A Brush with Fury

 Ancestry.com says I don’t have the gene for remembering dreams, but sometimes I do, and sometimes I wake up remembering something from long ago and not just remembering it but working on it as though I was rewriting it; so, I’m pretty sure I had been dreaming about it.  A couple of days ago I woke with a stiff-neck headache as though I had been writing or reading something that had me worked up, but what I was thinking about, was a girl I met just one time when I was about fourteen.

My stepfather, Welk, was in the habit of taking me with him when on some of his business trips and took me with him on this occasion to meet with a business associate.  We went into the man’s house and Welk and the man walked off some place to talk.  The man’s daughter stood there looking at me.  She was obviously a tomboy, dressed in jeans and a sloppy shirt. 

I don’t recall how old I was back then, but I was younger than sixteen, because I tried to enlist in the Marine Corps at age sixteen, and I was too old by then to want to go with Welk on any of his business trips.  I was younger than fifteen, because I knew I was going to enlist in the Marine Corps so every spare moment I was working out.  I knew boot camp would be tough, and I didn’t want to take any chances.  And I didn’t think I was as young as thirteen, because Welk bought me a bike right before I was thirteen, and I rode it everywhere as often as I good.  So, I was probably fourteen.  

I don’t recall how old the girl was, but she knew a lot of interesting stuff and did a lot of interesting things in the land behind her house; so she was probably fourteen as well.  She said, “do you want to see some really interesting things?”  She had a bit of a smirk on her face.  Maybe it was her job to keep me amused while Welk and her father talked business.

“Sure,” and off we went out the back door, and she really did have some interesting things to do back there, trees to climb, ropes to swing on, weird half-standing structures to explore, and she was talking a mile a minute the whole time.  

Once we seemed to have seen everything I said, “shouldn’t we be getting back?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said; so back we went through the back door and into the house where her father confronted me in a rage.  “What could possess you to take my daughter off like that?”

“Whoa.  She just wanted to show me some of the interesting things she played with out back.”  

“You had no business to take my daughter off like that ,” he yelled, his rage undiminished.  I looked over at Welk.  He said, “you really shouldn’t have.”

I said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but we didn’t do anything wrong.”  She just took me out back to show me some interesting things.”  I was really worked up by then.  I looked over at the girl.  She stood ramrod straight and was staring with a furious look at her father.   

I repeated, “we didn’t do anything wrong,” and her father looked me in the eye to see if I was going guiltily look away, but I didn’t.  He was a huge man, and I was a long way from being big or tough enough to make it through boot camp, but I knew we hadn’t done anything wrong.  

Welk hustled me toward the front door.  I gave the girl one last look, and she was still staring at her father with a look of fury and outrage. 

I thought of this event many times over the years, but only just the other day after probably having dreamed about it again, did I realize that the girl’s father had probably paid for his bad behavior.  His daughter, and I think she was an only child, wasn’t going to let him get away with the embarrassment he caused her.

Before I actually gave up going back to sleep, I found myself examining the idea of seeing that girl later on or perhaps writing to her because we seemed to get along better than some of the girls I really did go out with later on, but her father was an impenetrable obstacle, unless she had subjected him to some painful instruction.  But even if she had, I had no plans to have a girlfriend when I was only14, but rewriting my history as I sometimes do, I thought about it.   Could I have found occasion to give her my address and asked her to write?  But could she carry on such a correspondence?  Could I?  But no.  Had I thought of that while we were out back looking at all the neat things she had to play on, I could never later on have looked her father in the eye.

