Book #60 (Part 2) - Roman Lives (Plutarch)

I'm sitting here drinking my Plymouth Gin martini and trying to figure out how to start this latest blog post.  Usually I try to be witty and funny, and I let the alcohol wash over me like a wave of inspiration, sweeping me up into the vast ocean of wisdom to be found in the world's greatest literature.  Meh, but not tonight.  My martini is good, but somehow it's not quite the drink I thought I was craving.  And my reading of late has been slow going, just because the pressures of daily life have kept me away from the pages.  And finally, the mass shooting a few days ago in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina has made me sad and worried for this country.  WOOO, 'Merica!!  Ugh.  This country is so divided between right and left, common sense and respect for wisdom and knowledge have gone out the window, and the government seems so incapable of doing anything except for what's good for the rich and powerful.  Fuck!

I've been reading a few more of Plutarch's "Lives" lately.  It's interesting to compare what's happening today, versus the events and lives Plutarch tells us about from over 2000 years ago.  Back in Ancient Rome, man, now they knew how to get things done!  No sitting around in fancy cocktail bars drinking $12 cocktails made with artisan gin and pineapple gomme and hibiscus bitters, and moaning about how bad things are getting.  No, when those ancient Roman dudes got pissed off they took to the streets and got it DONE!  Take Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, for example.  What, you never heard of them?  The Gracchi brothers?  Well Plutarch, in his Life of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tells us about how these two dudes stirred it UP in the old Roman Republic.  You know, before the whole Republic thing fell apart and became a dictatorship...uh, I mean empire.  The Gracchi brothers lived in the mid-100s BC, and came from a wealthy and noble family.  They both served as tribunes, which means they were elected officials who served to protect the interests of the plebeians against the senate.  The Gracchi, in spite of their wealth, sided with the 99% against the wealthy landowners, and decided to push for agrarian land reform.  OK, that sounds pretty dull, but what it meant was that they were pissed off at the rich dudes who hogged up all the farm lands and wouldn't give the little guy a chance to do any farming.  So the Gracchi figured they should pass laws limiting the amount of land any one person could own, and thus take some of the land owned by the rich farmers who were just kicking back smoking weed while their slaves worked their asses off, and give it to the poor and homeless who just wanted a break, and maybe were veterans and all, and deserved a chance at a piece of the pie.  Go Gracchi!!  Occupy Rome!!  Of course, the rich dudes in the senate didn't like this at all, because they themselves owned a lot of farmland and didn't want it to get snatched up.  So the rich fought back against attempts by the Gracchi brothers to redistribute some wealth to the poor, and guess how that turned out.  Yep, the Gracchi were killed.  Tiberius was clubbed to death by his fellow senators, and Gaius killed himself years later after being cornered by an angry mob of political opponents.  Woohoo, violence solves everything!  Anyway, that was the beginning of violence seeping into the Roman political system, which became more and more ingrained as time went on, eventually undermining the Roman Republic.  So what can we learn from this?  We can learn Fight the Power!...and if we do we'll literally get beaten down and killed.  Woo.  I need another drink.

Ahh, feeling better now.  I'm drinking a rum and pineapple now, because rum remotely sounds like Rome.  That seemed like a pretty valid reason to me.  Meanwhile back in Ancient Rome:  after the Gracchi brothers, along came these dudes Marius and Sulla.  And yes, Plutarch wrote two of his Lives about them too.  Under their leadership, the violence in Rome's political system got worse.  A lot worse.  Gaius Marius was born in 157 B.C., Marius became a great Roman general, beating up on Germanic tribes and other foreigners, and served as consul for an unprecedented seven times.  Marius became a Roman hero, but in 88 B.C, another Roman consul, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, was put in charge of a Roman army to defeat an enemy of Rome, King Mithridates.  Marius did not like this, and tried to get the army for himself, and in response, Sulla took the army and turned it against Rome and Marius in an act of Civil War.  Marius was defeated and had to flee Rome.  Plutarch describes his flight, and it's pretty exciting, with lots of close calls and near escapes.  Finally Marius makes it to Africa, where he is safe, and Sulla takes his army and goes to fight Mithridates.  Sulla's absence allowed Marius to raise his own army and to march on Rome, retaking it for himself.  He and his soldiers sought a bloodthirsty vengeance, and killed a lot of his opponents upon his return to Rome.  Then he died in 86 B.C., of some kind of illness.

But the violence was not to end there.  In 83 B.C., Sulla once again marched on Rome, after having won the war against Mithridates.  After a huge battle, he seized control of the city.  Then the killing began in earnest.  Seems like Sulla was the Stalin of ancient Rome, instituting a series of purges where lists of "enemies of the state" were publicly posted, and bounties put upon their heads.  Sulla's enemies were killed, and then enemies of Sulla's friends, and then just rich people so that Sulla could seize their property and auction it off.  It was a bloodbath.  Plutarch's descriptions of the murders and executions are chilling.  Finally, two years later, Sulla surprisingly ended his dictatorship and returned Rome to its Republican rule.  He retired from public life and died a few years later of natural causes.  Nonetheless, his example of being a dictator was not lost on Julius Caesar, who took control of Rome a generation later and finally ended the Republic for good.

