The Satanic Verses

I'm reading -- for the second time -- Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. I'm about half-way through this second reading. I have two things to say about it at the moment. The first is a politico/religious comment and a bit of a shot at the Muslim faith. So, all you Muslims out there, be forewarned.

The second is not a politico/religious comment.

The first is this: even without knowing a whole lot about Islam, it's not hard to see why the mullahs might have been pissed off at Rushdie. The Satanic Verses is highly irreverent, possibly to the point of blasphemy, I don't know. Rushdie implies that the divine revelation of the Quran had its more temporal and political inspirations as well. And his portrayal of Muhammed (may peace be upon him) is not very flattering.

On the other hand, off the top of my head I can't think of any other contemporary religion that has the arrogance to issue a public threat or death sentence, as it appears the fatwah against Rushdie was. All over a bit of writing. Bad enough when governments think they have the right to imprison someone for their opinions. But for a religion? My question would be this: Who appointed you god?

(And yes, I'm well aware that the Roman Catholic religion is not exactly lily white when it comes to this sort of thing. But it's quite a while since the pope passed a death sentence...We are supposed to be evolving into beings of compassion and light, no?)

So, my response to the leaders of Islam: get over it, and get over yourselves. The faithful won't be swayed by writing like this. And infidels, like me, don't care. We just like a good read.

Which brings me to my second point. Rushdie is one of those writers who makes me cry out in anguish and envy, "Goddam! I wish I could write like that!"

Here's a brief passage. It would take too long to explain the context, but you don't really need context to appreciate this:

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated -- nearly -- into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted.

Much of Rushdie's writing is virtuoso performance, a romp through Indian-accented English and you can't help but admire the pure delight he takes in telling tall tales.

Truly a Proustian Effort

OK, so I have this book. Well, three books actually. The three "definitive" volumes of Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. En Anglais, The Remembrance of Things Past, or more correctly, In Search of Lost Time.

(An inadvertent typo just gave me an idea for a spy series along the lines of Ian Fleming or Graham Greene -- Remembrance of Things Psst!)

(Or a documentary about how the good old Gliberal government of good old Ontariario is once again screwing its loyal but phlegmatic citizens -- Remembrance of Things PST (ie. provincial sales tax).) (That could be a whole other post.)

To get back to the epic at hand -- Proust. This book. This tome. These tomes.

Volume One, which includes Swann's Way and In a Budding Grove, comprised just over one thousand pages. The remaining volumes are about the same length. For some reason, when I began reading this, I wrote a note on a piece of paper that I had started reading it in June, 1991. I finished it today. Exactly nineteen years. I may not live long enough to finish Volumes Two and Three.

Of course, I didn't spend nineteen years continuously, nor even continually. In fact, I began Vol. 1 more than once. The last time was January, 2004. I began it then and left it for some time and then started again where I had left off probably some time last year. Or maybe I actually started again from the beginning. But this time I was determined to finish it and I did.

Proust, like Joyce's Ulysses, is notoriously difficult to read. Like Faulkner, Proust tends to write extremely long sentences. Therefore, very few paragraph breaks. Lots of pages of solid print. Convoluted thought processes. Not much actual dialogue.

You may ask me what the book is about. I haven't the faintest idea any more. Except that it seems to be Proust's attempt to put on paper every convoluted thought process a man might engage in throughout the course of his life, in the finest detail possible, including all conditions, conclusions, concussions, confabulations, contradictions, concessions, and conniptions.

No detail escapes Proust's verbose perusal. Sort of. For a man who wants to tell every little thing that goes through his head while he's trying to figure out how to get a girl to kiss him, he neglects in the most irritating way to inform you how old the central character is at any given time, or the girl, or anybody else. They are either older...or younger. His grandmother, for example, is older.

