Monday Book Report: The Dog Watches and other poems

or, Through the mirror of Curt Hopkins’s poetry, and what I found there

The first book of poetry by Curt Hopkins, The Dog Watches and other poems, shows off this American writer’s talent for picking out the poetic shards of life from the collision between humans and the onrushing train of time and thought. In the title poem (which occupies over half the pages in this slim volume) as well as the ‘other poems‘, Hopkins proves himself a true poet: a seer with a telling eye for detail, a perfectly tuned ear for sound and sense, and a heart in love with words and language. The vision offered here is one of regretful sighs and loneliness in the big city, of the persistence of hope in the face of overwhelming evidence, the end of dreams, and the emptiness between streetlights and stars. You should read this book; you can buy it here.

People come with complicated dreams

And leave with much less complicated failures.

from “A New Jerusalem”

Curt Hopkins has been writing for as long as my daughter has been alive, longer, and that is a very long time indeed. Besides poetry, he’s written much on technology (in its current sense of computers and that ilk), as well as criticism, journalism, and plays. Yes, plays. He is also the greatest living authority on the surrealist works of Bob Folder, a quite possibly fictional personage of no small poetic talent himself. In The Dog Watches and other poems, however, Hopkins remains focused on the biggest of the big questions, so big that even asking them leads to even bigger questions. This book is his answer.

But who was the man I was when I was a man,

Before, when I was nobody, but before I was nothing?

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

As I shall dilate upon more at the end of this book report, I am not the best reviewer of poetry. My skill at exegesis is poor, like the dull knife that no longer holds an edge in your kitchen drawer that you haven’t brought yourself to throw away yet. Please remember as you read my words that much of what I say may be eisegesis instead of insight, and that you would do much better to read The Dog Watches and other poems yourself. Really, what’s stopping you? It’s only $5 bucks for the Kindle version, if you read stuff in that format. The link is right up there in the first paragraph above.

The hollow-eyed children of the Place Vendome

Have their tailor-made sackcloth and ashes

from “On moving to Paris to start a wan tubercular literary journal”

These poems ask “Who am I?” like a pestering child with frangible dreams and implacable persistence. Like a modern Zen koan, the verse of Hopkins holds up a mirror and asks: Who were you before you were born? Like most koans, the question itself is the answer, though the poet brings enough Whitmanesque solipsism to the page to push back the encircling shadows of doubt and darkness that threaten us all.

The world is what I say it is

And what I say today is this:

* * *

       even if awareness

Ends and never is reborn,

A thing thought stays thought,

Not as thought and not as thing,

Beyond the touch of time until

That time itself shall end

And still that thing shall not.

from “A history of non-existent objects”

The “touch of time” is ever present in these tender slices of poetry, threatening to subsume life in its awful embrace, leaving only memories and then not even those. Many of these poems describe the most difficult subject imaginable, the interstitial emptiness between galaxies and souls, that longing isolation that has engendered much poetry, though rarely of the great quality found here.

A lonely proposition, life.

You lean your head against the rainy light,

The windows cold as space between the stars

from “Rain from another country”

The title poem of the book, “The Dog Watches”, is a six-part (seven if you include the preface) threnody or perhaps a paean on death and dying, about the passing of friends, culture, Buddhas, dreams. It is an appropriate work for a poet who spent so much time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and who thus can see the ruins left behind by the collapse of the twentieth century. Each section deals with death—his death, her death, my death, our death—and struggles with the tension between the accomplishment of finality and the continual failure of living.

God forgive us for the multitude of deaths

Our lives leave in their wakes,

Including our own, including our hopes’.

from “The Dog Watches: III. The world is the celebrated boy”

A sharp though sweet loneliness permeates these verses, a contemplative judgment somehow unadulterated by melancholia. Hopkins sinks often into reflection, but never into gloom. Even in his darkest thoughts upon the human condition, he never forgets that each of us has his or her own unique loneliness, and somehow this observation becomes an affirmation in “The Dog Watches”.

Each man and woman waste their life a different

Way

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

This title poem starts off with a bang, with the end, with death and death and death. A three-time loser is the subject of the first section of Hopkins’s long poem. We all have—or will have—this experience with the death of a friend, that death which will always nag at our consciousness like a missing tooth, that death which may define our life, if we’re not careful.

He’s dead, irretrievably dead,

Irrevocable, third-hand and involuted,

Not simply dead, he failed and died and failed

Again and died again, until he finally

Died for good, went down and stayed there.

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

But in this opening section the poet promotes the difficult idea that it is only in death that we become whole, become important, have meaning, that only after we die can our lives and our purposes be fulfilled. I personally find this idea impracticable and unreasonable; my own experience is that the dying fade from the memory like … well, I don’t know what, I’ve forgotten. But poetry should make us face up to uncomfortable ideas, and maybe my own resistance to this one is only a vote for nervous nihilism as opposed to what I imagine is an egotistical solipsism. Hopkins’s premise seems to be that death is what is real, while life is merely fluid and faulty.

                    Life’s predictable

And dull until it ends, at which point

It grows green, pale as a melon rind

And never-ending, revisited. Life,

As it is lived, is inevitable and cramped,

But inasmuch as it has ended, it begins.

ditto

What is Hopkins talking about, however, speaking of death, save lonely life? In “The Dog Watches” as well as many of the other poems included in this book, the “Who am I?” question preponderates, and perhaps he is intimating in this opening section, “The ape, upright”, that this question can only be answered after the fact, and then only by those who are ‘not-I’. Life as lived may not be illusive or delusive, but certainly seduces and distracts from the crux of our precarious situation.