Reading Plutarch is surprisingly fun, for two reasons.  First, the dude is a natural born storyteller.  He's the kind of guy you'd want sit around the fire with on a cold winter evening, and hear him tell stories about the old days while sipping on another rum and pineapple.  But second, it's fascinating to hear these stories of people and times that are 2000 years gone, and yet still ring true today.  It's not hard to imagine how today's political debates and divides could break out into violence...and indeed, they sometimes do.  The Roman Republic fell, and launched an age of emperors, and that too eventually ended.  We sometimes take for granted that our own republic will always stand, but there's no guarantee.  Reading Plutarch makes one remember that nothing is permanent, and today's strife and struggles will one day be ancient history, and yet they may one day also be repeated in one form or another.  Hmm, so then I might as well have another rum and pineapple...

Book #61 - The Trial (Franz Kafka)

You know who fucking kicks ass?  Captain America, that's who!  I mean, first off, the dude has the word "America" right in his name!  America, fuck yeah!!  And then he's got this shield he throws.  I mean, how cool is that?  Usually dudes with shields use them to shield themselves....you know, as a defensive weapon.  But Captain America doesn't have time to wait around to defend himself.  Nope, he takes his goddamn shield and throws it at his enemies, doing them great bodily harm because NO ONE expects to have a shield thrown at them.  And why should Captain America need a defensive weapon when he can just throw his shield and hurt his enemies before his enemies get a chance to hurt him?  Yep, Captain America kicks ass.  

So why do I bring this up in a blog post about Franz Kafka's "The Trial"?  Am I simply tanked up on gin martinis and just ranting about the first thing that comes to my head?  Well, no.  I mean, yes.  Both, actually.  Because I am drinking a gin martini, made with Mayfair London Dry Gin.  I've never had this gin before...saw it at the store and took and chance on it and I'm glad I did because it is awesome!  It's got nice botanicals but it's not too crazy or heavy on the juniper.  It makes a refreshing martini and would be good in other mixed drinks as well because it's not overwhelmingly "ginny" (is that a word?).  But in regards to Captain America, no I'm not just ranting like a crazy man boozed out of his mind on this fine tasting gin.  Because I had a point, and my point is this:  In the totally excellent movie "Captain America: The Winter Soldier", the bad guys (led by Robert Redford, who surprisingly makes a chilling bad guy...who knew?) are ready to launch these huge drone ships that will hover above the Earth and kill with precision targeting anyone who is a threat to world peace...an no one can stop them because the ships are hovering above everyone and ready to be the judge/jury/executioner as determined by an algorithm that no one understands because it's too complicated.  And that reminded me of "The Trial", in which a man, Joseph K., is arrested and subjected to court proceedings and a trial in which the charges are never made clear.   In fact the only charge seems to be a sense of guilt, and poor Joseph K., who may or may not be guilty because we don't know what the charges are, is subjected to a Byzantine bureaucracy of secret courts and judges and lawyers, and we and he never really know what's going on.  Fuck.

OK, maybe the plot of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" is not the best analogy, so let me try another one.  A few years ago I was driving from San Francisco to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend a conference for work.  I decided to drive because I had a friend who was going to meet me in Las Vegas for a weekend, so we would party there for two days and then I would drive on to Santa Fe.  So I rented a car in San Francisco, drove to Vegas, had fun with my friend, and then left on Monday morning to drive to Santa Fe.  On Interstate 40, east of Flagstaff, Arizona, I was pulled over by a highway patrol officer for going a bit over the speed limit.  Oops.  I mean, it's flat, it's the desert, who cares if you speed a bit, right?  Well, he cared.  So he pulls me over and says "You were speeding and I'm just going to give you a warning...but do you mind if I search your car?"  So I say that's fine, since I only had one suitcase and a laptop bag, figuring he'd give just a quick look and knowing that I had nothing to hide.  The officer then proceeds to take every last goddamn thing out of my suitcase, all the while asking me questions like where am I from, and why am I driving a rental car, and how much is my rent (WTF?), and why do I seem nervous (um, because you're totally freaking me out?)?  After about 20 minutes of perusing my luggage he calls up another cop on the radio, who soon pulls up and gets out of his car.  The first officer goes over to him and I hear him say "Yeah, I get a bad vibe from this guy".  The newly arrived officer asks me more questions while the first officer keeps searching my car (at one point he bangs on the inside of the doors and asks me if these are "false panels".  I tell him politely how the fuck should I know, it's a goddamn rental car).  Finally the first officer comes back from searching my car and abruptly says "You can go".  It felt like I was on trial and presumed guilty and subjected to a legal proceeding beyond my control and in which I did not know the rules, which sounds like ''The Trial".  I mean, kind of, right?

