"Beowulf": Blood and Violence, Geat Style

I'm pretty sure I procured this from the book warehouse where I worked one winter season. I knew that I would want it for my library. I didn't read it for almost ten years.

It's very short, and this translation is brisk and breezy, especially  for something so violent and gruesome. On my 30th birthday the missus had procured tickets to the Banana Bag and Bodice production of their rock opera "Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage".

Having the copy and not having read it, I was inspired to read that year before going to the show. It didn't take very long to read. I always kind of found it weird that this was always considered an English work, rather, the early English work (besides Le Morte d'Arthur I suppose). But in the story, the hapless and helpless Danes need Beowulf's awesome ass-kicking force of Geats to help them with their demon problem, a sumbitch' named Grendel, and also his mom, who's kinda a pain in the ass.

I had to look up stuff about the Geats. They were a Swedish ethnicity, or at least that's what we'd call them now, and there is a state in Sweden called Geatland (I'm using the Americanized spelling). Now, the Swedes and Danes were mortal enemies for centuries, and the Geats wouldn't have called themselves Swedes by any means, but it always seemed funny to me that  the Danes are depicted in this English story as being ineffectual. But why this is the tale that survives?

I'll tell you why: It's the same reason big action movies get made, or used to get made. It is unbelievably violent and gory. Like, holy shit man. Nobody ever told me. Granted, I don't read a lot of horror, or zombie fiction, but this was the goriest thing I've ever read.

Before Beowulf shows up to help save the day, Grendel likes to kill the Danes and eat them, and the description of Grendel working their bones in his teeth sounds like my cat going at a chicken wing, gnashing his teeth on them and grinding the bones down with greasy glee. When Beowulf makes it to Grendel's lair at the bottom of a lake, he's not as shocked as you or I might be to see that Grendel decorated the inside with the peeled skin of his slain victims. Wall papered his lair with skin and guts, man.

Beowulf, during a fight, tears Grendel's arm off and beats him with it as he's fleeing..

Awesome.

The story got me nice and amped for that rock opera, which didn't disappoint. f you ever get a chance to see it, you won't be disappointed.

Sometimes the classics are classic for a reason.

"Fields for President": Gin Blossoms for All

This copy of Fields For President, the one I bought from a tiny bookstore in the mountains of LA at a family reunion on my mom's side, was published in 1972 and aimed to be part of the campaign literature of that year. It was originally published in 1939. I bought it with another book, one about Kissinger called Superkraut that I've since lost. I think they were fifty-cents each.

WC Fields was a  funny, funny man, and his humor translate mostly okay because of his mostly cynical and weary view of how government works. His view is also conspiratorial, one of the "the government is out to get me" types, but this attitude is laced with self-deprecating sardonic wit.

That's probably why it was re-introduced in 1972 early in that election year: it wasn't outdated. After a conversation I had with my godfather, the idea that films are harder to date when the protagonist is cynical and weary, whereas if they're happy-go-lucky, the times in which it was filmed shine through too brightly, and the piece become (often) badly dated.

With chapters titled "How to Beat the Federal Income Tax---And What to See and Do at Alcatraz" and "How I Have Built Myself into a Physical Marvel", you get a pretty quick idea just exactly where Fields goes with all this. 

Full of pictures, it's an interesting artifact of a comic from an earlier time that knew what funny was, having found success in vaudeville, on the radio and eventually in films. Fields is mostly forgotten today, and I've yet to see if his movies are dated...judging by this book's sense of humor, they may have lasted.

Inside this book is an advertisement for Club Cocktails Whiskey Sour in a can, with two young people in swimsuits, wading in knee-deep water, sharing a can with two straws. (Shudder)

"A Night to Remember", Alfred Lord: Prose You'll Remember

Upon the centennial of the Titanic sinking, I read a few articles about the incident, and all pointed to Lord's A Night to Remember as remaining the authority on the event. There are other books, larger books, thorough books that explain exactly the second-by-second details of the last hours of the ship and her passengers, and they'd still refer to this masterpiece of cool, elegant prose.

I bought it for fifty-cents or something on Amazon, where the cost of shipping is more than the cost of the book.

If you care even a little about hubris and arrogance, about real-eyed honesty in the face of obvious destruction, about the unchaining of the poor (which of course happened far too late), I can't be any more blunt: READ THIS BOOK.

Lord spoke with as many survivors as he could visit in the '50s when he wrote the book, and the authority of the events is so confident and to the point that it blows the mind. The night unfolds with lightening pace from the first grinding sound to the surviving ranking officer getting sucked under and then blown out with a dying gasp of a sinking vessel. He made it to a capsized life boat, and stood until the sunrise.

The book is maybe 200 pages, and, if under the right circumstances, could easily be read in an afternoon. It grips you, and doesn't let go.

I think science has left the great majority of the facts stated here intact, which is to the credit of the memories of those who survived to tell the story to Al Lord.

