when the world brings its fire...

"We Have Always Lived in the Castle", Shirley Jackson, 1962.

Merricat Blackwood poisoned her family long ago. She strategically kept her sister Constance and Uncle Julian alive; everyone else had to go. In this sinister story themed around reclusiveness and resistance to mainstream culture, we have a villainess and heroine all wrapped into one person.

All's well, or so it'd seem for these outcasted ladies. Following a trial that set Constance free of being charged for murdering her family (you don't have Merricat confirmed as the perpetrator until halfway through the book or so), the Blackwoods live a life away from everyone. Constance never leaves, Uncle Julian can't, and Merricat only goes into town for shopping (and a side order of harsh ridicule).

Then Charles arrives. A mainstream main disguised as family, the girls' cousin, he infiltrates the their away-from-it-all world in attempts to assimilate. Unwittingly, he sets fire to the house with one of his pipes and burns the entire upstairs. Then the house is plundered and pillaged, the climax being the time where society attempts to crush the girls forever. But see them a few days later, the remaining portion of the house barricaded, with only their garden and tablecloths for Merricat's clothes, and on they go, to their own drum.

But is the drum sinister? Is Merricat's design to keep her sister down and subservient? Or has Merricat liberated what was left of her family and separated them and their useless fortune from the doldrums of normalcy? These are appropriate questions, I believe, and ridiculously hard to answer. I suppose that qualifies the books as challenging, morally speaking, and you almost feel pleasure out of not answering, simply pondering. I couldn't help but feel oddly hopeful in the last chapter as I heard of Society's hindsight horrible guilt as they left food for the girls who waited until late at night to retrieve it. Charity. Heavy consciences. And the girls, not needing, not caring, but eating it and living on the essentials of love, garden, and air. It's bohemian stuff. With some sick fantasy we've all had in our most bitter moments -- to be on an island with our families, and everyone, just everyone, lost forever -- if not killed, then just exiled.

Just be on an island.

"'The least Charles could have done', Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.'"

the garden of laughter

"Candide", Francois Voltaire, 1759

After reading Michael Wood's excellent and exhaustive introduction on Voltaire's satirical masterpiece, "Candide", I've got no cause to write some retread interpretation. Instead, I offer my exhilaration upon my first of many readings of this novel, and what it means to my own work.

First of all, I sit in stream-of-postmodern-conscious and reel out all my anxieties, and I call it writing (which it is). Yet, I see Candide and his friends, who have been beaten, torn to shreds, tending their garden, and I forget to tend mine. I see Voltaire tending his for 94 pages and shredding the art of philosophy he made his legend off of, and I forget to *laugh* as he laughs at humanity.

To see Candide go through the the horrors, lie on a bed of philosophy and hope, travel the lands only to find perfection and deny it by some strange nature expelling himself from a land not natural to himself, all in the name of refuting Optimism, may be of the darkest joys I have ever partaken of. Even as he comes about his lovely Cunegonde, she is exposed as hideous and he marries her out of duty -- and I like the thought that this is reality realized through the previous ideal of marrying Cunegonde, or the idea of her.

No character leads a pointless existence, no episode drags, the pace of writing is extreme and refreshing to my eyes. There is an inkling of sentimentality toward the end, an existential nuance amidst the absurdity, even if it's the absurdity of destiny (a stylized contradiction in my reflection only). I love that Voltaire can even tease himself through Pococurante, and his pickiness toward literature, which the melancholy philosopher Martin chides when Candide suggests he's happy for his ability to criticize ("Which is to say...that there is pleasure to be had in not taking pleasure"). I can't say enough of the two day experience in reading "Candide", and how it reminds us that 1) Everything is indeed not OK and it's OK to confront this, and 2) Laugh at it, it's absurd.

Perhaps then I write my satire. Or just read more of them. Or, at the simplest and most useful, I walk around town and remember to laugh, that it's chaos and no one knows what to do and, indeed, we are asses. And I just laugh.

PS: The packaging with the various comics including the front cover of the opening of the novel and how Candide is thrown into his horrors, as well as the maze to discover the origin of Pangloss's social disease, are awesome, as well are the apt appendices (including excerpts from Voltaire's philosophical encyclopedia, a poem on the earthquake at Lisbon and its use toward refuting Optimism, and an alternate opening to the Paris chapter).

PPS: I also learned what an auto-da-fe is: When heretics were publicly charged and invited to make an "act of faith"; though in the circumstance in "Candide", Pangloss was hanged and Candide flogged in this horrid world.