On the rewriting of Huckleberry Finn

 

Having been raised in the Los Angeles harbor and further educated in the Marine Corps, I grappled with several majors in college and perhaps mostly because of my grandmother ended up majoring in English.  She herself had gone deaf for a while as a girl but made up for her lack of education by reading.  She became an evangelist for reading and for one of my birthdays or perhaps Christmas she gave me the complete works of Mark Twain.  That set wouldn't be considered complete today, but I read the whole thing, parts of it more than once.  However, when the question arose, as it often did back then, about a major American novelist whose work could match the likes of Thomas Hardy, Henry James (who at heart was more British than American), or Joseph Conrad who was perhaps as much Polish in his writings as British.  But regardless of however much British James and Conrad were, they along with Hardy were the novelists I admired back then and didn't think the U.S. had produced anyone comparable, certainly not Mark Twain; although I read him with great attention -- but not in a long time.

I was surprised, and a bit appalled, that so few seem to have difficulty with what Percival Everett has done in his James.   I am prejudiced against the rewriting works of the past.   If this were done with a modern work, I suspect the previous writer or his estate would be suing the rewriter. 

Pretty much any classic can be rewritten to make it more politically and scientifically correct, but historians would urge such writers to leave the non-politically correct writings alone. You may not like Hitler's Mein Kampf, but it just isn't something someone interested in truth and accuracy would want to see rewritten. Someone might conclude that the revised version makes them happier and less offended, but historians will be offended unless they are interested in papers at some point that discuss the extremes writers who take up political causes are willing to go.

Back in the day when I thought I would continue on with my education, I thought I might examine the muckrakers. I read quite a few of them, even got a letter from someone related to the IWW, International Workers of the World. The left wing of today has no interest in rewriting the writings of Big Bill Haywood who spent his last days in Moscow, nor, in my opinion, should they.

An old man thinking about his political future in San Jacinto

 

Ian Kershaw (who wrote a highly acclaimed biography of Hitler) is quoted in Wikipedia as saying that defining Fascism is like nailing jelly to the wall, and yet modern critics of modern Republican politicians apply that term with aplomb.  It has in effect become a modern curse-word, plucked out of history, without serious modern meaning.  The safest definition involves leaving it in its historical setting and applying it to the political practices of Hitler and Mussolini, and time has rolled them both up and placed them in the historical waste basket.   Hitler with his remarkable intelligence and political power had nevertheless received little formal education.  His desire to conquer Europe would have been understandable by many of the powerful monarch of the middle-ages, but no practical modern politician would seek such a goal.  We see the weakness of something similar in Putin's desire to restore the Russian empire.  The leaders of various of the former national entities that had broken away from the USSR after its collapse have for the most part no desire to abandon their own political interests and allow Putin to incorporate them back into a moribund Russia.

The invention of the printing press altered or undercut all the old ways.   Wars had historically been fought over matters of religion.  One had to adhere to the religion of one's monarch or potentially be declared a heretic and executed.  But once copies of the Bible were printed by Gutenberg, any intellectual who was interested could read the language and have an opinion that might well be counter to the official teachings of Rome, and as time went on, Protestant intellectuals countered the teachings of both Calvin and Luther as well.  So fragmented has Christian doctrine become that the declaring of a single teaching has become so impracticable that it has been determined to be against the law in the West.  A Western state can no longer establish an official religion. 

Politics is sort of moving in the same direction as religion.  But whereas it is possible for an individual to declare that he or she is an atheist, it is not possible for an individual to declare that he does not believe in politics -- or is it?  Well, it sort of seems so.  At various times small groups opt out of society in some form as (sort of) happened during the Vietnam War when people were urged to make love and not war.  The actual political forces that made actual decisions (both Democrat and Republican) made war anyway.  But again, Gutenberg's press (in its modern iteration in the Internet and rapid world communication) is making war less convenient, and in the midst of turmoil that in earlier times (as happened in fairly recent times when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) there was the opera Nixon in China.  Forget about the precise motivations which shifted and still shift about regarding that opera.  Its words, and in this case also its music altered (or was a symbol of the alteration) of the relationship between the U.S. and China, and even today when it seems the two nations are at serious odds with each other (and China no longer officially appreciates that opera) war between the two, given their economic involvement with each other, seems almost untenable.   Will China invade Taiwan?  Perhaps it wants to, but it is almost certainly trying to figure out a way to do it without going to war against the America, and most likely America's current allies, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and perhaps a few more in South East Asia.

Francis Fukuyama perhaps over-enthusiastically after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw Liberal Democracy as having a clear path to becoming the dominate economy practiced by the rest of the world.  Fukuyama has been written off as being wrong since wars continue, but he didn't say wars would stop.  The opponents of Liberal Democracy are autocrats that are examples of Fukuyama's Last Man, leaders Thomas Carlyle would have recognized with more approval than most in the West now do -- people whose ambitions override the practicality of becoming a Liberal Democracy.  Putin, for example, isn't willing to abandon the glory that the Russian Empire once achieved.  Will a resurgent Russian Empire gather up many of the elements lost after the 1989 collapse of Communism?  We will see.  Russia may well impoverish itself in its war with Ukraine, and even if it wins some part of Ukraine at the end, it may be a Pyrrhic victory.  Other parts of the former USSR are gearing up to resist Putin, and NATO a previously paper tiger, is taking Russia's ambitions seriously and even if Russia takes back most of the Russian speaking part of the Ukraine as Samuel P. Huntington assumed in his Clash of Civilizations, they probably won't get most of those who speak Ukrainian. 

Back in China, the war with Chiang Kai-Shek is still sharp in the memory of many Chinese still alive today.  When Chiang moved his army to Formosa, Mao's forces weren't able to do anything to dislodge him.  Can Mao's political descendants now accomplish the task?  Not without something like suicidal results, results something like Putin is risking in his Quixotic quest to restore a Russia Empire. 

Meanwhile here in the U.S., can we afford to oppose all the autocrats that defy Fukuyama's prediction that Liberal Democracy is sure to win out over all the other superseded forms of government in the world?   Samuel Huntington, if he were alive today might be surprised at many of our modern choices.  I don't think he would have approved of our siding with Ukraine militarily.  He thought the Russian speaking part of Ukraine might logically become part of Russia, but the Ukrainian-speaking part would probably ally itself to the West.  Whatever happened, Huntington didn't, in my opinion, envision our going to war in opposition to Russia over Ukraine.  He saw Russia as being the Core nation in the Slavic world, and believed we should not interfere with Russia's choices, just as Russia shouldn't interfere with the core nation in the West, namely the U.S. in matters within the Western enclave of nations.   And, he would have said the same thing about our commitment to Taiwan,  because China is the core nation in the Asian enclave of nations.

I am still fond of Samuel P. Huntington.  He wrote about the ongoing clashes of civilization, and now, living in the later results of such clashes, I wonder if we can afford to clash as much as some politicians would like.  Oh, I'm sure we can do it by printing more money to pay for our military expenditures (if China continues to like such an investment).   However, back here in San Jacinto, I recently turned 90 and my doctors seem to think I'm going to live several years longer, so I'm wondering if my retirement package, which seemed more than adequate in 1999 when after 39 years in aerospace I retired will last as long as I do.  Should I look forward to making it to 100 as my doctors are encouraging me to anticipate, or should I take stock of our commitment as world policeman and decide I can't afford it?

Trust

 I read Trust, the co-winner of the 2023 Pulitzer-prize for fiction.  I haven't read the other winner, Demon Copperhead, but can't imagine it's as good as Trust.  In all my recent reading of prize-winning novels, I've read none better than Trust.

But on the downside, it would help a reader if he knew something of economics and the stock market.  I know more about the former than the latter.  Years ago, a long-shoreman who was greatly impressed by a fellow long-shoreman who was a well-versed in communism, would urge various books upon me.  I read them all and didn't then have a good answer to Marx, but I spent time in the company library at Douglas Aircraft and discovered John Maynard Keynes, after which I discounted anything this longshoreman, or his friend had to say on the subject; however, I wasn't all that interested in economics and haven't spent any time with it until Trust.  How much trouble someone would have with no background in economics at all, I don't know, but I suspect some.   As to the stock market, perhaps most of us know a bit more about that.  And maybe the novel is self-explanatory enough, and I am exaggerating its difficulty.

But even if one knows quite a lot about economics and the stock market, Diaz, takes us beyond with the capability to get into a zone and know what is going to happen (without having facts in mind) before it happens.  Still having the concept of interactive reading, I recall being in a lunch-time hearts card game at McDonnell Douglas.  My partner was an electronics engineer named Bob Servis who counted cards.  I did not count cards, but at critical points when I needed to do the right thing and paused, not exactly thinking it over but feeling (or something) my way, I soon felt what was probably right and it invariably was.  Bob Servis would smile with satisfaction, but it was during this time that I met Susan on the McDonnell Douglas bus and subsequently gave up card playing.  Bob Servis never forgave me.

To account for my success, I did pay close attention to everything being played, so maybe I subconsciously counted cards, but then maybe the heavy hitters at stock market trading do something like that, but certain people, perhaps only one person in Diaz's novel goes way beyond that.  By the time I learned who this was and what had happened, I was entirely impressed.  The only reason I won't say "happy" is that the ending was a bit sad. And yet the most important person in the novel, dying unrecognized, died happy, mostly, or so it would seem. 

Creation Lake, second reading

 

Feeling I hadn't done Rachel Kushner justice in my sketchy review of Creation Lake, I read her The Flamethrowers, and then her Mars Room.   And then I read Creation Lake a second time.  In between, I read some other reviews of Creation Lake and they weren't so far off from my reaction after reading it the first time.  And yet the people running the Booker Prize had some very laudatory things to say about it in justification for moving from their long list to the short one, things I didn't see after reading number one.   But with of her previous novels under my belt, I became accustomed to her style and was better able to appreciate Creation Lake.  It seemed to me then that the reviews on Youtube critical of the novel were made by reviewers, as I was in my previous review, who were reading Kushner for the first time and being thrown off by her strangeness.  But she grows on you.  She did on me. 

My assumption that some of Sadies assignments were hits may not be right.  Kushner is somewhat vague about what she is asked to do on her assignments.   She is asked to kill Paton and says she doesn't do hits, but she has her price and the ones employing her accept it.  She doesn't actually have to kill the target.  The target climbs up on some logs to get away from a young foolhardy motorcyclist.  The logs collapse, that the target is killed.  We hear the song Get Lucky in the background on one occasion and coincidence is mentioned in another; so maybe Kushner doesn't want Sadie to be an ordinary hit-woman, but she takes the assignment this time and seemingly retires at the end of the novel.  She isn't completely home free.  People are looking for her in regard to a civil suit associated with one of her earlier jobs, one that went awry.  But the statute of limitations has run out on the event so she won't be threatened with jail.  She will, however lose a lot of money if she loses that suit; so she spends a lot of time looking over her shoulder.   She quit smoking and drinking.  She wants to stay retired.  It seems like she'll be able to, but she's living away from people, living by herself, never able to have children, maybe never able to live with anyone, filled with so many things she can't talk about, not able to be herself in a future relationship.  She's in her thirties and counting.

One of the Youtube reviewers said she was "evil, evil, evil."  I didn't see that.   She sets her morals aside when she takes on a job, but she doesn't want to keep on doing that, and she hopes, by the end of the novel, that she won't have to do it again.   When you give up drinking, you can no longer make excuses for the things you do that you don't like.  You need to learn to live with yourself, if you can manage it.  Seems like Kushner is telling us that Sadie can.

Is The Vegetarian also a political treatise?