(Any more of poison life and I’ll

Develop credibility, brand

Loyalty, and wisdom, the vulgarity

Of believing yourself when you speak.)

from “The Dog Watches: I. The ape, upright”

In our strange time after the collapse of meaning, the poet asks what substitute we can find. It is not entirely clear whether there is a substitute, or if words still have power. Substitute for what? The past centuries and the now collide and we are but innocent victims and guilty bystanders.

Gigantic statements are useless to us now

But what shall we replace them with? Does

A desultory hand mix our bones together

In the dust?

from “The Dog Watches: IV. The world eater”

In the penultimate section of his long poem, “V. Excavation”, Hopkins surveys death and dead cultures through the lens of archeology, and the sundered fragments left behind. He speaks of the earliest days of Hebrew history, a time of which the great preacher Frederick Robertson said, “In the first of these periods names meant truths, and word were the symbols of realities.” Or, as Curt Hopkins puts it:

                         the words

The same as what they said

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

Though he rages against failures including his own, and though he sees futility as the ultimate product of eternity, still Hopkins refuses to give up, refuses to stop refusing. He has a program for the end of days, and it involves picking ourselves up once more, again, and once more again, ever again, and moving on. And it also involves the journey of stopping, of taking time to halt and notice where we are, who we are.

We must risk grinding to a halt,

Never to move again.

We must explode, then grow still,

Explode again, then fall silent,

Even at the risk of never speaking or moving again.

Because significance lies not in our doing, but in our being

And not in our being, but in the being of others

And not in the being of others, but in the being of things,

Such as stones and wind, and water and stars and trees,

In seeing them and recognizing their being,

By doing that, being one with them,

And, in the process and product of being one with them, being significant,

Substantive, particle and wave,

Which we cannot do when we are shouting and running.

from “The Dog Watches: IV. The world eater”

Even his primal question “Who am I?” seems to be contradicted in the first of his ‘other poems‘, the homage to emptiness “The Outer Sunset”, where he asks (but does not answer)

The question (before who am I?) must be

How did I get here?

“That question does not deserve an answer.”

from “The Outer Sunset”

Still, poets are like politicians, in that both hide their secret purposes by saying what they mean, and meaning what they say. Curt Hopkins writes in The Dog Watches and other poems of futility and failure, and strangely derives hope from the very impossibility of success, which itself is a beautiful success.

     take comfort from the fact that not

A single one of your memories nor anyone else’s,

Not a single memory of anything you’ve done

Or that anyone else ever did, will survive.

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

I did have a few quibbles with Hopkins’s poems, besides my difficulty with his idea of life as a poor second to death. Like the Russian ambassador in the war room asking for fresh fish, I note that Bobby Darin’s name has only one ‘r’, and even in this narrow volume we note his partiality for the words ‘slough’ and ‘batting’. Entry into a frowsty room has especial meaning for this poet, and perhaps this idiosyncrasy is indicative of the basic problem of writing about loneliness: Are our personal visions meaningful only to ourselves? Occasionally, the delight Hopkins takes in wordplay comes across as almost trying too hard.

It takes so many words to make the world blank

You must summon the patience to wait them out:

Hail Dorothy and back to the I in time

While the lacquer cracks in the cup

And crushes the lack in its black shell

Where the silver silk’s stretched tight

Across its frame of sanded beech.

This nothing is epagomenal day.

I believe in them both.

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

But the overwhelming fact of The Dog Watches and other poems is its remarkable insight and persuasive power. Not only does he show himself the poet best suited to limn Bay Area communities (Burlingame here gets the most poetic treatment it is ever likely to get), Curt Hopkins compels us to our own introspective contemplation through the power of his words and the deft strokes of his pen. The poems he offers here well worth reading, and will repay your attention much more than another listicle you’ll share with your co-worker and forget. His words are quotable, relatable, remarkable, and honest. On every page presented here, he reminds us that poetry is a verb.

Ideas are the money that we spend

And when you’re broke, you’re broke,

And we’re broke

from “The Dog Watches: III. The world is the celebrated boy”

N.B. The problem with writing about poetry is that everyone who does it imagines himself a poet. I am a poor substitute for the perfect reviewer of Hopkins’s book, being only a meagre poetaster of little or no ability, though flabby in most other aspects of life. My only previous experience in poetry criticism was an indulgent demolition of one of the worst poets the vanity press has to offer, Ms. Mattie Jaxx. I prefer rhymed poetry to free verse, which is what we find mostly in The Dog Watches and other poems (though Curt Hopkins offers us several sonnets in his book, and even a sestina!). My tastes are pedestrian and faux classical, and I like the tiny intricacies of an A.E. Stallings more than the psychoanalytic insights of a Tony Hoagland. As well, I am ignorant of most modern poetry and poets. My favorite poem is “Ulysses”. I am a Cancer. I am also personally acquainted with Mr. Hopkins, or was about one-and-a-half lifetimes ago, and that always prejudices everything.

It’s sad to recognize the ending,

So few value its voluptuousness:

Mornings blessedly drained of all that is not

Regret

from “The Dog Watches: V. Excavation”

Friday Vocabulary

1. frowsty — musty, hot and stuffy

I knelt by the bed the better to hear his wispy words and tried to ignore the sickbed stench in the frowsty attic room.

 

2. hoick — (colloquial) to pull or lift up with a jerk

Uncle Slim leapt out of the truck, hoicked my cousin out of the muddy ditch and into the cab with a single jerk, and drove off with my disgraced partner in crime before I could even think to say anything.

 

3. limber — second pair of wheels on an axle behind which a field gun or caisson is hauled

The alarm caught the unit woefully unprepared, their cannon still attached to the limbers and thus unready to fire at the attacking calvary.

