Wish I'd written that: The trouble with developing taste

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films that I didn’t want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, there were no bad books—everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassady was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on earth would my English teacher think that The History of Mr Polly was better than Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality."

Nick Hornby
Fever Pitch

Video trailer for "The Electronic Mirror"

I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in Minnesota we're still in the throws of winter, with another five inches of snow today and lows in the single digits. On a night like this, I can't think of anything better than to sit next to a roaring fireplace with a good book. Unfortunately, I don't have the fireplace, but I do have the book for you: The Electronic Mirror. 

Here's a brand-new trailer for The Electronic Mirror, in case you need help making up your mind:


My thanks as always to the fabulous Carol M Ford Productions for the production and narration of the trailer for The Electronic Mirror. Even if you've already got the book (and if you haven't, why not?) be sure to give it a look.

Looking for the perfect gift? Why not "The Electronic Mirror"!

Still hunting for that perfect gift? Or, like the people on the Black Friday commercials, are you thinking about a little treat for yourself? It's not too late - allow me to suggest my book, The Electronic Mirror: What Classic TV Tells Us About Who We Were and Who We Are (and Everything In-Between). 

The Electronic Mirror looks at how classic TV acts as a time capsule, telling us how life used to be, and in many cases how things got the way they are today. Not only does it feature many of your favorite shows and stars, it also places them in context, explaining their meaning and significance. As Carol Ford (Bob Crane: The Definitive Biography) says, "You won't watch TV the same way again!"  Best of all, you'll have fun along the way. If you like It's About TV!, you'll love The Electronic Mirror. And at $12.95 (plus shipping, unless you're a Prime member) it won't break the bank.

The link above takes you to the Amazon link, but The Electronic Mirror is also available at Barnes & Noble.com, as well as many other online retailers. And if you really want to make it a special gift, how about a signed copy? After you've placed your order, just send me an email (the address is on the sidebar) with your address, telling me who it's for and how you'd like it signed, and I'll send you a bookplate that you can insert in your copy. Don't be shy; I won't bite!

I'm very proud of The Electronic Mirror, and I'm confident you and your favorite classic TV fan will enjoy this trip through television history. Order now, in time for your gift-giving!

Flashback Friday - On owning your soul

Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine.  Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may - until that time comes, I have the right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can.  Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than you'll do the truth good.  Or until I'm hauled before somebody who can make me talk.

- Raymond Chandler, The High Window

Originally published September 15, 2014

New books from Mitchell Hadley

Now I finally have something to show for the silence I've been observing this summer: not one, but two new books.

The Electronic Mirror: What Classic TV Tells Us About Who We Were and Who We Are (and Everything In-Between) is my collection of essays on classic television—how the programs of the '50s, '60s, and '70s illustrate the development of American culture in the second half of the 20th Century. These essays examine how this most personal form of mass communication reflects the culture of its time, how it has fulfilled (or failed to fulfill) its initial promise, and how TV has—intentionally as well as unintentionally—predicted the future, with sometimes disturbing results. As I write in the book, "Television is our history, no matter when we were born, for it tells us not only who we were then, but who we are today, and how we got there."

My new novel, The Car, is the story of Winter, an ordinary man living an ordinary life, it will not end until he learns what has happened to the car’s owner and why the car has been left abandoned and ignored on a city street. As Winter’s curiosity turns to obsession, his search for the missing owner intensifies and he finds the car taking him on a journey that he never expected, one of dreams and reality in which nothing–and no one–is what it seems. Not even him. And it asks a question: how do we measure the worth of a life lived?

These two books, along with my first novel The Collaborator, are available through Amazon now, and through other online dealers in the weeks to come; I'm hoping to have e-book versions available next month. You can find out more about my books, along with upcoming events, by going to my new and improved author page.

Throwback Thursday: Wish I'd written that

Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you - which is why I don't like to read good books.

- Jack Handey

Not really - I read good books all the time.  I just like the smartass way it sounds.

Originally published April 17, 2015

Flashback Friday: Crossing The Bridge

What with all the madness that's been going on the last couple of weeks, and the idea that killer whales should be considered human beings, it seems an apropos time to remind ourselves that there's nothing new under the sun.

A few years ago, when Drew first penned this piece, it was in reaction to a proposal by some liberals that to “reduce the carbon footprint” on the planet by depopulating – in other words, humans must die (off) so the planet can live on. Taking it one step further, there’s the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which suggests that “everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once.” As someone said at the time, that would indeed be the only logical extension of such thinking. “Wouldn't it be only proper for people suggesting this (and heck, given a chance, they'd enforce it) to kill themselves and set an example?”

