Shepherd (and Secret Control)

      Shepherd is a new website featuring book lists by authors recommending stories that inspired their own work, books they're fascinated by or books they just love.  Definitely take some time to explore the site, it's loaded with fantastic titles, many of which I had never heard of before, even though they're about subjects I've always loved.  My own featured book list, The Best Books About a World Under Secret Control just went live.  

What Puts the Evil in Evil Geniuses?

      Evil Geniuses is Kurt Andersen's work of (recent) historical and analytical journalism.  It seeks to recount and explain how a group of very wealthy conservatives used their money to alter the public consciousness and influence politics to bolster their own profits, and in so doing set the country on a path of social, economic and climatic ruin.

     In his review of the book for the New York Times Book Review, Anand Giridharadas discusses how Andersen closes the book on a note of hope (I suppose you'd technically call this a spoiler, but I doubt anyone's reading this book for a shock ending).  Just as the conservatives stole the world out from under the liberals back in the 1970s, when liberal power appeared to be at its height, so too can the liberals now take back that power and steer the country away from destruction.  They must, Andersen suggests by way of Giridharadas, simply use the same cunning, the same manipulation, the same power-grasping practices that were once -- and continue to be -- used against them and the rest of us.

     But here's what worries me.  What if it's the abandonment of self-limitation, the willingness to steamroll over everything else in order to get what you want that is the actual problem?  Granted, we are not in a good place right now and granted the liberal route is far preferable in terms of both humane existence and just plain old survival.  And granted, the methods they are currently using have not seemed sufficient to the enormity of the task.  But what if, in doing ANYTHING you need to in order to win, you become something different than you were, and the extreme level of power you wield simply sends us toward ruin, just a different kind at the other end of the spectrum?  What if how you do something is just as loaded with consequences as what you do?

Not a Dystopia

     I didn't set out to write a work of dystopian fiction.  Those That Wake was originally set in the present and the characters in it were trying to prevent circumstances which would lead to dystopia.  Market forces pushed the time-frame of the story ahead a few years, but I worked to ensure that it retained something I felt was crucial: a focus not just on how the world could be worse, but on how certain powers work to make it worse.
     We are not living in a dystopia, though the Coronavirus certainly invites comparison.  Dystopias are about living in an aftermath, dealing with the world after the disaster has happened.  The world is currently working hard to stop the dystopia from setting in (and we will, though exactly how long that will take is hard to say).  This situation is effective, though, for observing how certain powers are meeting the challenge, and also how people are contending with challenges on our own level.
     Reading is an excellent way to spend some extra time inside.  I find that reading books which allow me to conceptualize and understand the problem we're facing help the most.  Two books that get right to the heart of things are:
     Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick - For my money, this is Philip K.'s best (no small claim in a field of forty-four novels and one hundred and twenty-one short stories).  While it doesn't appear so at first, this is very much about how higher powers deal with times of crisis.  If you believe the article linked in the second paragraph of this post is about how powerful people try to alter the narrative, or if you believe it's the people who wrote that article that are trying to alter the narrative, Time out of Joint will still resonate for you.
     The Plague by Albert Camus - A work of literature that reads like an existential thriller (at times), it has much to say about how people deal -- and fail to deal -- with the particular sort of trouble we're in now.
     Maybe you prefer books that get you far away from the problem.  I get it.  If so, have a look at this, instead.

Thanks 2019

     Maybe things are crazier now than they were last year, or maybe not.  The truth is, things are always crazy somehow or other and no matter what side you're on, or if you believe it shouldn't be quite so much about taking sides, normal people just have to muddle through.  We can be thankful for the things that help us do that.  Sometimes they help us escape, sure, but sometimes instead they comfort us by telling us we don't need to escape.
     Philip K. Dick wrote about normal people: shopkeepers, farmers, salesmen, teachers.  A lot of his stories were about what happens when these people have a false world swept right out from under them, but some weren't about that.  Maybe the best one that wasn't about it is Dr. Bloodmoney.  The apocalypse has come and gone, but society is putting itself back together, as it does after its catastrophes.  This is about the normal men and women who have to get it done in small and sometimes impossibly big ways.  The villain of the piece may ring uncomfortably -- but also comfortably -- familiar in his obsession.  It's Philip K. Dick, so it gets very, very weird.  And what do the normal people have to do?  Of course, they have to let the weirdness happen, navigate between this side and that side, and muddle through.
     It always helps to have a joke on hand, too.  Here's one.

