Tag Archives: chaos

Democracy is not for the People, by Josef Kaplan @thethepoetryblog

Posted on November 1, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Are Michael Bay’s Transformers movies and the trend of using drones for assassination part of the same moral sickness?

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CCLaP Fridays: On Being Human: The Trilogy, by Samuel Beckett

Posted on October 19, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This week in the CCLaP series “On Being Human,” I analyse Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking “Trilogy,” where the famed avant-garde writer sought the essence of what it is to be human by stripping away the setting, plot, and characters of three small novels in a row.

After you’ve read the essay, check out this broadcast featuring Harold Pinter reading the final pages of the Unnamable.

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Translation Tuesdays: Firefly, by Severo Sarduy

Posted on October 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

A series dedicated to literature in translation whether classic or contemporary.

Originally published in 1990 as Cocuyo
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
Archipelago Books (Available March 2013)

Lauded by French semiotician Roland Barthes as a creator of a “paradisiac text,” a “teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure,” Severo Sarduy recreates a pre-Castro Cuba in his late novel Firefly.  Unfortunately, Barthes premature death in 1980 prevented him from reading Sarduy’s slim novel.  (He did however praise Sarduy’s earlier novel Cobra in the seminal work, The Pleasure of the Text.)  Linguistic pleasures abound in Firefly, about the misadventures of a child named Firefly whose giant head and poor sense of direction get him in all sorts of trouble.

Sarduy creates a kind of decadent picaresque, painting a Cuba immersed in occultism, decay, and danger.  We meet Firefly’s aunts “all in shining silk” and wearing “crocodile-leather high heels with red platforms and over their shoulders see-through handbags like round canteens for a thirsty outing.”  After faking his death from rat poison, Firefly ends up in a hospital where he gets examined by two doctors, Gator and Isidro.  Gator, “lean and olive-skinned”, wears a pinstriped suit, rimless glasses, and “a silk tie decorated with four-leaf clovers.”  But his footwear is most disturbing, since “His shoes are made of his own skin.”  His rotund counterpart, Isidro, teaches anatomy, and “owns a mouse-infested grotto” that functions as a makeshift medical school, where students gather to learn “his Frenchified skills in the pestilent art of dissection.”

Once freed of the machinations of the two doctors, he goes to live with Munificence, sleeping on a couch below an office used by notaries and situated next to a charity school.  Sarduy creates an atmosphere of decay and corruption as Firefly becomes employed as a gofer for the notaries and falls in love with Ada, a beautiful redhead student at the charity school.  Unlike the decadent works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sarduy leavens the atmosphere with color and energy.  As Firefly matures, he desires escape from the claustrophobic atmosphere.

The setting is asynchronous, existing in a hallucinatory past, with slave markets, mysterious cults, and Soviet advisors.  A dream logic persists throughout, with patterns repeating themselves, or reconstituting into different identities.  The novel is filled with mismatched pairs, usually one thin and one fat, whether it is Gator and Isidro, along with the two ladies who seduce him.

Along with Reinaldo Arenas (1943 – 1990), Sarduy belongs to the Gay Cuban literary heritage.  Both were expatriates, although Sarduy left in 1960, shortly after Castro dictatorship overthrew the Batista dictatorship.  Firefly is a meditation on exile, a sensual love letter to a Cuba of a childhood imagination, its exuberance and wit poking holes into the gummy haze of nostalgia.  Sarduy misses the Cuba he had to flee, but the hothouse corruption and rot, as evidenced in the notaries, the quack doctors, and the legacy of the nation’s slave trade, remind one that nostalgia can inform as much as delude the writer and reader.  Prior to Castro, Cuba was every bit as hellish for the poor and blacks as after.  Sarduy meditates on the knot of Catholicism, race, and slavery:

The catechumens always returned to their venerable orishas, hidden on the top shelf of their armoires – the inheritance, along with the cinnamon skin and thick lips, of some maroon ancestor if not of a great-grandfather who, being from Africa itself, was respected in the neighborhood as a man black by birth. [Emphasis in original.]

