The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion (Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, pen name for Bruce Frederick Cummings) is another of those minor classics I learned about by reading Noel Perrin's A Reader's Delight. It deserves to be among the classics of English Literature, and I'll try to make a case for why that is.
          Barbellion (to use the pen name) was a self-taught British naturalist, born in 1889. He passed the test for an appointment to the British Museum, scoring higher than his rivals who had been trained at Oxford and Cambridge. He was also a gifted writer, and might have been the Stephen Jay Gould of his age, except that he developed MS, and died at the end of his third decade.
          He kept a journal, from which this book is an extract, published 1919, just months before he died. Two more volumes followed this one, though he died before they got into print. He began the journal in 1903, and included all sorts of observations in it. His naturalist studies, his observations about people and the times, and his repeated self-castigation and self-analysis.
          Barbellion didn't move among the rich, the famous, or the powerful. What gives this journal its interest is its overwhelming honesty. He describes the mixed motivations we all have, our doubts, our failures to hew to our own ideals. He also shares enthusiasms and joys and poetic moments. He soars to questions of all mankind, and swoops to the discussion of specific parts of obscure insects.
          Some samples. He met a fellow whose specialty was the study of lice:
          "The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in Elysium.  He is not married."
         Barbellion lived in the era when doctors were not inclined to give their patients bad news, but would give it to the family. So when his MS was diagnosed, he wasn't told. He struggled with declining health for several years, and enormous mental anguish as his ambitions grew more unattainable, but not knowing the cause. His family knew, even his fiancée was told, but not him. He got married, thinking his wife probably didn't know the full extent of his problems, even though she had been given an interview with his doctor. The opposite was the truth, she knew and he didn't. Then World War I's draft came, and he had to go in for his physical. His doctor gave him a sealed envelope to give to the medical board, but when he actually went in the doctor already knew about his case, dismissed him after merely listening to his chest, and never collected the envelope.
          On the way home in the train, Barbellion opened the letter. Still, it was another year before he discovered that his wife not only already knew about his condition, but had known all along. (Note that he didn't tell her, himself, for all that time.)
          Ah, those were different times.
          Times with Zeppelins, too, bombing him in London. I've read many first-person accounts of the Blitz and the missile attacks on London in WWII, but this book made me realize that I've only read secondary accounts of the Zeppelin raids of the Great War.
          Here's another moment in history, as it appears in the Journal:

June 3, 1916.

This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a villager at about 6.30 a.m., '... battle ... and we lost six cruisers'. This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in the Daily News that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the railway station, the Morning Post was more cheerful, even reassuring, and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable indecisive action. We breathe once more.

June 4.

It has now become a victory.

Barbellion's journal is partly exceptional for not having been edited into consistency, or to make a single great point. He is full of contradictions, and that's the art of the thing.
         Which means that this isn't a book for readers who seek only to be entertained, or to be carefully "handled" by the writer. This is for those readers who like a bit of a mental challenge, who want to experience much, and then think for themselves.
          I was deeply amused by one error in the copy I read of this, the original Penguin Books reprint. Barbellion included a false last line in the book, after an October 21, 1917 entry of one word, "Self-disgust." and a FINIS. He had the bracketed phrase "Barbellion died on December 31." put there, on whatever impulse possessed him at the time. Actually he lived until October 22, 1919. Curiously, the back cover of my paperback mashed the two together, and authoritatively asserts that he died December 31, 1919.  !!
         One last sample, from near the end:

...'It is easy to be cynical,' someone admonished me. 'Unfortunately it is,' I said.

We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centered even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman's reserve, I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others. And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. 'To the pure all things are pure', whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people's motes.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
Company Aytch, Sam Watkins

          We've been reading The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes, illustrated by Laura Carlin, to see if it would be a suitable gift for certain young individuals. This is the children's story known as The Iron Man, in the UK, but changed for the American audience to avoid confusion with the comics hero, Iron Man.
          The wife says yes, it would make a suitable gift, and I agree. Though I can't help but worry about how the farmers will be able to afford to replace their tractors. Ooops, I'm giving away the plot.
          The book is actually made of a number of shorter episodes, involving the arrival of the Iron Giant, and what the community involved does to deal with it. Each tale expands the scope of the affected community, until the whole world is at risk in the final episode. I won't give away whether humanity survives, but I warn you not to bet on it.
          The style of the illustrations in this one is unusual, and intriguing. Some pages have no illustrations, some illustrations stand alone, or nearly alone. There are foldout pages. Many of the art pages primarily set a mood, rather than telling a story; others teem with detail.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
Company Aytch, Sam Watkins