Mythologies

     Our culture is ever more in love with mythologies: Star Wars, Harry Potter, superheroes.  The more that are invented and the more available they are, the deeper we go.  They're so much fun, it's easy to get lost in them, like we might lose track of the forest for how closely we're studying the trees.

     The forest -- the larger world the trees inhabit -- is important, though, because that's where we live.  We need to judge mythologies based on what they say about the world, on their metaphors and lessons, not just on what they say about themselves.  Relating them to our lives draws us outward and helps us engage with the world.  If we go down the rabbit hole of their invented histories exclusively, then the stories draw us ever inward, away from the world.  The best mythologies have always been about something bigger than themselves.

Thanks 2018

     Well, there's still plenty of turmoil in the world, but it's embracing the things we value that helps us get through it.  Hopefully, you have a few big things to be thankful for (for me, it's always about the people in my life).  As in years past, here's a list of some small things that I'm enjoying and that are helping me explore some of my favorite art forms more deeply.

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton - The world's first conspiracy thriller?  Published in 1908, it's about a poet recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate a group of anarchists (the terrorists of the time) and finds himself on their Council of Days, where he comes up against the terrifying man who is Sunday.  It's sinister and hilarious by turns, but flat out nutso from beginning to end.  Centered on dueling philosophies (sometimes literally dueling) and obsessed with disguises (the kind that hide, but also the kind that reveal), the esteemed British author Kingsley Amis called it "the most thrilling book I have ever read."

Mazeworld by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson - The story of convicted murderer Adam Cadman who is hanged for his crime, only to awaken in the fantasy realm of Mazeworld, where he's forced into battle with dark forces, including the ones he harbors inside himself.  Back on Earth, though, his not-quite-dead body is being carefully studied by dark forces of yet another kind.  The story is epic yet moves at breakneck speed, but it's Ranson's jaw-dropping visuals - gritty, grainy photorealism deepened with tactile surfaces and atmospheric lighting -- that elevates this work.

Room 207 Press - Howard David Ingham's website is a deep analytical dive into many of cinema's greatest cult movies (among other things).  Some of his pieces are trenchant and humorous, like the one on An American Werewolf in London; others are deeply personal and meaningful like the one on Possession.  All of them touch on what lies beneath the stories we see and know, and make an old favorite seem like a new experience

     And, of course, don't leave without your free turkey joke.

The Nature of Argument

     In their book, Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss the ways a few basic human experiences formed our language and the way our language forms our understanding of the world.  Their first example they use is about the way we think of arguments.  The fact that argument is steeped in metaphorical terms like winning and losing, defending your position, attacking your opponent's case, shooting down your opponent's points and going in with the right strategy deeply ingrains in us the idea that argument is warfare.
     What if, I've been wondering, instead of looking at argument as warfare, we understood it as a way to cooperatively solve a problem?  What if, instead of battle, it was a way we helped each other fix things?
     Particularly in light of recent events, just an idea I thought might be apropos to our imminent elections.

Thanks 2017

     On Thanksgiving last year, the country was on the cusp of a momentous change.  Things have not particularly calmed down since then (do they ever, really?), and however you feel that change has paid off for the country, you'd have to agree that things have not exactly become easier or brighter.  But one of the ways we get through it is by finding things we're thankful for, too.  As on Thanksgivings' past, here are a few small things I'm thankful for, that offer sheer enjoyment, but also a deeper perspective on things we take for granted.

All the President's Men by Carl Benrstein and Bob Woodward - As an account of Watergate by the two journalists who broke the story, it's not exactly a light read, nor an escape from the real world.  Adapted into a riveting movie, the book illuminates just how much bigger the story was than the actual break in at the Democratic National Convention headquarters.  Most astonishing is just how deep President Nixon's rabbit hole of corruption went and the lengths he and his people would go to destroy their enemies, both real and imagined.  It happened in the 1970s, but it's still (or once again) a timely read and, ironically, a hopeful one.  Watergate, which felt every bit as cataclysmic as our own era's problems feel now, did change our country forever.  But if we survived that, maybe we can survive a lot more than we think we can. 

