A Clash of Cultures

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

This book is a history of four cities: St. Petersburg (also in its Leningrad incarnation), Shanghai, Dubai, and Mumbai (in its Bombay incarnation).

The two cities that I found to be the most interesting were St. Petersburg and Shanghai. Both cities were founded by the imposition of the Western Enlightenment and its subsequent desire for trade with other cultures, the curiosity with other cultures, and the exploitation of a native culture for its own betterment and the West's.

Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, thought that he could import the Western Enlightenment into Russia by laying the groundwork of St. Petersburg. The mix of Western Culture and Russian Culture, after he wrested the area from the Swedish crown, would lead to a High Russian Culture that would rival and overtake the Enlightenment of Western Europe. All the good would flow to Russia, because that is the way the autocrat, Peter, wanted it. But, oh the Other People and the Little People, they don't know that they must serve the Autocrat not themselves. They will go and order things the way that they want them to be, not the way that their Betters Know That They Should Be. This problem persists in the World today.

Shanghai was also founded by a Briton who wanted to trade with the Chinese Empire. Britain had manufactured goods that needed markets preferably in China. The Chinese Emperor gave the land for the barbarians to use as their trading city, but then the Emperor refused to trade because the Europeans had nothing that the Chinese wanted according to the Emperor. Except for Opium from the British Indian Empire, the Chinese were willing to take some of that good stuff. In order to obtain the silks and lacquers and porcelain and art of the Chinese, Europeans only had, by the decree of the Chinese Emperor, Opium to trade. Hence the Opium War, a shameful war by all accounts on all sides.

Whereas Peter the Great made a city for the expansion of Culture and Trade, the Chinese Emperor made Shanghai to contain and contract the meeting of Cultures. It didn't work out well for either man's goals.


No Easy Day: An Autobiography of a Navy Seal: The First Hand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen

I saw Zero Dark Thirty and wondered about the accuracy of the last part of the movie, so I read this book. The movie and book pretty much follow each other in the raid.

The rest of the book is about how Mr. Owen became a Navy Seal and what his training consisted of. The rest of the movie is about the wanderings in the Torture Desert of Moral Ambiguity to find the Devil. Both parts of those stories depend upon what the reader or viewer is really interested in.


The Iron King by Maurice Druon

Philip IV the Fair was the King of France in the later part of the thirteenth century. He decided that being a Temporal King was no great challenge and he went after the Papacy too. He made up his own Pope and then went after the wealth of the Templar Knights who ran the Crusades and financed many shenanigans throughout Europe.

Philip broke the Templar Knights (they are the ones that The Maltese Falcon belonged  to) but didn't get anymore satisfaction out of it than did the Fat Man and Sam Spade. The head of the Templar Knights cursed Philip the Fair and his progeny to the thirteenth generation as he burned at the stake. And it appeared that the Curse did some Good or Bad as it was intended.

Philip the Fair died soon afterwards and his children and their children fell on hard ruling times and the Hundred Years War. The French ruling family, the Capets, died out. The Valois branch took over. The British ruling family of the Plantagenets (who were connected to the French Capets through intermarriage) fell apart and began the Wars of the Roses which gave Shakespeare the basis for his History Plays.

The book has a couple of subplots about a scheming knight and an Italian Banking House that were interesting sporadically. I usually just skimmed those parts. The royals are the interesting stinkers in this book.

Dorothy Dunnett's The Lymond Chronicles is a better written set of books about the mid-sixteenth century that gives intimate details of the history and culture and customs of Europe. It helps to know French and Latin for her books, although one can get by just fine without them. Mr. Druon doesn't have the depth of research nor gives the historical details that Miss Dunnett does, but he is a quick read.

Some Odd People

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

This book is a murder mystery that goes to trial where the truth to be discovered about the trial and whether the accused child murderer did what he is accused of is discernible about half way through the book and the trial.

The real mystery is why the child's attorney, or solicitor (this is a British mystery), is estranged from his adoptive mother and biological mother.

This is good trash reading.


That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert A. Shanke

Mercedes de Acosta knew every one who was Any One in the early twentieth century. She was a lesbian groupie who slept with all the great lesbians of that age, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Eva le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Alice B. Toklas, etc.

Miss de Acosta also wrote plays for the theater of the time and screenplays for Hollywood movies.

This is a good biography. It moves fast and explains the period and its people well to anyone who has not read much about it.

And Cecil Beaton was the one who called her a furious lesbian. Really Mr. Beaton, you are one to talk.

More Ghost Stories

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

The first line in the book blurb on the Barnes & Noble site caught my eye and my sense of the ridiculous:

"Bestselling novelist Helen Dunmore’s historical novels have earned her comparisons in the press to Tolstoy and Emily Bronte."

What? Who would make such outrageously unbelievable comparisons but a book review comedienne? That is comparing apples to raisins or a fly to a saber toothed Big Cat.

