Totalitarianism and Octopuses

A visit to a museum turns up a short book of cartoons. The first part of a multi-episode historical film. A round of Roulette. A novel and a children's book.

Comics Cougar

Two old cartoonist friends were tabling at an event at the Cartoon Art Museum here in San Francisco, so I tagged along to visit with and support them. (And run out to get lunch so that they wouldn’t have to leave their tables unattended.)

There happened to be a great exhibition of animation cels in one room and I got to see a real, and really cool, cel from the great sixth-season episode of The Simpsons in which Homer attends Krusty’s Clown College and works as a substitute Krusty. Really exquisite thing to behold on a museum wall and probably my first time seeing a Simpsons cel with my own eyes.

I also wandered into the Museum’s reading library and took a few minutes to rack up a new entry for the list: The Peanuts Platform, illustrated by Charles M. Schulz with editorial direction by Arnold Shapiro and Arthur Wortman and design by William Hunt and David Jenkins. (I don’t know who those individuals are but since this book is an objet d’art unto itself, it seems worth categorizing the editors and designers as coauthors.)

It’s a red-white-n-blue-colored pamphlet-styled cartoon collection in the format of a floppy children’s book published in 1968 by the Hallmark company, riffing on the 1968 Presidential election by arranging illustrations of the Peanuts gang doing their usual schtick into parody campaign promises such as “Victory over the RED BARON” (Snoopy on his doghouse in Flying Ace regalia), “HIGH-LEVEL conferences!” (Linus and Snoopy perched atop the doghouse locked in some intellectual Linus-type discourse) and “HAPPINESS for everyone!” (a pleasant concluding note showing a few of the gang plus Snoopy smiling at the comics-reading electorate).

Picture Panther

Finally getting around to starting in on the multi-part 2022 documentary film The U.S. and the Holocaust directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. I’ve only watched the first one so far but it’s pretty good and interesting, raising some connections and comparisons I haven’t seen explored this fully before about how the United States of America failed to do enough to prevent the Holocaust but also could be construed through the worst episodes of American history and policy as having indirectly inspired the ghastly crimes and excesses of the Third Reich.

I’m inferring that this sentiment should set the tone for this particular angle on Holocaust history and it’s an interesting conceit, a kind of two-way moral mirror through which we hindsight-having American viewers can examine our country’s historical failures through both an outward- and inward-facing gaze. I suppose my present views and biases militate against leaning too hard on this framework since I think it could potentially be in poor taste to measure historical atrocities against one another, and most importantly since the USA is a dynamic republic capable of error-correction through a relatively stable succession principle and the possibility of incremental policy change, while the Third Reich was a static totalitarian society that, given the chance, would have escalated into ever-more-horrifying atrocities on scales that stagger even the most bloodthirsty American imagination. To put it another way, while both societies are responsible for grandiose transgressions, the USA has largely been developing as its Founders hoped along the correct moral axis, and was arguably the most significant bulwark against the success of a rival global power that was moving as quickly and aggressively as possible in precisely the opposite direction.

But I’m open to having this view challenged or at least deepened and amended through the absorption of nuance and historical context and it appears that this is basically what I can expect from Burns and company’s approach to the material. And naturally The U.S. and the Holocaust is composed and assembled with the slick and sophisticated craftsmanship with which Burns and his collaborators always put these projects together. It’s conscientiously edited to make the history engaging and undestandable while still carving out space for novel insights and some genuinely chilling and unsettling narrative tension. And I always learn new things about the subject at hand from watching these Burns programs.

For example and most interestingly to me from the first episode, I didn’t know that the American Department of State under Cordell Hull was a bastion of old-guard establishment pseudo-isolationism and that the disharmony between State and much of the rest of the government was a big part of why the USA was slower than it ought to have been to respond to the rising threat in Europe. Fascinating how a memeplex of bad ideas, which Hull’s State Department in itself appears to have been, can misinterpret facts into odiously faulty conclusions and, whether intentionally or not, prevent good information from getting where it needs to go in the rest of a complicated policy apparatus.

Roulette

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien, read in 2022. I’ve been wondering for a while when this eventuality would come up: a random drawing from the complete reading list that has already been covered in One Could Argue outside of the Roulette feature. I think the right way to play it is to simply refer readers back to what I said about The Return of the King at the time, even though I actually think it’s among the worst writing I’ve done so far for this newsletter. C’est la vie.

I Yam a Donkey! by Cece Bell, read in 2019. This is a children’s book about which I remember nothing. I can tell from chronological context that it was almost certainly something I plucked at random, perhaps even literally without looking at what I was picking up, from the shelves of the Seattle Public Library.