Channel Zero: No End House - Comprising the second season of the SyFy Channel's anthology horror series overseen by off-beat horror writer Nick Antosca, this takes the frame of the creaky old scary story standby, the haunted house, and builds something new out of it.  A small group of college-agers are lured by urban myth and social media into a mysterious, intermittently appearing and disappearing house.  Braving its increasingly terrifying rooms, they find that the true danger comes after they leave . . . or think they have.  Creepy, weird and psychologically insightful, this draws its fear from its characters and their relationships and, in a growing pool of TV horror anthologies, puts Channel Zero as the top of the heap.

Cinemaps by Andrew DeGraff and A.D. Jameson - A follow up to DeGraff's Plotted: A Literary Atlas, which provides maps for and commentary on several literary works, this does the same for thirty-five different movies.  You could spend plenty of time pouring over the intricate maps themselves, especially in such clever forms as the multiple time-period representation for Back to the Future, but the perceptive essays that accompany the maps draw insightful new thematic elements out of well-trodden and often-analyzed classics (The Empire Strikes Back and Alien are two particular stand outs).

     Have happy Thanksgiving and take a free, bonus turkey joke while you're at it.

 

Why and How

     Along the road that led to this Inauguration Day, 2017, I recently reread two books that feel so impossibly relevant to current politics, it's difficult to believe they were both written more than a half a century ago: William Golding's Lord of the Flies and George Orwell's other fictional dystopian rumination, Animal Farm.
     Whether today feels like a celebration to you or a tragedy, I recommend both of these books as a way to understand more deeply why and how this country has arrived where it is.    

Thanks 2016

     As with all Thanksgivings (and all other days in the history of days), there is plenty to be grateful for and plenty not to.  Recently, a little less than half of voting Americans decided it was time for this country to, shall we say, reinvent itself.  Whether this fills you with unease or relief, you're probably grateful that the divisiveness of the campaign is behind us and eager to get to work building a future, however you might individually envision it.  As in Thanksgivings past,  here are few things to make some of your downtime from the building more enjoyable and even, perhaps, more insightful.

The Songs of Johnny Cash - I happen to have heard part of Hurt running under the trailer for the movie Logan.  The sense of longing and melancholy that rode so powerfully in the lyrics and Mr. Cash's voice made me curious to investigate his entire oeuvre.  It has, so far, proved most rewarding, both in its dark, searching depths and its funny, twangy highs.

Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye by Gerard Way, Jon Rivera and Michael Avon Oeming - One of the titles in DC's new Young Animals imprint, a line of comics founded on the tone and outlook of Grant Morrison's seminal Doom Patrol run.  Cave Carson is well and truly bonkers in the most delightful way, as the retired underground explorer (and obscure DC Comics Silver Age character) Carson is pulled back towards his former life in a particularly gruesome way.  Filled with wonder and darkness with a lovely and complicated father-daughter relationship at its heart.

Haunted by Leo Braudy - A cultural study of what we're scared of and why, tracing the lineage of our monstrous archetypes back through the centuries, searching for the historical events and currents that made certain horrors resonate so deeply in our collective unconscious.  Dense and extremely well-researched, this is not a light read, but it is loaded with fascinating insights into the things that truly make us tick.

     Happy Thanksgiving.  Be sure enjoy a good Turkey joke with your meal.

Thanks 2015

     It's the same world it was last year, so there's plenty to be thankful for, and also plenty not to be.  As has become tradition here, though, these are a few small things that can make a day feel a little happier:

Person of Interest - The CBS television show is barreling towards its fifth (and probably final) season, but over the course of the previous four it has transformed from a gritty crime procedural about a reclusive genius and an ex-assassin turned vigilantes into an epic tale of a battle between two A.I. gods.  How it got from the one to the other, accumulating and losing engaging characters and exploring the deep moral ambiguity of surveillance along the way, is much of the fun.  In retrospect you can see how all the main beats were planned out from the beginning, thus providing Network TVs most satisfying and exciting story.

Spider-Woman by Dennis Hopeless and Javier Rodriguez - The highly entertaining story of a pregnant superhero, with the sharpest dialog and character work and the most inventive and energetic page compositions in mainstream comics.

The Great Forgetting by James Renner - A man returns to his hometown and stumbles into what may be the conspiracy to end all conspiracies, one that brings into question the very nature of memory.  If you enjoyed Those That Wake and What We Become you may find this a very worthwhile read.