 

4. ostracon (also ostrakon) — inscribed potsherd, esp. that used as vote for ostracism

Will he be relegated to life outside the world of the so-called ‘Smart Set’, his name to be found only amongst the ostraca of those whom society has declared personae non gratae?

 

5. coping — finishing course of brickwork or masonry in a wall

The roof had no coping at all, as I discovered when my foot stepped half on and half off the edge of the rolled asphalt, leaving me precariously balanced as Tomas grinned widely, still holding the gun that had killed Timmy.

 

6. epagogic — inductive, of or relating to argument from particular instances to a general conclusion

He had a wealth of examples of mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance by the state’s judges, and I think all the assembled citizens found ourselves persuaded by his epagogic argument that the judiciary was in dire need of reform, and that something like the Missouri Plan would provide the best alternative to the current scheme.

 

7. insolation — exposure to solar rays

As the summer wore on the drained lake became lined with cracked squares of dried mud, and the children enjoyed immensely throwing these products of insolation at the exposed red earth cliffs overhanging the now waterless hollow.

 

8. sedulous — diligent; persistent

Lulled by his sedulous attention to my foster daughter, we were flummoxed to learn that he was married to our charwoman.

 

9. lavalier (also lavaliere) — jeweled pendant worn on chain around the neck

She thought her emerald lavalier was a beautiful piece of jewelry, for she wore it often, but I knew it for what it was, a weighted stone around her neck forever binding her to that devil in man’s clothing she called Patrick.

 

10. viaticum — Eucharist given to dying person; allowance made for traveling expenses or needs, either as money or provisions; provisions for a journey

Each man in the common ranks received only the barest viaticum for the voyage, consisting of hardtack biscuits, some chicory coffee, and meagre tinned pork rations.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(neologism coined by me, this week)

leukophorytocracy — rule or government by white trash

Not since the days of Nero had such terrible taste and gaucherie been touted as high style and fashion, but gilt-edged toilet seats and monster trucks on the palace lawn were the least damaging affects of the leukophorytocracy who still believed that ‘classy’ was a laudatory adjective and that ‘education’ was a waste of time since you could look up everything online anyways.

Monday Book Report: Nightwatch

Nightwatch, by Andrew M. Stephenson

Too much and too little compete for the reader’s inattention in this barely workable SF book in which the most human characters are robots. The protagonist, though purportedly a human earthman, seems to understand human emotions as poorly as the author understands actual human beings and such things as plots for novels. The science is likely authentic, but I couldn’t care after wading through boring first-person narration to get to boring third-person narration. In a trick stolen from Salinger’s “For Esme—With Love And Squalor” the narrative point of view shifts halfway through the novel, a choice which leaves this reader suspecting that the author had already written one half one way before deciding that the book needed to be in the other person, and couldn’t be bothered to go back through the already written portion and change it. There are big ideas in the book: man’s destruction of the world, robotic consciousness, contact with aliens. Yet Mr. Stephenson fails to bring any of this to life, muffling the big stuff with meandering maundering about that maybe-girlfriend and this maybe-enemy. There may be a good story here, but its buried so deeply that it would be easier to start from scratch.

Harlan Ellison once spoke of the ‘one-word people’, people who could be understood by knowledge of the one word, the one thing which motivated all their actions and determined all their responses to the world around them. Mr. Stephenson’s protagonist seems to be the opposite of a ‘one-word person’, taken to absurd extremes, in that the pages are filled with words, word, words, and yet no clearer picture ever emerges of the pallid nonentity at the heart of this otherwise traditional Sci-Fi tale. He talks … to robots, to aliens, to maybe-not-quite girlfriends, to enemies, to maybe-friends, to himself … mainly to himself. He thinks deeply in his shallow channel of thought. But none of the words matter. Hell, I’ve already written more about Nightwatch than ever I planned to, leaving me to wonder if I, too, have succumbed to its malefic spell. Everything in the book—and quite a lot happens, though at times it’s hard to realize it—everything happens to him; nothing is done by him, save the endless and pointless brooding in both the first-person and third-person halves of the book. The protagonist* travels to the Moon on a secret mission, is thrust in the middle of mysterious (mostly because poorly written) plots by unknown political factions, watches the Earth destroy itself in devastating war, meets alien beings of unimaginable power, and all that … just sort of … happens. He wanders through most of the novel, along with his robot friend who is confined to a box, intermittently meeting with other supposed human beings, including one of the more unbelievable characters in fiction, but not in a good way, Steelyard Jones. (About whom I won’t say more; you can read the book yourself if you’re that curious.) At the end, the book ends, and I was grateful for that at least, since there were portions of the novel which seemed truly interminable.

* Perhaps ‘anagonist’ would be a better term, meaning a character who affects nothing, and who is not affected by anything.

Friday Vocabulary

1. gantry — framework or platform supporting a crane; framework across railroad tracks for showing signals; scaffolding framework for rockets

I chose to say nothing to Black Tom, waiting instead until the last moment to fall down on the boxcar roof, letting the signal gantry sweep my enemy and his Colt .45 off the train.

 

2. neglection — (obsolete) neglect, negligence

Do not wonder that I am come unchallenged into your arméd camp, rather wonder why not our common enemy has not already made you rue your manifest neglection of military art.

 

3. ruction — disturbance, tumult, row

The Englishman picked his hat up from the ground and held it in his hands as he sheepishly said, “We are quite sorry that our little ruction has discommoded you, milady, and we’ll be leaving now.”

 

4. quaquaversal — (chiefly geological) pointed in all directions, sloping downwards in all directions from a common center

By following the downed trees back to their roots we could determine from the quaquaversal distribution the impact point of the Tunguska event.