This was precisely the idea behind D. Keith Mano’s brilliant, disturbing 1973 novel, The Bridge. Long out of print (as is, sadly, most of Mano’s work; the best place to find them is a used book store), The Bridge is set in the dystopian New York of 2035, where civil war has resulted in a world run by a radical environmentalist/totaliarian regime. In this world, all forms of life – “down to the merest microbe” – are considered equal. All acts of aggression – even disagreement – have been outlawed. The absurdity of their thinking is summed up in the words on a plaque outside the now-deserted and crumbling Yankee Stadium, “Where, in an age of brutality and ignorance, men presumed to compete against their brother men.” (Interestingly enough, Mano didn’t anticipate the use of inclusive language – which shows you that 1973 was, indeed, a long time ago.) Mano demonstrates the ruthlessness, indeed the inhumanity, of such inflexible thought with this exchange between two prisoners of the regime, discussing the consequences that followed when all automobiles were banned:

"It was after the road breakers came. After my brother died because there was no car to take him where the doctor was."

"Lots of people died like that."

"They said thousands had died in cars. It was better that one man should die because there were no cars."

Despite these and other decrees designed to, as we would put it today, “reduce the carbon footprint,” a mass genocide continues, to which the regime’s response is stark, and final:

Whereas it has been ascertained irrefutably by the Council's Emergency Committee on Respiration that the process of breathing has and will continue to destroy and maim innumerable forms of microscopic biological life, we of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours. It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species. . . It is hoped bretheren, that you will donate your physical bodies to the earth in such a manner that the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race throughout history may in some small way find redress.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one could almost imagine the names of some of our more prominent environmentalist/politicians being attached to a statement like that, don't you think?

From thereon in, The Bridge becomes something of an action thriller, with Mano's protagonist - the unlikely, but typically Manonian-named, Dominick Priest, who had been imprisoned for the crime of "competition" (playing chess) - on a quest to return to his home and his wife, a journey which will take him through a landscape run riot by decay, overflowing vegetation (remember, even cutting grass is a murdeous crime) and wild, feral animals, and regime officials seeking to enforce the Council's mandatory suicide decree, culminating in a harrowing crossing of the remains of the George Washington Bridge.

Ultimately, what Priest represents is the resiliency of man, the urge to survive, the quality which is the bain not only of the Council, but of totalitarian regimes throughout history. Priest is not altogether a likeable hero; Mano has chosen to portray him not as some kind of monastic crusader seeking to redeem the world, but as a man on a singular mission to live, with only a limited comprehension of the higher, existential meaning of life. As such, Priest is filled with all the foibles of man, and then some. This leads to a startling, indeed deeply disturbing (while at the same time somewhat satisfying) resolution, the consequences of which can be seen in an epilogue taking place years later.

Keith Mano has always been identified as a "Christian" novelist, and it is true that his Episcopal faith has made itself known through all of his books - from Take Five, in which a man slowly loses each of his five senses, to Bishop's Progress, featuring a confrontation between a lukewarm Episcopal Bishop and the devil, to Horn, a debate between the priest of an urban parish and a radical black leader. His most commercially successful novel, Topless, can best be summed up by the book's tag line: "Father Mike Wilson's having a bad day. He just found a headless body in his topless bar." As one might be able to gather from that last description, Mano's books have always been laced with a heavy dose of black humor.

It would be wrong to call these "comic novels," however, for the humor is mostly of the ironic sort, presenting a scenario that often borders on the absurd but merely serves as the setup for Mano's provocative probing, challenging questions on the meaning of life, and our ability (or lack thereof) to ascertain it. Religion - or faith, if you will - is never far from the surface but, despite that fact that most of Mano's protagonists are priests (in name or fact), the religiousity is not of the overt, preachy type that so often passes for "religious fiction" nowadays. It's more, as one critic put it, in the style of Waugh or Greene, probing into something deeper, and often darker – not just what it means to be a believer, but what it is to actually believe in anything.

Mano's books, while critically acclaimed, were for the most part less than commercially successful; he once recounted that his agent told him after his latest slow-seller that the only way he'd be able to get published again was under a pseudonym. His most recent novel, The Fergus Dialogues: A Meditation on the Gender of Christ, was published in 1998; since then, he has for the most part retreated from writing due to the onset of Parkinson's disease.

And that is a shame, professionally as well as personally, because in novels such as The Bridge, Keith Mano proved himself to be not only a provocative novelist but a prescient one as well.

Opera Wednesday

There is an opera point to this, if you can wait long enough. At first, however, it might seem as if the only opera we're talking about here is a soap opera, such is the feeling one gets when thinking about the stories we've been reading about for years about the "epidemic" (I think that's the word they used) of student-teacher sex affairs. Of particular interest to many was the number of female teachers who had become involved with young male students, many of them in their early teens. Some call these teenage boys "abused," others consider them "lucky." Whatever, clearly the answer to ending this scandal is to allow teachers to marry - wait a minute, my mistake; it's allowing priests to marry that's supposed to end sexual abuse of teenage boys.

