Bought: The Good German

Oh the insufferable snobbery of the fanboy. I can remember when I wouldn't have a movie tie-in cover on my shelves. Most egregious instance? For years the only available copy of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the Blade Runner tie. At the height of my PKD-mania I couldn't read that key novel because I hadn't found an untainted edition. (I still haven't.) Eventually I got over my distaste and bought the damn thing (retail!), and felt a little silly about the years I had held out.
Like a lot of lifelong readers (I suppose) I resent the way movies dominate our culture. More, I hate how they consume our culture, voraciously swallowing up books, comics, old TV shows, the life stories of the famous and the heart warming triumphs of the obscure - anything to keep the film rolling. And afterward all of it, whether real event or artful fiction, is forever a kind of shadowy appendage of the movie, at least to the majority of people.

I remember seeing Kanon's earlier books in stores, but I missed this one somehow. I've only seen a few clips from the movie. It, like the poster/cover seen here, is pastiche, meant to resemble something the studio (Warner Brothers) might have made sixty years ago. Steven Soderbergh is a great director, and something of a chameleon, so I'll have to catch the whole thing one of these days to see just how far he ran with it. In the meantime I wonder what Kanon thinks of the whole thing. Based on what little I've seen, I can't help feeling that shooting in black and white was a very good idea - but trying to emulate Warner's midcentury style may have been a very bad one.

I used the word pastiche above, but of course the poster is more than that. It's an outright lift. A shameless, didn't even bother to file the serial numbers off, bare-faced, brilliant steal, and the reason the book caught my eye in the first place.
The setting (Berlin, immediately post-war) and the protagonist (an American correspondent who lived in the city before the war, now returned) are almost irresistable, given my recent reading. And it certainly got enough praise from the critics. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm not going to pick an excerpt out of a book I haven't even read, so here's a zinger from Ugarte, as played by Peter Lorre:

"You know, Rick, I have many friends in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust."

Old Friends: Shadow Land

Straub may be my favorite living author. Shadow Land isn't his best novel (I might nominate Koko) but it is my favorite, the one that echoes inside me. This excerpt requires no setup, and gives an idea of the tone.

"Imagine a bird," the magician said. "Just now - flapping up, frightened, indeed tormented by fear, up out of this hat."
He twitched the white scarf away from the tall silk hat, and a dove the shade of the scarf beat its wings on the brim and awkwardly fell to the table - a terrified, panicked bird, unable to fly, making a loud clatter of wings on the polished table.
"Pretty bird," said the magician, and smiled at the two boys. "Now imagine a cat."
He whisked his scarf once again over the hat, and a white cat slipped over the brim. It came up out of the hat like a snake, flattening itself down onto the table, looking at nothing but the dove. With a slow predatory crawl, the cat went toward the dove.
The magician, who was dressed as a sinister clown in white-face and red wig above black tails, grinned at the boys and abruptly sprang over and backward, landing on his gloved hands. He held himself rigidly still for a second and then folded his legs down and his trunk up in what looked like one flawless motion. Now he was standing where he had been, and he dropped the white scarf over the elongated form of the cat.
When the magician passed his hand into the scarf, it fluttered down onto the flat surface of the table.
Three inches away, the dove still worked its wings and made its terrible clattering noise of panic.
"And that's it, isn't it?" the magician said. "Cat and bird. Bird and cat." He was still grinning. "And since our little friend is still so frightened, perhaps we'd better make her disappear too." He snapped his fingers, twitched the scarf, and the bird was gone.
"Cats remind me of a true story," he said to the mesmerized boys, speaking as if he were merely yarning, as if nothing but entertainment was on his mind. "It's an old story, but the truest stories are very often the oldest ones. This was told by Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving, and by Monk Lewis to the poet Shelley - and to me by a friend of mine who actually saw it happen.
"A traveler, in other words my friend, was journeying on foot to the house of a companion - not me - where he was going to spend the night. He had been walking all day, and even though it was already late and night was coming on, he was tired enough to rest his feet when he came to a ruined abbey. He sat down, took off his boots, leaned against an iron fence, and began to rub his feet. An odd series of noises made him turn around and peer through the bars of the fence.
"Down below him, on the grassy floor of the old abbey, he saw a procession of cats. They were formed into two long equal lines, and were marching forward very slowly. Now, of course, he had never seen anything like that before, and he bent forward to look more closely. It was then that he saw that the cats at the head of the procession were carrying a little coffin on their backs, and were making for, were slowly approaching, a small open grave. When my friend had seen the grave, he looked horrified back at the coffin borne by the lead cats, and noticed that on it sat a crown. As he watched, the lead cats began to lower the coffin into the grave.
"After that he was so frightened that he could not stay in that place a moment longer, and he thrust his feet into his boots and rushed on to the house of his friend. During dinner, he found that he could not keep from telling his friend what he had witnessed.
"He had scarcely finished when his friend's cat, which had been dozing in front of the fire, leaped up and cried, 'Then I am the King of the Cats!' and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. It happened, my friends - yes, it happened, my charming little birds."