Written in 1990, Firefly can be seen as a parody of the novels of the Latin American Boom and a harbinger of things to come (Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marías).  The novel’s tone and structure have it swinging between a kind of magical realism (the opening chapter involving the hurricane) and long-form dream sequences (the chapter with Firefly in The Pavilion of the Pure Orchid, a Lynchian nightmare in cloying tropical heat).  Sarduy’s verbal richness sets it against the now-standard Magical Realist novels (One Hundred Years of Solitude, etc.) and Bolaño’s tricksy epics like The Savage Detectives and 2666, works exploring the post-NAFTA socioeconomic situation through a combination of flat journalistic prose and gut-wrenching horror and violence.  Sarduy’s pre-Castro Cuba is far from idealized, but he deftly avoids devolving into simplistic agitprop.

An overly nostalgic interpretation of the past can be crippling in its construction of false idols, assuming one doesn’t take Faulkner at his word when he said, “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”*  The carnival of grotesques, the decadent corruption, and the dreamlike atmosphere dissolve into a mélange of beauty, cruelty, and comedy.  Sarduy is unencumbered by chronological exactitude and the evangelizing obsession to assert that the past was better.

Firefly and Severo Sarduy are worth the time, especially given Mark Fried’s luminous and playful translation.  Sarduy is a master stylist, his writing radiating the refined sensuality of Jean Genet, the formalist experimentalism of James Joyce, and the verbal richness of Joris-Karl Huysmans.  A gorgeous and decadent seam of literature is revealed in the pages of Firefly, offering yet another aspect of Latin American literature.

*Requiem for a Nun (1950)

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Critical Appraisals: A Spy in the Ruins, by Christopher Bernard

Posted on October 2, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Described by Anna Sears as “A Bildungsroman hallucinogenic in its intensity,” A Spy in the Ruins by Christopher Bernard constructs a postapocalyptic anti-narrative replete with verbal richness, political aggression, and erotic tenderness.  The back cover blurb by Jack Foley asserts Spy “is a book not for the faint of criticism.”  A book this intense, word-drunk, and ferocious demands a proper dissection and investigation.

Spy is an idiosyncratic book about the Sixties and the moral consequences.  At the same time, it encompasses much more in formal experimentalism and in vicious verbal assaults.  The only other fiction where one encounters lacerating indictments “our vexed, complicated, technomiserable situation” (again, Jack Foley) are in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Alexander Theroux, and Thomas Bernhard.  Despite the formalistic challenges presented in the text, an almost physical immediacy haunts the text.

While the current trend in literary circles is to bow before the Cult of the Sentence, crafting polished gems befitting the pages of the New Yorker, Bernard rips apart and defiles the sentence.  It takes a while to adjust to the flow of the novel.  Bernard creates scenes with run-on unpunctuated sentences followed by.  Brief.  Breaks.  In the text.  This is off-putting at first, but eventually this becomes a means to instill a specific tone for the novel.  With the breaks and the run-ons, Bernard’s style balances between that of a prose poem and an epigram.

The plot of the novel follows the life story of “the solitary one,” an unnamed (for the most part) male whose formative experiences include some political activism in the Sixties.  Divided into ten chapters with an overarching framing device, Spy follows the Solitary One from birth to death.  Besides the narrative style, the first half of the novel is notable for its insistent vagueness.  There are discrete scenes and characters, but lacking in proper names and location.  It creates a mythic, dream-like quality, apropos since Foley (again) compares Spy to Finnegans Wake.  (In his blurb, Foley likens Spy to both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, a comparison the novel almost achieves.)

The only time the novel really fails to deliver is in passages obviously set in the Sixties but seemingly clouded in a willful vagueness.  The Kennedy assassination is described as a leader killed in a Southern city.  It is only when the accretion of historical facts lean against the mythic edifice of the novel that things begin to strain.

The Solitary One endures a brutal upbringing, only leavened by his nascent sexual experiences with a female schoolmate.  But his upbringing drain these erotic scenes of their joy and later corrode and curdle in his later relationships.  The last sections involve him enduring a one-way conversation with his former lover.  The scene possesses a vicious mood with the Solitary One desperately wanting to answer, but prevented by his deteriorating health.

Prior to that, Spy has chapters increasing in specificity.  A screenplay has a Him and Her where we see a relationship fracture amidst the earnest political discussions one witnesses in bright-eyed college students.  The ninth chapter begins as an espionage novel and ends as a Therouvian indictment of modern culture’s shallowness and rot.  Characters get specific names, but we are unsure whether this is a realistic depiction or whether the hospitalized Solitary One is making this up in his head, retconning the past to make his mistakes more palatable.  The chapter is less Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy than Malone Dies.