Clearly, if we learn anything from this whole mess, it's that the theory that allowing priests to marry will eliminate the pedophile scandal is nothing but a red herring. First of all, it's not pedophilia but pederasty that drove the Church's scandal - that and a rejection by the priests involved of Catholic teaching.

This, however, is a matter for another day. What interests so many about this teacher abuse study is a fundamental question of human curiousity: what do these grown women see in teenage boys? There's something almost nauseating about the whole thing. What I find interesting about it is how this behavior contrasts so dramatically with how women used to behave, or at least how they were portrayed in popular culture. Forget for a minute whether or not that pop culture portrayal was an accurate one; what mattered, in order for the portrayal to be a successful one, was that it was plausible.

Nowhere is that more evident than in pulp detective fiction, especially that from one of the genre's masters, Mickey Spillane, and his greatest creation, Mike Hammer. Hammer is, to put it mildly, a chick magnet (as well as a magnet for bullets, fists, Commies, Mafia, and all sorts of other unsavory characters). And we're not talking about ordinary women here - just beautiful ones. Breathtakingly beautiful ones. Hammer, at first blush, would seem to be the most unlikely object of desire.

He is, by his own admission, not a handsome man. It’s true that women often meet him after he’s been beaten virtually to a pulp by some nefarious perp, who invariably winds up dead, either right away – in the “you should see the other guy” school – or later on, when Hammer fulfills his mission of revenge. It’s clear, though, that Hammer harbors no illusions about his own appearance, even in the best of times.

And yet women literally throw themselves at him. Within minutes of the initial meeting, they’re tossing off suggestions and bon mots at him that would make a sailor blush. To these invitations Hammer often reacts lewdly, taking advantage of some, distaining others. It must be nice to pick and choose that way.

Hammer is by no means unique in the world of detective fiction. Philip Marlow, for one, has the same, shall we say, problem (especially when he’s played by Humphrey Bogart), and easy sex with loose women is a staple of both pulp and mainstream mysteries. Even Nick Charles, he of the Thin Man series, is one of those men who women want and men want to be like. Nick is considerably smoother and more handsome than most of them, however, plus he has Myrna Loy to come home to, and so he remains above those kinds of temptation.

Nevertheless, what is it about these characters that causes beautiful women – far more beautiful than the men are handsome – to throw themselves at them with a speed worthy of a Puccini opera? The reason for this animal magnetism, implicit in the Hammer books, is a simple one: manliness. Hammer is a real man, not a fake – a man who knows what he wants, knows how to get it, and, most important, isn’t afraid to take it.

And this is what brings us back around to the central question asked at the beginning – why the epidemic of female teacher-male student affairs? What is it that these older women – some barely older, some much older – could possibly find of interest in these boys? One theory that I find plausible is that implicit in these actions is a rejection of modern malehood – the lack of manliness so prevalent in men today. As the metrosexual (if that term isn’t already passé) becomes a dominant archetype of the modern man, more and more women yearn for that old-style masculinity found in the likes of Hammer and others. Enough with men who seek to be in touch with their “feminine side.” To many women, this breeds doubt, uncertainty, an unwillingness to take the initiative – hardly qualities that make a man truly attractive. Hugh Grant may be the ideal man for those tissue-drenching chick flicks that Lifetime and Hallmark live on, but it’s not hard to imagine that a real relationship based on that Hugh Grant character would lead to frustration and exasperation before too long.

So, confronted with the lack of “real men” out there, and dismayed by the alternative - young men wrapped up in rude, crude and boorish Maxim-like behavior, women reject the choices presented to them by conventional society and instead turn to the raw material, the stuff that their dreams can truly be made of. In the handsome, virile boy in their classroom they find a boy eager to learn, eager to please, with much to offer in the physical sense; but also one not yet corrupted by sensitivity training. Perhaps he’s a rugged jock, or a boy who exhibits all the hesitant masculine boisterousness that teenage boys usually have. Or he’s untapped ground, one who can be shaped not by the demands of society to emasculate himself, but by the desires of a woman who thinks (however misguided) she can teach him how to be a real man.

This kind of thing is really nothing new however, as is shown by Richard Strauss’ comic opera masterpiece Der Rosenkavalier. The subject matter in this story, written in 1911 but set in 1740s Vienna, was the source of some controversy as well. In it, we have the Marshallin, a charming but aging noblewoman, who is involved with Octavian, described as “a handsome young man with an eye for beautiful women.” Through a series of impossibly convoluted twists and turns, Octavian loses his heart to the beautiful young Sophie, who herself is engaged to the inept and repulsive Baron von Lerchenau.

