Living that Expat Life--Panama

Books 20 and 21 of 2018

Have for a few years intended to read Le Carre. Call for the Dead has one of those immediately appealing English narrators who pull you up to the fire side and regale you with a finely spun tale. You know the sort of narrator of which I speak. And Smiley is an appealing bumbling sort of wise detective--I'd expected more of a spy/intrigue novel, but this is actually a murder mystery with some espionage overtones.

It's a good time to re-visit this Cold War era, what with a new Cold War in the wings, or perhaps the surprising new end of the Cold War after everyone thought it had already ended? We shall see. But this world of George Smiley and East and West and Iron Curtains and jockeying between Capitalists and Communists is the era in which I grew up, and how odd it is that it feels so distant now.

I found the novel appealing enough to continue with the series of George Smiley books. I like the portrait of England and English class structure after the War as its empire is dismantled and handed over to the Americans. There is the standard upper-crust snobbery and casual homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that of course was a feature of the age, and these features of English society are lampooned by LeCarre as much as recorded by him.

  

This installment is much less engaging than the first. This is more a Gothic mystery/horror tale with a gruesome murder at a decaying prestigious private school. The best bits are a sort of Evelyn Waugh-ish character whose disgust at the English class system and descriptions of its fraudulent institutions is rather amusing. But the plot is awkward and clunky, the characters are types who turn out in the end to not be what they seem a la virtually every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and as Le Carre describes the book in its introduction, there are some good instances of satire but overall it's a failed mystery thriller. I'd agree. But I shall continue with the series despite this disappointment. The end is particularly bad, as all the clues which have pointed one way suddenly are forced to point another and there is a quick arrest and then it just ends.

Book 19 of 2018

The Night Ocean: A Novel

When we were living in Baltimore and going to karaoke with a group of regulars a new guy joined us often. He was one of these young 30-ish guys who sport a carefully manicured beard, and who have a beard maintenance kit always to hand with a comb and some lotion to comb into the beard when too much beer or gin and tonic has frothed it up. He also had an aggressively maintained mustachio which curved elvishly up into spirals at each end of his upper lip. He couldn’t sing a lick, but was an enthusiastic singer nonetheless. In between singing, we drank and talked about shit. It’s what one does with karaoke buddies.

One night he pronounced Cthulhu incorrectly while discussing a meme, and I pointed it out and corrected his pronunciation, and he responded “I play Dungeons and Dragons, I think I know how to correctly say Cthulhu.” After I got over my initial shock that D & D had become a thing again (hipsters—is there nothing they won’t mine from the past and resuscitate with gusto?), I took up the challenge.

“Have you read Lovecraft?” I responded. He replied in the negative. “Well it’s interesting that you would know how to pronounce Cthulhu when you’ve never read Lovecraft. I have read EVERYTHING, and own the Arkham House four-volume Collected Works in hardback. My Honors English high school literature paper was a Jungian analysis of Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and I was turned on to L. Sprague de Camp’s bio of HPL by my English teacher that year. I have perused many of his letters and have even endured his Vogon-quality poetry about mushrooms from Yuggoth. I read S.T. Joshi’s biography, Stephen King’s musings on HPL in Danse Macabre, and even read Michel Houellebecq’s acid little philosophical tome about Lovecraft’s worldview in the original French. I have a blog whose title is a Lovecraft pun. In many texts both scholarly and otherwise I have read how Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu, so I’m pretty sure I know how to pronounce it, and I’m positive you do not.”

It’s a truism in life that know-it-alls are assholes. This guy was a know-it-all without any backup for his know-it-all-ism. I’m a know-it-all who brings out the heavy (and nerdy) artillery when needed.

When I was a teenager reading Lovecraft nobody in my circles knew who the fuck he was. Until Mrs. Hardin, my 12^th grade English teacher, I don’t think I met anyone who had even heard of him, let alone read him. And now Lovecraft permeates our culture. Every time I see the latest Hollywood schlock there are HPL references, subtle or not. TV shows like Stranger Things are Lovecraft light. All the comic book films owe substantial debts to HPL. Political memes with Cthulu, T-shirts, mugs, plush toys—he’s everywhere. People who have never read Lovecraft and who would need a dictionary to get through the first two pages of “The Outsider” or “The Music of Eric Zahn” know about Cthulhu.

Many writers have been obsessions in my lifetime. Some of those obsessions re-wired my brain and came to permeate my day-to-day life. Lovecraft was the first to really do that for me, even though I only read him for a few years and stopped reading him by the time I was no longer a teen. His stories are for the most part awful—even the best ones are at best dis-satisfying. Trying to go back and re-read them is pointless; I can never slog through more than a few pages. But there was something about that alternate reality, and that cold archaic worldview…and those entities beyond time and space! For a formative time of my life, he set a standard, and though he was quickly replaced by Dostoevski and then Henry James and then others...he was a key figure in my youth and remains vitally important to me.

The Night Ocean is about HPL specifically, but more generally about stories and writers permeating one’s existence, saturating one’s being. It is an extended nerdgasm, not just for weird fiction fans, but for sci-fi geeks, political wonks, fans of archaeology, for beats and hippies. It’s also a reminder about how far we’ve come as a society in terms of acceptance of alternate lifestyles and tendencies.

Let me just run through some of the characters: Isaac Asimov, William S. Burroughs, Robert Barlow, Frederick Pohl, Hart Crane, Roy Cohn, Whitaker Chambers, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo. Houellebecq is included but is thinly disguised.

This novel is a well-imagined forgery about well-imagined forgeries about a weird Luddite racist throwback whose peculiar imaginings have tentacled their way down through the last century and a half, and whose distasteful personal beliefs and philosophy can teach Americans a lot about ourselves to this day. The Night Ocean was not what I expected, but it was a hoot. I learned some things about Lovecraft i did not know!

And, gleefully, the correct pronunciation of Cthulhu is explained herein.

Books 15, 16, 17 and 18 of 2018

Brothers of the Gun is a harrowing first-hand account of the collapse of Syria into civil war. The story is centered on Raqqa. The narrator is a student of English Literature who sloughs off what he regards as a sort of backwoods religiosity in his upbringing, and who wants to experience the wider world. The Arab Spring brings hope, but this is quickly dashed by barrel bombs from the Assad regime, and then by warring factions, and finally by the arrival of ISIS.

Marwan Hisham at once recreates and critiques his Syrian culture and history with wit and sensitivity. He bemoans the cost of revolt and what was lost as a result, but not without humor and wisdom. The people he describes are hardscrabble survivors who are determined to build the best life they can in increasingly dire circumstances. I can't recommend it enough. Fantastic illustrations by Molly Crabapple from photos by the author lend further pathos to the text.




A colleague middle school teacher told me she was having her Lit students read Tripods: The White Mountains over the summer break. I'd never heard of the novel, which she claimed was her favorite childhood book in New Zealand.

Not sure how I missed it, but it was a great read--very exciting and sort of what the world might have been like had Wells' War of the Worlds ended in a loss for humanity. Great fun.

 


Manly P. Hall brings the wisdom of the Mystery Schools into the modern age. Want to incorporate Pythogrean principals into your busy late-phase capitalist existence? These short tomes are full of helpful tips.