Here's an example of what I mean. I remember the last part of the book best -- for reasons which should be obvious. The character (Proust himself, let's say) is plotting a romance with a young girl named Albertine. Or perhaps it's Andrée, a different young girl, but a friend of Albertine's. It all depends on how things work out. Or whether they work out. Now, one of the male friends/acquaintances of Albertine and Andrée smokes cigars. So that puts him at an approximate age. But the girls themselves seem to act like precocious schoolgirls, and Proust's description of the campaign to win Albertine's lips sounds remarkably juvenile or adolescent. I mean, it just drips with teenage angst.

The problem is that this character has already had one love affair, which was his first, with a girl named Gilberte. OK, first loves could come at twelve or thirteen, no? So is this guy like fifteen? Or eighteen?

And just to make it more complicated, in the early book, Proust spends much time with M. Swann in love. Now, M. Swann is no teenager, but a grown man well known in French society circles. Except that his convoluted thought processes are not much more mature than those of our lovesick protagonist.

Anway, the last part of Vol. 1 was a bit of an easier read because it seemed to move along more quickly in its obsessive way, but I think I'll be having a bit of a rest before I tackle Vol. 2.

Really, when you think about it, writing this novel killed Proust. Best not to have it kill its readers too.

The Teachings of Rasta Zen Mastah Soon Come #0001

A student came to Rasta Zen Mastah Soon Come and said, "What is enlightenment?"

Mastah Soon Come replied, "I an' I be flyin' mon."

The student bowed and left the room.

Nonie Crete at the Registry Theatre

Nonie, Eugene Rea on guitar, Ken Brown on bass, Michelle Josef on drums and HWSRN on keys.

I Wanna Have Rachel Maddow's Baby!

I'm not a regular watcher of MSNBC or Rachel Maddow, but occasionally I get directed in some nefarious way to a segment of her broadcast, and every time I do, I fall in love again! And she seems to be getting better with age too! I love her gleeful scorn directed at pompous asses and arrogant SOBs. I love the way she punctures rhetoric and manipulative discourse. Sometimes she gives miniature lectures, like this one, demonstrating how it's done...all the lies, the hype, the misdirection, the manipulation...all the techniques used to prevent us ordinary peeples from discovering the real truth or even learning how to uncover the real truth....

Really, I wanna have her baby!



Alas, dear friends, that is a desire destined to be forever frustrated, since Rachel is a lesbian. I certainly don't hold that against her. Because the odds of getting an opportunity to hold it against her are astronomical. So I guess I'll just admire her from afar and dream of the unborn children we never could have had...

Werds By The Pound Pt. III

Now here's a real horrorshow raskazz that I've owned for a good long raz. My appy polly loggies if you don't kopat my govoreeting, O my brothers and sisters. You will just have to kupet it and read it, or itty over to the biblio and borrow it. Have yourself a tass of the old moloko-plus while you are at it.

And that's about all I can manage of the Nadsat language, with which A Clockwork Orange is replete. From the very first page, you know you are in for it:

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

And what you're in for is a taste of the old ultra-violence of disaffected youth...in the case of Alex, a case of love of violence for its own sake. And the follow-up is the violence perpetrated by the state for the purpose of preventing the violence of the disaffected youth.

I'm oversimplifying, but in these days of lawn order politicians, minimum sentencing and so-called stiff penalties for every little thing, oversimplifying fits very well with the zeitgeist.

Alex and his droogs commit several heinous crimes, and then, because Alex was a little too trusting of his droogs and miscalculated their loyalty, he gets nabbed by the millicents and sentenced to prison. And eventually submits to an experimental treatment whereby he is rendered incapable of violence. The very thought makes him violently ill. As an unintended side-effect, the treatment also robs him of his only redeeming feature, the love of music.

And then he gets released. Within hours his negative karma catches up with him. He meets his old droogs and gets the crap kicked out of him. He takes refuge with a previous victim who then turns him over to some political types who use him for their own purposes. He gets thrown out of the house of his own pee & em. He attempts suicide.