Although the Marschallin is captivated by her affair with Octavian and falls in love with him, she knows that eventually he will leave her for a younger woman - one more his age. Eventually, this happens, and in the heart-wrenching trio "Hab' mir's gelobt" she releases Octavian to follow his heart and go to Sophie, saying she loves him so much she only wants happiness for him, even if it is with another woman.

With this ending, Strauss hints at the natural law of things, that eventually people - especially young ones - gravitate toward those of their own kind, their own age. And I think that what people most strongly object to in these teacher-student affairs is the idea that the young are being robbed of their future, of their natural maturing into the world beyond their youth, in essence being trapped into a lifestyle (and the consequences) long before they're ready to accept - or even understand - that life. Thus, they are not victims of sexual abuse per se, but of the same kind of abuse that we see in advertising campaigns, in peer pressure, in a hundred different ways - the abuse of forcing children to become adults before they're ready. Some would say that the unfortunate, if not ironic, aspect of this is that in the teacher-student case this is often being done by women who refuse to grow up, who yearn instead for their own childhood, free of responsibility.

As I say, I’m no sociologist, so I don’t pretend that this is anything other than a theory that I find compelling. It also suggests, but doesn’t necessarily deal with, the immaturity that these women themselves exhibit, their own failure to grow up and act responsibly. It does, however, answer a great many questions. And undoubtedly it says a lot about the present state of masculinity – or the lack thereof – in the modern male. I don’t know if we should be more worried about this epidemic of schoolhouse abuse, or the cultural forces that may be playing a part in it.

Whatever the case, this whole phenomenon should cause us to look closely at what our culture has become - how we view childhood, what it means to be a "real man" (and how through our culture so many of the natural aspects of manhood are being stripped away), and how for so many nowadays, adulthood is something to be put off as long as possible.

Flashback Friday: Staying connected

At dinner [Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn't. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy."

- Rex Stout, writing about Nero Wolfe in A Right to Die

Originally published April 18, 2011

Flashback Friday: Crossing The Bridge

I wrote the majority of this piece back in 2007, in response to a movement by some liberals to “reduce the carbon footprint” on the planet by depopulating – in other words, humans must die (off) so the planet can live on. Taking it one step further, there’s the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which suggests that “everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once.” After all, this is only the logical extension of such thinking, isn't it?

What this reminded me of was D. Keith Mano’s brilliant, disturbing 1973 novel, The Bridge. Long out of print (as is, sadly, most of Mano’s work; the best place to find them is a used book store), The Bridge is set in the dystopian New York of 2035, where civil war has resulted in a world run by a radical environmentalist/totalitarian regime. In this world, all forms of life – “down to the merest microbe” – are considered equal. All acts of aggression – even disagreement – have been outlawed. The absurdity of their thinking is summed up in the words on a plaque outside the now-deserted and crumbling Yankee Stadium, “Where, in an age of brutality and ignorance, men presumed to compete against their brother men.” (Interestingly enough, Mano didn’t anticipate the use of inclusive language – which shows you that 1973 was, indeed, a long time ago.) Mano demonstrates the ruthlessness, indeed the inhumanity, of such inflexible thought with this exchange between two prisoners of the regime, discussing the consequences that followed when all automobiles were banned:

"It was after the road breakers came. After my brother died because there was no car to take him where the doctor was."

"Lots of people died like that."

"They said thousands had died in cars. It was better that one man should die because there were no cars."

Despite these and other decrees designed to, as we would put it today, “reduce the carbon footprint,” a mass genocide continues, to which the regime’s response is stark, and final:

Whereas it has been ascertained irrefutably by the Council's Emergency Committee on Respiration that the process of breathing has and will continue to destroy and maim innumerable forms of microscopic biological life, we of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours. It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species. . . It is hoped brethren, that you will donate your physical bodies to the earth in such a manner that the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race throughout history may in some small way find redress.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one could almost imagine the names of some of our more prominent environmentalist/politicians being attached to a statement like that, don't you think?

From thereon in, The Bridge becomes something of an action thriller, with Mano's protagonist - the unlikely, but typically Manonian-named, Dominick Priest, who had been imprisoned for the crime of "competition" (playing chess) - on a quest to return to his home and his wife, a journey which will take him through a landscape run riot by decay, overflowing vegetation (remember, even cutting grass is a murderous crime) and wild, feral animals, and regime officials seeking to enforce the Council's mandatory suicide decree, culminating in a harrowing crossing of the remains of the George Washington Bridge.