This book is really surrealistic.  It's not just Joseph K.'s unexplained arrest and ongoing trial, it's everything that happens in the novel.  One day Joseph K. walks into a back room of the bank where he works to find two of the men who arrested him getting whipped.  Joseph meets an artist who knows the court system well, and helps him out.  An artist?  The artist is harassed by teenage girls living in his apartment building.  The courts are located in obscure, out-of-the-way areas of weird apartment buildings.  Joseph seems to have women throwing themselves at him hard, which seems unlikely.  The whole novel is like this - weird and dreamlike.  But in an ominous way.  Not scary, but ominous.  The novel is foreboding...all the odd things that happen, and the way they are described, lend to the feeling of being in a rather sickly universe, where people get crushed by the machinery of the society around them, but crushed in a slow, impersonal manner.

Anyway, The Trial doesn't end up well for Joseph K., but then the reader never really expects that it will.  The novel is actually unfinished...for some reason Kafka stopped writing it and put it aside, and then died of tuberculosis before getting back to it, if he ever would have.  Fortunately he wrote the ending, so the reader knows the ultimate outcome, but there are other places where there are obvious holes.  Plot threads are left dangling, and we don't know how he ended up in the situation at the end of the novel.  But whatever, the odd incompleteness I think adds to the surrealism and confusion of the novel, and thus actually helps it.  Not that Kafka needed help.  The world he paints in this novel is very, uh, Kafkaesque.  Wow, how does he get his own adjective and Captain America does not?  It's an outrage!  Anyway, it's a dark, grim, soul-crushing world he depicts, and as many have pointed out, foretells the emergence of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century.  It's an odd and strange book, but one whose message is prescient and more relevant than ever.  Which is why we really need Captain America these days!  Where the hell is he, anyways?

Suite Francaise (Irene Nemirovsky)

So it was the Christmas holidays and I was heading back to the Midwest to visit family, and I wanted to take a book along to read.  Hmm, what book to take?  So I looked at my shelves and pulled down "Suite Francaise", which I'd bought quite awhile ago but had never gotten around to reading.  Yeah, it's not on my list of 105 books that I really need to readand blog about before my impending death, but once again I threw caution to the wind and veered off the list.  I'd been wanting to read this book, and besides, what could be more appropriate for the holiday season than reading about Nazis?  That was a joke.  The Nazis sucked.  I mean totally sucked, and that's made clear by this book.  Not even just the plot of the book, but the circumstances under which this book was written.  Goddamn it, I just spilled my martini.

Fuck, that was a good martini too, made with Plymouth Gin and chipotle pepper-stuffed olives from The Olive Pit.  Fortunately there wasn't much left of the martini when I spilled it, but one of the olives rolled across the floor and I had to toss it in the garbage, as it was now thoroughly coated with a dusty residue.  What a pity!  Chipotle-stuffed olives are the bomb and you can quote me on that.  And that's not just the 7/8ths of a martini talking.  Well, maybe it partly is.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, those goddamn fucking Nazis.  Both the plot of this book, as well as the story of the author and how and where this book were written, are tainted with Nazis.  Irene Nemirovsky was a Russian Jew born in Kiev in 1903.  During the Russian Revolution her family fled to France, where she attended the Sorbonne and became a writer.  She married and had two daughters, but after the Germans invaded and occupied France in World War II she was eventually arrested (in 1942) as a "stateless person of Jewish descent" and deported to Auschwitz where she died soon after.  Her husband later died in Auschwitz as well, but her two daughters survived the war, and they had in their possession a notebook written by their mother during the German occupation.  Thinking it was a memoir, they couldn't bear to read the contents, and so it was stored away until the 1990s, when one of her daughters finally read it.  Surprisingly it wasn't a memoir, but the first two parts of a planned five-part sequence of novellas.  It was quickly published under the title "Suite Francaise" to great critical acclaim.

The book is fascinating, because the subject of the two novellas is the German occupation of France, and the lives of the French citizens under the occupation.  The book thus fictionalizes events that were occurring during the war right as the author was writing it.  The author had no idea how the sequence of five novellas would turn out, because she didn't know how the war would end.  And tragically, she didn't and couldn't predict that the war would consume her before she could finish the work.  But fortunately for us what she did get to write survived and was rediscovered.