Miss Dunmore has written an enjoyable (and a quick read---take that Tolstoy) ghost story about the Battle of Britain and the dreary and rationed aftermath of World War II for the British people. The main characters' lives are arranged and circumscribed by death and deprived life and love. Everyone wants more but no one can have it. It just isn't there anymore. The war wore it out.

The book is about a 1950's doctor's wife in one of those old flats that has a bathtub in the kitchen and dirt in the cracks of 1800's woodwork that not even an archaeologist can dig out for research into climatic changes of the Industrial Revolution. When her husband the doctor is out on a late night call, the wife answers a tapping on the dirty window pane of the main entrance door to find a WWII pilot asking for admittance. The wife is none too circumspect and all too bored with her life and waves the pilot in for a sexy landing. And from there, we explore sex with a ghost or an incubus.

One of the advantages of sex with an incubus is that the living don't pay attention to it. So the wife doesn't really have to hide her affair from anyone (her husband) except the old hag who owns and rents out her flat. The Old Hag, as with most Old hags, knows more than anyone else about the pilot incubus. The Old Hag wants her Youth and her Love back, but she doesn't have the ration credits to obtain it.

Family Noir

I will read anything by Ross MacDonald.

He was a US/Canadian citizen by the name of Kenneth Millar who wrote the best Noir Detective stories about The Sins of the Fathers (and Families) that carried through the generations and caused Mayhem and Murder for the next generation or two.

His landscape was California of the Post WWII and the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War Times. People go to the wars and come back altered and bearing bad fruit that will disturb and molest and deform the next generation. The Beauty of California countryside will always slide into ranging and out of control fires and mudslides inland and rip tides along the coast. Beauty hides the motives of a Harsh Mistress of Nature, both natural and human.

The plots of the novels are as convoluted as are the motives and anxieties of the characters. The characters are not the most introspective or self aware people, the hero detective, Lew Archer, supplies that in "Spades". The characters are bewildered by the supposed Good Fortune of California, because that Fortune goes Bad for them because of their deals with the Devil of American Prosperity and Pursuit of Happiness.

I've just finished re-reading all the novels. And now I wish I could do it again. When I read other detective fiction, it all goes flat and stale for me. No one else has Mr. MacDonald's terse yet poetically precise turn of phrase to describe his characters and their dilemmas. No one else can bring the Horror of bad actions and motives in a Family and make them so tragic and appalling. Everyone else thinks that they just have to describe the bad acts (child molestation, abuse) in details to catch their readers. Mr. MacDonald doesn't do that, he describes the consequences and there are no rampaging and fake serial killers who kill for a spree and who are geniuses begging for some appreciation of their talents. Mr. MacDonald's characters are people who are silly and stupid and naive and unknowing. The Kill is a moment of panic and desperation or a moment of Temporary Madness and the rest of their lives are the Big Cover-up for that Sin.

Is there any detective novelist today who has this depth? I haven't been able to find one. Let me know if you have.

I want to read Good Trash Detective Novels that remind me of Greek Tragedy. I want a detective novel that is close to me, not some fantastic S&M dream of some great human hunt.

Viewpoints

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagel

In 1945, a Egyptian, who was avenging his father's murder in a blood feud, discovered some rolls of papyrus in a large red clay jar. The Egyptian knew something about grave robbing and antiquities and put one of the papyrus rolls on the market to find out the value of what he and his brother had dug up. So, the Gnostic Gospels, another view of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus came to the attention of Bible scholars.

The fundamentalists won the war of the Protestant and Catholic Bibles. They favored the hierarchical, rigid, Religion is the Church and its temporal judgements and demands and don't fall afoul of it version of the Bible. The Gnostics were more in the vein of God is what is inside you and is a personal god. The Gnostics also believed that Mary Magdalene was a disciple of Christ and one of the most intelligent ones and not some street whore.

Why, reading this book about these other gospels that weren't allowed to be Canon, you get the idea that these Gnostics weren't even Christians, even though they knew Christ and followed his teachings.

Religion is Politics, that is really what was meant by all the rendering unto Caesar.

Oh and the Egyptian and his brother found his father's killer and hacked off his limbs and ate his heart just like in Today's Bible.



Queen Isabella by Alison Weir

The English have a long history of getting rid of the monarchs that they don't like. Edward II was the first one to be deposed.

Edward was a gay monarch, a little too gay. He fell in lust and thrall to his favorite whore sons Sluts and gave them his kingdom for a good shag. His barons and the people became very irritated at being thieved upon and imprisoned and murdered and raped for the voracious financial appetites of his Sex Boys. They no sooner got rid of one of the Sex Boys then the King would go and find another one. I think that Edward II was a bottom, and if you believe the tales of his death, so did his subjects.

