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Okay, busy weekend. I steam cleaned many a carpet, played on a Wii, and hosted my family for a BBQ. So, I'm behind on the August writing thing, clearly.
Also, I've neglected to post book reviews...
#29: Murderers and Other Friends, by John Mortimer (1992)
Mortimer is best known to folks in North America as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. This is a rambling autobiographical rumination, essentially a collection of anecdotes stringing together the couse of Mortimer's life. While he resembles his most famous creation in some regards, he is no Old Bailey hack, nor an unadventurous stick-in-the-mud. Bon vivant, raconteur, (and a bunch of other French words for "tells entertaining stories"), he is also a fierce socialist and disdainful of conservatism.
He has a large circle of famous friends that included David (not Larry!) Niven and Tony Robinson. Stories include his defense of The Sex Pistols against obscenity charges - he convinced the judge that when they said "Nevermind the Bollocks" they were referring to 18th century sailing tackle. And, when defending a dildo importer in the early 70s, he noted the judge had a wooden leg and said they should be considered prosthetic limbs. There are also a number of bawdy stories about British celebrities.
One of Mortimer's more interesting cases involved defending a magazine against charges of heresy. In Britain, private citizens can bring charges, and a moralizing MP successfully levelled heresy charges against a publisher in the late 70s. As Mortimer points out, "heresy" can only be considered a crime if the offense is agains the C o E. Britons are free to insult Catholics, Jews, or Presbyterians! The case in the 70s was the first successful prosecution for heresy in over a century.
Mortimer has a love-hate relationship with religion, and considers himself an "Atheist for Christ," which is to say that he respects the ideals and history of Christianity highly, while rejecting the supernatural as a requirement for morality. He acknowledges the dark elements of past and present history while putting them firmly at the door of human failing.
#30: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Written in 1962 and rejected. The author was in his early 30s when he committed suicide in 1969. His mother peddled the manuscript around in the 70s, and it finally hit bestseller lists in 1980. It recounts the adventures of a Falstaffian man-child, Ignatius Reilly, aged 30. He reminds me strongly of a Daniel Pinkwater character in a less-forgiving universe, one with sex. Ignatius is a ridiculous character, but not more ridiculous than people I've known in real life.
If he were alive in 2008, Ignatius would have a modestly popular blog, a large collection of very well-loved plush animals, and spend his hours railing against foes in utterly pointless (but well spoken) flame wars. Instead, he spends his time locked in his bedroom, writing furiously on school notebooks, carrying on an angry (yet sexually charged) correspondence with a former classmate, and having sexual fantasies about his dead dog.
He also has a lot of trouble with his "valve."
“It smells terrible in here.”
“Well, what do you expect? The human body when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I ,too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
Ignatius is a simultaneously tragic and comic figure, a sort of clever, verbose, selfish child in a man's body. He sabotages his own successes by a combination of apathy of complete lack of self-knowledge, which he defends as a sense of medieval aesthetics and philosophical resignation to the evils of the modern world. Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft really let himself go and ate only hotdogs and cake. Still, he's hardly less of a freak than most other people, and at least he's got a better vocabulary. You want him to succeed, even though it seems clear that he can't.
#31: Can You Speak Venusian?, by Patrick Moore (1973)
A short book that details astronomer Patrick Moore's experiences with "independent thinkers," which is to say people who have absurd theories and worldviews - Flat Earthers, Cold Sunners, Hollow Earthers, and so on. Moore is comically (or tragicomically?) surprised to hear that people are still disagreeing with evolution in this day and age... which was now 35 years ago. One interesting theme is how he links together belief in Glacial Cosmogony through several different oddball theories, as a kind of grand unified weirdness world model.
Moore basically spends 150 pages making fun of people, usually for good reasons, but he is so dismissive and contemptuous that the book started to annoy me. He's best when he admits that "these people" make his world a much more interesting place. He's most annoying when apparently writing off psychiatry and the Labour Party as airy-fairy nonsense on par with a man who claims the Moon is an inch thick. Of course, Moore wears a monocle and plays the xylophone, so one is never quite sure just how serious he is.
Moore is currently about 300 years old. He's been presenting the same television show on the BBC since 1957, an astronomy themed show that comes on once a month.. All his books, including this one, were written a typewriter from 1908. He is in several respects extremely cool, sort of like a cranky uncle with a lot of good stories. But, like a cranky uncle, don't ask him about people on welfare or single working mothers - his charm wears off fast.