The first novella, called "Storm in June", recounts events as the German army stormed into France in 1940.  As the Germans press towards Paris, many residents of the city flee, as it is not clear whether Paris will be leveled with bombs or not (it wasn't, as an armistice was signed and France surrendered before Paris could be destroyed).  The roads are flooded with refugees, taking as many of their belongings with them as possible.  Panic is everywhere as no one really knows what's happening, or what will happen.  The book follows the stories of a cast of individuals and families as they flee the oncoming Germans.  Most of the characters do not have any connection with one another, so the narrative cuts back and forth from one person/family to another.  This might seem like it would be confusing, but it actually works quite well.  As the characters flee, chaos reigns, and all their initial plans become confounded.  Most of the characters become more and more unsympathetic, as they lose their humanity and become more ruthless and self-centered in order to survive.  But the book really moves, and it's hard to put down.  Despite not really liking many of the characters, the sense of doom and danger is made quite palpable.  And there's one scene that I found particularly disturbing.  One of the characters is a priest who is leading a group of orphans fleeing into the countryside.  When he chastises them for breaking into someone's house, they turn on him.  The scene was a surprise to me, and things just get worse and worse for the priest, and it's horrific.  The helpless orphan boys become as bad, or worse, than the oncoming Nazis.  The scene reminded me of something from "Lord of the Flies".

In the second novella, called "Dolce", we are introduced to several new main characters, although some of the characters from the first novella reappear, or are at least mentioned.  This novella focuses on a small French country village which is occupied by the Nazis.  The Germans live apparently peacefully with the villagers, and the officers are billeted in the French people's houses.  Relations on the surface seem polite and cordial...the Germans try to keep things as normal as possible, and many officers try to respect the lives and property of the citizens. The Germans are perhaps a bit too formal for the French (they are military personnel after all) but at least they're polite.  But beneath the veneer, things are much more grim.  The French can never forget that they have been conquered, and that many of the men from the town are being held captive somewhere far away in German POW camps.  The Germans post many rules, such as a curfew and prohibition of gun ownership, and notices plastered around the town remind people that violations of the rules are punishable by death.  Some townsfolk collaborate with the Germans, and are despised, while others resist but not too openly.

The main character in "Dolce" is Lucile Angellier, a young newlywed whose husband has been captured by the Germans and is in a POW camp far away.  She has mixed feelings about this, because she doesn't want him to suffer, but on the other hand he has been unfaithful to her and she has no love for him.  She lives with her mother-in-law, who despises her.  A young German officer, Bruno von Falk, is billeted in their house.  Bruno is a polite and cultured, and was studying to be a musician before the war.  He and Lucille start discretely spending time together and they fall in love.  Well, sort of.  Because of the power dynamics of conqueror and vanquished, and their different cultures and languages, there is always a gap between them.  Eventually a local farmer murders a German soldier because he was trying to seduce his wife, and Lucille agrees to hide him in her house, under the nose of Bruno.  She does so because she knows Bruno and the Germans would never suspect her of all people from hiding this most wanted man.  But by doing so, she drives a wedge between her and Bruno, at least in her mind, as it make apparent to her their vastly different roles in the war.  But then the Germans in town are forced to leave when Germany declares war on the Soviet Union, and they are called away to fight on the Eastern Front. It is there that the novella closes.

This book is one that is going to stick with me.  The writing was beautiful, and the story was a page turner.  But what makes this book so totally poignant is how the author's story is intertwined with the story in the book.  The German occupation of France, which she novelized right as it was happening, is what led to her own downfall and death, and prevented her from finishing the book.  She left an outline of the third novella in the five-part series, entitled "Captivity", but she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz before she could start writing it.  Both her book and her life are a tragic and horrible story in a tragic and horrible historic period that consumed many millions of lives.  Goddamn Nazis.  But fortunately this beautiful book survived and was rediscovered.  A small consolation, perhaps, and too late for the author, but ensuring that the story of her own personal tragedy, and her insights into the lives of the citizens who suffered in France in World War II, will not be forgotten.

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)

Times have changed so much in the last 150 years that it's hard to fathom.  150 years ago we were fighting the Civil War, and there was a frontier where the living was hard and dangerous, and there was no delicious Willett single barrel 4-year old straight rye whiskey available for bloggers like me to sip on while the desperately try to write something slightly interesting and remotely relevant.  Hard to imagine.  So what did men and women do out on the frontier back in those rugged days if they couldn't fall asleep while trying to read my latest lame blog post?  Well, if you're like the main character of this book, Archbishop Jean Marie Latour, you saved men's souls while doing a lot of horseback/muleback riding.  Yes, it seems that for an archbishop in the old southwest frontier days horseback riding was part of the job description.  An archbishop could drink wine too, apparently, but there was no rye whiskey...or at least none in this novel.  Hard living indeed.

"Death Comes for the Archbishop" is based closely on the life of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, a French Roman Catholic prelate who served as the first archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Lamy was a French priest who got the missionary bug, and came to the US to work in Ohio in 1839.  In 1850, the pope sent him to New Mexico to be a bishop.  He eventually became archbishop, and oversaw the building of the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe (pictured above), before retiring in 1885 and dying in Santa Fe three years later.  The novel follows Cather's version of Lamy, Jean Marie Latour, as he and his vicar buddy Joseph Vaillant wander around the desert southwest, spreading Catholicism and administering to the whites, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the Native Americans, and everyone else.  They have to contend with snowstorms, windstorms, dust storms, rebellious priests, outlaws, suspicious Native Americans, and the vast loneliness of the desert surroundings.  It's pretty cool actually, the contrast of the spreaders of a very organized European religion lead by an aristocratic French intellectual, with the almost unfathomable vastness of the desert frontier and the myriad of issues and tensions surrounding the coming together of so many cultures...French, Spanish, Native American, mountain men, gold miners, etc.