 

5. winkle — prise or dig from confined place

His fingers were almost too fat, but with some effort he at last was able to winkle out the pawn ticket from the springs of the car seat in which it had become entangled.

 

6. omnigenous — of all kinds

The sounds which came from his basement apartment were almost indescribable, for his omnigenous musical taste could not be constrained by discussion of genres or chronology or styles or—even—taste itself.

 

7. sinter — to form or shape metal by heating without liquefaction

Our company’s blast nozzles have a sintered tungsten carbide liner for strength and longevity.

 

8. mizmaze — maze; bewilderment

The real world and life itself was only a mizmaze he could neither escape nor comprehend.

 

9. puncheon — pointed tool; graving tool; short framing timber, post supporting mine tunnel

I tied the dynamite around the puncheon and my fingers shook as I contemplated what I was about to do to Joe and Ebby.

 

10. comital — of or related to a count or earl

At this time, of course, the king could not absolutely depend upon the ducal or comital military forces, as their leaders often had their own agendas.

 

Monday Book Report: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Roald Dahl’s classic work of children’s fiction, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is neither very good nor very bad, unlike the ridiculous stereotypes of children presented to us by the author. The book is ‘classic’ in the both senses: old and made into a movie. (Two, actually, but the second does not improve the Gene Wilder version, whereas Gene Wilder’s movie greatly improves the book.) The book is at times ludicrous, starkly depressing, boring, implausible or unbelievable (à votre goût), funny, heavy-handed, sardonic, and sweet. Unfortunately, it very rarely manages to be more that one of those things at a time, a failing which surprised me given the hype this book has received from friend and foe alike.

To speak of the friends and foes first, you can pick up a first edition of the book, just 55 years old now, for $6,500. Many people have loved the novel, including Tim Burton, who ruined the perfectly good movie already at hand. Several lists (if you’re into that sort of thing) have included Charlie et. al. in their ‘best children’s books’ assemblages, such as the Grolier 100, or Time magazine’s 100 Best Young-Adult Books. I suspect it made the lists because people think children are stupid. Its foes include those who object to the colonializing ideas behind the Oompa Loompas—who were African pygmies in the first published versions—though to this reader the minuscule people seem to be just another half-baked idea poorly executed in this hodgepodge of a book.

The main problem with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is lack of focus and voice. I first thought that Roald Dahl simply could not write for children, just as Margaret Atwood proved disastrous when she attempted to preach to kids in her trainwreck of an illustrated children’s book, Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. However, I have come to believe that the problem with Dahl’s book is that he had too many ideas, and tried to shoehorn them into a book for kids whether the idea belonged there or not. The focus upon sweets and chocolate as a glorious thing is perfect for youngsters who have not yet experienced the excitement of pubertal acne, and works (mostly) as a tentpole around which to revolve this novelette. But mixing in direst poverty, tut-tutting criticism of modern parenting, and industrial espionage just makes for a mess, and the potentially sweet core becomes instead just a soggy lump.

“Did you know that he’s invented a way of making chocolate ice cream so that it stays cold for hours and hours without being in the icebox? You can even leave it lying in the sun all morning on a hot day and it won’t go runny!”

“But that’s impossible!” said little Charlie, staring at his grandfather.

“Of course it’s impossible!” cried Grandpa Joe. “It’s completely absurd! But Mr. Willy Wonka has done it!”

Roald Dahl at his best, proving Aristotle’s maxim that a plausible impossibility is preferable in poetics to an implausible possibility

The problems start on the very first page, when we are introduced to Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine. Here is what they look like:

These emaciated living dead creatures are Charlie’s paternal grandparents, waiting in bed all day for the blessed release of the grave

(Note: though the cover shown above is from a later edition (and is pretty pedestrian art), this and all other illustrations are reprinted from the first publication, the work of Joseph Schindelman. So this is what the author expected his creatures to look like.) The original cover had Charlie’s face, emaciated with haunted eyes, conveying his extreme poverty and eternal hunger. From what the book tells us, Charlie and his family are the only hungry people in all the world; all others we meet are chubby candy store owners, fat rich kids and parents, self-absorbed rich kids and parents, etc., etc.

So right away the lines are drawn pretty clearly (except for the somewhat impressionistic cross-hatching illustrations) between the hungry extended Bucket family and the sated yet consuming rest of the world. Only the mysterious Willy Wonka stands apart from this lopsided dynamic, while five-sevenths of the poor class (i.e., Charlie’s family) stay home in their ramshackle house all day, waiting for Charlie to return home from school and Mr. Bucket to return home from his job. His job at the toothpaste factory. Screwing on the tops of toothpaste tubes. He will later lose his job because the factory shut down, which is surprising given the fact that the entire community must be suffering from serious tooth decay given everyone’s predilection for candy and chocolate.

In the evenings, after he had finished his supper of watery cabbage soup, Charlie always went into the room of his four grandparents to listen to their stories, and then afterwards to say good night.

Every one of these old people was over ninety. They were as shriveled as prunes, and as bony as skeletons, and throughout the day, until Charlie made his appearance, they lay huddled in their one bed, two at either end, with nightcaps on to keep their heads warm, dozing the time away with nothing to do.

Roald Dahl came close to writing Soylent Green nine years too early

Since Charlie walks past Wonka’s chocolate factory every day to-ing and fro-ing from school (which is mentioned only as another place for Charlie to starve), he is tortured by the delicious smells emerging from behind the great walls around the plant, and listens avidly to his Grandpa Joe’s tales of the amazing Willy Wonka. Once a year, Charlie gets a candy bar for his birthday (the smallest bar, natch), and then nibbles slowly at it to drag out its consumption a full month. Then in the book—blah, blah, blah—the golden tickets, the media goes wild, the bad kids get them, and Charlie doesn’t have a chance. But it’s his birthday, and … he doesn’t have a chance.