     Happy Thanksgiving.  Wherever the holiday takes you, don't show up without a good turkey joke.

The Widow's Broom

     After reading to children professionally for more than fifteen years, I can say it is fairly seldom that a story actually renders them speechless and wide-eyed with the sublime tension of suspense.  It's all the more remarkable when the story is so subtly told.
     Such is The Widow's Broom by Chris Van Allsburg, which tells the tale of a lonely but kindly country widow named Minna Shaw, who inherits the broom of a witch.  Mr. Van Allsburg pairs his customarily evocative, precise and textured art with a way of conveying emotion and meaning that is sheer elegance, achieving a somber subtly nearly unheard of in picture books.
     Still more appropriate to the approaching holiday, The Widow's Broom balances a sense of the creepy with a deep understanding of what its young audience can handle.  It enthralls with a dreadfulness that turns out to be just dreadful enough to utterly delight.
     A treat of the non-standard variety for your Halloween.  

Trembling Houses

     Referring to our "fragility of thought," the Bureau of Surrealist Research in their "Declaration of 27 January, 1925," noted "on what shifting foundations, what caverns we have built our trembling houses."
     When this fragility is brought to our attention, it can make us reassess who we are and what our world is in vital ways.  Because such reassessment can be such a keystone to our growth, it pays to set those houses trembling real good from time to time.
     Such an experience naturally disturbs as well as enlightens, but if you're interested in having it in a "safe" way, I would heartily recommend a tracking down the works of Thomas Ligotti or Shaun Tan or a browse through some of the visuals from the Art Institute of Chicago's "Shatter, Rupture, Break" exhibition, which you can see by clicking on the link above, though the show itself is unfortunately gone now.  The image below, "Eye and Barbed Wire" by Nathan Learner, is from that show and serves as an excellent way to whet the appetite. 
   

    

The Way Inn

    Attending a conference, Neil Double checks into the Way Inn, one location of a Holiday Inn-like super-franchise.  But the Way Inn's hallways wind much deeper than anyone suspects and when Neil follows the wrong person through the wrong door, he steps into a surreal nightmare of cosmic proportions.
     Will Wiles has written a powerful rumination on the effect our modern physical and social structures are having on the world and on us.  Beyond the fact that it's beautifully written, I found that Mr. Wiles explores many of the same ideas I do in Those that Wake and What We Become, though with his own sophistication and expression, of course.  If I may be so bold as to say so without Mr. Wiles's permission, the Way Inn feels like an adult counterpart to my own young adult novels.  For this, as well as for reasons of pure quality and enjoyment, I couldn't recommend the Way Inn more highly.

The Black Hat

     Having previously considered aspects of heroes and antiheroes, I was interested to come across some salient  comments on villains in Chuck Klosterman's literary ode to that cultural and real world type.  In his book of essays I Wear the Black Hat, he notes "in any situation, the villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least."  This applies mainly to your master villains (say, Blofeld or Lex Luthor) and encompasses both the villain's key quality of lacking empathy and also that he has a level of superiority that makes him that much more threatening.  It's interesting to note how well this applies to good fictional villains, but generally does not apply to real life villains.  Most human beings have the benefit of caring about something other than themselves and most villains you're likely to run into in daily life -- a mugger or bully, for instance -- don't gain a sense of threat from their superior knowledge.
     He expands his discussion in another essay, talking about a real person (D.B. Cooper) and commenting that "he should be a villain.  But that overlooks the one intangible that makes Americans forgive everything else: superhuman self-assurance . . . Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief?"  What's most fascinating about this is that it is applicable in both real life and fiction and to both villains and heroes (it's a fitting description of, to name just two, James Bond and Superman), but also points up a great paradox in the human psyche. it makes no accounting whatsoever of either morality or motive, which both seem like they ought to be central arbiters of who and who is not, a villain.

