refuge for those who had been crippled by it. This was not new to the ten Booms: even during the war they sought to shelter and teach the mentally infirm, who were left without resources by the Nazis and threatened with euthanasia.    ten Boom shared a vision of having a place where former collaborators could redeem themselves  by serving those whom they'd previously oppressed. This, she admits, did not work out well: there were too many fights between both sides, each holding the other in resentment.  Even so, her shelter was one of the few places open to homeless former collaborators.   The ten Booms' refusal to give in to hate is utterly inspiring in a day when  spite and contempt saturate every political argument, when old hatreds are constantly given new life and the bleeding sores of politics never allowed to heal.

"It was a day for memories. A day for calling up the past. How could have guessed as we sat there -- to middle-aged spinsters and an old man -- that in place of memories we were about to be given adventure such as we had never dreamed of. Adventure and anguish, horror and heaven were just around the corner, and we did not know.
Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?

p. 12

Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London
© 1933 George Orwell
224 pages

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

(A Christmas Carol)

In 1933, young George Orwell took a room in the warrens of Paris and was promptly rendered penniless when someone broke into his room and stole his savings. Struggling to find work teaching English, Orwell drifted into poverty, until he found himself back in England, living as a tramp. Or...did he?  Down and Out in Paris and London describes itself (in my edition) as a novel;   elsewhere, it is described as a memoir of Orwell's, one that took real events and made a proper story out of them.   Regardless,  Down and Out delivers a convincing picture of life in the dregs, both employed and not.

The story begins in Paris, where a struggling narrator links up with a Russian friend of his as they both try to avoid being thrown out of their penny flats. They try everything from the circus to  writing Communist propaganda, but most of these opportunities melt away as soon as they get close. (Orwell concludes that  the communists are swindlers; brother, you ain't see nothin' yet.)   At last they find work -- and plenty of it -- in the kitchens of a classy hotel, which is far from classy behind the servants' doors. There the scene is chaos, insults, heat, and staff wading their way around one another through floors wet with discarded lettuce leaves and oil.  Seventeen hours a day -- broken by a mid-afternoon break to relax in the bistros --  is not unusual.  This provides a secure existence until the two friends break away to help launch a Russian restaurant. It never ignites, and eventually Orwell drifts to England where he takes up tramping and tries various boarding houses and so on.

Most of this is strictly memoir, but Orwell pauses to reflect on what he is seeing from time to time. He notes, for instance, that the high class meals are an utter farce: if the gentlemen outside were to witness their food being prepared, they would hesitate to feed the result to their dogs -- what between the steaks being rescued from dustbins and the hair grease-tainted soup. The work was badly organized, Orwell wrote, highly inefficient, and he suspected motive at work. Keep the lower classes running hither and yon, and they wouldn't have time to get in trouble.  Similarly inefficient is the waste of human energy he sees in London:  the tramps spend their time on the move because they're only permitted to use a given relief house once, so they move from house to house. All of this time spent walking and waiting for hostels to open could be made more productive, Orwell muses, if lodging homes for the poor included some element of farming: those who stayed would work towards their own support.

Down and Out is utterly readable in the Orwell way and despite its subject is funny from time to time. One man is described as rather ambiguous, for he wore sidewhiskers and those were the mark of either an apache or an intellectual -- and no one knew how to place him.  In the Paris segment, when the narrator considers a job at the circus, the requirement include: cleaning up litter,  moving benches, and standing astride two chairs so that a lion might pass through one's legs. One of those things is not like the other.   Orwell captures a great many human stories, some of them curiosities of the time -- like the Russians who fled Stalinist Russia.  Part of his argument made a certain sense and others do not. He writes that beggars' labors should be considered as work, since they perform actions -- wailing a song, or drawing on the sidewalk -- that are responded to (albeit grudgingly) with money.  What's the difference between that and a man swinging a pick at the railroad, he asks -- they're both labor.  That would be the labor theory of value, which is of interest to middle schoolers who spend all day half-hardheartedly picking at their bedrooms and then claim they've worked all day at it.   The difference between a man paying to go to an Enrico Caruso concert and a man giving a dollar to a street yodeling is that he actually wants to listen to Caruso, and he wants to get away from the yodeler.  The London system does seem inefficient, but equally counterproductive is encouraging unemployed people to remain in one county forever through social support, when there are neither jobs nor the prospect of jobs in then near future. People used to move away when opportunities failed; now problems just fester.  It just goes to show that there are no solutions, merely trade-offs.