The novel essentially has no plot.  It is more a collection of anecdotes describing the adventures of the Fathers Latour and Vaillant as they minister across the southwest.  And I use the word "adventures" loosely.  Very loosely.  Sure, there was the time they narrowly escaped being murdered, and rescued their would-be murderer's abused wife.  But most of the stories are much more subtle, describing a clash of cultures that isn't really a clash, just different types of people trying to figure out how to live together.  The book is really almost meditative.  Not all that much happens, yet it's easy to get caught up in the book's subtle rhythm and just go along with it.  Some might call it a slow read, but I think that misses the point.  To me the writing is reminiscent of the southwest itself...calm, vast, inspiring awe.  I'm not a religious man, but I couldn't help admiring the characters' devotions to the people in their diocese.  And while the two main characters are vastly different (Latour is more inward focused and reflective, while Vaillant is a fearless extrovert with a huge personality), they both love each other and the people living in their congregation.

Eventually Latour leads the construction of the cathedral at Santa Fe, while Vaillant is called to minister to an influx of gold miners into Colorado.  The two grow old separately and do not see one another again.  Latour eventually retires. lives for awhile longer just outside of Santa Fe, then becomes ill and dies peacefully.  Which brings me to the book's title.  WTF?  Yes, death came for the archbishop, but not until he had a long, full life.  So why is the title relentlessly focused on his death?  Perhaps the rye whiskey is making me foggy, but I have no idea.  Whatever...this is a good book.  It is very different from My Antonia, but well worth reading to get a flavor of what it was like out on the frontier of this country 150 years ago.  To us it would be like another world, as it was to the archbishop...a world long gone by.

Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)

I started this blog seven years ago.  WTF?!?  I was almost 20 years younger then...so innocent and unknowing of the cold, callous ways of the world.  And now, having read 59 1/3 of the 105 books I originally intended to read, what have I actually learned along the way from this blogging/reading project?  Well, I've learned, relearned actually, just how delicious some alcoholic beverages can be (yes, I'm talking to you, aged rye whiskey).  And I've learned that it takes fucking forever to read 105 books, especially when you're reading them with an addled middle-aged mind.  I've learned that some books quickly fade from memory once they're finished...I'd tell you which one(s) but I can't remember them.  And yet, I've learned that some books not only stay with you after you've read them, but seem to grow in importance long after their covers have been closed.  In particular I'm thinking of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War".  As readers of this blog may recall (assuming there are readers of this blog, which seems highly unlikely) Thucydides was not the definition of an easy read, and although his book was quite interesting, it was not a page turner.  And yet, I think back onto this book almost daily.  I'm somewhat of a news junkie, and I follow current events and politics fairly closely, and I'm blown away by how the problems of the Greek world of 400BC as described in Thucydides so closely parallel many of the problems faced by our global society today.  The tension between aristocracy and the common people, and the pressures on democracies to become oligarchies, are themes very relevant to society in 2014.  And the rise of demagogues in Athens, and the penchant for such politicians to make decisions that are not in the best interests of the country in the long run, well these seem depressingly similar to the political scene in America today.  History indeed repeats itself.  People are the same as they were 2400 years ago, making the same mistakes and coming to the same dysfunctional ends.  Ugh.  The human race is not evolving, it's just on a stationary treadmill.

But this is not what's going on in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Childhood's End".  Arthur C. Clarke was a science fiction writer, best known for his book (and the Stanley Kubrick movie based on it) "2001: A Space Odyessey".  "Childhood's End" was an earlier science fiction novel of his, written in 1953.  No, it's not on my list of 105 books for this blog, but I once again veered off the list because I fucking wanted to, and because I haven't read a science fiction novel since maybe the sixth grade.  Plus after a big bite of Plutarch I wanted to read something completely different...a quick read and a page-turner.  Anyway, where was I...oh yeah, this book is all about the evolution of humankind into something higher and better, very similar to the theme of "2001", actually.  And like "2001", aliens are involved.  At the novel's opening, super intelligent aliens in huge spaceships come to Earth.  Their ships hover over all the major cities, and they announce that from now on there will be no more war or violence or unnecessary cruelty towards animals (yay, animals!).  The aliens are unbelievably technologically advanced and don't even need to show themselves, although they eventually agree to after 50 years.  Meanwhile, relieved of all their misery and troubles causes the human race to become, for the most part, relaxed and unmotivated under the new regime of the aliens whom they refer to as "The Overlords".  Why make art or do research when you can just chill out and let The Overlords deal with shit.  So what happens...Are The Overlords good or evil?  How can humans evolve under such circumstances?  Well, I can't really go into much more detail without spoiling it, because there are lots of plot twists and curves.  Some of them are great, while others are kinda meh, but still the fun of this kind of book is having no idea what comes next.  So I will leave you hanging until you read it yourself.