          I started When Red is Black, Qiu Xiaolong's third Shanghai Police Bureau novel, on my recent trip to New Orleans, but once I got back it went on the shelf, mostly. I finished in widely-spaced snippets.
          I've got two more of the series on my pile, and another on my to-buy list, and they continue to please me.
          This one follows Chief Inspector Chen, and Detective Yu, as they try to unravel the murder of Yin, a writer and former subject of "reeducation" during the Cultural Revolution. She was the young lover of a famous poet, and is someone the Security forces keep an eye on. So, of course, the case has complicated political ramifications.
          While there is a police case, these books are really novels about dedicated people trying to cope with a country that keeps changing all around them. Yu's promised apartment is taken away at the very beginning of the book, and Chen gets roped in to a lucrative translation project for a land developer. That job comes with interesting, and inexplicable, perks.
          These novels are a window into a different world, and the stories are quite interesting. My only negative remark is that from time to time (but not too often) the dialogue turns into an exchange of little speeches, rather than something people would actually say. I notice it, but it doesn't stop me from wanting to read the next in the series.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
Company Aytch, Sam Watkins

          Another book I'll be using for the World War II class is The Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two, by Ronald Story. It's a pretty good little Atlas, mostly set up as a map or two on the right-hand page, and text on the left-hand page; in 50 sections.  It needed 60, and it needed more careful editing.
          Problems: many of the color keys don't actually match the map. Some keys lack the full set of colors and symbols. Some maps contradict the text. The map of the ships in Pearl Harbor, colored to indicate which were sunk, which damaged, which ignored, is riddled with errors.
          And the book ignores Scandinavia and the Balkans. No map of the invasion of Denmark and Norway, or the battles there (to include significant sea battles). No map of the invasion of Albania. No map of Nazi advances into the Balkans, or Britain's adventures in Greece. No map of the Bismarck chase or the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales.
          The text does refer to some of these events, and is generally good. I'm irritated by some of the cheerleading. The French get rather generously treated, with the Resistance seeming to offset their collaboration. Hmmm.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
When Red is Black, Qiu Xiaolong

          Also finished while on the trip to New Orleans was one of the books that I'll be teaching from in the Fall, in the WWII class: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher R. Browning. I had been warned by a student who took the course previously (when it was an 8-week, online class) that it was "boring" and "the same thing over and over." I found it a bit dry, and it's true that repeated mass murders can seem awfully familiar after a bit, but I wonder if it was the accelerated pace of the class that was part of the problem. The book is neither very long, nor very difficult. It covers the material fairly succinctly, though it is emotionally distanced, because the author did not seek out the members of the unit for further interviews; everything was from old police investigations.
          The interest of this book, as a part of the tale of Nazi atrocities, is that the unit was not a self-selected SS killing machine; but was a collection of policemen and conscripted workers and businessmen, who were meant to be occupation police. They were reassigned, however, to mass killings of Poles and Jews in the Lublin area of Poland. The book tries to piece together how it is that these regular folks were turned into fairly efficient killers.
          There is an afterword, addressing the controversy between Browning and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the much better known book, Willing Executioners. I have not read that book, so my impression of the debate is questionable. Browning's portrayal of Goldhagen's argument suggests that I would not prefer Goldhagen ... but then that's what one expects when hearing only half the debate. (The key to the debate is that both authors concentrated on the same extensive set of prosecutorial interviews, but characterize the nature of what happened in almost opposite ways.)
          While I appreciate the scholarship that went into this study, I found myself regretting the narrowness of its scope. I would have liked to see later interviews; or at the least an exploration into what the psychological effects, long-term, were from being made to kill in this fashion. In many of the units involved in the Final Solution, the psychological casualties among the killers were quite high. This book mentions the morale problems, but not in detail, and not with any systematic analysis of the post-war results.
          The book addresses an important part of WWII history, so it makes sense as part of the syllabus. It'll be interesting to see what the students see in it.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two, Ronald Story
When Red is Black, Qiu Xiaolong