Ultimately, what Priest represents is the resiliency of man, the urge to survive, the quality which is the bane not only of the Council, but of totalitarian regimes throughout history. Priest is not altogether a likable hero; Mano has chosen to portray him not as some kind of monastic crusader seeking to redeem the world, but as a man on a singular mission to live, with only a limited comprehension of the higher, existential meaning of life. As such, Priest is filled with all the foibles of man, and then some. This leads to a startling, indeed deeply disturbing (while at the same time somewhat satisfying) resolution, the consequences of which can be seen in an epilogue taking place years later.

Keith Mano has always been identified as a "Christian" novelist, and it is true that his Episcopal faith has made itself known through all of his books - from Take Five, in which a man slowly loses each of his five senses, to Bishop's Progress, featuring a confrontation between a lukewarm Episcopal Bishop and the devil, to Horn, a debate between the priest of an urban parish and a radical black leader. His most commercially successful novel, Topless, can best be summed up by the book's tag line: "Father Mike Wilson's having a bad day. He just found a headless body in his topless bar." As one might be able to gather from that last description, Mano's books have always been laced with a heavy dose of black humor.

It would be wrong to call these "comic novels," however, for the humor is mostly of the ironic sort, presenting a scenario that often borders on the absurd but merely serves as the setup for Mano's provocative probing, challenging questions on the meaning of life, and our ability (or lack thereof) to ascertain it. Religion - or faith, if you will - is never far from the surface but, despite that fact that most of Mano's protagonists are priests (in name or fact), the religiosity is not of the overt, preachy type that so often passes for "religious fiction" nowadays. It's more, as one critic put it, in the style of Waugh or Greene, probing into something deeper, and often darker – not just what it means to be a believer, but what it is to actually believe in anything.

Mano's books, while critically acclaimed, were for the most part less than commercially successful; he once recounted that his agent told him after his latest slow-seller that the only way he'd be able to get published again was under a pseudonym. His most recent novel, The Fergus Dialogues: A Meditation on the Gender of Christ, was published in 1998; since then, he has for the most part retreated from writing due to the onset of Parkinson's disease. And that is a shame, professionally as well as personally, because in novels such as The Bridge, Keith Mano proved himself to be not only a provocative novelist but a prescient one as well.

Since I wrote that, things seem to have gotten much worse. Look at the outcry about that gorilla killed in the Cincinnati Zoo. Let's set aside the question of culpability - aren't these critics saying pretty much the same thing as the rulers in The Bridge - that you can't attach superiority to human life over that of animals? Don't the Social Justice Warriors aspire to become the same humorless, fascistic rulers as those in The Bridge? Aren't we, day by day, becoming citizens of Keith Mano's dark world? The question is this: what kind of ending will our story have?

Originally published September 14, 2007

Don't move!

L



ongtime readers know my fondness for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, whom I've quoted many times at this blog, as well as having praised one of the very best television adaptations over at the TV blog.  It should be no surprise, therefore, that I was attracted to this story at the Weekly Standard on the history of what Benjamin Welton calls "the stationary detective."  Wolfe is, of course, the first name that comes to mind (my mind, anyway) when one thinks of sleuths able to solve crimes without leaving the house, and Welton spends a good deal of this brief article talking about Wolfe, but mentions several other detectives as well.  Mystery fiction is all the rage out there, but if you don't mind going back a few years, I think you'll find that many of the authors Welton discusses are worth your while as well.  Check them out, but read Wolfe first! 

Throwback Thursday - Crossing "The Bridge"

What with all the madness that's been going on the last couple of weeks, and the idea that killer whales should be considered human beings, it seems an apropos time to remind ourselves that there's nothing new under the sun.

A few years ago, when Drew first penned this piece, it was in reaction to a proposal by some liberals that to “reduce the carbon footprint” on the planet by depopulating – in other words, humans must die (off) so the planet can live on. Taking it one step further, there’s the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which suggests that “everyone in the world should stop having kids all at once.” As someone said at the time, that would indeed be the only logical extension of such thinking. “Wouldn't it be only proper for people suggesting this (and heck, given a chance, they'd enforce it) to kill themselves and set an example?”

This was precisely the idea behind D. Keith Mano’s brilliant, disturbing 1973 novel, The Bridge. Long out of print (as is, sadly, most of Mano’s work; the best place to find them is a used book store), The Bridge is set in the dystopian New York of 2035, where civil war has resulted in a world run by a radical environmentalist/totaliarian regime. In this world, all forms of life – “down to the merest microbe” – are considered equal. All acts of aggression – even disagreement – have been outlawed. The absurdity of their thinking is summed up in the words on a plaque outside the now-deserted and crumbling Yankee Stadium, “Where, in an age of brutality and ignorance, men presumed to compete against their brother men.” (Interestingly enough, Mano didn’t anticipate the use of inclusive language – which shows you that 1973 was, indeed, a long time ago.) Mano demonstrates the ruthlessness, indeed the inhumanity, of such inflexible thought with this exchange between two prisoners of the regime, discussing the consequences that followed when all automobiles were banned:

"It was after the road breakers came. After my brother died because there was no car to take him where the doctor was."