But, barring aliens coming down and hovering over our cities, I fear that Thucydides really nailed the human condition over 2400 years ago.  Times change but human nature does not, as much as we like to think it has.  Maybe someday, but not today.  We're waiting for those aliens, just like they waited for Godot.  Waiting...waiting...

Book #60 (Part 1) - Greek Lives (Plutarch)

Whatever happened to The Classics, anyway?  I have the impression, perhaps based on a combination of wishful thinking and idealization of the pre-antibiotic era, that high school and college students of the 1800s read and studied and were intimately familiar with The Classics, often in their original Greek or Latin, and that the mark of an educated man was having read Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Sophocles, Plato, Plutarch, and the rest of their ilk.  The classics had a cachet, and were thought to contain ancient yet timeless wisdom, that could still benefit those of us born a couple of thousand years later.  So what happened?  When I was in high school we read Homer (The Odyssey), and maybe a play by Sophocles, but that was about it.  The classics were definitely not the core of the curriculum.  Are they anywhere anymore?  And were they really the centerpiece of a good 19th century education, or is that just an idealized fantasy?  I don't know.  What the hell do I know, anyway?  I'm sitting here typing into a computer, sucking down a very strong yet delicious Margarita, made with tequila (Hornitos...mmmm), triple sec, lots of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a splash of orange juice.  Yes, dear reader, if there's one thing in life you get out of this blog, it's not to read the classics or Middlemarch or any other book I've blogged about, but this:  throw in a splash of orange juice when you're making a Margarita at home.  Use the best orange juice you can get, not that cheap frozen, concentrated crap, but real freshly-squeezed, never-frozen stuff, like Odwalla or something, and I guarantee you that your Margarita satisfaction will be upped 1000%.  Trust me.  Then after that, go read Middlemarch and the classics if you want.  Or not.  Whatever.  God, I love Margaritas.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, The Classics.  I've been on a classics tear lately, having spent some quality time with Thucydides, and I decided to continue with my reading about ancient Greece by reading some of Plutarch's "Lives", specifically a collection of nine of Plutarch's Greek Lives compiled by the Oxford University Press.  Ah, Plutarch...everybody in my idealized 19th century used to read this guy, and who does now?  Well, me at least.  Plutarch, or Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and philosopher, who lived from 46-120 AD.  He was Greek at a time when Greece was part of the Roman empire.  He was born into a wealthy family, and apparently became a leading citizen of his hometown of Chaeronea.  He also became famous as a writer, and wrote a helluva lot of books, only some of which survived down through the millennia.  Perhaps his most famous works, and the ones which I have on my reading list for this blog, is a series of biographies known as the Parallel Lives.  These are biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, which are arranged in pairs to show their common qualities. The surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives.  The pairs of Lives also have short essays attached to them, comparing the paired Greek and Roman Lives.  My goal for this blog is to read all 50, plus the comparisons, and so I started by reading this collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives of famous Greeks.  The biographies included in this collection are Lycergus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Agesilaus, and Alexander the Great.

To start off this discussion of Plutarch, let me just say this it is a tragedy that neither Plutarch, nor any of the nine Greeks whose biographies make up this book, ever got to taste a Margarita.  That is an utter shame, and suggests that perhaps the ancient world was not all it was cracked up to be.  From what I can tell, the ancient Greeks drank mostly wine, and they drank it diluted with water.  Which makes me curious...was ancient Greek wine anything like a modern day Zinfandel from Napa Valley?  Was it delicious and notable and worthy of comparison with any of the wines we drink today?  Or was it real rotgut stuff, which is why they had to dilute it with water?  I don't know.  But wine was important enough to the Greeks for them to have their own god of it, Dionysus.  But how would Dionysus react to a Margarita?  Very favorably, I suspect.  Especially if it contained a splash of freshly-squeezed orange juice.

Anyway, Plutarch...I love this guy! Plutarch, as he himself explains in his Life of Alexander, is not a historian, but is a biographer, and is particularly interested in moral character.  In his biographies he will often skip over major battles and historical events, and instead focus on anecdotes and stories that reveal elements of his subjects' personalities.  He's a philosopher, and is more interested in what makes people's characters than in telling a chronological history of events.  Nonetheless, Plutarch's Lives are invaluable historic resources, since Plutarch had an extensive library which he used to write his biographies, and many or most of the sources he used and cited no longer exist (goddamn passage of time!).  So his Lives are sometimes the only records we have of certain historical events and persons.  But while he had access to many manuscripts lost to history, you and I have access to Margaritas, so perhaps the trade-off is about even.  And Plutarch seems exactly like the kind of guy you'd want to hang out with in your living room while tossing back a few delicious Margaritas and munching on some chips and guacamole.  Not just because the Margarita and the guacamole would have totally blown his mind.  But because his writing is so fun and enchanting.  He's a natural storyteller, and his style is easy and rambling...quite unlike Thucydides whose writing was much more complex and convoluted.  Not that Thucydides wasn't great to read, because he was, but I don't get the impression he'd want to pound back many Margaritas.  But Plutarch, he seems like he'd be game, and would tell you a bunch of cool stories at the same time.