          Also on my recent trip, I read the entirety of Jaspreet Singh's novel, Chef. This was warmly reviewed somewhere, and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize; but a chief reason I picked it up is that I'm particularly underexposed to writing from India these days, and certainly haven't read a Sikh author for some time.
          It's set in Kashmir, in a "present" timeline; and a backstory timeline, when the main character was younger, during the Siachen Conflict. The character is a cook who once served a General in Kashmir, and has been summoned from retirement to cater the General's daughter's wedding. We learn that the General and Chef had a falling out, and we're looking for a resolution.
          This is a good literary novel, with some lush writing, and strong use of metaphor. I can mildly recommend it, and I'm planning to read Singh's collection of short stories, Seventeen Tomatoes. However, this book seems a bit unbalanced, and it bounces around from subject to subject enough that it almost doesn't gel.
          The book also poked a sore spot of mine. Most of the recent "literary" works I've read seem to turn on inappropriate sexual behavior involving people of different classes. This is not one of my major concerns in life, and I find myself asking, "Is there nothing else to write about?? Is this what literature is??  Just this??"
          To return to the novel: a key thread of the book is a character (based on a couple of real incidents) from Pakistan, who was arrested as a spy or infiltrator. It seems that she actually had tried to commit suicide by throwing herself in the river, and she washed ashore in India, and was promptly jailed, and beaten and abused. She has a child as a result of her treatment, and when India finally admits she doesn't belong in jail, Pakistan refuses to allow the child into Pakistan.
          It appears that this woman's story was meant to be the central event of the novel; but that wasn't my reading experience. It seemed important, but also peripheral somehow. This is where, I suspect, the structure of the thing weakened it.
          However, I repeat, I enjoyed the experience of reading the book; enjoyed reading about an unfamiliar culture and setting; enjoyed the metaphor of a cook who must cook for Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, without giving offense.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two, Ronald Story

          While we were in New Orleans, I took a bit of a break from school reading, and enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's The Full Cupboard of Life. It's the fifth in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, and just as delightful as the first four.
          Mma Ramotswe is given the job of vetting the four suitors of a rich businesswoman; Mma Makutsi faces moving to a new house, and the lack of a suitor; Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni verges on the Big Jump, and fights off a threat to all mechanics in Botswana; and Mma Potokwane has to raise funds for the Orphan Farm.
          It also seems that everyone is threatening to write a book.
          The book (like the series) is upbeat, good-hearted, humorous and delightful. Tears were shed at one point.

CBsIP:  The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two, Ronald Story

          The last American Lit text for the term was Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson. I reviewed it in October, so I'll let that blog speak for itself.

CBsIP: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Oxford Concise Historical Atlas of World War Two, Ronald Story

          To brush up on the Norse for my workshop at the Nebula Weekend, I read through The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings, by John Haywood. I can recommend it. These short historical atlases have become a Really Useful addition to home reference libraries. I have the Penguin one for Ancient Rome, and am about to read the Oxford one on WWII. I find myself going to these things first, when refreshing my memory on relevant subjects.
          I quibble with Haywood's odd notion that the Jomsvikings were "legendary" (he does this while accepting the rest of the information from the same sagas as fact); and with his decision that the Normans who continued to raid and invade in the Mediterranean were somehow "not Vikings" in any real sense. These are issues of judgment and definition, though. Otherwise I found this very useful, and it generated half a dozen lines of further research for me.
          One of the intriguing sections was the maps of Greenland and the far North, indicating the location of the individual Norse farmsteads in Greenland, and the artifacts that have been discovered in the High Arctic.
          More useful to employ alongside the sagas of the Heimskringla and the like are the maps of various eras of raids and conquests. When the tactic is raiding, then going back to sea and moving a hundred miles and landing again, then driving through the interior for a while, then going back to sea ... it can be very hard to understand what's happening in larger terms. Maps help a lot with these episodic campaigns.
          Great pictures in this, too, even though the selection is, perforce, limited.

CBsIP: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
Edda, Snorri Sturluson

          The second-to-last American Lit text for the term is Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. I'd read it before, but this time I used the new version with the "Afterword" (which is, curiously, not listed on the copyright page) that is a bit of a stitch. (The discussion of how it was written, and all the post-movie cultural results, is priceless.)
          The other section of American Lit has assigned this book, too. No surprise, it's full of good, memorable lines and moments. It's sly, it's satire, it's Joe's Dripping Bile Duct.
          I know this, because Tyler knows this.