Bernard marries the formal experimentalism of James Joyce with the unflinching emotional brutality of Samuel Beckett.  Written in 2005, A Spy in the Ruins has a bold experimentalism welded to a strident and intelligent point of view.  It stands toe-to-toe with Infinite Jest, Angels in America, and The Savage Detectives as an epic that has a lot to say and does so in a new invigorating way.

 

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80sSFF: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Apocalypse Now Redux (2001)

Posted on November 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

The first part in a series dedicated to examining the science fiction and fantasy films from 1979 to 1989.  The series will investigate whether these films possess certain ineffable qualities missing from today’s films of the same genres.

Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

Why are we beginning a series devoted to the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s with Apocalypse Now?  Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film holds the key to unlocking what made Eighties science fiction and fantasy films so great.  It’s an unlikely beginning, especially since John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, was released the previous year.

Apocalypse Now, while still a War Movie, has several characteristics that make it closer akin to the Fantasy genre.  There is a Knight on a Quest in search of a Mythical Object guarded by a Monster.  In the film, the Knight is Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), accompanied by the crew of a small patrol boat.  They travel up the Nung River in search of Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, at once the Object and the Monster.  In addition, Apocalypse Now is a visionary film.  To be a visionary, one has to look at the same thing but in an entirely different way.  While the War Movie has a long and storied history, Coppola created a unique cinematic experience, cobbled together from a script by the conservative scriptwriter John Milius and narration written by war journalist Michael Herr.  What resulted was a depiction of the Vietnam War as a hallucinatory carnivalesque nightmare.  The effects of the Vietnam War on the domestic side would not be covered with this extended unflinching hallucinatory nightmare until Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

At the time of its release, the closest antecedent to Apocalypse Now was Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), itself an extended indictment of the ravages and excesses of industrial capitalism.  In terms of science fiction and fantasy film, Apocalypse Now’s title is telling.  Unlike, say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or The Dark Crystal, which are both post-apocalyptic films, the apocalypse is now.  The soldiers in the film seem morally adrift and numbed to the world, only attuned to finding sex or the next drug fix.  Chef reads a newspaper article about the Charles Manson murders, the murders mirroring the actual atrocities of My Lai.  Surrounded by madmen, murderers, and mayhem, the world seems at an end.  The apocalyptic setting and the horrific montages make the film much more than a faithful transcription of a Southeast Asian conflict.

The End is the Beginning is the End

Apocalypse Now came at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s unrivalled critical and commercial success.  The film also represents the terminus of the American New Wave, Coppola belonging to a membership that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.  Coppola’s success began in 1972 with The Godfather and continued with The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the Conversation (1974).  Marlon Brando gives a landmark performance as Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, his presence a potent admixture of military and intellectual genius, Nietzschean amorality, smoldering sexuality, and tribal godhood.

The release of the film came during a revolution in the world of cinema.  Gone were the days of the freewheeling director and hands-off producers.  Apocalypse Now came two years after Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), a film that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster, and the Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner).  While not a cinematic flop, the film’s cost overruns and numerous other issues would make produces much more reluctant to give a visionary like Coppola massive budgets and little creative oversight.  The Eighties would see the rise of empty spectacle, family-friendly pap, and marketing juggernauts.  Apocalypse Now is a self-contained epic, not a node in a massively orchestrated marketing and merchandising operation.

Apocalypse Now vs. Apocalypse Now Redux: a Defense for Both

In criticism, especially film criticism, an overarching trend exists where “the director’s cut” has more credence than a film released by the studio system.  The phenomenon exists because of the Auteur Theory championed in academic circles and the larger trend of the search for Authenticity™.  When discussing Apocalypse Now, fans, critics, and audience members become divisive regarding which version is better.  Many see the original Apocalypse Now as the better film and Redux as a travesty.  (Thankfully, Coppola’s film was about the Vietnam War and not a Jedi insurgency, thus giving the world a Director’s Cut without CGI dewbacks and Greedo shooting first.)

My opinion splits the difference.  I enjoy both, but both versions are radically different films.  Even at nearly three hours, the original Apocalypse Now possesses an insistent pacing and momentum.  It is the more economical, pared-down film.