"Lots of people died like that."

"They said thousands had died in cars. It was better that one man should die because there were no cars."

Despite these and other decrees designed to, as we would put it today, “reduce the carbon footprint,” a mass genocide continues, to which the regime’s response is stark, and final:

Whereas it has been ascertained irrefutably by the Council's Emergency Committee on Respiration that the process of breathing has and will continue to destroy and maim innumerable forms of microscopic biological life, we of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours. It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species. . . It is hoped bretheren, that you will donate your physical bodies to the earth in such a manner that the heinous crimes of murder and pollution committed by our race throughout history may in some small way find redress.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one could almost imagine the names of some of our more prominent environmentalist/politicians being attached to a statement like that, don't you think?

From thereon in, The Bridge becomes something of an action thriller, with Mano's protagonist - the unlikely, but typically Manonian-named, Dominick Priest, who had been imprisoned for the crime of "competition" (playing chess) - on a quest to return to his home and his wife, a journey which will take him through a landscape run riot by decay, overflowing vegetation (remember, even cutting grass is a murdeous crime) and wild, feral animals, and regime officials seeking to enforce the Council's mandatory suicide decree, culminating in a harrowing crossing of the remains of the George Washington Bridge.

Ultimately, what Priest represents is the resiliency of man, the urge to survive, the quality which is the bain not only of the Council, but of totalitarian regimes throughout history. Priest is not altogether a likeable hero; Mano has chosen to portray him not as some kind of monastic crusader seeking to redeem the world, but as a man on a singular mission to live, with only a limited comprehension of the higher, existential meaning of life. As such, Priest is filled with all the foibles of man, and then some. This leads to a startling, indeed deeply disturbing (while at the same time somewhat satisfying) resolution, the consequences of which can be seen in an epilogue taking place years later.

Keith Mano has always been identified as a "Christian" novelist, and it is true that his Episcopal faith has made itself known through all of his books - from Take Five, in which a man slowly loses each of his five senses, to Bishop's Progress, featuring a confrontation between a lukewarm Episcopal Bishop and the devil, to Horn, a debate between the priest of an urban parish and a radical black leader. His most commercially successful novel, Topless, can best be summed up by the book's tag line: "Father Mike Wilson's having a bad day. He just found a headless body in his topless bar." As one might be able to gather from that last description, Mano's books have always been laced with a heavy dose of black humor.

It would be wrong to call these "comic novels," however, for the humor is mostly of the ironic sort, presenting a scenario that often borders on the absurd but merely serves as the setup for Mano's provocative probing, challenging questions on the meaning of life, and our ability (or lack thereof) to ascertain it. Religion - or faith, if you will - is never far from the surface but, despite that fact that most of Mano's protagonists are priests (in name or fact), the religiousity is not of the overt, preachy type that so often passes for "religious fiction" nowadays. It's more, as one critic put it, in the style of Waugh or Greene, probing into something deeper, and often darker – not just what it means to be a believer, but what it is to actually believe in anything.

Mano's books, while critically acclaimed, were for the most part less than commercially successful; he once recounted that his agent told him after his latest slow-seller that the only way he'd be able to get published again was under a pseudonym. His most recent novel, The Fergus Dialogues: A Meditation on the Gender of Christ, was published in 1998; since then, he has for the most part retreated from writing due to the onset of Parkinson's disease.

And that is a shame, professionally as well as personally, because in novels such as The Bridge, Keith Mano proved himself to be not only a provocative novelist but a prescient one as well.

Wish I'd Written That

Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room, talking to you - which is why I don't like to read good books.

- Jack Handey

Not really - I read good books all the time.  I just like the smartass way it sounds.

Opera Wednesday - the little black dress

It had to happen again.

In preparation for a book tour promoting her autobiography Call Me Debbie, Deborah Voigt decides to confront the Little Black Dress that cost her the title role in a British production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and admits her problem with food, which too many people have.

After thinking about it as an 11-time marathon finisher (and athlete myself), I thought about the weight issue considering my friendships with dancers and fitness people.  Watch it with grains, and avoid refined sugars and chemical sierra storms.  Maybe a certain singer I know needs to watch it herself too!

Deborah Voigt has fun with that incident, eleven years later!