CBsIP: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings, John Haywood
Edda, Snorri Sturluson

          I've been reading some good books lately, but because some of the time I'm only doing partial re-reads for my Literature class, I haven't been listing them here. I should mention two, though, because they are always worth reminding people about.
          First is Bernard Malamud's The Natural, which I reviewed last year. I loved the parts of it I re-read, and I strongly recommend it. Some amazingly poetic writing, and an unusual anti-hero work.
          Second, and even more strongly recommended, is Norman Maclean's novella "A River Runs through It", most readily available in the collection of the same name. (I don't get to claim a completed title, because I didn't re-read the other stories in this collection this time.) To put it simply, "A River Runs Through It" rivals "Billy Budd" for best American novella, and "Heart of Darkness" for best novella in the English language. It is poetic, powerful, psychologically accurate, mythic, and it puts bait fishermen in their place.
          Which brings me to the latest book for class, which I did finish. Tim O'Brien's classic, The Things They Carried, is just as good the third time around as it was the first two. I was interested in the student reaction, which turned out to be  overwhelmingly positive.
          What is especially interesting about O'Brien's masterpiece is the strategy of making a sort-of novel out of linked, but disparate, short pieces. Some are short stories, some are vignettes, some are almost essays, one is a pastiche. Most of them stand alone, like any short story; yet the book feels like a unified work, and is carefully structured, actually.

CBsIP: (decaying stacks of student manuscripts)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher R. Browning
The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings, John Haywood

