God Is Not Great – Christopher Hitchens

image courtesy of The Guardian

Describe it

The late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens’ informed and impassioned attack on religion.

What I loved

Hitchens is at his most likable when he is gushing over his political, scientific and literary heroes and their legacies.

“We [Atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.”

The breadth of knowledge that he brings to bear on his argument is impressive and exhilarating.

His most convincing argument is that societies have become more just and equal due to secular reforms.  In times and places where religious institutions hold significant power, there is greater repression, especially of minorities, and more atrocities are committed to supress the diversity of human nature.  The more tolerant approach displayed by religious institutions in developed cultures is a strategic reaction to their diminished influence.

Indian Camp – Ernest Hemingway

Describe it

The first Nick Adams short story from In Our Time, in which Nick’s father, a doctor, takes him to an Indian camp to see a complicated birth.  Described by one critic as the “master key” to Hemingway’s writing.

What I loved

It all rings true.  One of my favourite Hemingway quotes from The Green Hills of Africa goes:

“First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Perhaps the most striking word in this quote is “disinterested”, which seems a strange trait to encourage in writers.  By this, I believe that Hemingway meant that a good writer must have the ability to take a step back and observe life, dispassionately, unblinkered by dogma or fear, never turning away from notions that society deems unacceptable.

In Indian Camp, Hemingway’s commitment to truthfulness can be seen in his exploration of masculinity, one of his chief preoccupations. 

Colonel Santa and the Red and White Song Battle, or My New Year’s in Japan

Yoyogi Park

25 December 2011

On the Narita Express (N’Ex!) to Tokyo.  It’s a clear winter day.  Bare trees raise their feathery branches towards the sky.  Rice paddy fields, their harvest exhausted for the year, give way to neat little houses, then uniform apartment blocks that crowd either side of the tracks, so that when we cross a bridge we are surprised by the sudden horizon, the clouds, a river, and a wheat-coloured baseball field where kids are doing early morning sprints.

M asks if I thought it was ugly the first time I saw it.  I say I don’t remember.  It’s not ugly now.  I’m comfortably numb from the wear of the flight.  There aren’t many people in the streets and the traffic still eases along.

Tokyo from Aoyama-I-Chome

26 December 2011

You’re never alone on the streets of Tokyo.  Even on the latest drunken stumble home, you always happen upon someone on their own night errands.  Now, I’m sitting in the sun on another clear winter day, at a cafe on a side-street t-junction, watching the steady stream of people.  They speak in quiet, regular tones, moving around each other and the slow intermittent cars.  They are impeccably dressed.  There are many beautiful looking people.  In groups, the women laugh and chat in high clear voices.  The men are mostly alone, but even in groups they barely talk.

Absolutely Crabb-ulous! – The political commentary of Annabel Crabb

Who she is

ABC’s chief online political writer. She is insightful, informed and frank, but her greatest asset is her wit, which makes the dry stuff of politics accessible and fun. Also brings her warmth and enthusiasm to TV on Insiders and The Drum.  Read her columns here.

What I love (feel the need to add “about her writing and commentary” before this gets creepy)

Her conversational style and bitingly funny, deadly-accurate pop-culture similes lay bare the absurdities, hypocrisies, challenges and, very occasionally, triumphs of the Australian Democratic system. On Julia Gillard:

“Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form. There’s a compelling, almost cinematic quality to her determination; it’s like watching a slalom downhill skier deliberately hitting every peg.”

Tells it like it is. Keeps it real. Straight up OG (Observer of Government). Her style brings politics down a peg to a more engaging, honest level:

“that [the mining tax] did not apply to ordinary activity but only to the whoopingly, hilariously over-profitable kind, was not fully understood during the Mining Tax Massacre of 2010.”

And being such a clear communicator, one of her chief hates is obfuscation. As she puts it, “give me a clanger-dropper over a fudger any day.”

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [Round 2!]