"'What is Optimism?' asked Cacambo - 'Alas!' said Candide, 'it is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.'"

broken hearted hoover fixer sucker guy

"Our Man In Havana", Graham Greene, 1958

First, it's been a month since I posted here. I've been in the doldrums of James Joyce's difficult "Ulysses", which I believe I understand on some levels (psychological, spiritual) but know I do not on others (cultural, literary), so I've recruited the help of "The New Bloomsday Book" to assist me. I got 461 pages in before I decided that, so the journey has been a rough sail, but I'm excited for the assistance, and strangely excited to go back through the book. I'm going to make it like a college course and study a few nights of the week, and will be an undergrad level "Ulysses" scholar by the time I finish the novel and its companion.

But oh, I've toiled.

Got to the point I had to read something else with it, and all knows Nietzche wasn't the one for it (figured that out tough) so after dabbling in "The Portable Kerouac" found in a Flagstaff used bookstore, I took Graham Greene's "Our Man In Havana", and up against the sometimes-impermeable "Ulysses", it was a fast, engaging read, even more readily appreciated because of Christopher Hitchens' intro, which at first I hated, and am now even more indebted to.

See, I tried reading Hitchens' "God is Not Great", but I find that he is far too in love with the sound of his own voice. Not to mention his writing is boring. However, this short essay on the ontological aspect of Greene's "entertainment" on Cold War Era espionage (from the British side) is right on the money. Greene's writing is clear enough in its purpose that the introduction serves only to put into words what we figure easily enough by reading -- that Jim Wormold, the middle-aged vacuum cleaner selling protagonist, was floating toward death and in need of an awakening from his luke warm state. The incompetent secret service in Britain was the just the thing to assist him, and before you know it, he was of sudden importance, and took advantage of it to rough consequence, before crushing both identities and living. There are risks and there are rewards in stepping out of your box; and as opposed to Kurt Vonnegut's impressive, dire "Mother Night", Greene goes for the lighter side and Wormold's world manipulates him juuuuuuuust right to get around the worst of fates.

The transformation of Wormold's being, then, is primary, and the events of the Cold War it premeditates are secondary, perhaps only an interesting and relevant setting for growth, and I'm sure for the time, an incendiary commentary on British incompetence. But it's really all about Jim, the pathetic man who sits late at nights with his only friend, Dr Hasselbacher, also old and pathetic, after his vacuum job. When the infantile, idiotic Hawthorne comes to see him at the bar and make him Our Man In Havana, Wormold sees the way to make some extra cash by creating fake agents under him and submitting numerous reports under these aliases, and using sketches of vacuum cleaner parts to pass as designs for bombs. The cash is, of course, to get him and his daughter, 17-year-old bombshell Milly, back to Great Britain, and away from sex fiend Captain Segura. Thus, he becomes, as Greene would say through secretary Beatrice, a successful, well-paid writer of bad fiction, who cares not about his characters. He's living on the edge, which would cost him his best friend, and his Havana world, but the consequences don't seem to outdo the ultimate rewards, and perhaps Greene is chiding himself early on for the inevitable death of Hasselbacher, who seems so easily disposed of.

Regardless, Wormold eventually outsmarts Segura, finds he is not a killer and delights in the moral standard he now owns and we realize the difference between the real and artificial in life, so we blame nottasoul when his ending sees him back in Britain with job, Beatrice as a girlfriend, and all the money he saved up to get Milly a better life. He crushes the old sad Wormold by finding an actual mission to live for (quite existential, the belief we are capable of satisfying a great objective), he crushes the new Wormold by standing up to his lies and seeing the incompetent crushed. And Christopher Hitchens might say this far better than I, but hey, this is my reflective spot. Being is being able to be something rather than simply floating. For Wormold, a traditional-minded, low-key, loving push-over father, the be something is naturally to provide and be there for his loved ones. In a quirky, fun, rollicking way, Greene presents his character study with great intrigue.

Thank all, too, that Milly drops the duenna face, too, and grows to be a woman. Her transformation is subtle, but it seems father and daughter are destined for a much closer relationship; and the entrance of Beatrice into their world, a non-Christian womanly influence on Milly, can only help bridge the gap between Jim and his daughter. The old silly Milly of Catholic mockings was, after all, crazy enough to get involved with Segura. Man, evolve!


"If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone's global war" (Wormold)