A word of warning: if you decide to read Shadow Land you will meet the Collector, and the Collector will mess you up.

Bought: Fanny Hill

While searching for the Book Hut in Ocean Shores I found a sale on behalf of the local library in a nondescript building on the main drag. A rather intense roundtable about city politics was in progress, and continued throughout my visit, continually refreshed by new arrivals as the original participants went their various ways. I'm not as good at tuning that kind of thing out as I used to be, so I scanned the shelves as fast as I could. A stack of books on stage magic yielded an oversized Martin Gardner I had never heard of, and a shelf marked "classics" included two examples of literary smut. I paid my $2.something and escaped into the gray afternoon.
If quizzed (which never happens in real life) I could have told you the title of Cleland's book given the subtitle, or remembered the subtitle if given the title, but otherwise my ignorance was complete. I had a vague notion it dated to the early 20th century (in fact it predates the United States by a generation), and in complete contradiction to this I also confused it with Moll Flanders, which is at least in the correct century.
Having browsed through the introductory material to correct my ignorance, I opened the book at random in search of smut. Just how naughty are Fanny Hill's naughty bits? Very naughty indeed. It's strange (and good dirty fun) to read a text that is entirely explicit but also free of both the vulgar and the clinical names of the various bits and acts. Warning: the following excerpt becomes more naughty as it proceeds.

I bid him come towards me and give me his letter, at the same time throwing down, carelessly, a book I had in my hands. He colour'd, and came within reach of delivering me the letter, which he held out, awkwardly enough, for me to take, with his eyes riveted on my bosom, which was, through the design'd disorder of my handkerchief, sufficiently bare, and rather shaded than hid.
I, smiling in his face, took the letter, and immediately catching gently hold of his shirt sleeve, drew him towards me, blushing, and almost trembling; for surely his extreme bashfulness, and the utter inexperience, call'd for, at least, all the advances to encourage him: his body was now conveniently inclin'd towards me, and just softly chucking his smooth beardless chin, I asked him if he was afraid of a lady? . . . , and with that took, and carrying his hand to my breasts, I prest it tenderly to them. They were now finely furnish'd, and rais'd in flesh, so that, panting with desire, they rose and fell, in quick heaves, under his touch: at this, the boy's eyes began to lighten with all the fires of inflam'd nature, and his cheeks flush'd with a deep scarlet: tongue-tied with joy, rapture, and bashfulness, he could not speak, but then his looks, his emotion, sufficiently satisfy'd me that my train had taken, and that I had no disappointment to fear.
My lips, which I threw in his way, so as that he could not escape kissing them, fix'd, fired, and embolden'd him: and now, glancing my eyes towards that part of his dress which cover'd the essential object of enjoyment, I plainly discover'd the swell and commotion there; and as I was now too far advanc'd to stop in so fair a way, and was indeed no longer able to contain myself, or wait the slower progress of his maiden bashfulness (for such it seem'd, and really was), I stole my hand upon his thighs, down one of which I could both see and feel a stiff hard body, confin'd by his breeches, that my fingers could discover no end to. Curious then, and eager to unfold so alarming a mystery, playing, as it were, with his buttons, which were bursting ripe from the active force within, those of his waistband and fore-flap flew open at a touch, when out it started; and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw, with wonder and surprise, what? not the play-thing of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ'd, it must have belong'd to a young giant.