Of course it helps a lot that Plutarch's subjects are so damn interesting to begin with.  Several of the Lives included in this collection were dudes that played prominent roles in Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War".  Like Alcibiades, for instance, possibly my favorite ancient Greek.  This guy was a crazy narcissistic motherfucker, incredibly brilliant and incredibly self-serving, and I can't help but be fascinated by him.  He was incredibly good-looking, according to all the sources (which really says something), and Plutarch hammers it home that he wasn't just good looking when he was young, but that his looks never left him until he died in middle age from a volley of arrows. Many of his misadventures are described by Thucydides (such as his having to flee from Sparta after knocking up the Spartan King's wife...oops) but Plutarch has other sources and goes into more detail about Alcibiades, and also tells of his life after Thucydides' history breaks off, including his death by assassins.  Two other Lives in this particular collection that are also in Thucydides are Pericles, the great Athenian leader at the outset of the Peloponnesian War, and Nicias, the indecisive, waffling general, who commanded the Athenian forces in Sicily, as they suffered complete and utter defeat at the hands of the locals.  Nicias is a portrait in failure...a noble, well-meaning man who just can't take he initiative needed to make victory happen.  Ironically the name "Nicias" is from the Greek "Nike" meaning victory.  Although nowadays it means athletic shoes.

Other Lives in this volume include Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Agesilaus, and Alexander the Great.  Lycergus was the man who laid down the law in Sparta.  Sparta, now there's a fascinating place.  Hold on a second and I'll tell you all about it, but first I need to refill my Margarita.  Be right back.  Ahhhhh, much better.  I think it's also the salted rim that really makes the Margarita for me.  I love salt...I'm a salt monster.  It's amazing I'm not in some hypertensive coma right now, actually.  But I digress.  Anyway, Sparta...man those dudes were crazy.  Lycurgus, who may or may not have been a real person, set up many of the Spartan institutions, and in a way Plutarch's biography is more a description of Sparta's unique society than a biography.  Sparta was really a totalitarian military organization disguised as a society.  Per Lycurgus' reforms, all adult males were required to eat in mess halls, where they feasted on some sort of black gruel.  Mmmm.  All children over the age of seven were taken from their parents and sent to the agoge, which were basically military training camps.  They stayed there until they were 17 and could then join the real army.  Spartan society could support all male citizens being in the army because they had a population of slaves, called Helots, who farmed the land and raised food for the Spartans.  Life in Sparta was brutish and militaristic.  When Lycurgus came to power he found that wealth in Sparta was unequally distributed, and so he took everything and distributed it among the population in equal amounts.  Among the Spartan population, that is, not the Helots.  Sorry, Helots.  Let's face it, Sparta was weird, and totally unlike anything else in the ancient Greek world.  And Lycurgus started it all.  According to Plutarch, when Lycergus was done implementing all his reforms, he blew town, making the Spartans take an oath that they must not change his reforms until he returned.  He never returned, and purposefully died on the road, forcing the Spartans to keep to their word indefinitely.  I like his style.  I would definitely make Lycurgus a Margarita.  But he would probably refuse it in favor of a bowl of black gruel.

Then there's Agesilaus, to me one of the more poignant Lives.  Agesilaus was a King of Sparta after the Peloponnesian War, ruling from about 400-360BC.  Agesilaus was partly lame (the FDR of Sparta!) and short in stature, but lead many military campaigns for Sparta.  Unfortunately he suffered some significant defeats, and Sparta went into a long term decline.  His last days were spent as an old man in his 80s fighting as a mercenary in Egypt, and he died on his way home afterwards.  Plutarch's Lives are complex, with good men with noble intentions, like Agesilaus and Nicias, falling to defeat not through vanity or evil character, but through character flaws that in other positions in life wouldn't have mattered, or simply through the circumstances of their situations.  Fuck.  I'd love to give them both Margaritas.

The longest life in this collection was Alexander the Great.  We all sort of know who he was...the Macedonian King, son of Philip II of Macedon, who took Greek forces and smashed through most of the ancient world, conquering his way through the old Persian Empire, that old Greek nemesis, and all the way into India, before his troops rebelled and said "enough".  Alexander is depicted as a complex man, greatly ambitious (duh), fiercely loyal to his friends, but also quick to temper and quick to turn on people on a dime, especially if he'd been drinking.  And he seems to have been drinking a lot.  Many of the more violent anecdotes in his life occurred when he was drunk out of his mind.  Definitely not someone who I would have given a Margarita to.  But hey, the dude conquered the known world.  Then he died of illness at the age of 32.  Wow, way to make me feel insignificant.  I'm way older and no one's ever called me "The Great".  Sigh...where's my Margarita?