Dracula

Dracula
© 1897 Bram Stoker
416 pages

Every attorney has problematic clients,  but few can claim an actual monster. Such is the case with Count Dracula, as  young lawyer Jonathan Hawker discovers to his dismay and horror when he arrives at the mysterious count's manor in Transylvania.  The trip was just a bit of business --- finalizing the papers for the count's purchase of land in England.  But the Count is a man who the locals fear, who can command the beasts of the earth, and who is never around during the day.   Hawker quickly finds himself an effective prisoner, shut up in a foreboding castle full of locked doors and secrets, and when he stumbles through one into the other -- discovering that the Count is a vampire, who subsists on human blood --   Hawker realizes both he and the City of London are in peril.

For a century-old gothic thriller, Dracula stands up very well. It uses an unexpected format, its story rendered in the letters and diary entries of the participants, who occasionally pool their notes to get the bigger picture. This epistolary approach allows the reader to piece the story together, instead of having all the work done for us by the narrative.  (A good bit of the characters'  work is done by Dr. van Helsing, who has a tendency to lecture.)  Modern readers of vampires will recognize the creature here, but books like Twilight and In the Forests of the Night divorce the monster from his background. Stoker's vampire is a creature of Hell,  experiencing a corrupted and bastardized version of eternal life;   his association with the devil is not merely one of hyperbole, but real to the point that Dracula and his victims are completely disabled by the presence of a Eucharistic wafer. (Not included as vampire traits are a tendency to say "Bleh!" and an obsession with counting. Sesame Street lied to me!)

From its beginnings -- the dread-laden arrival in Transylvania, the creeping horror as Hawker and others piece together the truth -- until the chase at the end,  Dracula remains a very effective thriller.

Spin Me Right Round, Baby

Every so often the Classics Club does a 'spin' challenge, in which players post a list of twenty books from their classics-to-be-read pile, number it, and wait. After we've had a few days to post the list, the folks at the Classics Club blog issue a number. Whatever number they draw, that's the book to be read next.   So, here's twenty items from my list, and I await Monday with anticipation!

1. The Aenid, Virgil
2. The Histories, Herodotus
3. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
4. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
6. Inferno, Dante
7. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
8. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
9. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
11. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
12. Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain 
13. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
14. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
15. O Pioneers!  Willa Cather
16. White Fang, Jack London
17. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
18. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
19. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
20. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray
© 1890 Oscar Wilde
180 pages

Dorian Gray is the picture of youthful innocence, but his portrait is one of deathly corruption. After sitting for a painting rendered by his friend Basil, Dorian becomes a source of infatuation for himself.  Awed by his own beauty, Dorian is driven to angst by the sight of his own beauty and confesses that he would do anything, even give his soul, if the figure in the painting would age instead of himself.   Through such a Faustian bargain, the portrait becomes Gray's hidden self, his conscience  reflecting the ugliness within as he becomes increasingly self-obsessed. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tale of sin and degradation, of a man's destruction -- the fulfillment of the teacher's exhortation in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity.

Although The Picture of Dorian Gray ends in death, being the literary account of a moral crash-and-burn,  Wilde's wit makes for numerous fun moments. There is a bitterness to the laughs,  the vicious humor; the many stabs taken at society and middle class morality are strikes rendered by truly vicious men,  individuals who commit murder and abandon themselves to moral chaos. Many witticisms attributed to Wilde are placed in here the mouth of the malicious Lord Henry, like "The only way to get rid of a temptation is yield to it."  One hopes that few readers look for wisdom from the likes of Henry, who is such a profoundly dismal influence that the painter Basil begs him not to corrupt young Dorian. (Alas for Bas, soon Dorian will be doing the corrupting...and to such an extent that many of his deeds can't be named directly, but alluded to only by the fact that people leave the room when he arrives.)    During at least two points in the work, Dorian wavers at a moral crossroads, but at both times he only slides further into the pit, unable to free himself from his one fixation: self-adulation.