Throwback Thursday - Cormac McCarthy on the irony of life

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talking about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain't even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don't like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don't think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I don't have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm going to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men


Originally published June 5, 2007

Throwback Thursday - On the Beach

Perhaps it’s the recent talk about the movie adaptation of P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men that brings to mind one of the best-known of the Cold War post-apocalyptic novels, Nevil Shute’s haunting 1957 On the Beach. Like James’ novel, On the Beach tells how people face the approaching end of the human race. Like James' novel, it was made into a so-so movie (starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner). But whereas the end cause in James’ world is unknown, the reasons are all too familiar in Shute’s: nuclear war.

Before you go jumping to conclusions though, I wouldn’t call On the Beach an ideological screed. While there can't be much doubt what Shute thinks of war (he's against it, as most of us are), he approaches the subject with sorrow rather than outrage, melancholy instead of polemics. The novel is set in 1963 Australia following a catastrophic war, and observes its inhabitants as they await the slow drift of the nuclear fallout that brings with it certain death.

What’s left of the American navy is there, led by Captain Dwight Towers, who becomes involved in a platonic relationship with Moira Davidson, an Australian woman introduced to him by mutual friends. While the two form a close friendship, it doesn't go any further than that. It can't, for Towers - a good and decent man - still has a wife and children home in Connecticut. We know they're dead, as is everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, and Towers knows it too - he just can't bring himself to face it. In one poignant scene Towers and Moira go shopping for presents for Towers' family, in particular his quest for a first fishing rod for his son.

Denial seems to be the predominant mood of most of the people we encounter, and what’s most fascinating (and terrifying) about On the Beach is watching how they accept their approaching death. For the most part there is no defiance, no panic in the streets. Society still maintains order, the streets are kept clean and people go about their work and their lives as best they can. On the surface it's as if there's been a slow, backward movement of civilization - cars are apparently a thing of the past, and only enough electricity for radio. It might seem not so different from the rationing and shortages of World War II, except that there was no war Down Under - only the consequences.

People enroll for college courses that won’t be completed, plant gardens they’ll never see, hoard gasoline that won’t be used. A woman goes in for an operation that her doctor says, without a trace of irony, should “give her a few more years of life.” It’s the secret that everyone ignores, the elephant in the room, the crazy aunt living in the attic, who nobody talks about. They talk of a future that's already gone, mouthing the words "next year" even though none of them really believes it. The start of trout season is moved up, and we understand why - by the time the original date rolls around, there won't be any fishermen left. That doesn't stop some from speculating that the government's just doing it for political advantage at the next election - an election, of course, that will never be held. ("Of course," one cynic says, "they'll have to change it back next year.") The date of the Australian Grand Prix is moved up too, and the drivers take ridiculous chances on the rain-slicked track – after all, what difference does it make if you die doing something you love, or wait for the sickness to kill you?

For those who might not be "fortunate" enough to die doing something they love, there's the free euthanasia pills (complete with instructions) being offered by the Aussie government. This may sound like a parody, but it’s deadly serious – and, considering the premium we seem to put on “quality of life” today, it probably creates less of a stir than it did when the book was first published. In particular Shute describes a young husband, an Aussie officer assigned to Towers’ submarine, trying to explain to his wife how she is to euthanize their baby and then herself if he hasn’t returned from his mission by the time the cloud arrives.

All through it the reader is confronted by the humanity of the characters, people struggling to get a grip over something they understand but can't comprehend. The mood shifts subtly during the year or so that the book covers. The world as they know it, the world that's left, becomes oppressive, a kind of living death, as the city slowly starts to fall into disrepair - things are broken but never fixed, shop clerks abandon their stores, people disappear from rooms and never return, presumably clutching the coveted pill in their hands. There is a sudden moment of reckless abandon as the end draws near - gasoline seems to appear out of nowhere, cars fill the streets, there's scattered crime and disorder - but even that lasts only a short time, a final fling while people can still appreciate it. "Everything's just slowing down," someone says sardonically. When reports start to come in of cases of radiation sickness in Melbourne, everyone knows the time has come.

It's that "living dead" sense (which you see so vividly in Eliot's "The Hollow Men," from which Shute gets his title) that I think stays with you after the book is over, the slow and gradual decay, the feeling you get when people just don't give a damn anymore but are helpless to do anything about it - even give up. A telling scene occurs when Towers and Moira go to an art show featuring a painting of a sorrowing Christ against the background of a destroyed city (presumably New York). Towers hates the painting - at first he criticizes it as being "phony" (the planes destroying the city are too low, the buildings are situated all wrong for New York) - and finally the truth comes out. "It couldn't have looked like that," he says, letting the denial fall away for just a moment. He goes on to say he gets no comfort from the painting: "as for religion, that's just not my line."