"Hocus Pocus", Kurt Vonnegut: Nabbed from the Cuz

This is the first Vonnegut I read after reaching a maturity level appropriate to appreciate what he's doing. This copy I guess I stole, but mostly by accident. It was living at the house of the missus' cousin, where we stayed in Upstate New York when we moved Back East. I picked it up and started reading it, and must have gotten it mixed up with my own stuff, and it's been with me ever since. Down to Brooklyn, over to Austin, on to Long Beach...

It's a wacky one, for sure. The main character is a Vietnam vet who came back to work at a prison as a guard, and then is made a prisoner himself when the prisoners riot. Because he's not a violent prick guard, he's not treated too badly by the prisoners when they're in charge.

I may have made that entire synopsis up, and since the book is too far for me to get, I'm going to leave that as is. The veteran, as Vonnegut's politics would have suggested, had always felt conflicted about what he'd done or seen, and the position of prison guard was almost too ironic for him. I'm starting to think he was a prisoner there himself to start with...

I can't remember. I read it more than six years ago, and have had a few beers and Pynchon's in the time between.

In any case, one of the two more striking elements is that it's sections range in size from pages to lines. The premise being that he's been writing it on scraps of paper, and the sense you get reading it is a oddly paced confessional. The second element is part of the puzzle, and how the narrator frames it. Of his regrets, he realizes that the number of women he's slept with is the same number of people he killed in combat. This tidbit he mentions early on, but never states what the number is. Throughout the entire book. One of the very last things he says is an explanation, a rubric, for how to calculate the number, what pages to look on for the pieces to combine to get the answer.

I guess these little things are more review-like than I felt earlier.

Oh well. It was good. I liked it at the time. I'm sure it's not Vonnegut's best work, but it had an interesting pace and story design, and I would recommend it.

Making Some Changes

I've decided to make a few changes to how I title my posts. If you read this regularly (uhh, okay), you might have noticed the titles of the posts have been changed to reflect the title of the book and the author, if applicable, that will be discussed in the post itself.

I resisted that at first, as I didn't want people to come along the blog and think that it was a review site. Of course it wouldn't take too much reading to realize that this is most definitely not a book review site (I leave that for poppa Chef Gonzo), so I realized my worry was mostly unfounded. What not having the book titles in the post titles did do, though, was make everything cryptic when I was aiming for artsy.

Best laid plans, right?

Now at least a search of a title may direct some unwitting reader here, where they won't be getting a review, rather a narcissist's ramblings on how he acquired said book, either by buying or stealing, and what that person got from it, or the designs they made for it in his grand scheme, his Ganzebilde.

Okay. Moving on...

"The Savage Detectives", Roberto Bolano: Sexy Adventures of Mexican Poets

I bought this while living in Brooklyn, and read it mostly on the subway. At those time I would take the dust jacket off and leave it in my bookshelf to look proper, and over time the hard cover would become stained and shabby with the sweat and oils from my fingers and palms. I even wrote about this phenomena over at my oldest blog, complete with pictures of the damage.

I had read a review of this book, and of Roberto Bolanyo. He'd been a Chilean poet and author and had moved to Mexico and started a poetry movement. This book mirrors that scenario to a degree. The whole idea behind the novel, and its execution piqued my interest, and I went out and got it.

It starts out like a seventies coming-of-age/soft-core film, with a main character out writing poetry and trying get laid. He tries to ally himself with two older poets who have started a movement, one Chilean and one Mexican, and they have big plans: they plan on kidnapping Octavio Paz. There is so much discussion of seventies era new-world Latin American poets and poetry that it'll blow your mind. You don't really have to know anything about them to enjoy the story, but if you were familiar with it, the references would be awesome.

This section ends abruptly, on the eve of a big action set piece. The next two-thirds of the book is a series of interviews with folks who were tertiary characters in the opening section, and all taking place fifteen to twenty-five years later. Through the interviews the ramifications of the actions that hadn't occurred when the first section stopped are starkly apparent. How everybody reacted and the aftermath played over the years, the disappointment and regret, all laid bare.

A few things, though: the interviewers are never fully defined or introduced, and the main character from the first section, is mentioned maybe once during the long interview section, and that's way near the end.

When the interviews are over, and a couple of decades of living on the margins of society, as many non-famous poets are wont to do, are painted for the reader, the first section starts up again, right where it left off, and now it's like a seventies action movie. The events that are being investigated throughout the middle of the book are witnessed, and we see how events turned into anecdotes and then turned into stories.

It really is a good work, a nice work of fiction. I looked into but haven't yet procured Bolanyo's so-called masterpiece, the mysteriously titled 2666, a 900-page novel split in five sections and deal with European literature critics and Mexican prostitute murders, and they are all connected. In reading a review of 2666, the names of some of my favorite writers get mentioned (Denis Johnson and Murakami) and a few writers I've heard of but haven't yet gotten into (Don DeLillo, James Ellroy).

If you're looking for something else, somewhere to start in the newly discovered and ever-growing market of Spanish writing translated into English, The Savage Detectives would probably be a good start.