Gray is a curious accomplishment,  humorful but with a great sadness. Gray's obsession with himself, his surrounding of himself with trivial amusements, are haunting.  For all his pleasures taken, for all the pursuit given to making himself feel good, Dorian at the end is worse for the wear. The one character who remains interested in his person -- Henry again -- does so because Dorian is an amusing spectacle.  Even the man who encouraged him on his descend will not accompany him on it, merely watch coldly from above.  Selfishnesss reigns. In a world filled with trivial amusements, and now more than ever obsessed with perpetual youth, Dorian Gray remains a warning.  In both art and substance, Wilde's sole novel commends itself to the modern reader.

Related:
Mephisto, Klaus Mann

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey
© 1986 Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrick
316 pgs

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, mankind makes an extraordinary discovery: unmistakable evidence of life outside the environs of Earth. An object on the moon makes plain the fact that three million years ago, extraordinary and intelligent creatures were present…but who they were, and what their interest or relationship was with Earth, is a mystery with clues as far removed as Saturn. 2001: A Space Odyssey, is both the story of a physical journey through the Solar System in search of answers, and a fatalistic view of mankind’s evolution.

Surely there is a word for completely misinterpreting the plot of a story based on pop culture references. It would apply to my experience with 2001, which was far as I was concerned was wholly about an astronaut named Dave’s struggle with the sentient artificial intelligence running his ship – and running amok. As it turns out, HAL-9000 is dispatched in one chapter here, and the story is mostly about mankind’s progress toward…oblivion? Clark combines technological optimism and Cold War fatalism in such a way that the ending really threw me. Admittedly, I was poised to be thrown: a sequence in which the main character is taken on a journey through the Cosmos by a greater lifeform reminded me of similar voyages in Contact and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Suffice it to say, in 2001 the main character does not return to Earth with a transcendental view of the universe to share with his fellows for their betterment. It’s more like the ending to Beneath the Planet of the Apes; though considering that the book begins with ape-men learning to use tools to smack around their neighbors, I suppose it’s appropriate.

2001 is dated in its optimistic predictions about our establishing sizable, stable outposts on Mars and the Moon. There’s not a lot of science actually mentioned, though, so once one ignores the date, anachronisms almost cease. (Okay, so the Soviet Union isn't still around, and 'tablets' are around a few years before their time...) As an adventure set in space, it’s great fun, I knew what was coming with HAL, and even so the so realization by Dave that his computer was listening and moving against him succeeded. While there’s not a lot of hard science, 2001 does touch on a few heady topics, like the volatility of intelligence; considering the difficulties in managing human-made AI, the lead characters how we can reasonably expect to communicate with completely foreign intelligences. As unexpectedly grim as the ending was, I do appreciate Clarke for hinting that superior intelligence does not necessarily bring with it a “more evolved sensibility”. Naturally, I share Carl Sagan’s hope that if there are other intelligences out there, those with powers greater than ours, that their survival past ‘technological adolescence’ indicates they have their CRUSH KILL DESTROY instincts in check. That doesn't mean they would recognize us as beings whose life merits respect, though. We might be as incidental to them as flies upon an interstellar windshield.

The Classics Club

For the past year or so I've been aware of a book/blogging community known as the Classics Club, whose members have pledge to read a list of fifty or so "classics" within five years, and share their thoughts about them with other members of the group. Although that sort of thing seems right up my alley, I've not joined in yet because I didn't too much like having to choose the books in advance.  On reflection, however,  I realized that I'm going to be reading classics, anyway: I might as well have company in doing it.  So, here's my official throwing-in announcement: below is the list of titles I expect to read before September 22nd, 2020.

These move generally from western civ classics to American literature, including southern literature.

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Danny Jackson
2. The Aenid, Virgil
3. The Histories, Herodotus
4. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
5. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
6. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
7. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
8. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
9. The Prince, Machiavelli 
10. Inferno, Dante
11. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoeyesky
12. The Seven-Storey Mountain,  Thomas Merton
13. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
14. The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
15. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
16. Dracula, Bram Stoker
17. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
18. The Swiss Family Robinson, Robert Louis Stevenson
19. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
20. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
21. Emma, Jane Austen
22. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
23. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
24. The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
25. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
26. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
27. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
28. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
29. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
30. The Federalist Papers, various
31. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
32. .Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain 
33. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
34. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
35. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
36. O Pioneers!  Willa Cather
37. White Fang, Jack London
38. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
39. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
40. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
41. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
42. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
43. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
44. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
45. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
46. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
47. The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
48. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
49. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
50. 2001: A Space Odyessey, Arthur C. Clarke