I enjoy Redux because it delves deeper into this nightmarish world.  Characters are expanded, entire set pieces are added, and Captain Willard comes across as a different person.

The issue of pacing becomes more pronounced with Redux.  Even the original is lacking in traditional battle scenes.  After Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) aerial assault on the Vietnamese village, the only military “action” are isolated skirmishes and the Do Long Bridge stalemate (less a battle than a siege).

The majority of the film is Captain Willard reading the Kurtz’s dossier.  The normal narrative trajectory of a war film is the reverse: skirmishes leading up to a climactic battle.  The film operates under a series of anti-climaxes.  In the end, Willard finally reaches the Kurtz Compound to realize the Colonel is not there.  When he does return, there are several conversations and finally Willard taking down Kurtz at the very end of the film.

Redux includes two extended scenes which were cut from the original: the crew meeting the Bunnies and the French Plantation Scene.  In the latter, Willard tells Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément) that he doesn’t intend to return to the United States following his mission.  It’s a major difference and the film narrative becomes altered, since this throws into question why he should continue his mission?

The longueurs and anti-climaxes heighten the viewer’s sensitivities.  The waiting, the meditation, and the visuals combine to create a cinematic experience both hypnotic and excessive.  The artificiality of Carmine Coppola’s score plays off against the claustrophobic and ruthless nature of the Cambodian rainforests.  The score becomes integrated into a whole by the editing, cinematography, and sound design.

The film is a non-traditional candidate for a science fiction or fantasy film, but it excels in its fantastic visuals and the meticulous worldbuilding.  Standing at the crossroads of the American New Wave and Eighties Action Spectacle, Apocalypse Now prepares the way for films set after apocalypses (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Dark Crystal), those indicting the inhumanity of bureaucracy (Brazil), and the organized madness of modern existence (They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Bladerunner).

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Hav by Jan Morris

Posted on October 2, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Hav by the Welsh travel writer Jan Morris is a very Borgesian work, bringing to mind the Argentinean writer’s love for mirrors and labyrinths.  There is even a character named Dr. Borge and Hav’s major cultural motif is the labyrinth.  Morris achieves distinction in creating a place that goes beyond being a second-rate pastiche of Borges themes.  Unfortunately, the field of science fiction is riddled with examples of good ideas soured when executed.  Poor execution usually involves sloppy writing where the author received payment by the word.

New York Review Books has released a stellar volume with Jan Morris’s Hav.  The book compiles her two works of science fiction, Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2006).  The volume also includes an introduction by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and an epilogue by the author.  In the introduction Le Guin notes how readers began booking trips to Hav, not knowing it was fiction.  After reading Morris’s Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone, one can understand the reader’s oversight of Hav’s non-existence.  Her travel essays for Rolling Stone, written in the 1970s, envelop the reader with a keenly constructed sense of place, quirky characters, and a narrative drive, though not necessarily plot-based.  This non-fiction writing is reflected in her fiction, creating a plausible locale.  Hav, a tiny Mediterranean peninsula off of Anatolia, possesses a culture frozen in amber, isolated from the world at large, but also an amalgamation of Eastern and Western cultures reflective of the wars, conquests, and commerce that passed through the area.

Last Letters sees Hav as a sleepy community with an outdated bureaucracy, an ambiguous British colonial political presence, and a multicultural kaleidoscope.  On the Escarpment reside the primitive Kretevs.  Arabs, Greeks, and Chinese reside in their own ethnic enclaves.  Hav has the westernmost settlement of Chinese, owing to the proximity of the Silk Road.  The Venetian and Russian empires made their marks in art and architecture.  A muezzin cries along with Missakian’s trumpet call, a remnant of the Crusader’s retreat.  The back cover summary describes Hav as having “chaotic and contradictory splendor.”

One should note that this is not alternate history.  Hav’s fate follows the ebb and tide of history, albeit from the perspective of a geographic asterisk.  A humorous passage in Last Letters involves the local intellectual circle hating Ferdinand Braudel because he never mentioned Hav in his monumental survey The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.  Le Guin states in the introduction,

Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognizable type and superb quality.  The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history.