Also, I've neglected to post book reviews...
#29: Murderers and Other Friends, by John Mortimer (1992)
Mortimer is best known to folks in North America as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. This is a rambling autobiographical rumination, essentially a collection of anecdotes stringing together the couse of Mortimer's life. While he resembles his most famous creation in some regards, he is no Old Bailey hack, nor an unadventurous stick-in-the-mud. Bon vivant, raconteur, (and a bunch of other French words for "tells entertaining stories"), he is also a fierce socialist and disdainful of conservatism.
He has a large circle of famous friends that included David (not Larry!) Niven and Tony Robinson. Stories include his defense of The Sex Pistols against obscenity charges - he convinced the judge that when they said "Nevermind the Bollocks" they were referring to 18th century sailing tackle. And, when defending a dildo importer in the early 70s, he noted the judge had a wooden leg and said they should be considered prosthetic limbs. There are also a number of bawdy stories about British celebrities.
One of Mortimer's more interesting cases involved defending a magazine against charges of heresy. In Britain, private citizens can bring charges, and a moralizing MP successfully levelled heresy charges against a publisher in the late 70s. As Mortimer points out, "heresy" can only be considered a crime if the offense is agains the C o E. Britons are free to insult Catholics, Jews, or Presbyterians! The case in the 70s was the first successful prosecution for heresy in over a century.
Mortimer has a love-hate relationship with religion, and considers himself an "Atheist for Christ," which is to say that he respects the ideals and history of Christianity highly, while rejecting the supernatural as a requirement for morality. He acknowledges the dark elements of past and present history while putting them firmly at the door of human failing.
#30: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Written in 1962 and rejected. The author was in his early 30s when he committed suicide in 1969. His mother peddled the manuscript around in the 70s, and it finally hit bestseller lists in 1980. It recounts the adventures of a Falstaffian man-child, Ignatius Reilly, aged 30. He reminds me strongly of a Daniel Pinkwater character in a less-forgiving universe, one with sex. Ignatius is a ridiculous character, but not more ridiculous than people I've known in real life.
If he were alive in 2008, Ignatius would have a modestly popular blog, a large collection of very well-loved plush animals, and spend his hours railing against foes in utterly pointless (but well spoken) flame wars. Instead, he spends his time locked in his bedroom, writing furiously on school notebooks, carrying on an angry (yet sexually charged) correspondence with a former classmate, and having sexual fantasies about his dead dog.
He also has a lot of trouble with his "valve."
“It smells terrible in here.”
“Well, what do you expect? The human body when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I ,too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
Ignatius is a simultaneously tragic and comic figure, a sort of clever, verbose, selfish child in a man's body. He sabotages his own successes by a combination of apathy of complete lack of self-knowledge, which he defends as a sense of medieval aesthetics and philosophical resignation to the evils of the modern world. Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft really let himself go and ate only hotdogs and cake. Still, he's hardly less of a freak than most other people, and at least he's got a better vocabulary. You want him to succeed, even though it seems clear that he can't.
#31: Can You Speak Venusian?, by Patrick Moore (1973)
A short book that details astronomer Patrick Moore's experiences with "independent thinkers," which is to say people who have absurd theories and worldviews - Flat Earthers, Cold Sunners, Hollow Earthers, and so on. Moore is comically (or tragicomically?) surprised to hear that people are still disagreeing with evolution in this day and age... which was now 35 years ago. One interesting theme is how he links together belief in Glacial Cosmogony through several different oddball theories, as a kind of grand unified weirdness world model.
Moore basically spends 150 pages making fun of people, usually for good reasons, but he is so dismissive and contemptuous that the book started to annoy me. He's best when he admits that "these people" make his world a much more interesting place. He's most annoying when apparently writing off psychiatry and the Labour Party as airy-fairy nonsense on par with a man who claims the Moon is an inch thick. Of course, Moore wears a monocle and plays the xylophone, so one is never quite sure just how serious he is.
Moore is currently about 300 years old. He's been presenting the same television show on the BBC since 1957, an astronomy themed show that comes on once a month.. All his books, including this one, were written a typewriter from 1908. He is in several respects extremely cool, sort of like a cranky uncle with a lot of good stories. But, like a cranky uncle, don't ask him about people on welfare or single working mothers - his charm wears off fast.