“You never know, darling,” said Grandma Georgina. “It’s your birthday next week. You have as much chance as anybody else.”

“I’m afraid that simply isn’t true,” said Grandpa George. “The kids who can afford to find the Golden Tickets are the ones who can afford to buy candy bars every day. Our Charlie gets only one a year. There isn’t a hope.”

Comforting words from Grandma Georgina, followed by a reality chaser

Of course, you know the story, or think you do. I know I did, or thought I did. Or … wait a sec, now I’m confused. Anyway, everything plays out just as you expect and know, and so Charlie gets the last ticket—on the very last day!—and he and Grandpa Joe go off to meet the strange and incredible Willy Wonka.

Willy Wonka in his original depiction: black top hat, plum coat with tails in velvet, bottle green trousers, pearl gray gloves, and small black goatee. His eyes are described as “sparkling and twinkling at you all the time. The whole face, in fact, was alight with fun and laughter.” ‘Twould have been better if more of that fun and laughter had made it into the book.

Most everything you saw happen in the movies happens here: chocolate rivers, gobstoppers and gum, squirrels and nuts, magical TV cameras for chocolate, and so forth, with the end result that only Charlie is left to receive the bestest prize of all: ownership of Willy Wonka’s factory! Yippee.

Okay. Can we stop for a second and talk about how stupid Mr. Wonka’s plan is? Put five tickets randomly into the millions (well, at least tens of thousands) of candies sold by this huge enterprise, the finders of which visit the factory, and whomsoever can manage not to glutton or stupid their way out of the tour group becomes the new owner of the plant? Why not just adopt a stray puppy and make it CEO? The idea is as ludicrous as asking the Internet what to name a boat, or what flag a country should have, or who should be president. In the real world the tickets would have been found by agents of Slugworth and Fickelgruber and Prodnose, Wonka’s rivals and the raisons d’être for closing his factory gates to the world.

Which is another point. The plant could provide needed jobs for at least Charlie’s father, but industrial spies have made it more practical for Wonka to import foreign labor on H1-B visas than to hire domestic workers. ‘Tis a very strange world that Dahl creates.

“Mind you, there are thousands of clever men who would give anything for the chance to come in and take over from me, but I don’t want that sort of person. I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child.”

Makes sense when Mr. Wonka explains it

Now the movie and the book are really very similar, in that all the good parts of Roald Dahl’s book are in Gene Wilder’s movie. And the parts that are different in the movie make the story better—more cohesive, less depressing, more fun. For instance, there’s no Slugworth-wants-you-to-steal-a-gobstopper plot point in the book; its inclusion in the movie tightens up the story immensely. Ditto for the fizzy lifting drink, which is just one of the rooms passed in the crazy boat ride in the book. Speaking of crazy boat rides, that’s totally in the printed story, and is just as crazy, with almost the same mad poetry from Willy Wonka. (Though the boat itself is an enormous Viking ship with a hundred Oompa Loompas manning the oars.)

Willy Wonka’s Big Canoe plunges into the cavernous tunnel

But in the book many of these episodes are only half-drawn and lie flat on the page. Whereas Wilder’s Wonka has a rakish and dangerous charm, Dahl’s version is clever but boring, like a spinster aunt trying to entertain children by touting the ‘scrumptious’ candy she has brought. Also the starvation. Oh, did I not mention that?

There is an entire chapter of the book delightfully titled “The Family Begins to Starve”. At that point in the story, Charlie has managed to acquire two (2!) Wonka candy bars, spending money the family could have spent on cabbage, and finding—of course—no Golden Ticket within. Now the father has lost his job, and the thin, watery cabbage stew becomes thinner and more water, less cabbage, and the entire family begins to face the very real—and realistically depicted—threat of starvation. The grandparents try to give Charlie some of their food, but the noble idiot refuses it, even though he is now the only one leaving home on a regular basis, as his dad has only occasional work shoveling snow. The dire and potentially fatal consequences of hunger are limned by Roald Dahl with too much veracity for a children’s book, and I found myself wondering just what I was supposed to be reading. It really is one of the saddest passages I’ve read in a kids’ book without the death of a pet.

And every day, Charlie Bucket grew thinner and thinner. His face became frighteningly white and pinched. The skin was drawn so tightly over the cheeks that you could see the shapes of the bones underneath. It seemed doubtful whether he could go on much longer like this without becoming dangerously ill.

And now, very calmly, with that curious wisdom that seems to come so often to small children in times of hardship, he began to make little changes here and there in some of the things that he did, so as to save his strength. In the mornings, he left the house ten minutes earlier so that he could walk slowly to school, without ever having to run. He sat quietly in the classroom during recess, resting himself, while the others rushed outdoors and threw snowballs and wrestled in the snow. Everything he did now, he did slowly and carefully, to prevent exhaustion.

Charlie resolves to starve quietly rather than noisily demand help from the people all around him with full bellies

Not to worry. All this pathos and bathos will be quite forgotten by the time Charlie is adopted by Mr. Wonka and goes to live in Neverland—er, I mean the factory. And the fact that Charlie spends found money on candy for himself rather than nutritious food for his entire family is forgiven, as the book teaches us that it is best to trust to ridiculous amounts of luck rather than to ask for help in times of need.