Naturally.

The maypole is described eloquently, and in great detail.

Naturally.

A thought, a question and a conclusion:

1. A book's worth can't be judged based on two paragraphs cherry-picked for their prurient interest, but there's nothing here that wouldn't fit seamlessly into Letters to Penthouse, if translated into modern idiom. That male fantasies have changed not at all in 250 years is either comforting or frustrating, as you will.

2. Why do straight men who write erotica unfailingly spend as much verbiage describing enormous maypoles as they do beautiful women? Have any such writers speculated about this for the record?

3. And so to bed.

P.S. Oh yeah, the cover. Soft focus photograph with strategically placed title. Ho hum. Odd detail: paper has a canvas texture the scan doesn't show. To lend a little class to the product?

Bought: The Shining

Another find from the Book Hut in beautiful Ocean Shores. The price ($3.50) and the mention of Cujo on the cover dates this edition to the year 1981maybe2. Astonishingly, it appears to be unread, although I like to imagine it had one previous owner who, like me, bends the pages of his paperbacks instead of the spines. God only knows how many copies of The Shining have been sold in the last 30 years. Used bookstores, without exception, have King spilling off the shelves and out into the street. I'm sure more than a few Christines have been used as kindling or to plug drafts in the siding on long winter days. But just try to find one of those gajillion copies without unsightly spinal creases!
How is Stephen King like William Shakespeare? At any given time all of his work (as far as I know) is in print, an astonishing measure of success with at least one interesting consequence: one of the pleasures (I would imagine) of being Stephen King is that every few years all your books get new covers. His first, Carrie, has had a dozen or more just in the US. I wonder if he's ever lined up all the Carries or Salem's Lots or Shinings chronologically from first edition to latest, 30 years of evolving book design laid out before him. Maybe not. But I know I would do things like that if I were him.
I think this minimalist design is brilliant, although it (and the back cover blurbage) might mislead the potential buyer into thinking he's holding yet another evil/possessed child novel. Why is the little boy on the cover faceless? Because he was born in the caul. Look it up.

Bought: Rogue Roman

The Book Hut in Ocean Shores took a while to find. It's actually about 400 square feet of space inside a little community center on Chance a La Mer (chance with the sea? gamble with the sea? dunno). A sign outside informed me that sales supported the center, which made it hard to quibble with the prices, which were on the high side.
When you walk into a tiny place like that (or a garage sale, or a "paperback x-change" catering to ladies buying sackfuls of romances or mysteries or mysterious romances) you know a real find is unlikely. But if you do find something, the payoff is likely to be big: a 50 cent book that you might pay $10 or $20 for on Ebay.
Any psychologist or gambler would recognize this set-up that collectors find themselves in, though most likely only the psychologist would know it has a name: operant conditioning with a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. If you want to teach a mouse to pull a lever, you don't give him a small reward every time he does it. You throw a die (consult a randomizer) every time, and give him a big reward if you roll a six (or whatever), nothing otherwise. That's what keeps mice at their levers, gamblers at their slot machines, and me stopping at every yard sale I drive past, all summer long.
So, through the door; dim and cavernous space before me - a stage back there, large shapes in the dark - piano? speakers? folding chairs leaning against things. Shelves on my left, tables to the right, nice lady reading a book further to the right: the proprietress? Yes.
After the bare minimum of small talk I glance at the first table, first stack. I must have made a noise at that point, because Nice Lady said "Find something already?"
I had.
Lance Horner wrote or co-wrote a dozen or so books in the sixties and seventies, mostly so-called "plantation novels", steamy melodramas of master/slave (or mistress/slave) desire.
But who cares? as Ruby Rhod so wisely said. The cover is the story here, an early Frank Frazetta. There's a large scan of the painting here.
Frazetta paperbacks are as close as I get to being a completist. If there were an edition of Mein Kampf with a Frazetta cover I guess I would have to pass, but I can't think of much else that would stop me.
I managed to find $20 worth of overpriced paperbacks to go with my 50 cent treasure, and having done my part to support the community center I drove back to the hotel to see if naptime was over yet.