Sam the Sudden by P.G. Wodehouse, read in 2017. Meanwhile this was the second-to-last novel and thirteenth-to-last book I read in San Francisco before relocating to Seattle (from where I have subsequently relocated back) but I didn’t get this one from the library. I got it from one of the many boxes of books in the basement I was living in at the time in the home of my friends, the house that burned shortly after I returned to San Francisco and moved back into it and once again moved out of it to my current pad.

At that pre-Seattle time I was fairly newly obsessed with P.G. Wodehouse, having been turned on to his work when a gal I went out with a few times in 2017 gave me a paperback copy of the story collection Very Good, Jeeves!, which according to the complete reading list is currently both the very first and very last Wodehouse book I have read to date. Wodehouse’s work was and remains easily the funniest fiction I have ever read and in 2017 I set about reading and sometimes re-reading every word Wodehouse ever wrote about his two signature characters, the bumbling, amiable, well-intentioned, aristocratic and common-sense-bereft narrator Bertie Wooster and his ingenious, loyal, wry, resourceful and imperturbably dignified valet and butler Jeeves.

Sam the Sudden was only the fourth Wodehouse book I read and it is one of the very few on my list outside of the Jeeves and Wooster cycle. The copy I read is probably burned to cinders now along with everything else that my pals owned at the time of the fire. It’s a standalone comic novel involving…some lightly funny and relatively unmemorable stuff. Lemme see what I can recall without resorting to research:

Sam is a charismatic young bounder who has been off doing something in some remote place for a long time and returns to English civilization and is courting a girl he has never met before but of whom for some reason there was a picture on the wall of the cabin in which he was staying and he fell in love with the picture because it got him through the difficulty of his isolated period in whatever brutally cold place he was living. He and this girl, who I think end up by accident living next door to one another, start to develop a powerful attraction. Meanwhile a gang of small-time thieves believes that some cache of valuables are stashed in one of the houses and want to con their way in to gain access to them, and I think the plot comes down to Sam somehow figuring out what they’re up to and getting a step ahead of them.

I also have some dim recollection of a number of good-natured jokes at the expense of differences between the English classes, a hallmark of Wodehouse’s best writing, of which Sam the Sudden is not a prime example. I remember finding it mildly diverting and being intrigued over my first foray into non-Jeeves Wodehouse, but not even Wodehouse himself can, in a non-Jeeves book, be as maddeningly, achingly laugh-aloud hilarious as are the best Jeeves and Wooster stories.

Literature Lion

In between when I started re-reading the first Ellroy books I also started re-reading Orlando: A Biography, the strange faux-historical/magical realist Virginia Woolf novel from 1928 in which Woolf posits an account of a hypothetical young, beautiful and opulently rich English nobleman of the late sixteenth century who eventually both stops aging for centuries and also rather spontaneously changes sex from male to female. I read this book years ago because a university teacher of a class on British cinema had put me onto the the excellent Sally Potter film of the same title based on Woolf’s book. I was interested enough to watch the film probably two or three times altogether.

Eventually I sought out the book. I have been wanting to reinspect both book and film for years. I began to re-read it some months ago but then the library system abruptly wanted their copy back ahead of schedule so I returned it and pivoted back to Ellroy. My current goal is to finish re-reading the Woolf novel before I go out of town for two weeks towards the end of this month. I am also on the library’s waiting list to get their solitary DVD copy of Potter’s Orlando film. More to come on Orlando, Woolf, Potter et al in upcoming pages of this newsletter.

Finally: I like how this Farrell author draws waves. I read a great children’s book that was recommended by a friend who knows I dig ‘em and knows a lot about ‘em. It’s called Thank you, Octopus and was made by someone named Darren Farrell and published in 2014.

A lovely and succinct page-turner about a little kid living on a boat in whatever New York City-adjacent body of water the Statue of Liberty is in. His onboard sidekick and congenial, well-meaning tormentor is an octopus who keeps offering to perform rituals that will help ready the kid for bed like bathing, changing and teeth-brushing. But instead every gesture ends up making trouble for the kid, like offering a bath in a tub of egg salad or brushing the kid’s teeth with a paintbrush instead of a toothbrush. Goodhearted fun and a sprightly read that should be enjoyable for literally anyone of any age. Also colored in a pleasant palette of pale pastels that soothe the eye of a sleepy reader, quite clearly a conscious choice on Farrell’s part since this is after all a bedtime book.

In the indicia I noticed that Farrell mentions having made the entirety of Thank you, Octopus “from my official window seat at Coffee Temple in Seoul, South Korea.” From looking up an external view online, Coffee Temple seems to still be there and looks like a serviceable place to hang out and make children’s books. I wonder if Farrell still does, or if he was only living in Seoul temporarily, and if so why, and if not why not.

I’m putting three other Farrell books, any of which may or may not have been produced in Seoul, on hold with the library.

One Could Argue out.