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.

Lazy Readings

I am still reading away, just a little too lazy to post about any of the books.

But now, back to the books that I have read.

1. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.	5
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,	10
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

From Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The story goes that Mr. Coleridge was writing the above poem in haze and daze of Opium induced delusion when some one knocked on the door and Mr. Coleridge gave up on the poem to entertain his guest---even Opium can't ruin the manners of a polite poet. When the guest left, Mr. Coleridge took a deep puff of the Magic Elixir, Opium, and tried to go back to his writing, but he had forgotten the rest of the poem. The moral of this story is that Opium and Manners don't mix.

Mr. Calvino, in his book, decided to continue Mr. Coleridge's poetry fragment by narrating a conversation between Marco Polo, famed Traveller, and the Kubla Khan, ruler of half the world, about the cities of the Khan's kingdom which was so vast that the Khan never visited most of them.

I like travel books even when they are about imaginary kingdoms and cities and this book is about the imaginary kingdom of the Khan.

Calvino---I wonder if Mr. Calvino was a Protestant? A Calvinist sort of Protestant?

2. Pierrepoint

Albert Pierrepoint was an English Hangman, back when Great Britain still had state executions, who hanged around 400 convicted criminals among them the staff of the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen. He was accounted to be very good at his job. But he outlived his executing and took up campaigning against state executions at the end of his life.

This just goes to show that one's Youth and Old Age are two very differently experienced  life periods for many people. One is not the same person that one used to be.

3. Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by David Roberts

How I love any Arctic or Antarctic exploration stories of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

This one is about an Australian Explorer named Douglas Mawson, who after exploring with Ernest Shackleton, mounted his own Exploration Expedition and saw much more of the Antarctic than he expected or wished to. He ended up dragging his own dog sled (the dogs had all been eaten) for thirty days, ALONE by himself, in the inhuman desolation of Antarctica, back to his base camp which was located on the Windiest Place in the World.

Meanwhile, back at his base camp, the telegraph operator went insane and either wouldn't sent anyone's telegrams or sent indecipherable telegraphic ravings to the outside world about his persecution and perilous escape from being murdered by the remaining crew of the expedition at the base camp. It was wild times in Antarctic Exploration, those Aussies know how to party.

4. The Dinner: A Novel by Herman Koch

This is a murder mystery where the reader only regrets at the end that all the obnoxious characters, and they are many, weren't murdered.

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.

The Stockholm Octavo

I enjoy Historical Fiction. Hilary Mantel is one of my favorite authors. Yes, I know that she does contemporary novels but most of them are dull except for Beyond Black which is wilder than any drug fueled book by William Burroughs and more confusing than any Reality Bending novel by Philip K. Dick. While I was reading Beyond Black, I had ten or more possible explanations for what was happening in that book and why it was happening. Anyone of them would have applied quite well at the End.

Miss Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety made the French Revolution my favorite revolution of the 18th, 19th, and 20th century. I like a revolution where the people are committed and the heads roll. Sure Stalin and Mao had the greater numbers of deaths, but they didn't have the Superior Wits to observe and comment on their deeds. The only testimony to their Superior Blood Lettings were just a bunch of scared sycophants or brain-washed used-to-be-someone-in-the-revolutions who were hopefully staring a Quick Death in the face to years in the Gulag or another night in Lubyanka. Stalin did have Trotsky, but the years in Mexico just amplified Trotsky's Envy for Power. Trotsky just knew that he could do it better than Stalin if he had the chance. I read The Russian Revolution. All the reflections on and accurate histories of Stalin's and Mao's Great Leaps in Mass Killings came long after the damage was done.

And Stalin and Mao had Years to do their Worst; Robespierre was a Splash in the Head Bucket or a Spurt from the Guillotine. "Kill Fast and Die Young" was his Motto. "Kill With Poetry" was Mao's Motto. "Just Kill'em" was Stalin's.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is the other contemporary novel of Miss Mantel's that I like. I have a half finished screenplay for it even though I don't own the rights or envision that I ever will.

I keep looking for another author who can write good Historical Fiction, because Miss Mantel is just not churning out her work fast enough for me. I gave The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmann a try.

The Stockholm Octavo had possibilities. It had a woman character of dubious past and delirious present who read the Tarot cards, just like the protagonist or witch or whatever she was in Beyond Black. And The Stockholm Octavo took place in Sweden in the early 1790's which is when the French Revolution of A Place of Greater Safety was gearing up for its Red Dawn.

I am not familiar with much Swedish history except for the ascension of Napoleon's Field Marshall Bernadotte to the Swedish throne in the early 19th century. I know that from watching Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in Désirée, another movie where I didn't understand most of the characters' motivations. On a Hollywood level, I understood why Miss Simmons develops a time warp mentality (like a Philip K. Dick novel) and seeks to constantly and endlessly re-live her first blush adolescent love affair with Marlon Brando. Michael Rennie is a Great Bore.

But on a Historical level, I just don't get it. Désirée was a Great Bore, but she had two men of some ability in love with her. I can only assume that neither Napoleon or King Whoever of Sweden cared much for intelligence or discernment in a woman. And neither one of them cared much for food either, so the way to a man's heart is not through his brain or his stomach, it is through his penis. Robespierre was so much better than either of them.

My unfamiliarity with Swedish history made The Stockholm Octavo more suspenseful. I had no idea how the assassination of the Swedish King would go. Would the King Go? Or would the traitors go to the gallows or jail?

I have read a few Tarot cards, and I found the cards and the readings that drive the action in the book incomprehensible and boring. The main male character, a man about town, and the lady card reader's endless discussions of their card readings improved my reading speed greatly. I leaped over them.

Most of the characters in the book were just extraneous. I know that they were butterflies in the chaos of the assassination, beating their little butterfly wings and changing the great things (there was even a butterfly fan in the mix that beat the winds of change into the faces of the characters---have I gone too far with that image?) and showing up in the card readings, but where are the Dickens of Today?

Incidentally there was a lot of snow in this novel. Or the Balzacs? Why couldn't I just enjoy the characters and then later in the novel find out that the street sweeper is a very important character despite his poverty and lack of intelligence (Little Dorrit)? Why did I have to be told and re-told that some fairly interesting or mostly dull character was Important! IMPORTANT! Pay Attention!

The book was adequate, but no Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.