Marianne Dreams

      Marianne Dreams is a children's novel by Catherine Storr, written in 1958, back when such books were a little denser and maybe a little more merciless.  It tells the story of a ten-year-old English girl who is struck with an unexplained illness and, while confined to bed, draws a picture of a house that she begins dreaming about.  The dreams seem to encourage her to add elements to the picture and, as she does so, the dream world of the house deepens and expands.  And that's merely the beginning.
     Though adapted for theater, television (as Escape Into Night) and film (as Paperhouse), Marianne Dreams seems to remain somewhat obscure to mainstream readers.  Possibly this has something to do with its tone, which must have caught readers somewhat off guard back when it was first published.  It is thick with an eerie atmosphere and an uneasy sense of foreboding that is still distinctive in the world of children's literature.  A fascinating walk off the beaten path for adventurous younger readers, it should also prove quite an unusual treat for adult readers whose tastes run toward the ethereally macabre. 

The Strange Library

     As a librarian, it's always fun to see unusual depictions of libraries in literature.  A recent, and particularly delightful example, is in Haruki Murakami's  The Strange Library, a characteristically lyrical and bizarre work that features the following passage, sure to delight librarians across the world.
   
     "Don't you think that's awfully cruel?" I asked . . .
     "But, hey, this kind of thing's going on in libraries everywhere, you know.  More or less, that is."
     This news staggered me.  "Libraries everywhere?" I stammered.
     "If all they did was lend out knowledge for free, what would the payoff be for them?"
     "But that doesn't give them the right to saw off the tops of people's heads and eat their brains.  Don't you think that's going a bit too far?"

50%

     A few weeks back, I mentioned the dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette.  As you may already be aware, this dispute has been settled, with the publisher receiving a reasonable portion of the e-book profits it was asking for (at least as far as I understand it).   This is good news, of course.  It's hard to debate a publisher's desire to share equitably in the profit from their own product.  The settlement is being hailed as an important one for publishing in this country.
     What the settlement does not address is this: Amazon is a single corporation currently in control of fifty percent of the book market in America.  Now, Amazon is, among a vast array of things, a smart company providing a useful, highly-valued service.  We are a capitalist country and much of what we are entitled to here is measure by success.  Does Amazon's success entitle them to this kind of control and what, exactly, does this kind of control enable them to do?             

Thanks 2014

     Like last year and all the years before it, the world is a complex place, filled with big things to be thankful for and not.  As in posts past, though, here is a list of some small things that are worth feeling good about.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes - A riveting police procedural involving one of the most bizarre homicides in literary memory alternates with the perspective of the lead detective's teenage daughter, whose own life is flying apart at the seams.  Written with both intensity and humor, Beukes creates a tone of deep uncertainty both by setting the story in the teetering city of Detroit and by suggesting a sense of the supernatural pushing in at the edges of reality.  This would be a great choice for fans of HBO's True Detective.

The Hole on DVD and Blu-Ray - An outstanding example of that seldom attempted hybrid: the family horror movie.  Joe Dante directs this story of the new kids in town who discover a hole in their basement that . . . well, the nature of the hole is part of the fun, but let's just say that it isn't where the hole leads that's the key, but rather where the hole leads you.  Hinging on a great, creepy idea and making sparing but effective use of scary images, this works for ages twelve through adult and turns out to be a movie that uses its chills to really explore its characters.

Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan - A haunting story told as a list of rules to help two brothers navigate the bizarre dangers of their summer vacation, this is anything but a simple picture book.  Both creepy and sweet, surreal and symbolic, the remarkable Tan creates an intricate link between his minimal words and his lush illustrations to create a narrative of surprising emotional depth and complexity.

     Happy Thanksgiving and don't leave without your free turkey joke.

America's National Story

      Poet, critic and professor Joshua Clover makes a fascinating supposition in his monograph on the movie The Matrix, for the British Film Institute's Modern Classics Series.  In a rather heady footnote, he suggests that the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers "is America's National Story, the one it remakes in times of crisis."  The original film, based on Jack Finney's book, was made in 1956 and remade in 1978, 1993 and 2007.  Clover sites the film's central thematic allure as being "the fantasy that one is the last free consciousness, as yet untainted by ideology, called to superhuman vigilance lest one be overtaken."  One might say that the human-duplicating pod people (the "body snatchers" of the title) represent a direct threat to what Americans hold most dear: individuality.
      This is a fascinating theory and one could spend days coming up with alternate stories that might qualify as the prime narrative of America's collective psyche, not to mention stories that do the same for other cultures (Clover's throws out the story of the 47 Ronin as Japan's).  Beneath all this, though, is the compelling point that we use our art not simply as a means of expression but as a repository for our most essential ethos.