Screams and Blackshirts

A ranging round of Roulette. I rewatch a film. I read and re-read classic newspaper comics. I read two short books. I start reading two more books and plan for another.

Roulette

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, read in 2016. An acknowledged masterpiece of the children’s picture book genre, published in 1939. Five other titles from the series that Madeline launched appear on my complete reading list over the ensuing four years.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, read in 2011. I read this because I had just then been reading The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux in which he mentions having read this book while traveling. And because I love Poe’s work.

Poe is one of my very favorite writers; I’ve read extensively in his short stories and can recite his poem “The Raven” in entirety as a cheap way to impress or annoy people. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is his only finished novel and it’s a doozy: an unrelentingly plodding tale of dread and horror aboard ships full of specters and cutthroats, told by a narrator who ultimately finds himself bound for some inconceivably off-map supernatural geographical region. I gotta read this one again.

The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher's Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient by William B. Irvine, read in 2020. You might know a year named 2020 and recall how uniformly maddening it was, and Stoicism had been en vogue for a few years even before that. So it tracks why I wanted to read a relatively new self-help philosophy text applying Stoic principles to the challenges of everyday life. I read Marcus Aurelius in 2019; Irvine’s book led me to read Seneca and Epictetus in 2021. Of those three classical Stoics plus Irvine I find Epictetus the most skillful writer.

Film Selection: I Enjoyed Rewatching a Good Movie But Still Had to Pause It Twice to Nap Because I’ve Been Feeling Run-Down and I Was Lying Down Anyway While I Watched It

Still haven’t been into watching many movies, but I finally got around to a rewatch of the 1982 Lindsay Anderson picture Britannia Hospital, a barbed but congenial farce about an NHS hospital that serves as a metaphor for Britain throughout the Seventies, a cauldron of anxiously-competing interests sloshing against the stiff upper lip of strictly-ordered class systems and rules of politeness. Two competing sets of protesters assail the hospital from without, workers strike from within, a mad scientist abuses his medical authority to perform unholy breakthroughs in vivisection, the administration plots a ceremonial visit from the Queen Herself and two drugged-out photojournalists get high while they’re supposed to be covering it all.

Meandering naif-like through this goofball miasma is Mick Travis, played perfectly as he was in the first two films in the “Mick Travis trilogy” by Malcolm McDowell. Taken over the course of all three films, Mick is like a Wile E. Coyote for Anderson’s and his writer David Sherwin’s slapstick-nightmare vision of a unique culture going uniquely insane. In if…. schoolboy Mick violently defies all authority and systems and in O Lucky Man! he embarks on a career and answers affirmatively to everything and everyone he encounters; in Britannia Hospital he infiltrates the ghoulish hospital laboratory and finally dies onscreen, giving way to a strange, open-ended concluding note for the trilogy that I don’t especially understand and quite enjoyed. Britannia Hospital, like its predecessors, visually gets by just fine with a modestly low-budget look because Anderson is an inventive and clever director and because the darkly comedic notes in Sherwin’s writing are woven into a sensible narrative structure. Recommended.

Stars and Spinach

Comics-wise I’m still working through The Complete Peanuts 1961 to 1962 by Schulz and E.C. Segar’s Popeye: “Well, Blow Me Down!” by Segar. In the last panel of a July 1962 Sunday strip Linus remarks to Lucy that “Falling stars don’t scream!”, which is a plausible observation for a precocious preadolescent kid to make and is also a poetically crazy line of dialogue for a cartoonist to write. Which sums up much of what I like about Charles Schulz’s writing style.

In the Popeye book I came across what I think has to be the first-ever mention of Popeye’s interest in the fitness benefits of eating spinach. In July of 1931 he agrees to a boxing match with General Bunzo. He lets Bunzo take a full-on crack on his jaw and, standing stock still, simply remarks that “You should eat more spinach,” which I imagine Segar tossed off blithely with no idea or intention that it would later become perhaps the most well-known part of the Popeye mythos.

Peanuts books take much less time to read than Popeye books. When I finish this Schulz collection, in parallel to Popeye I really am going to try out The Second Garfield Treasury by Jim Davis, which I previously mentioned having found a copy of in a Little Free Library. I wasn’t kidding; I want to give a chance to a strip I’ve always disliked and check out the early years and see what’s there.

Short Books of Fiction and Poetry

There are two additions to the complete reading list to report.

The Symposium from the early fourth century BCE, written by Plato and translated with an introduction and notes by Christopher Gill. I bought this pseudo-fictional philosophical dialogue a while back because a tiny independent bookstore sprang up near my workplace and I wanted to be supportive. I read it because I thought it would be cool to have Plato’s name on the complete reading list.

Black Shirt Emblazoned from 2024 by X.P. Callahan. Callahan is a writer I have come to really look up to creatively, intellectually and personally. Black Shirt Emblazoned is a mini-chapbook comprising a cycle of new and old poems reflecting on the horrors of the October 7 pogrom and contemplating why that terrible day led to a global outpouring of overtly antisemitic rhetoric and violence. Of great significance is the short prefatory essay “Trigger Warning,” a righteously acidic pronouncement of moral clarity that serves as a guiding flare in a time of gathering darkness. Callahan is honorably and commendably donating all of her proceeds from sales of this book to ZAKA Search and Rescue, so I encourage everyone to buy copies.

Nonfiction Books I Have Been Reading and Will Read

For the first time in far too long I am going outside of my current state of residence for a few days. I’ll be takin’ the spiritual phone off the metaphorical hook and continuing to read a few books I’ve already started in on.

In a Little Free Library I found a book of meditations called Zen Word, Zen Calligraphy by Eidō Tai Shimano and Kōgetsu Tani (text by the former and calligraphy by the latter). In the introduction, E.T.S. states of this book that “it is important to read it slowly, one page a day at the most,” and so I have been doing precisely that. Same as how I read Complete Sonnets of Shakespeare at the strict rate of one sonnet a day.

While I’m traveling I’ll also continue reading the engrossing 2023 book The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by the philosopher John Gray. I’ll finish that on the road and when I get back I’ll start reading another nonfiction book from 2023, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone. (For all of my upbringing and education on the subject, I’ve only read comics and memoirs and watched documentaries and feature films about the Holocaust. Never read a straightforward and scholarly history on the subject.)

I’ve never read Hobbes’s Leviathan but I adore the Mastodon metal record Leviathan and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s visceral documentary film Leviathan. I’m feeling thoroughly stimulated (and rather disquietingly nonplussed) by Gray’s contemporary Leviathans, so that is a stunning success rate for creative works with the word “Leviathan” in the title. Perhaps I should make an effort to read Hobbes’s Leviathan one day, but Gray is doing a targeted job of elucidating and relativizing key bits of it for me.

On a note less negative, I was jazzed by Gray’s biographical explanation that “Hobbes took care not to be poor, but found himself hard up at several points in his life. By choice, he did not enter a profession. Serving the Church or any institution that claimed authority over his mind was intolerable to him.” So, for all of my numerous flaws, questionable lifestyle choices and professional missteps, I have those three sentences of Gray’s perfectly in common with someone as intelligent and influential as Thomas Hobbes. That’s only on page 10 and has little to do with the main theses of Gray’s book, but these days I’ll take what encouragement I can get.