And so I won’t ever read this book again, though I’m likely to watch Gene Wilder every chance I get. I’m also a little chary of Roald Dahl’s other books, but only time will tell about those stories.

Until next time…

Friday Vocabulary

1. diligence — public stagecoach of early 18th Century, esp. in France

I told the innkeeper to run out and hold the diligence while I gathered the soi-disant baroness up from the floor, along with her physical baggage.

 

2. bedizen — to dress up, esp. in a vulgar manner

His green plaid waistcoat was bedizened with silken tassels and small metal figurines suggesting the tools of his trade, among them a tiny pewter trowel and hod.

 

3. elapid — of or related to the Elapidae, a family of venomous snakes which include coral snakes and cobras, all having hollow venom-injecting fangs fixed to the upper jaw

We were warned to wear full eye protection as we sought the lair of the spitting cobra, as the venom projected from his elapid fangs could permanently blind the unwary hunter.

 

4. foetor (also fetor) — stench, offensive smell

The crime scene team seemed unfazed by the foetor which enshrouded the bottom of the dumpster where the body had been found, but I had to retreat up the fire escape and clear my lungs of the lingering stink.

 

5. opisthognathous — having retreating jaws or jawline

For all his talent on the ball field, he was cursed by his opisthognathous profile and his inability to grow a beard to hide that accursedly noteworthy weak chin.

 

6. spandrel — (architecture) space between arch and a rectangle enclosing that arch; space between extradoses of adjacent arches

Nestled within the two spandrels framing what had once been the postern of the church, I noted that what I had taken to be a pair of cherubs were actually winged demons, their bird-like claws tucked menacingly beneath their open jaws.

 

7. bibulous — addicted to drink; of or related to drink; absorbent of moisture

We all agreed how sad it was that Charlie’s fall from favor had not been checked though his own efforts, and that our formerly friendly louche loser had become merely another bibulous bottom-feeder and hanger-on at all the least exclusive parties.

 

8. butt splice — cylindrical crimp connector for electrical wiring, with a crimp at each end

After much searching we finally found the culprit: a faulty butt splice in which the connector had broken, hidden by the heat shrink plastic that exactly matched the color of the joined wires.

 

9. linctus — syrupy medicine

In France at that time you could purchase codeine over the counter, either in a linctus or pastilles, and so we did.

 

10. superincumbent — lying or resting upon; overhanging; from above (as of pressure)

We might never have found the corpse save for the rank smell, which the superincumbent boxes of potpourri could not conceal.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(fashion, late 20th c.)

brothel creeper — shoe with thick crepe sole, often with suede uppers

Before it became the favored shoe of Teddy Boys and Russian stilyagi youth of the 1950s, the brothel creeper was worn by World War II soldiers stationed in the North African theatre.

113,000 Songs

Just 80 days after my last such notice, I have just heard my 113,000th unique iTunes track, the slightly desultory Grateful Dead song “When Push Comes To Shove”, from the Dead’s show at Frost Amphitheatre on May 2, 1987. This particular file was digitized from my own tape of the show, which I was at (and that’s my ticket to prove it) (not that that proves anything, but if you want to come over to my house I can show you the ticket, which also proves nothing, but I sure do miss physical tickets). This was followed by the 113,001st song, “Hell With The Lid Off”, a rant by the eight year-old preacher Marjoe Gortner, kicking off the next thousand tracks with a bang, as it were.

113,000 unique tracks makes up 735.41 GB of data (↑ 9.8 GB), with a total duration of 477 days, 19 hours, 48 minutes, and 48 seconds (↑ 11+ days). Left unplayed in my iTunes collection at this moment are 78,101 songs, which is 461 less than last report (meaning that a net 539 tracks were added since last report). The unplayed tracks comprise 536.29 GB of data (↓ 4.4 GB) with a playing time of 289 days,21 hours, 45 minutes, and 30 seconds (↓ 9 days & ~6 hours). (Purists among you may wish to add back into this time the 2:44 duration of the Marjoe Gortner rant. I wish you well.)

To reach the 113,000th unique track, I listened to 1254 songs since track #112,000, starting this latest leg of my musical consumptive journey with “Life Is Like A River” by The Sultans Five. Thus including the previously played songs (and since I’ve been working on my mix CDs for my cousins I’ve listened to some of those quite a number of times), the total size of files heard in the last set of 1,000 comes to 11.22 GB, lasting 11 days, 21 hours, 51 minutes, and 43 seconds were you to listen to each of those files back to back. Of course, as I just said, I’ve listened to several of these multiple multiple times (which is not a stat I can track easily in iTunes, nor do I think I should like to).

It took 80 days to listen to the last thousand songs, meaning precisely 12.5 new songs per day were heard.

12.5 New Tracks Heard per Day

If we include the previously heard songs, we find that I heard 15.675 tracks per day.

15.68 Tracks Heard per Day

 

No additional comments beyond those already made for this particular tranche of a thousand songs. See you next time!

Friday Vocabulary

1. callipygian — having shapely buttocks

I gladly followed the callipygian blonde up the narrow trail and—not for the first time—gave silent thanks to whomsoever had introduced yoga pants into the realm of fashionable casual wear.

 

2. manustupration — (archaic) masturbation

For centuries the detrimental effects of manustupration upon the body, the psyche, and the spirit have seemed manifest to all physicians who deigned to issue an opinion on the matter, though the latest study by the Urologic Society seems to undercut many of these unscientific ideas entirely.

 

3. giaour — (Turkish) nonbeliever; non-Muslim, esp. Christians

In spite of the mocking comments and reproachful looks from the giaours I was forced by my straitened circumstances to travel among, I of course performed salah at the required times each day.