Morris’s writing is what makes Hav such a treasure to read.  Described as a “romantic traditionalist Welsh author,” she approaches travel at a different speed and pitch than Anthony Bourdain.  Morris’s character of Jan Morris is indistinguishable from her presence in her non-fiction travel essays.  She seems like a nice middle-aged lady who, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees the best in people and has the bad habit of asking awkward questions to stage-managed power brokers.  Not conservative in the vulgar faux populist mutation common to the United States, but one whose conservatism cherishes the artifacts and lessons of the past and seeks to preserve them for future generations.

Morris’s “traditionalist” leaning comes to the fore in the sequel, Hav of the Myrmidons.  Morris returns to Hav twenty years later to find a series of unsettling changes.  Following the Intervention, Hav is now a theocracy run by the Cathars, a Christian heresy long thought extinct.  The Holy Myrmidonic Republic of Hav exists both as a Catharist theocracy and as an emerging capitalist power.  A new airport, highway, and resort hotel – the Lanzaretto! tower – have been carved out of the rubble.  One thinks of Dubai and China’s emergent industrial hubs, whereas Old Hav bespoke of Danzig or Trieste, political “free cities” with their own syncretic cultures.

A chilling episode occurs when Jan is invited to a meeting at the ominously named Office of Ideology.  She meets Hav’s political deputies.  “They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa.”  Nothing is more stultifying and possibly unintentionally comical than the long-winded prattling of a totalitarian state’s cog, all ideological purity and true believer crazy eyes.  In Destinations (1980), she summarized the ideology of apartheid as “the intricate political device – part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick – by which the white race maintains its supremacy over the blacks.”  With its omnipresent icon of Achilles’s helmet, Hav expresses that same combination.  The Greek community on San Spiridon, an outlying island, has become reborn, albeit with a troubling fanaticism.

This new iteration of Hav reflects the Post-911 world in its admixture of aggressive free market capitalism and political authoritarianism.  One need only look at China (and the countless Chinese products we all buy without a second thought) or the political autarkies of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin.  The United States has catered to the whims of dictators, so long as the bananas were cheap and the despot made the appropriate anti-communist slogans.  Morris reverses Marx’s quote by showing the old Hav as a farce and New Hav as tragedy.  Hav is on the make, aspiring to rekindle its Venetian or Arabic drive to link itself again to a global marketplace.  Morris wonders at the human and cultural costs of those aspirations.  Is the material gain accrued from integrating with globalization really worth it, especially if all one caters to are incurious tourists blathering on about a place’s safety and comfort?  Travel without risk, at least the risk of random discovery, is a pointless endeavor.  Reading Hav is not.

 

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The Evil Garden (1965) by Edward Gorey

Posted on March 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Victorian stock characters get attacked by carnivorous plants and animals. The drawings have a simplicity matched by the rhyming couplets that explain the terrors illustrated for our enjoyment. The poetry conjures up nursery rhymes and like nursery rhymes, they veil the fangs and claws of Nature. Gorey’s slim volume is reminscent of the playful chaos of “Alice in Wonderland” and has a curdled humor like Max Cannon’s “Red Meat.”

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Critic’s Notebook: Unpopular Causes, Part III

Posted on June 17, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Reappropriation: Camp, Kitsch, and Sincerity

“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition.  The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything outlandish.” – “Notes on Camp” [1965], Susan Sontag

“Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was kitsch. However, unlike the not-quite-weird-enough musical stylings of ABBA, say, or the Village People, Liberace-style kitsch is so weird, so outré, that hipsters find it impossible to appropriate as cheese. Liberace didn’t make his work inappropriable on purpose; others, however, have. The director John Waters, for example, described his (excellent) early films, which lovingly celebrate kitsch in an extreme, even terrifying way, as “trash.” He did so in order to prevent hipsters from fake-appreciating his work — as they’ve done with, e.g., the films of Ed Wood. Deploying the term “trash” was a brilliant anti-ironic maneuver on the part of a master ironist.” – “Kitsch, Camp, and Cheese,” Hilowbrow.com [June 5, 2010], Joshua Glenn

Beneath every hipster opinion is a root of contempt.  For the popular, for the mainstream, the straw men are various and sundry.  A similar position of championing the unpopular involves camp and kitsch.  Unlike the fake-appreciation of hipsters for Pabst Blue Ribbon and the accoutrements of working class garb, fans of camp and kitsch embrace certain cultural products with a passionate sincerity.  Camp and kitsch, while similar, are not the same, although the popular press and consumers often confuse the two.