Reading: Postwar - Day 3

Here's some depressing math for you. For me rather. Let's say I live another 30 years (possible: my health isn't what it should be, but medical advances could very well balance that out). If, on average, I read one new book per month I will only read 360 more books. Period. That number seems impossibly, insufferably low. I protest! Even if they stopped writing new books, how can I choose just 360 out of the entirety of the written works of mankind from Gilgamesh on?
What if I could boost that number dramatically - to, say, 1000 books? Let's assume my "career" (pause for laughter) remains viable another 20 years and I can spend the last ten years of my life in retirement, my modest needs provided for, with nothing much to do but sit on the porch swing beside my wife, book in my lap, coffee in my cup, twinkle in my eye, blah blah blah.
Yeah, I'd have to call that a very long shot indeed, times being what they are and me being what I be. And come on. 1000? World literature, genre fiction, biography, history, science, etc? 1000? It's still a sick joke.

As it happens, I have read just 88 pages of Postwar in 3 days. If I can keep up this grueling pace it will be exactly a month before I can move on to number 359 on the big countdown/funeral march.
My brother recommended Postwar to me. I was wrapping up Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich, looking toward William Shirer's awkwardly titled 20th Century Journey Vol II: The Nightmare Years, and thinking about what would come after that. To my own surprise I seem to have embarked on a kind of post-mortem of the good ol' 20th, only (or already) eight years in its grave. Shirer's memoir ends with his impressions of the Nuremburg trials. A history of Europe since WWII seemed like a natural follow-up.
I can't remember Marc (that's my brother) ever steering me toward a bad book, and his record remains intact. Postwar is (so far) well organized and concise. Judt has an eye for the telling quote and the kind of transparent style that makes reading feel like telepathy.

On the various Resisters, now faced with waging peace instead of war:

Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place yourself beyond the law.

On the near-universal perception that planned economies were necessary:

There was a great faith in the ability (and not just the duty) of government to solve large-scale problems by mobilizing and directing people and resources to collectively useful ends. Obviously this way of seeing things was particularly attractive to socialists; but the idea that a well-planned economy meant a richer, fairer and better-regulated society was taken up by a very broad constituency, including the Christian Democratic parties then rising to prominence all over Western Europe. The English historian A. J. P. Taylor told BBC listeners in November 1945 that "nobody in Europe believes in the American way of life - that is, private enterprise; or, rather, those who believe in it are a defeated party which seems to have no more future than the Jacobites in England after 1688". Taylor exaggerated as always, he was wrong in the long run (but who isn't?) and he might have been surprised to learn about the planist enthusiasms of many New Dealers prominent in the contemporary US administration of Germany. But at the time he was broadly correct.

On the post-war German "economy":

In Germany there was no functioning currency. The black market flourished and cigarettes were the accepted medium of exchange ... The value of a carton of American cigarettes in Berlin ranged from $60 - $165, an opportunity for soldiers in the American occupation forces to make serious money converting and re-converting their cigarette allocation: in the first four months of the Allied occupation US troops in Berlin alone sent home $11 million more than they received in wages. In Braunschweig, 600 cigarettes would buy you a bicycle...