Anyway, I'm digging Plutarch, and I highly recommend reading some of his Lives.  They're entertaining, easy to read, and utterly fascinating.  If they were good enough for our great grandparent's generation's education, they're good enough for us!  I have more of his Lives to go...many more...but I think I'll take a break for a bit and read something more modern next.  Um, as soon as I finish this Margarita.  And the one after that.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)

Normally when I write these posts I try to write them a day or two after I've finished the book.  That way my rapidly aging and booze-addled mind can still remember what the hell it was that I just read.  But alas, this time life intervened in the form of a business trip, so I'm blogging about a book I finished over three weeks ago.  That may seem like a tiny puddle of time to many of you, but to me it's a lifetime.  I mean, I could have died two weeks ago and I probably wouldn't even remember it by now.

Anyway, for those of you who care (i.e. no one) you will have noticed that with this book I strayed off my list of the 105 books I want to read before I die (assuming I haven't died already...see above).  The thing is, after reading Thucydides (which I loved, don't get me wrong) I wanted to venture into a work of fiction that was a little bit of a breezier read, and I've had this classic book on my shelf for years and decided to give it a shot.  I don't know why exactly I didn't include this book on my original list.  After all, the Modern Library put the novel 17th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  So it must be pretty good, I figured.  Plus the author, Carson McCullers, wrote the book when she was 23, so unlike me her brain was probably still in top working order when she penned it, and not pummeled by years of booze, broads, and whatnot like mine.  Not that I ever got pummeled by broads, except in my dreams.  Sigh.  Still waiting for you to call, Chloe Sevigny.

The book was published in 1940 and takes place during the 1930s, in a small southern town.  Carson herself grew up in Columbus, Georgia, so she knew the South, and the book is pretty much in the Southern Gothic tradition of eccentric, lonely characters in a sleepy town where nothing much happens except for loneliness, detachment, and brooding, until things are punctuated by sudden outbursts of unexpected violence and terror.  Sad, lonely, depressing stuff.  It reminded me somewhat of Flannery O'Conner, whom I read years ago, although the characters in this novel weren't as utterly crazy as some of hers.  But the loneliness and detachment abounds in all the characters.

The focal character of the novel is John Singer, a deaf mute who lives with his fellow deaf mute Spiros Antonapoulous.  Singer dotes on Spiros and puts a lot of effort into their friendship, but Spiros is oblivious, perhaps in part due to the fact that he's mentally ill.  Spiros soon starts to behave in very odd ways and gets committed to an insane asylum.  This leaves Singer lonely and sad.  But soon Singer is befriended by an odd assortment of quirky, lonely characters, including (1) Biff Brannon, the owner of a diner where Singer hangs out, and a man whose wife of many years suddenly dies of cancer, leaving him totally detached and lonely, (2) Jake Blount, a communist labor agitator who's new in town and a raging alcoholic, (3) Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, an idealistic black physician who is totally estranged from his children, mostly because they didn't grow up to become the idealistic, successful role models he had hoped them to be, and (4) Mick Kelly, a tomboyish girl who is obsessed by music and dreams of playing the piano, but whose family is so dirt poor that they'll never be able to afford her a piano or any sort of music lessons.  Mick is the one ray of hope in the lot, because she's young and she's clearly both fascinated by music and has talent for it (we can tell because she seems to have an astounding memory for the classical music she hears on the radio, even though she's never played an instrument).  But in the end, after her family must pay for damages due to an accidental shooting by her brother, she has to drop out of school and go to work as a store clerk, and while there's still some hope for her I suppose, her future looks pretty bleak.  Talent and potential snuffed out by abject poverty at a young age.  Ugh.  And while all these characters are convinced that Singer is their best friend, they really don't know him at all...they assume he's a great and wise person because he doesn't say anything (he is mute, after all), and so they can just see in him what they want to see.  They don't really know him, and they don't know at all about Spiros and how much Singer misses his friend.  Eventually, Singer visits Spiros in the insane asylum only to find that he's died there, and so he kills himself, and all Singer's "friends" are mystified.  Bleak.

God, even writing this review is depressing me.  All these characters are so disconnected and isolated.  Which we can all relate to, because we all go through that, at least at times.  But hopefully for most of us we're not always stranded in a small sleepy town, isolated and lonely and trapped with no one to relate to...stuck in our loneliness like a bear in a steel-jawed trap.  So yes, it's a great well-written book, and well worth reading, but you'd better pray you'll join me in early onset senility to get the lonely memories of this sad tale out of your head.  Sigh...