Camp reappropriates culturally disreputable works in a kind of counterintuitive appreciation.  A work that is generally abhorrent and awful (example: Zak Snyder’s 300) can be repurposed.  As a standard action film, 300 represents the nadir of the genre.  But what if one watches it as a comedy?  The Heavy Metal Librarian asserts:

I predict that, in ten years, 300 will have the same type of following that Rocky Horror Picture Show has today: ie, it will be aired after midnight at theaters in college towns all over the country, attended by audiences of gay men and people dressed up in costumes from the movie, who will recite the dialogue word for word, throw popcorn at the screen, and laugh uproariously at parts that are supposed to be deadly serious. After all, the only real difference between the two movies is that the latter is intentionally campy. (from the post, “Wank the Spartans”, Heavy Metal Librarian, September 14, 2009)

300 is unintentionally campy and pretty hilarious when read that way.  Sontag differentiates the Camp from the bad by the outlandishness of its execution. 300 fits the bill.  The Heavy Metal Librarian catalogues 300’s outlandishness:

300 is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

I was reminded of the film’s brilliance when it made its television debut this past weekend. Seriously, it’s perfect. What other movie gives you:

  • Howlingly bad dialogue (“because freedom isn’t free” sounds like something from George Bush’s wet dream)
  • Rampant homoeroticism (buff, chiseled, shaven-chested Greeks prancing around in underwear and capes) in an allegedly tough-guy war movie
  • An enemy, the Persians, who manage to simultaneously look like a cross between an al-Qaeda training video and a Gay Pride parade from Mordor
  • Said enemy led by Xerxes, a ten foot tall Rupaul clone obsessed with making people kneel in front of him

The undeniably homoerotic element in the movie is its most amusing aspect. After all, there exists a high correlation between people who think that Islamofascists are hiding under their beds and those who believe that Teh Homosexual Agenda is attempting to subvert their children. The fact that this crowd loved 300 constitutes further scientific proof of the Foley/Haggard Theorem (“The Degree of one’s Homophobia is Directly Proportional to the Depth of one’s Closet.”)

The same reading could possibly be made for John Wayne’s performance in The Green Berets, but most definitely for his turn as Genghis Khan.

Kitsch is a much harder beast to cage, since it is typified by terrible artistic production.  Embracing Art Nouveau lamps and Busby Berkeley musicals can be Camp.  Embracing Keane paintings and the Left Behind series is kitschy.  Unless one sincerely believes the idiosyncratic Bible interpretation of the Left Behind series, it is a challenging work to champion, let alone read, on any level.  Where Camp succeeds in surely executed outlandishness, Kitsch fails because of shoddy craftsmanship.

Camp

Kitsch

This brings us to a reckoning point: Sincerity.  (The weasel word “authentic” will be avoided, mainly because of the associations with fake-authentic cultural products.)  Can one appreciate a disreputable genre or film or book with sincerity without falling into the traps of Kitsch and Camp?

Up next, Nathan Rabin!

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Mechanicum (The Horus Heresy, Book 9) by Graham McNeill

Posted on April 24, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The Horus Heresy series continues in Graham McNeill’s epic Mechanicum.  Graham McNeill is one of the Black Library’s “dream team” writers.  The other members of the trio include the hyper-prolific Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.  The trio wrote the first three novels of the Horus Heresy series.

The first three novels functioned like a self-contained trilogy, chronicling the Warmaster Horus and his descent into heresy and madness.  James Swallow’s Flight of the Eisenstein (Book 4) was a taut thriller with crisp writing and wonderfully orchestrated space battles.  Since then, the Horus Heresy has had its ups (Legion by Dan Abnett) and downs (Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon).  This reviewer happily reports that Mechanicum brings the series back up to fighting trim.

In the novel, the readers encounter the adepts and forge masters of Mars.  Centuries ago, the Emperor and the Fabricator-General created a union between Terra and Mars.  The Mechanicum is one of the pillars of the Imperium of Man.  The novels functions as an institutional history, similar to earlier volumes that chronicled the origins of a specific Space Marine legion.  Only Graham McNeill could pen a compelling narrative based on supply chain logistics and portraits of the mechanically modified denizens of Mars that humanize them.

The novel includes many competing plots (and competing plotters).  Adept Koriel Zeth wants to build the Akashic Reader, a device capable of giving someone unlimited knowledge.  Fabricator-Generator Kelbor-Hal wants to open the Moravec caverns, sealed by the Emperor’s command.  Finally, Dalia Cythera, a lowly transcriber drafted by Adept Zeth to construct the Akashic Reader, deals with her visions of a dragon and a secret long buried in legend and deception.  During this historical period of the Imperium, there is no single interpretation of the Omnissiah, the so-called Machine-God worshipped by the Mechanicum.  To use more familiar figures, Adept Zeth, a champion of scientific exploration and eternal skeptic, could be seen as Dr. Richard Dawkins.  She does not believe that the Machine-God actually exists.  Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal, a cold-blooded figure of monumental avarice and ambition, could be seen as Reverend Pat Robertson.  Kelbor-Hal, a servant of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, will use every means at his disposal, including unleashing the demonic forces sealed away by the Emperor.  And like Pat Robertson, he is not moved by the death of millions, but only uses it as a means to acquire more power in the name of the Machine-God.

While these machinations and theological debates occur, the Mechanicum suffers catastrophe after catastrophe.  The atrocities lead to the inevitable split, with those loyal to the Emperor arrayed against those loyal to the Warmaster.  The novel also includes great battle scenes with rival Titans, Reavers, and Knights fighting each other.

The novel is a wonderful continuation of the Horus Heresy, bringing a mix of space battles, ideological debates, and gothic imagery.

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Battle for the Abyss (The Horus Heresy, Book 8) by Ben Counter

Posted on November 2, 2009 by | 1 Comment

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Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter begins with the construction of the gigantic battleship, the Furious Abyss, within the hollow center of Thule, a moon of Saturn.  The Mechanicum construct the ship using the ancient technologies they preserve.  Unbeknownst to the Emperor, the Mechanicum build the massive warship for the Word Bearer Traitor Legion.  Those familiar with the Cylon basestars of Battlestar Galactica will recognize the Furious Abyss.  Heavily armed and holding a contingent of fighters, the Furious Abyss is an intimidating force.  Unlike the sleek basestars, the Furious Abyss resembles a giant battlestar with Chartres Cathedral sitting on top.

In the novel, we meet several Space Marine legions, each with their own specialty and genetic modification.  The aforementioned Word Bearers are a Traitor Legion combining martial skill with a fanatical adherence to the Word of Lorgar, their Primarch.  In the unfolding galaxy-spanning civil war, the Word Bearers resemble Oliver Cromwell at his most theocratic, fanatic, and tyrannical.

Members of the five legions meet up on Vangelis to resupply their ships.  Everything proceeds apace, with the Space Marines prepping themselves for their future engagement, to must at Calth “in preparation to launch a strike on an ork invasion force besieging the worlds of the neighboring Veridan.”

Following a psychic attack on Vangelis, Cestus, Brother-captain and fleet commander of the Ultramarines 7th Company, discovers that the Wrathful Abyss will strike the Ultramarines homeworld of Ultramar.  Cestus commandeers the Wrathful, a ship of the legendary Saturnine Fleet.  The Fleet has a history that predates the Empire of Man.  Members from three other Space Marine Legions accompany Cestus.  Skraal, Brother-captain of the World Eaters Legion, fights with a psychotic ferocity that frightens the other Space Marines.  Brynngar, Captain of the Space Wolves Legion, with his lupine incisors and penchant for drinking, has serious misgivings about Mhotep, Brother-sergeant of the Thousand Sons.  Mhotep raises Brynngar’s ire because the Thousand Sons, shunned at the Council of Nikea because of their psychic abilities, embody an irrational, unknown force.  At this stage of Imperial history, people possessing psychic powers still pose a threat to the Emperor’s embrace of rationalism and reason.  The Word Bearers broke their oath with the Imperium because their fanaticism and superstition met with censure from the Emperor.

When the Furious Abyss destroys the Waning Moon, the loyalist Space Marines have to make the decision to wage war on their battle brothers.  The prophecy given to the Alpha Legion (in the previous book, Dan Abnett’s Legion), about the Imperial Civil War has come to pass.  The loyalist Space Marines have their loyalties tested.

Battle for the Abyss provides plenty of action, including ship-to-ship battles.  Ben Counter, author of the Soul Drinker’s Omnibus, fills the pages with adventure, excitement, and gore.

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