          I finished Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, by John Watts De Peyster yesterday, and it has been my ten-pages-a-day quota book for several weeks. Frankly, I don't think I could have tolerated reading it any faster. It's a pretty badly written book.
          Why did I read it, then, you ask? Well, Kearny had an interesting life, so it should have been an interesting biography. And De Peyster was his cousin, his sometime military aide, and an interesting character himself. So I read it for historical interest (I couldn't find another bio of Kearny), and because it is sometimes interesting to read a bad book to understand why some things fade quickly from the bookshelves.
          Phil Kearny was a cavalry officer in the 1830s, and he was assigned to visit the cavalry school in France, in order to see how they did things over there. This was necessary because the U.S. had only recently invented a Cavalry, and had essentially no experience. Kearny, and others, went; and he volunteered to go along on a campaign in Algeria against bandits and revolutionaries there, so he saw combat. Later he also joined the French army in Italy, and fought in the famous battle of Solferino.
          Between those two foreign events, he fought in the Mexican War, and he lost his left arm as the result of a charge by his dragoons up to the very gates of Mexico City. Actually, he was shot as he pulled back, but the charge is famous.
          When the Civil War broke out, he was not called back into service. He helped raise some units of volunteers in New York, but the NY militia declined to offer him a command. The State of New Jersey decided to offer him a command, and so he became a Volunteer Officer in the war, and served mostly under McClellan's command.  He fought in several battles of the Peninsular Campaign, then with Pope at Second Bull Run. He was killed, soon thereafter, at Chantilly.
          De Peyster, Kearny's cousin, is an interesting character, too. He wrote a prophetic series of articles in The Army and Navy Journal which claimed that loose order (skirmish order) needed to become the battle formation for infantry, due to the greater killing capacity of modern weapons. This was adopted by some commanders in the Civil War, and in later wars, but didn't really become standard in the US Army until World War II. His articles were translated into several languages, and had the effect of causing the adoption of this tactic in several European armies.
          De Peyster did many beneficial things for the public, as well. He made historic contributions to the development of fire departments, among other things. But, it also seems he was a bit of a crank (see the wikipedia article), and it shows throughout this book.
          The writing of this book is so "bad" by modern tastes, that it's hard to tell (without reading other books of his) how he could have been so widely published in his day.  He wrote numerous top-selling works. But this biography of his cousin is bad. Really bad.
          The first problem is that De Peyster cannot, cannot, will not, simply cannot stick to the subject. He constantly digresses from what he's saying about Kearny in order to compare him to a dozen different people in history, and then digresses again into a discussion of the specific cases in the life of that other person, long dead, that led to the comparison. The result is that he buries what might have been said about Kearny under non-pertinent information.
          He also begins each chapter, and also fills the text and footnotes, with scores of quotations from books about other generals, or other things, that would be apropos if written about Kearny, but they actually aren't. He sometimes puts Kearny's name in brackets after the name of the person it's actually about, and if a comment about another character is included, then we get brackets with the name of the comparative character in there as well.  Later De Peyster gets in a fight with his editor over length restrictions (yes, he makes snippy remarks about the editor IN THE PAGES OF THE PUBLISHED BOOK), but he could easily have said what needed to be said, if only he'd left out all this impedimenta of useless quotation.  I kid you not, maybe a quarter or more of the text is quotes that have nothing to do with the subject.
          Just to make my point, opening to the middle of the book, Chapter XIX, "The Second Advance to Manassas", we find a series of quotes: an unnamed poem which I suspect he wrote himself, Capt. Blake's "Three Years in the Army"; Richard III, Scott's "Marmion", Titus Andronicus, Richard III (again), Virgil, and, one more time, Titus Andronicus.
          De Peyster also has axes to grind about many things, and he keeps cramming them into the text. I am, literally, reminded of Mr. Dick's problems with the head of Charles I.  De Peyster hated McClellan (as did Kearny, who had to serve under him), so he constantly digresses about McClellan's faults.  This leads to a whole chapter on the First Battle of Bull Run, which would be fine, if Kearny had fought in that battle.  BUT KEARNY WASN'T EVEN IN THE ARMY THEN.  He was training New Jersey troops, under a militia commission.
          What makes this rant about Bull Run even worse, is that IT ISN'T EVEN ABOUT BULL RUN.  Instead it's a catalog of historic routs from all through history, and I guess that's supposed to lessen the shame of this one.  Beats me.  But he digresses from his own digression.  Did I say he can't stick to his subject, even when he isn't sticking to his subject?
          De Peyster thinks Hooker and Pope were underappreciated and maligned, so he is constantly stopping his story to discuss them, instead.  He's got some other weird historical ideas (like thinking that the Governor of St. Helena treated Napoleon well), and he stops to tell us those.  He starts a sentence that should be about Kearny, but then he brings up Bayard, and that brings up something else, and he never gets back to Kearny.
          My summary of the style is in my notes: "He spends more time writing about what he isn't writing about than what he is."
          Later on, one discovers another purpose behind this book, and perhaps the reason for its shape.  It seems that De Peyster, nominally a General of volunteers, but not given a command or staff position, was writing articles and letters telling everybody in the Union Army what to do, probably with the same endless citations of historical precedents to prove his point.  He was briefly (at the battle of Williamsburg) on Kearny's staff, and got mentioned and praised in Kearny's report.  We learn this because De Peyster quotes the report, and doesn't extract that part (as almost any gentleman would).  He then quotes letters from Kearny to himself in which Kearny says, in effect, "You may have invented that strategy first, and written a letter to X about it, but now it's "his" strategy.  Maybe he didn't reply to your letter because he didn't want to tip his hand..." which tells us that he was trying to tell De Peyster to lay off.  De Peyster doesn't get it, and publishes the letter to show that he doesn't get it.
          So this book was De Peyster's excuse to say, "I told you so."  To say, "Kearny was a great general, he should have been in charge, and I was his advisor. I played wargames with him as a child, and so I trained him."
          The crank syndrome may have been a family trait.  It seems Kearny, though terribly solicitous of his troops, could be a jerk with his fellow officers.  At Second Bull Run he got an aide captured, by insisting that a nearby house wasn't in the hands of the enemy, despite the aide's assurances that he had ridden by it and seen the Confederates there. Kearny insisted they go over and see, and the aide got him to agree to let him (the aide) ride 50 yards ahead. The result was the aide was captured, and Kearny lived a few more days.  Kearny died at Chantilly because a subordinate pointed out that there was a gap in the line, and Kearny denied it.  To prove it, Kearny rode into the gap alone, and (surprise) rode into the enemy.
          I wish I could read a good biography of Kearny, but none seems available.  We have, instead, this historical curiosity, and a window into a writing style that no-one tolerates anymore.