The whole family is packing up this weekend and going to Ocean Shores so Timothy and Nicholas can see the beach before winter sets in again. Maybe I can make some real progress while we're there.

The Pursuit of Crappyness: example #1

"So bad it's good" doesn't work for me the way it used to. When I was a lad my friends and I got no end of jollies out of bad fiction, bad music and, naturally, bad movies.
Nowadays bad is mostly just bad, and I avoid it. Life is short, after all. But I do keep a handful of paperbacks whose covers are so bad it's hard to believe they exist at all.

This isn't one of them. This is my favorite Shell Scott paperback. The link takes you to a terrific article on the Thrilling Detective site. If you're me (and for all I know you are) you could lose days of your life exploring T.D. Caveat lector.
The sixties Scotts were all guaranteed to have two things on the cover: one (or more) scantily clad women, many painted by the one and only Robert McGinnis; and a distinctive portrait of the smirking Scott, looking a little like Dobie Gillis's evil twin.
Later, Scott went to Pocket Books and (briefly) photo covers. And now we enter the ninth circle of paperback hell...

I guess Dwayne Hickman wasn't available to model Scott. So they called in Tito Puente, made him up as an Oompa Loompa, and posed him next to Melanie from the secretarial pool.
A lot of things could be said about this cover, but all that come to mind are pointlessly cruel, so I'll leave it be - except to note that if they hadn't splurged on satin sheets they might have been able to afford a background.

Reading: Postwar - Day 1

My brother recommended this one to me, and I picked it up at Half Price Books a month or so ago. The trade paperback is available now, but I don't have much use for trades (a rant-worthy topic I will save for a future post) and I can almost always find a used hardcover cheaper anyway (seven bucks, in this case). Brilliant cover design, somewhat wasted on me, since I display my hardbacks sans cover.
I don't know anything about Judt, and I'm not going out of my way to find out until I've finished this monster.
Which may take a while. I like to think I'm a good reader. I know I'm a slow one, without much reading time to start with. I've got an hour at lunch everyday, plus whatever time I can steal away from the boys and the wife and household duties and the endless distractions the internet offers, including this blog. Oh, and sleep. And drive-time. Work. Not much give in any of those.
Not much to say about the first 30 pages, except that Judt has a lot of numbers in his utility belt and he's not afraid to use them. Here's a somewhat condensed excerpt, virtually number-free, to give you an idea of his style.

The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities ... were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. ... but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after WWII Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities ... were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream.
But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future.
This new presence of Europe's living 'others' - perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey - has thrown into relief not just Europe's current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead 'others' of Europe's past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

That's from the introduction, and I like it very much. Blinking. Demographic heath. The understated irony of the dictators' accomplishments. I'll be looking for more of it once I get past the necessarily number-heavy portrait of Europe circa 1945: how many refugees where and of what nationality, how many dead and of what cause, what percentages of homes, industry, roads, rail destroyed in what nations, etc. Oy.

Bought: The World of Tiers

I drive a delivery truck in south King County, Washington. This Friday I was out east of Black Diamond, near the end of a county road that wrapped around a little lake up in the hills. Instead of trying to turn around in one of the steep gravel drives leading down to the lake, I drove to the end of the road, where I knew there were a couple of houses and a circle of asphalt just big enough to turn my truck around. When the cul-de-sac came into view I couldn't believe my eyes: the last house on this dead-end street was holding a yard sale. Now, I make a point of watching for sales during the summer, and I hadn't noticed any signs on the way out. Maybe they put an ad in the paper or maybe they were just naturally optimistic. A fortyish woman and her sixtyish father sat in lawn chairs at one end of a ragged arc of tables covered with the usual crap. The books were in three boxes, sorted for my convenience: one box of true crime, mostly Ann Rule, a local author; a box of recent "thrillers", legal, historical and romantic; and finally a box of fantasy and fantasy-tinged sf, including this hefty SFBC omnibus edition of Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series. What to do?