The bleeding hearts get themselves in an uproar and force the government to restore him to his original condition, an ultra-violent lover of Beethoven.

The end.

In the end, Burgess offers an indictment of both sides. Beware the demagogues and simple-solution advocates. Things are not that simple. What was done to Alex was an outrage (even tho he more or less agreed to it.) Put as oversimply as possible, the state has no right to remove one's humanity (limited as that humanity might be.)

But the other end of it is just as unsatisfactory. In the end, Alex reverts to his original state:

Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo [of Beethoven's glorious Ninth] I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.

But jolly old England was not a safer place.

***

My copy of A Clockwork Orange doesn't quite predate the movie, but it does predate what later became the iconic images. I looked, but couldn't seem to find online an edition with a cover like the one above. So I scanned it and offer it to you. And in case you don't remember, here's what came out of the great success of the film:

Often when a book is made into a movie, the film doesn't quite live up to the book. That is not the case here. Stanley Kubrick crafted yet another masterpiece with A Clockwork Orange, and made Malcolm McDowell's career for him. Kubrick often managed to be ahead of the curve. In this case, among other things, the soundtrack by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos broke new ground with its use of electronic music. Electronic Beethoven what a concept!

Many years later I heard an interview with Wendy (previously Walter) Carlos, who described the incredibly painstaking process of creating this complex music with the (relatively) primitive, altho powerful, electronic instruments of the day, in particular the Moog.

Some of you may remember the early Moog synthesizers. They looked like telephone exchanges with a keyboard attached, and to change the sounds you had to plug things in here and put them over there and twiddle the dials, change the amplitude, the frequency, the wave form, and then unplug that so you could put it in this until the right sound came out, and then you had to get the notes right. Nowadays, sez HWSRN, you press one key and the arpeggiator does the work.

April is Po-tree Month

Part I:
You may not have noticed, but April is national po-tree month. I'm not quite sure which nation we're talking about here. Maybe the nation of Murricanaduh. I dunno. I'm pretty sure it's Canaduh. And the US too. If not, so what? You don't need an excuse for po-tree.

So, in that spirit I present a pome from an old dead white guy who achieved a good measure of fame for his po-tree, name of William Butler Yeats. This comes from the Oxford Book of English Verse:

Where My Books Go

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken'd or starry bright.

***

Furthermore, in the spirit of national po-tree month, April, I too have a pome, inspired by this work of Yeats. It goes something like this:

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must span the ocean 'lectronic
Either ether or Uther & come to rest
In the Dark Age of the Dragon's Pen;
Or colonize minute interstices
'Mid rampant ignorant superstishies;
Or grind themselves in plates tectonic
Between Scylla whole reading & Charybdis phonic.
None may pass the spellcheck test
& retain the rubric "Larry's Best"
Lest philistines gobble clash & groan
And somehow make this pome their own.

***

I think I could not demonstrate with greater clarity why William Butler Yeats is in the Oxford Book of English Verse and Larry is in the Yoni School for Wayward Poets carrying on his Mental Blog.

---

Part II:
As proprietor of this here blog, Mental, I get the odd communication from people in the biz. This communication I am about to communicate to you was not so odd, however.

I received an email from Michael Douma who has developed a website called Poetry Through the Ages. I encourage you, if you are interested in po-tree, to visit this site. It has an interesting feature which Mr. Douma calls a nodemap...what I believe is a Java-powered version of "clustering", a technique with which many writers will be familiar. (There is now at least one computer version of this clustering technique called FreeMind, which I have used. It's a way cool -- and useful -- app. Poetry Through the Ages uses SpicyNodes, a web-based app.) What you can do with this map is explore different areas of the website by clicking on the balloons.

And there are many different areas to explore: the history of poetry; different forms both classical and modern; obscure forms; popular forms; notes about the biz of po-tree. There's even a shop where you can shop. And of course links to other resources.

Personally, I plan to revisit the villanelle.