 In my lazy visiting of the currently-being-published and receiving such prizes as the Booker and Nobel Prize for literature, and making my own judgment about their merits, I am presently in Han Kang, reading her Human Acts.  After the Korean War, South Korea endured some dictators and the military's subduing of a protest in 1980.   A political treatise, can't at the same time be a good novel, or so I was taught years ago, but Kang is hammering the dictator and the soldiers he ordered to shoot unarmed protestors.  The government at the time said about 20 or 30 were killed, but I read elsewhere that the true number might be closer to 2,000; so this is a part of South Korea’s history that nearly every Korean is going to have an opinion about and those in leadership in 1980 are probably being excoriated in the same manner that French leaders under Phillipe Petain have been. 

But, does the Nobel Prize committee need to worry about whether a novel is political?   I wonder if they don't use the opposite criterion.  Consider The Vegetarian, the novel that won Han Kang the Booker prize.  I understand it has been applauded by feminists.  This has been denied by the reviewers I read, but after reading the novel, that is what I saw as well.  It doesn't take much to rake the flowers aside and look at the brutal treatment of the poor protagonist who has taken a firm stance.  She took a recognizable if not popular vegetarian stance, but in response to the cultural coercion she received, she took a position that clouded by poetry though it may be is a feminist stance.   After being held down and force-fed meat which she threw up, she resolved to take a further step and eat nothing at all.  Was she crazy?  No, she asks her sister whose charges are keeping her in the mental institution to let her go home.  The sister refuses.  Not just because she slept with the sister's husband, but because she refuses the wishes of their father and culture by not eating meat.  She becomes a feminist martyr by starving to death.

If the feminists and I are right about the nature of this novel rather than those who admire the beautiful poetic language, which those of us who don’t read Korean can’t properly judge (even though the translator of The Vegetarian won the Booker prize for translation), then the question remains, can a novel with a political agenda be a great novel? 

The Booker Prize was awarded to The Vegetarian, but the Nobel the other day seemed to be awarded to Kang's whole body of work.  I have read only two and a half novels, but these are her major novels if I can believe what has been written about her.  

The Vegetarian, a Phantasm on Passive Resistance

 

The main character, Yeong-hye, a hitherto ordinary Korean wife has a dream, after which she decides to become a vegetarian.  Her family and friends aren't interested in her opinion, her dream.  They want her to conform to their opinions, the common ideas of her Korean culture, but she resists, quits wearing a bra as well.  Her father hits her, and her husband leaves her, but she doesn't submit.

Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, her sister's husband, a photographic artist of sorts, finds the relatively isolated Yeong-hye the perfect object (victim) for an off-beat, semi-pornographic video he wants to make.  He approaches, slowly seduces, Yeong-hye into cooperating with his project which involves painting her naked body with flowers.  She is rather haphazardly returning to nature in her thinking and so goes along with his plan.  After fully painting her, he wants to make love to her.  But she objects because he doesn't have any flowers painted on himself.   So, he rushes off and gets an old girlfriend to paint flowers on him, rushes back, gets Yeong-hye to make love with him, while he records the whole thing.  He and Yeong-hye fall asleep on the floor of his studio.  When they wake up, the artists wife, Yeong-hye's sister is there.  She tells them that they are both obviously insane and that she is having them committed to a mental institution.  The authorities arrive and take them away.

Yeong-hye at the mental institution moves beyond vegetarianism and quits eating anything as well.   Her sister, In-hye, admits to herself that she had her sister committed in order to punish her, but she won't admit that and renounce the decision that got Yeong-hye committed.  She lets the authorities at the mental institution try their best to get Yeong-hye to eat, but Yeong-hye's strength and resolve is too much for them.  In a protracted, ugly battle, witnessed by her sister, Yeong-hye succeeds in starving herself to death.

I won't promise that what I have written here is what Han Kang had in mind.  When I think about what that might be, I recall the softening and poetical beauty of Yeong-hye's resistance and refuse to give up my theory -- not that I'd be willing to starve myself to death in support of it.