1. I felt obliged to buy something. I might be the first customer of the day. I might be the only customer.
2. Farmer is a sentimental favorite of mine. First encounter: "Riders of the Purple Wage" in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, one of the few stories in that fabled anthology that seems, in retrospect, not just very, very good (they all were that), but genuinely dangerous. Looking back now, I am astounded at the subversion - sexual, political, aesthetic, what have you - that I found in my junior high library, smuggled in under cover of sf.
3. I knew I was going to finish The Courts of Chaos at lunch or that night after work, which meant I needed to decide on a new book by 5:45 a.m. Monday morning (my God! that's less than twelve hours away as I write this). The next "grown-up" book in my sights is Tony Judt's Post War, a history of Europe since 1945. A 42 year old should be reading grown-up books, but I am a fanboy, and I value fiction, especially the imaginative literatures marketed as sf and fantasy, more than anything else. So when I should pat myself on the back for reading The Anatomy of Fascism, instead I scold myself for never finishing The Dreamthief's Daughter. After the Riverworld series, the World of Tiers books are Farmer's best known, and I've never read them. The omnibus would make a terrific reading copy, something I could take to work everyday without worrying about it getting beat up.
4. Naked people. Practically naked. Tarzan and Jane there on the cover. That's another early Boris Vallejo, recycled from a two volume SFBC omnibus of the same five novels published circa 1980. Never underestimate naked.

So I bought it, plus a paperback anthology of end-of-the-world stories called Armageddons, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I probably have half the contents or more already but what the hey.
The omnibus was published in 2001. The SFBC has a snazzy new logo for the spine of the thing but otherwise same old BCE. Worth two bucks? Absolutely. Going on the shelf with the real books? Enhh...

Bought: The Chronicles of Amber Volume II

Something must be wrong with me. In the space of a week I have paid good money for two book club editions.
Granted, the first was an emergency purchase: I went to work Tuesday without my copy of Roger Zelazny's Sign of the Unicorn. As lunch time approached I ducked into Baker Street Books (nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes: the store lies at the west end of Baker St. in Black Diamond, Wa.) to grab a reading copy to get me through my lunch break. They had every book in the series except Sign. I turned in desperation to the hardbacks and found multiple copies (of course) of the SFBC omnibus editions, late 70's vintage. Oh well. The Man with the Mustache made sure I knew it was the second volume of a set, tapped the cover, said "Good books," and rang up my $4 purchase.
Now that book sits out in the garage like the redheaded stepchild it is, waiting to be taken to Goodwill. When I was 13 or so the Science Fiction Book Club suckered me in with their 4 for a dollar deal, and over the next two years my shelves slowly filled with BCEs: slightly smaller, slightly shabbier versions of actual hardcovers. All are gone now, sold for pennies on the dollar or donated to libraries or simply thrown away. I quickly learned the disdain in which (most) BCEs are held by collectors, and now I would no more allow one in my library than I would let one of my wife's Sandra Browns share shelf space with my Ursula K. LeGuins. Tracy Samantha Haven (née Lord) once said that the worst kind of snob is an intellectual snob, but it seems unlikely she had ever met a fanboy snob. We've got intellectual snobs beat all to hell.

P.S. Nice cover, though. For twenty years or more, Boris Vallejo's work has tended toward pin-up, and oiled-up, muscle-mag pin-up at that. But I grow fonder of his early stuff as the years go by. This 1978 painting isn't one of his best (either that "sword" is about 7 inches long or he seriously screwed up the perspective) but I like the composition and it's also a good example of one of his real strengths: a bold, hallucinatory and magnificently pulpy use of color. The scan above is pretty washed out, and too small anyway. These three sites have larger scans, arranged chronologically for an idea of how his focus has changed over time.