 

4. squiffy — drunk, intoxicated

“I’m sorry, old man,” he apologized, “I don’t know if it’s the altitude or my cold or your very fine cognac, but that one drink seems to have left me completely squiffy, and I really must have a bit of a lie down.”

 

5. manometer — instrument for measuring pressure

Of course, one reason for using mercury in our manometer is the density of the liquid metal, which allows accurate readings with a reasonable scale.

 

6. pong — stink, unpleasant smell

Not finding a plumber’s friend or a snake, we decided simply to use the upstairs bathroom for the remainder of our long weekend, resolutely ignoring the pong which kept seeping through the firmly closed bathroom door.

 

7. vulpicide — killing a fox by any means other than hunting it with hounds

I might question whether Brigadier Gerard’s greater crime in the eyes of the British officers he surprised mid-hunt was the vulpicide or his gaucherie.

 

8. fortalice — a small fort; (archaic) fortress

The captain realized the French would return in force within a day or two, but still believed we had time to construct a workable fortalice from the spars, masts, and other boards of our doomed ship.

 

9. seidel — large beer mug

Joe had to glad-hand the rubes as we walked through the club so I kept walking, grabbed a couple of seidels of beer from Dave at the bar, and carried them to our usual table in the corner of the front room.

 

10. despond — to lose hope, to become depressed by loss of confidence or courage

As I related my failure to find a trail out of our now freezing valley I saw in the desponding faces that same resignation and despair that I had been struggling against each step of my return trip to our seemingly doomed cabin.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. orpiment — yellow arsenic sulfide used as pigment

Although most commonly associated with ancient painting, orpiment has many, many uses, and in India and Iran is not infrequently used as a depilatory.

 

2. bort — low-grade diamonds and fragments of good diamonds, used commonly as abrasive

Though over half of mined diamonds are bort sold to industry, almost 93% of industrial diamonds are manufactured through synthetic processes.

 

3. fillip — motion made by bending last joint of finger or the nail of the finger against the thumb and then suddenly releasing it; to strike with a nail snapped from the end of the thumb

I started the cunning device off with a fillip against the steel marble placed at the top of the wooden tower, regretting my action immediately as my nail throbbed with pain in reaction to the momentum transmitted to the small but heavy metal orb.

 

4. springald — young man, stripling

She entertained his attentions with great patience, yet all knew that the flighty springald could have no real claim upon her heart.

 

5. springald — medieval engine of warfare used for shooting large bolts

The left wing of the Turkish calvary was charging furiously through our last line of pikemen, threatening to overrun our springald and remove the advantage it had given us thus far in the overall battle.

 

6. gudgeon — small European freshwater baitfish; gullible person, someone who will swallow anything

By flattering his intellect and political acumen I was able to bend that gudgeon to my will, and eventually he signed the contract without demur.

 

7. tick — cloth cover or case to hold filling (feathers, hair, etc.) used to form a mattress or pillow

It was the simplest of beds, and the straw kept sticking right through the worn tick, usually as I was just falling asleep.

 

8. austringer (also astringer) — trainer and keeper of goshawks or other short-winged hawks

The austringer has one advantage over other falconers in that his bird can hunt both mammalian and avian prey.

 

9. pizzle — animal penis; penis of a bull used for flogging

The highlands of Peru are patrolled by vigilantes who administer swift justice with the pizzles they carry as a symbol of their self-appointed office.

 

10. mesentery — membraneous organ attaching intestines to the rear abdominal wall

It was only as recently as 2012 that researchers were able to prove that the various mesocolons, the mesoappendix, and the mesorectum were a single organ, showing that the mesentery extends from a common point.

 

Monday Book Report: Suddenly, At Singapore

The first novel featuring the adventurer, importer, sometime gun-runner Paul Harris is not as cohesive, nor as finished as the only other I’ve read in the series (You Want To Die, Johnny?), but it rollicks around Malaya and Sumatra quite successfully, kicking off the long-running series with gunshots, plane wrecks, and hot boat on boat action. Author Gavin Black—pseudonym of Oswald Wynd, a Scot born in Tokyo to missionary parents—created in Paul Harris a frustrating and fascinating character, an embittered man in a loveless marriage, who fights a rear-guard war against the collapse of colonialism in the island states of southeast Asia during the height of the Cold War. Though he is seriously flawed, Paul Harris passionately believes in his adopted land, a land he has loved since fighting the Japanese in its jungles during World War II. In this initial novel of the series, either Harris or the author lacks the confidence he evinces in the later work, and the story verges into melodrama at times, particularly when Paul Harris muses about his relationships with women. Many of these thoughts verge on misogyny, yet the author will show Harris being put in his place almost every woman in the novel; Harris eats a dish of crow more than once and is forced to face his own fallacious outlook upon that and other aspects of his world—though confronting himself does not always seem to result in change, and he seems always to retain his privileged relation (at least in his own mind) with the people resident in his ‘beloved land’.

The Japs had dive-bombed this ferry once, in the dark like this, but accurately, pasting us for about an hour, while I waited in a slit trench. A lot of men had been killed. It was something to think about, the good men who had been killed, while you went on for years, and blundered.

Paul Harris contemplates surviving only to err

The action starts in Kuala Lumpur, where Paul Harris is spending some time with his not-actually mistress Kate being Platonic and close and friendly and all. Kate is a reporter, a woman reporter, as she points out, who is writing a story about Paul and his brother Jeff, who are involved in some ill-defined under-the-table business which involves—at the very least—smuggling guns for rebel forces operating in Sumatra against the communists of Indonesia. Kate moans that a woman reporter “can’t ever be really good. Not tops. We’re not ruthless enough.” Meaning that she can’t both be Paul’s lover (in the strange Platonic sense the novel wants us to believe) and at the same time drop a dime on him to publish her bombshell story about his gun-running and what-all with his brother. They talk about how to deal with Paul’s wife, and are just heading off for drinks at the hotel (they have separate rooms, btw) when—Wham! Paul gets a call: his brother is dead, murdered in Singapore.