CBsIP: (dusty stacks of student manuscripts)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

[	Tags	|	fiction	]
[	mood	|	exhausted	]

          My American Lit class was assigned Jack Kerouac's On the Road, so that's my latest rereading. I'm glad I assigned it, because in a class of 28 students, none of them had read it. Apparently they didn't spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, either, because nobody seemed to know who the characters "really" were.
          So, they got to experience the classic work of the Beat Generation. They got to think about Dean Moriarity.
          Sadly, they had an instructor (moi) who required them to stop and take notes after each chapter; which is exactly the wrong way to read Kerouac.
          While I admire the book in several ways, I'll admit that it was less interesting on rereading than it was on first read. Of course, I was taking notes at the end of each chapter, too, so that might have been part of the problem.
          I'll also confess that I'm not a big fan of the Beats. I should probably read Dharma Bums sometime, but I'm not actually in possession of a copy. But, still, if you haven't read On the Road you need to correct that situation. Too influential, both culturally and in literary terms, to be ignored.

CBsIP: (awesome tels of student manuscripts)
Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, John Watts De Peyster (this is consistently dreadful)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming

          Before the "Have you dropped off the planet" questions get any thicker, the answer is, "Well, sorta."
          I'm in a Spring Break grading frenzy. Got 16 different assignments for the undergrads to grade by Monday, while also getting through an entire thesis novel for the MFA program. I'll be reading On the Road for school, but not yet.
          I am noodling around in the books listed below, but only in tiny amounts. Basically when it would be inconvenient to be marking up manuscript pages.
          The Barbellion is one of those forgotten classics that I found via A Reader's Delight.
          I'm reading the Kearny biography at the quota rate of ten pages per day. It has historical interest, but the guy who wrote it (despite some historically important contributions) is unbelievably annoying. He cannot, cannot, will not, won't stick to the subject. He is constantly bringing in other historical figures for comparison, for no good reason, and then digressing into that material. He is grinding a whole shed full of axes of his own. He is trying to prove that the Civil War would have been over in about a year, if only everybody had listened to him, and they had enough chances, didn't they, because he clearly wrote to them all endlessly with his advice.
          Ahem.
          And the days are getting longer, so that's why one of my books about disastrous Arctic exploration came off the shelf.

CBsIP: (steaming heaps of student manuscripts)
Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, John Watts De Peyster (this is consistently dreadful)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The Journal of a Disappointed Man, W. N. P. Barbellion
Ninety Degrees North, Fergus Fleming

          I think of myself as a fan of Jonathan Lethem, so it is somewhat embarrassing to realize that I let his National Book Critics Circle Award winning Motherless Brooklyn gather dust on my shelf for over a decade. So, yeah, I'm reading Lethem, and I'm about a decade behind.
          Lethem reminds me of Stanislaw Lem, though the comparison may not be obvious. Both write Science Fiction some of the time, but also write mystery-related work. They write in several different genres, and Lethem interests me because no two of his books have been the same; not even really the same genre.
          Lethem also owes a good deal to Raymond Chandler (he quotes him directly in this novel), and that's a good thing. Since this book is structured as a detective novel, albeit with ersatz detectives, the Chandler influence is particularly strong here.
          So what kind of novel is this?? Well, the narrator is a young Brooklynite who works for a car service that only has a couple of cars; and the car service also pretends to be a detective agency, but is really an errand-running operation for some mobsters. The young man, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette's syndrome, and is nicknamed Freakshow by his pals. But the language is more literary than standard detective fiction, and the Tourette's is used metaphorically, and it is used by Lethem as an excuse for poetic and interesting use of language.
          Essrog's mentor and boss is murdered, and Essrog assumes the mantel of a detective and tries to find out who killed him, and why. In the process he brushes against dangerous and powerful groups, all of them made of complex individuals. The mixture of wisdom and evil in Lethem's characters is challenging, and raises this book far above the norm.
          This was a strange read, and I'm happy to say it was unlike anything else I've read in quite some time. (I know that this could be lumped in with a number of books that use various diseases and syndromes as the basis of literary stunts. There have been quite a few in the last decade and a half, and some of my students have tried it, too. I haven't read most of them, however, so I can't compare.)
          It also kept my interest, even though I'd been reading it only in small doses, in and around all my obligatory school reading.
          My evaluation: worth considering.

CBsIP: (seething piles of student manuscripts)
Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, John Watts De Peyster (this is consistently dreadful)
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois