Book Review: Muller, Tannen und Wolken

Müller, Dr. Phil Karl Friedrich Tannen und Wolken (Firs and Clouds) (1934) A curious book. Fay found it at a yard sale, and bought it for me. The copyright date is significant - one year after Hitler was made Führer by a vote of the Reichstag (that Hitler became dictator by legal means is something that is rarely taught, and never emphasised.) The publisher describes itself as “Volkskunstverlag”, “publisher of folk arts.” This does not refer to naive painting, it refers to the arts of (and about) the Volk, the German people. The racist undertones are deliberate.

Also significant is the author’s academic title – Germans have overvalued such titles for generations, with some justification, since it was the ramping up of secondary and post-secondary education that enabled Germany to speed up its industrial revolution in the 1800s. But the assumption that a man with a D. Phil (and a Leica) will be a better photographer than the ordinary shutterbug is of course nonsense. The photos in this album are second-rate considered as art, and merely average considered as tourist snapshots. They are pleasant enough, and would grace a family album, in which they would serve to recall a hiking holiday. Müller uses all the rules of composition and landscape lighting – trees etc in the foreground to frame the distant vista, white clouds contrasting against the sky (difficult to do with the films of the time), layers of hills fading away to create the illusion of depth. He knows his stuff. But the pictures are banal and ultimately boring. They have some interest as documentation of the rapidly disappearing farm architecture of the region. But they don’t do what even many casual snapshots do: make us see the object with new eyes. They merely confirm the sentimental “Heimatliebe” (love of the homeland) that the Nazis pretended was the essence of patriotism.

What’s interesting is the almost total absence of any modern artifacts - no roads, no cars, no power lines, no agricultural machinery. The Black Forest is presented as an almost medieval landscape of peasant farms and semi-wilderness. Only the few people in modern dress, shown walking away from the camera, indicate that these photos were made in the 20th century. Why this nostalgia for a country life that never existed? In part, this is the debased legacy of Romanticism, the revulsion against modern technology and cities. But since it went further in its kitschiness in Nazi Germany than anywhere else, I think it’s also part of the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden, blood and soil. It’s easier to feel sentimental about the farm, the forest, the mountains, to pretend that this supposedly more virtuous way of life still exists, than to face up to the injustices of corporate capitalism. We have a version of this sentimental claptrap in our own times: the idealisation of the small town. *

Stone Kiss (Book Review)

Faye Kellerman, Stone Kiss (2002)

Decker is asked to help find the missing niece of his half brother’s wife. But when he gets to New York, the family puts him off. He looks up an old nemesis, Chris Donatti, whom he sprung from jail because the evidence had been cooked, and who has become a major supplier of drugs and women. Donatti becomes a key figure in the denouement, and even more entangled with Decker and his family. The family, personal, and business relationships are a tangled mess, not clarified by corrupt cops, religious scruples, and horrific family dysfunction. Donatti is a psychopath, which makes for tension and violence, but when his purposes coincide with Decker’s, he is an ally. He uses violence as a tool, with no particular pleasure.

In fact, the book has a lot of violence – Kellerman is clearly angling for a wider audience. The result is a book that’s very TV, even its elucidation of the sources of evil has that facile psycho-babble that makes so much American TV less than credible. The accounts of Jewish life are, as always, interesting, and I must take them at face value. In the books between the first two (I read the second one) and this one, Decker has discovered his birth family, which was Jewish, so he turns out to be Jewish after all. But he still has close ties to his adoptive family. Etc. These aspects of the narrative are more interesting than the violence, which feels more like a movie than real life. A minor disappointment, despite its swift narrative rhythm. **

Companions on the Road (Book review)

Lee, Tanith Companions on the Road (1975)

This is a quest story. Havor has participated in the destruction of a city, in one of the endless wars of his time and place. He and two others find and steal a chalice of mysterious and very dark powers. It had been used in unspeakable rites by the defeated King and his brother and daughter. Lukon, one of Havor’s comrades dies in the fighting, but not before he gives Havor his savings and enjoins him to bring them to his family, many leagues distant. So Havor, Kachil the thief, and Feluce the corporal of dubious antecedents, set out to fulfill Havor’s vow, and with luck sell the chalice and divide the loot. But ghosts accompany them, and first Kachil and then Feluce die, somehow destroyed in a dream encounter with the daughter of the King who owned the evil vessel. Havor manages to survive, but only because he has fulfilled his vow to Lukon, and in his dream encounter with ghosts pities their spiritually wasted lives and their present condition. He will marry Silsi, Lukon’s sister, and have as contented a life as is possible.

Lee writes a spare but lyrical style, which moves the story forward briskly. She is very good at producing and maintaining an atmosphere of struggle against the weather (wintry), the people (taciturn and unwilling to help), conflict within the little group of three unwilling allies, and a dreamworld that lethally impinges on the waking reality. The characters of course represent the Jungian archetypes, Havor the ego, Kachil the alter ego, Feluce and the ghostly princess the animus and anima. They are well drawn, having about them enough individuality that we care about them as people, yet never forget their roles in a drama that we all know well.

As in all quests, the plot turns on inward growth and increasing knowledge: Havor must learn who he is by surviving tests not only of his physical prowess but more importantly of his moral worth. The intended audience is the middle school child, and I think the book would appeal as much to girls as to boys. At any rate, I will pass it on to Bria and Connor, and see what they think of it. A well done example of its kind. **-½

Book Review: Major Barbara (GBS)

Shaw, George Bernard Major Barbara (1906)

Shaw’s Preface is as outrageously wrongheaded as usual: he loved the sound of his own ideas. His comments on the way the world works are as acutely and cynically accurate as always, but his inferences about how we should deal with it simply miss the mark. He is very good at presenting us with real and lifelike characters, but when he thinks about people he goes awry. It’s as if his intellect and his imagination don’t know of each other’s existence. The play works well, and would be a pleasure to see. The plotting is perhaps a trifle too pat, but that’s GBS for you: he will make his plays demonstrate his ideas, and that’s when the machinery creaks. When he just goes with his imagination, as in the Salvation Army scenes, the results are brilliant, witty, emotionally true, and beautifully paced. ***

Book Review: John Bull's Other Island (GBS)

Shaw, George Bernard John Bull’s Other Island (1907)

I started to read the preface and gave up. GBS was not the best analyst of politics - his notions of how the Irish Question came about and how it should be resolved were shown to miss the point by events. About the only thing he seems to have gotten right was that it would be a protracted and bloody affair if it wasn’t settled quickly.

The one thing GBS never seems to have fully understood was the lure of power for its own sake. (This leads him to make Undershaft a seeker after profit, which is the only serious flaw in Major Barbara. Profit (money) is a means and instrument of power, not and end in itself.) Like many idealistic ideologues, he believed that sweet reason would prevail, if it was made clear enough what the benefits would be. He would not recognise the irony of the Canadian toast, “Peace, order, and good government.”

That sheer bloody-mindedness and paranoid delusions are more potent motives than the desire for peace, prosperity, and lawful order was something he could never see. That’s one reason he (like many other Socialists of the time) kept excusing the excesses of Soviet Russia, for example. He was of course right that the Protestants would have nothing to fear in a Catholic united Ireland, but he couldn’t see, because he couldn’t understand, that religious paranoia would prevent a settlement. He also couldn’t see that the IRA was dominated by psychopaths, who carried on their bloody vendettas, not because they expected politically acceptable results, but because they liked the murder and mayhem (as well as the loot).

So I didn’t read the play. I don’t think I missed anything.**

Book Review: Palm Sunday (Kurt Vonnegut)

Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday (1981) Subtitled "An Autobiographical Collage".

Vonnegut is billed a "America's greatest satirist", and he may well be. But I find him a gentle and melancholy clown rather than a savage Juvenalian or a mocking Horatian. That his books were attacked as obscene seems almost unimaginable in these days of internet porn, but obscenity and vulgarity were never the real reasons for the attacks. Vonnegut has the gift of telling unpalatable truths baldly, and that's what people disliked and loved him for. In this book he assembles bits and pieces from his occasional output, stitching them together with commentary and narrative, some of it quoted from his Uncle John Rauch's family history. Rauch means "smoke", one wonders how much of his story is just so much smoke and mirrors.

The theme that Vonnegut refines out of the dross and breccia of his and our messy lives is that we are lonely because we have lost our extended family, our tribe. We are highly social animals (some scientists argue that our mathematical ability is a side effect of the ability to remember large sets of people and their relationships - kinship is a pattern, a kinship chart is a graph, graphs are representations of sets, and there you are – arithmetic derives from geometry.) We need family, relatives, friends. Barrack Obama's recent success rested in large part on his ability to evoke the American nation as a family. The Republican emphasis on individual responsibility too easily becomes disdain for those who cannot make it on their own - and we all know that we all, especially the self-styled individual successes, depend on each other for whatever material comforts, security, and success falls to our lot. I think Ayn Rand was stupidly wrong: no one can achieve any kind of material success without the (almost entirely anonymous) co-operation of vast numbers of other people, who operate the systems that produce the goods and services that the individual needs to achieve his success.

Vonnegut goes on to say that we need commonly accepted myths, communal narratives that give meaning to our lives. Alone, we cannot have such myths. (It seems to me that the Horatio Alger story has devolved into one of brutal competition, but Alger's stories were founded on notions of mutual help and co-operation as much as on the doctrine of hard work and honesty.) The solitary individual who tries to find his meaning in power and wealth, in acquisition of goods as the signs of success, will find instead an unbearable loneliness. The nuclear family, with its assumption that two people can be all-in-all for each other, fails abysmally. "And they lived happily ever after" is a cruel fantasy. (Keep in mind that in the fairy tales, the marriage of the commoner and the princess occurs in a well-ordered mutually supportive society, the kingdom that the happy couple will inherit.) I think Vonnegut is right.

Well written in Vonnegut's laconic style, a pleasure to read, if not always a pleasure to contemplate. ***

Book Review: Breaking the Maya Code

Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code (1992)

Coe begins with a survey of the history of writing systems, with a glance at linguistics. His main story tells of the rediscovery of the pitifully few codices salvaged by a few of the Spanish friars, and the slow and steady recording of the inscriptions found on stone and pottery. Early students of these Mayan remains suggested that like all writing systems they were phonetic. A Spanish bishop, Landa, even recorded what he understood of the Mayan alphabet, which provided the key to the eventual deciphering of the script. Like all ideographic scripts, it's a mix of logograms (signs that represent words or morphemes), and phonetic signs that indicate the pronunciation of the logograms. The phonetic signs are also used to spell out words (for example, foreign names, which are meaningless in the native language). Thus a character could be a logogram or combination; or a logogram with one or more phonetic signs; or a combination of phonetic signs. Like the Egyptian scribes, Mayans used all three methods interchangeably, sometimes for aesthetic reasons, sometimes perhaps for word play or merely personal preference.

Coe is very good at sketching the character and life of each of his protagonists, and at summarising their research and its results. He tells s story of clashing personalities, professional envy, ego-involved clinging to obvious errors, and even interference by ideological politicians. The deciphering of the code was the work of many hands and minds (one a teenager), took longer that it needed to, and shows that academic infighting is as nasty and mean-spirited as any. In the end, we recognise an immense intellectual achievement, which will enable the (partial) recovery of Mayan history and culture.

That culture was bloody and cruel. I've been bemused by people who profess to see beauty in the Mayan characters and sculptures. I've always thought they expressed some of the most evil impulses of the human spirit, and had no desire (as I did when I looked a Egyptian art) of being transported back in time to live a few days or weeks in that society. Eric Thompson, one the most assiduous Mayanists, believed that the Maya were a society ruled by priest-kings, mystics who cultivated science and spiritual wisdom. I can't understand how anyone looking at the art could believe this. The most common expression on the faces is a sneer. The Mayan elite clearly believed themselves to be superior to the peasants who fed them, and gloried in humiliating their adversaries. The images of the gods show monsters. Mayan mythology seems to be death-obsessed - the majority of the gods were gods of the underworld.

Thompson believed too that the Mayan script was ideographic, "representing ideas directly". He should have known better – no other script anywhere in the world does this; all are phonetic. "Picture writing" exists only in the form of comic strip-like drawings, and both intuition and records of how they were used show that such drawings were used as mnemonic devices: they were not scripts. But scripts are not comic strips. What's oddest about Thompson and his like (and there were many scholars with similar attitudes) is that they thought they could decipher the inscriptions without knowledge of the Mayan languages, and with minimal knowledge of their culture. But that knowledge was available: despite their generally arrogant assumptions about their cultural superiority, and the truth of their religion, the Spanish invaders did leave reasonably accurate accounts of what they observed of the indigenous peoples' lifestyles. To make little or no use of these resources, to make no attempt to learn the language, to ignore the results of comparative philology and anthropology, all these indicate a man obsessed with a vision of some idealised world, and locked into a belief that he had found an actual example. No other interpretations could be admitted as valid or true. Yet oddly, Thompson did from time to time acknowledge that such facts and results were likely true. He just didn't incorporate them into his view of the Maya.

Not that Thompson was alone, nor is his use of anthropological studies unique. Think of the not so distant characterisation of the !Kung as a pacific, innocent tribal people, untouched and uncorrupted by the evils of civilisation. Yet statistical analysis shows that their murder rate is much higher than that of any civilized society. The desire to believe in an innocent stage of human society is strong; the myth of Eden expresses its essence.

One of the perennial questions about archaeology is its value. What good is it to know about long-vanished cultures? What practical value is there to knowing that the Mayan kings not only tortured and killed their adversaries, but also subjected themselves to horrifically painful rituals, some of which must have left permanent scars and impairments? The answer is, none. Except perhaps to help us understand what humans are capable of. The Maya were cruel and bloodthirsty, as were the Aztecs, the Sumerians, the Stalinists, in fact all totalitarian states (and all states tend towards totalitarianism.) But they were also accomplished mathematicians and astronomers, and had a far more subtle and accurate method of counting the days than we have.

In any case, we are blessed and cursed with an ability to produce far more surplus wealth than we can reasonably consume. Our preferred method for consuming that surplus is to destroy it in wars. Far better to use it for adventures of the human spirit. Space exploration is cheap compared to war. Archaeology is cheaper still. Each of these, and many other impractical endeavours, satisfies curiosity and intellectual and spiritual yearnings. That's more than enough justification, I think. I know that perhaps only a few thousand people will care that the Mayan script is now partially readable, and that our intuitions about their way of life will be more or less confirmed as their history is unravelled. That's OK. All interests are minority interests.