When I came out it was with my world broken around me, blown up, shattered. I felt sick and old.

Paul learns of his brother’s death

Paul rushes pell-mell back to Singapore, Kate in tow, to find the varmint that killed his brother. He goes to the scene of the crime, then home to his whining wife Ruth, where he meets Inspector Kang of the Singapore Police, who will dog his steps for the rest of the novel (and who will reappear in the series to come, as well). The Chinese-born Kang is scrupulously polite, though Harris is not fooled for an instant. Paul must keep quiet about most of the clandestine activities he and his brother were involved in to avoid legal entanglements from the police, and resolves to keep Kang at arm’s length.

Inspector Kang’s eyes were very cold. I think mine were, too, they were meant to be. It wasn’t just that latent hostility between a policeman and the ordinary citizen, but something that went much deeper at once, that moved into zones of feeling which knocked out reason in both of us. I didn’t like the world into which Kang was fitting so nicely thank you. And he thought my world should be liquidated, that it was only a matter of time until it was.

Paul Harris meets his bête noire, Inspector Kang

From here on out we have action, action, action, until the usual third act rest and recuperation, then more action, surprise twists, and a resolution that was strangely satisfying to me. In the meantime, there are betrayals and disappointments, both suffered and inflicted by Paul Harris himself. He proves himself a poor judge of female character, at minimum, and is upbraided with honest and reasonable heat by those he thinks himself more civilized than, the very people he would either help in his paternalistic fashion or whom he would exile entirely from the political process due to their inaptness for rule. Along the way Gavin Black paints us a portrait of a world few Westerners know well, a world which the author obviously lived in and loved. (One can be fooled however, as Wynd returned to his native Scotland immediately after the war, never to return to southeast Asia.) The Malaya that Mr. Black evinces is a hodgepodge of many and varied influences and cultures, all vying for supremacy even as another syncretic culture is being created out of the mix.

Mrs Flores opened a shutter and there was more light to see a room crowded with trophies of disordered living, each piece like a little symbol of an eccentric ambition which had petered out. There was a Victorian rocker, a contemporary sofa, a dead gramophone and a mahogany piano. There were Chinese jars with wilted feather plants in them, and across one corner a cocktail cabinet which was open to show the glasses and the mirrored surfaces.

Paul Harris visits the cheaper district of Singapore

Like many noir heroes, Paul Harris takes it on the chin, though the enemies he claims to be fighting, the warlords and communists, inflict no damage as severe as that given him by many of the women in his life. From the women, he gets it in the gut with both barrels. It is startling to have such a strong and assertive character receive his comeuppance not once but multiple times in a single book, each time suffering attacks on the very foundation stones upon which his character rests, yet each time reasserting himself and groping about until he comes to the conclusion (mostly) that he was right all along. What’s not clear to me is whether the author meant to show a man who cannot be swayed from his patronizing, colonializing ways by mere evidence of his wrong-headedness, or whether the decades since this book was written in 1961 have so changed the zeitgeist that I have become incapable of picking up the cues and clues that would demonstrate how Paul Harris’s paternalistic anti-communism is always going to be the right choice, even in the face of strong attacks against his down-putting ways.

‘We are not to be relied on, Mr Harris. How sensible not to trust me with your secrets. We are too emotional, I think. Perhaps we imagine wrongs that are not being done to us. Maybe we should accept politeness at face value. Your instinct was surely most sound. Such a fool, knowing too much, could be most dangerous. Now will you go? Will you go to hell?’

It’s not me … it’s you, as Paul Harris learns … maybe

Even though this book is not as cogent and complete as the other one in the series that I have read, it is easy to see why Joan Kahn chose Gavin Black to be one of the authors to whom she gave her imprimatur while helming the Harper Novels of Suspense. (She also championed at least one book published under the author’s own name, Oswald Wynd’s The Blazing Air.) Whatever flaws this first in the Paul Harris may have, Suddenly, At Singapore packs plenty of action into a complicated yet reasonable plot with an unusual and vibrant locale. Though we may doubt the protagonist’s views of the world he lives in, we are convinced that he certainly believes in them, and thus he allows us a glimpse of a decaying world now forever lost.

It is always safe to lead the French to the Chinese, the only other people in the world they will allow any claim to be civilisé.

Paul Harris indulges in social niceties or racism, take your pick

And this ‘otherness’, this revelation of a time forgot, the hopelessly sincere passion manqué of a Cold War Asia rotting in the fetid heat beneath a rising communist sun, speaks across the half-century which has come and gone in a flurry of sound and fury, and seems more foreign to my ear than the latest K-Pop sensation. If I were to read a Soviet-era rendition of a communist 007, fighting the good fight against the imperialist West while using his plentiful sex appeal along with his rock-hard socialist principles, it would seem no more cognitively dissonant than Paul Harris does as an action hero in the formerly British Malaya. Yet both of these, the fictitious Soviet spy and the fictive hero created by Gavin Black, both thrill me where most current suspense protagonists only cloy. Thus Paul Harris enlivens tropes that have become stale, while he startles with sincere convictions no longer fashionable, nor perhaps even extant. From the sultry humid jungles of his beloved island, he brings a refreshing take on the action novel, while enduring painful lessons about the limits of his own worldview and world—lessons he does not always seem to learn.