Anyway, Edward II's wife (yes, custom dictated that he have a wife, but he closeted her instead of his Sex Boys) took his heir, Edward II could make the effort when required, and went off to her brother, the King of France, when she had had enough of the latest Sex Boy. There was speculation that the Sex Boy was straight and doing Edward for the money and the lands and the title. The Sex Boy had made some moves on Isabella in his spare time and might have raped her. The Queen had put up with the Sex Boys for ten years and more (she married at twelve), but they were doing her husband and not her.

The Queen was in Paris in the Spring and fell in love and lust with an exiled English no-more-nobeller-than-most Lord named Mortimer and through their calculated love and ambition (hey, not everything is a screwball comedy, some of it is just screwing your lover and your enemies drama); the pair rounded up the exiled disaffected and an army and invaded England and took back the Land and the Knights and deposed the King.

The deposed Edward II was sent to a castle and told to seek individual solace, if you know what I mean. I guess that he did, until the third attempt to free him and put him back on the throne. Then Mortimer sent some wiseguys to smother the used-to-be King with Pillows and then ram a red hot poker up his anus to finish him off, just like one of his Sex Boys. It was an Orgasmic Death for Edward.

Then the Queen and Mortimer put the under aged heir on the throne and made out like bandits, hugging and kissing and appropriating all the Sex Boy's appropriated lands and money and goods. The Queen and Mortimer were just as sexy and greedy as the Sex Boys who came before them. Then Edward III turned eighteen and sent Mortimer to be hung and his mother into retirement.

But was Edward II really sent into the great Sex Death? Or did he escape and spend the rest of his days as a hippie monk wandering around Europe with a backpack and a Bible? Miss Weir does come up with interesting circumstantial evidence for that conclusion.

The Kingly deposings continued after the long reign of Edward III. His heir was his grandson, Richard II, and we all know what happened to him. He had his great grand kinggie's tendencies. And thus, the War of the Roses was born.

Inevitable Death

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green


As I have said before, I like to read Young Adult Fiction when I want a fast book read. Young Adult Fiction quickly establishes its characters and the plot; and keeps everything moving swiftly to the end. It is as if the Young Adult Fiction Authors had all taken an intensive fiction writing course in The Works of Ernest Hemingway or Ellen Gilchrist. Keep the language simple but effective and spell it properly (::cough Twitter::)

This novel is narrated by Hazel who is fourteen or sixteen (let us say fifteen then) and has Stage IV cancer in her lungs. Her breathing is assisted by her faithful oxygen pump and later at night by a BiPAP. But even with assistance, most of her energy is spent on actually making herself breath and feeling the effects of not being successful at that.

Trash Talking:

The Water's Lovely

by Ruth Rendell

Miss Rendell is one of my favorite mystery/thriller/suspense writers. I don't care that much for her police procedurals, I can't even remember the name of her chief police protagonist---wait, Adam Dagliesh? or is that P. D. James? Another British author with a dyspeptic view of the human condition.

I think that I like Miss Rendell's Barbara Vine novels the best. The psychological messes that her characters manage to tangle themselves into are compelling to me. But I don't think that Miss Rendell has written many of them lately. Or I haven't come across them.

Miss Rendell has a deep appreciation of and amusement with the hypocrisies of human nature. There are no "good" characters and there are no "bad" characters. The "good" character or sister in this tale is self absorbed (she thinks that her sister murdered their stepfather who sexually abused her because of her, she never even considers her younger sister's sexual peril). The "good" sister has never turned in her sister for the stepfather's murder because blood is thicker than water, although the "good" sister has felt guilty about it. The "good" sister is also involved in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend and later fiancee. The "good" sister just loves abuse.

The "bad" sister is happily married and appears to have the most healthy life and marriage. The murder of her abusive stepfather has appeared to have freed her psychologically and emotionally. But you can never be sure with a Rendell character, they are most often seen through the eyes of another character and none of her characters see themselves or others too clearly.

The policeman in this story marries a woman who cares for older people out of the greed in her heart. She ingratiates herself into their lives and wills and then puts them out of their lives to relieve her own penury misery. She also blackmails the "good" sister with her "bad" sister's actions. The blackmail is not caught by the law or justice (in the sense of the Law of society), but she is sentenced to a married life with her retired policeman husband and her scope for bad action is severely limited. And the reader does not believe that that is a happy ending for her nor does she.

Miss Rendell's characters may not get their Lawfully Just deserts, but they do have to take the consequences of their actions, good or bad, well or ill intentioned. It is like learning the Mean Girl in high school has taken to cleaning the homes of the high earning, talented Freaks from high school whom she regulated to the Locker Room Sock Pile.

"C'est la vie," says Miss Rendell, "It goes to show that you never can tell." And those unexpected turns in life and crime are what makes Miss Rendell such a good read for me.