Describe it

In its story of the idle, hedonistic elite, it expresses the anxieties of the modern age – the passing of the old world, the new roles of the sexes, and man’s loss of faith in God, in ideals, in himself. Read it.

What I loved

The spare beauty and vigour of Hemingway’s prose. The strength of an active sentence, the power of that perfect verb.

It made me want to dance and drink whisky in Paris, and fish and drink wine chilled in a mountain stream in the mountains of Spain, and see a bullfight and drink from a wine skin in Pamploma. To say damn this and damn that, and “What a lot of rot” and “To hell with you, Lady Ashley.”

Shibuya No Love – Hannu Rajaniemi

I was clicking around the always excellent Guardian Books page, source of many a mid-work literature fix, when I came across this interview with Hannu Rajaniemi.  He seemed endearingly down to earth, is a fellow Murakami fan and his novel, The Quantum Thief, sounded like an interesting concept, so I followed the link to the first piece he had published, Shibuya No Love. 

I enjoyed the story, but it’s clearly the work of an inexperienced, though talented, writer.  It can be instructive to read the work of less polished authors, though, because the visible seams make it easier to understand what works, and what doesn’t.

About a Boy – Nick Hornby

I tore through About a Boy in a couple of days, even staying up late into the night to finish it, which I haven’t done in ages.  This isn’t to say that it’s the best book I’ve read in the past year, but it is the most readable, largely thanks to its very British sense of humour.  I haven’t read a lot of books whose priority is to be funny, but those that I have, such as The Finkler Question, seem to use the same kind of humour, full of understatement, overstatement and comically frank descriptions.  And like The Finkler Question, About A Boy isn’t just aiming to make you laugh: it also has something to say about some pretty dark themes, and late 20th Century England.

It does this by focusing on the unlikely friendship between Marcus, a socially awkward twelve year old burdened with a chronically depressed mother, and Will, a thirty-six year old man-child who lives a care-free life on the royalties of a Christmas pop-song written by his father.  The two meet at a picnic for single parents: Marcus is there with one of his mum’s friends; Will is there because he has fabricated a son to pick-up single mothers.

The Trial – Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is regarded as one of the best and most influential authors of the 20th Century, and is a major figure in existentialism and magic realism.  Like all of his novels, The Trial was left unfinished, but to me, it still read like a complete story.  This might be because Kafka blends the surreal and mundane, and you need to relax your logic to be carried along with it.  Or it might just be because, by the time I was three quarters of the way through the book, I was sick of it.

Farewell, My Lovely – Raymond Chandler

Near the end of Farewell, My Lovely, a beautiful woman gazes up at Chandler’s legendary shamus, Phillip Marlowe, and says:

“’You’re so marvellous… So brave, so determined, and you work for so little money.  Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out.  What makes you so wonderful?’”

It’s a question that you could ask not only about the prototypical hard-boiled detective, but about the author himself.  What is it that elevates both the character and the writer into a league of their own?

Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut

There are a hell of alot of interesting things going on in Breakfast of Champions: a distinctive authorial style that challenges fictional conventions, insightful social commentary, and an exploration of the relationship between fiction and determinism.  But because all these ideas are held together by a weak plot, the whole ends up being less than the parts.

The plot revolves around a science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, who has “doodley-squat”, and a Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover, who is “fabulously well-to-do”.  We are told that, in the future, the American Academy of Arts and Science will recognise Kilgore Trout as a great man for both his writing and his often hilarious insights, such as this:

“…we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and underpants.”

In the time period covered by the book, however, no one has heard of Kilgore trout, and his stories have only been published in porno magazines.  He’s surprised, then, when he is invited to speak at the Midlands Arts festival by someone who thinks that he’s written the greatest novel in the English language.

Meanwhile, bad chemicals in Dwayne Hoover’s head are sending him insane.   When he hears Kilgore Trout read one of his stories at the Arts Festival, it gives shape to his madness and he goes on a homicidal rampage.