"You go to church regularly," Moira says.

"Oh well, that's different," Towers replies.

It is one of the saddest sections of this sad, sad book, this lack of consolation. Religion is there, sort of, but it's just pro forma. It doesn't really mean anything. In that sense I suppose it does nothing so much as mirror our own attitudes toward religion - it is a cultural thing, something you do, but not something you actually believe.

If there is a major shortcoming to On the Beach, I think it revolves around Shute's brief explanation of the war itself - how it came about, where it happened and why. Not that his explanation is implausible (it manages to indict everyone without pointing fingers at anyone) - it's just unnecessary. The war is the monster under the bed, Eliot's "Shadow," the great force that has nonetheless managed to ruin everything, no matter how they try to ignore it. As one character comments, "There never was a bomb dropped in the Southern Hemisphere. Why must it come to us? Can't anything be done to stop it?" As in any good horror story it’s the fear of the unknown rather than the known that is the most terrifying. The greatest of these stories are those in which the monster is never seen save fleetingly: a shadow, the movement of a window drape, the creak of a floorboard. Better that the war should have been seen that way, visible only in the effect it's had, but never seen straight on. To spell it out even to the extent that Shute does is to injection a brief glimpse of reality into a nightmare world that, because of its serenity, remains all the more nightmarish.

Some critics have pointed to other flaws: stilted writing, wooden dialogue, implausible behavior, bad science. It’s tempting to say these people are missing the point, though. (And you have to read this book in the context of the 50s, rather than the let-your-feelings-hang-out mores of today.) Ultimately what resonates with the reader is not how well the book is written or how realistic the dialogue is. It’s the atmosphere Shute creates - this overwhelming, almost unbearable sense of sadness. To truly appreciate it, try reading the last thirty or so pages while listening to all three parts of the Kyrie from Bach's Mass in B Minor, or perhaps Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix from Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila. If you're familiar with either of those pieces, then you'll understand what I'm talking about. If, after you finish this book you look at your loved ones and suddenly feel just how precious life is, then you understand what I'm talking about, too.

*** 

Read T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" here.


Originally published February 23, 2007

Retro TV Friday

I have never stuck up for any criminal. I have merely asked for the orderly administration of an impartial justice...Due legal process is my own safeguard against being convicted unjustly. To my mind, that's government. That's law and order."

— Perry Mason, written by Erle Stanley Gardner, in The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito ◙

The book without a cover

There's no doubt in my mind that whenever one moves forward, something gets left behind.  It doesn't mean that progress should be avoided; just that there will always be something that gets lost in the translation.  Such is the case with one of my new and favorite toys, the Kindle.

I got a Kindle Touch from the sainted missus for Christmas.  It was invaluable to me on my recent trip, when it helped kill two airport layovers - I mean, to have two books in something that's smaller and easier to handle than a magazine, well, who could ask for more?  It is as advertised - easy to use, easy to read, a space saver.  And for someone who's preparing to move in the next month, saving space is no mean feat.

And yet, nothing's perfect.  As we look through our library, going through the books that we're planning to replace when time and need (and budget) permits, there's a sense of sadness at losing the tangible.  One of the great pleasures for a book lover is to look at the libraries of other people, looking at the titles on the spines of their books, admiring the quality of the binding, getting an insight into the personality of the owner - their likes, dislikes, interests, passions.  Where does that go when the titles disappear inside a tablet?  We've already lost that with music, where the album gave way to the CD, and now the iPod.  Look at all those great scenes in 60s TV shows where the man, upon entering the woman's apartment, looks through her albums while she slips into something more comfortable.  One of them might even put a record on the turntable, setting the proper mood.  It just isn't the same with an iPod.

What of the autographed copy?  I'm still not sure about that, how one goes about getting an ebook personalized by the author.  A little thing perhaps, but it still removes a level of intimacy between the author and the reader.  And as someone who hopes to have a book published next year, I'll be curious to see how this plays out.

Wish I'd Written That

At dinner [Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn't. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy."

- Rex Stout about Nero Wolfe, A Right to Die ◙

Wish I'd Written That

What right have you to march in here and ask questions at all? Polite or not?"

"None. It's not a right, it's a liberty. I have no right to ask you to have dinner with me this evening, which might not be a bad idea, but I'm at liberty to, and you're at liberty to tell me you'd rather dine at the automat with a baboon, only that wouldn't be very polite. Also, when I ask if you have any letters from Sarah Yare you're at liberty to tell me to go climb a tree if you find the question ticklish. I might add that I would be at liberty to climb a pole instead of a tree. Have you any letters from Sarah Yare?"

- Rex Stout (as said by Archie Goodwin), Murder Is No Joke. ◙