The Happy Isles of Oceania

What a slacker I am. No, it’s true. But then again, the pressures of work are particularly intense right now, so maybe I can be forgiven for not getting up any writing for a long time. But here’s the thing: you have to keep the best part of yourself for yourself. Being a slacker is not as bad as allowing work to dominate your life. If it were just a matter of wasting time in a pleasurable but not unhealthy way, that would be ok. But that’s not what I have been doing. I’ve been allowing work to suck up all my time and energy, leaving me unfit for anything but watching baseball on tv at the end of the day. Work will take all you give it and never be satisfied that you are giving it enough. It’s like dealing with a particularly demanding and unappreciative child, really. No matter how much you give it, it only asks for more. Time to cut that child loose and let it fend for itself.

So I’ve picked up The Happy Isles of Oceania again, by Paul Theroux. It’s a book I started almost four years ago, at a time when I myself was getting ready to visit Micronesia. I never quite finished it, but now I am making time, and loving it. It’s well researched and intimate, and it takes me back in spirit to some of the places I have been.

What Theroux captures so well is the marginal nature of the islanders, their sometimes pointless existence, and their inability to rise above their circumstances. He is particularly hard on the French colonial influence, especially in his chapters on Tahiti and the Marquesas. The Marquesas is where Melville based his novel Typee, and is also where Gaugin is buried (what a bastard he was!).

The islands are very difficult to reach, having steep cliffs down to the sea and no good harbors. At one time the Marquesas supported an estimated population of 80,000 people but it is now down to about 7,000. As with Easter Island, and as with the Mayan empire, The Marquesas is rich in archeological remains which testify to a complex but largely forgotten culture. Ecological disaster seems to be at the root of the de-population. Stone temples covered in thick vines can be found in inpenetrable jungle hills and valleys. Many of these sites have never been excavated, but most have been defaced by overzealous 19th century missionaries intent on whacking off offending penises and such. Most of the native islanders have never visited any of the sites, even the ones in their own backyards, and they have no particular interest in their history - such is the dissapating effect of missionaries and colonialization.

Here is what Theroux has to say at the end of his stay on the Marquesas:
“There is no cannibalism in the Marquesas anymore - none of the traditional kind. But there is the brutality of French colonialism…. The French praise and romanticize the Marquesas, but in the 1960s they had planned to test nuclear devices on the northern Marquesan island of Eiao, until there was such an outcry they changed their plans and decided to destroy Moruroa instead. It is said that the French are holding Polynesia together, but really it is so expensive to maintain that they do everything as cheaply as possible - and it is self-serving, too. Better to boost domestic French industries by exporting bottled water from France than investing in a fresh water supply for each island [there is an abundance of fresh water in the Marquesas]. That is what colonialism is all about… The French have left nothing enduring in the islands except a tradition of hypocrisy and their various fantasies off history and high levels of radioactivity..

“When France has succeeded in destroying a few more atolls, when they have managed to make the islands glow with so much radioactivity that night is turned into day, when they have sold the rest of the fishing rights and depleted it of fish.., when it has all been thoroughly plundered, the French will plan a great ceremony and grandly offer these unemployed and deracinated citizens in T-shirts and flip-flops their independence. In the destruction of the islands, the French imperial intention, its mission civilisatrice - civilizing mission - will be complete.”

So there you have it. “Grrrr…. the French,” as Michael Moore would say. But of course the parallels to our so-called civilizing mission in Iraq are readily apparent - and so is our attitude to the way we treat the scarce resources in this Island Earth. Use it up while you can, because tomorrow only matters for our grandkids - and since they are not us, they don’t really count.

Paradise

My current read is Paradise, by A.L. Kennedy, a younger Scottish novelist. It’s a good read, though difficult in places due to the harsh realities of its alcoholic narrator. Here’s the blurb from “The Seattle Times:” “A stunning depiction of alcoholism, as funny as it is sad, as ironic as it is romantic.” In this passage the narrator is standing in the doorway of a barn, soaking up the feeling of a Scottish summer, and remembering her childhood.

“Beyond the lintel’s shade, there is the sweetness of grain fields on the breeze, the bland dust of poor soil, baked to a yellowish crust: and salt, too: something of the high-tide line, bladderwrack and rock clefts dank with scrub and gorse: that slightly human, musty fug of heated gorse, the snap of its seeds, the blood drop in the yellow of each flower: which is to say, the smell and taste and everything of my being a child in summer, of running between the blue, narrow shore and the racing depths of barley with my brother until the sun had fallen and the sandy earth was cooled to match the temperature of skin.”

A beautiful evocation of place, strangely punctuated, and a delight to read aloud. As a matter of fact, you could chop it up randomly and call it poetry.

Bovine masses

Kate Christensen’s satirical novel, The Great Man, has just won The PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction. She gives a great interview:

“We live in a profoundly conservative time. The pendulum has swung backward to “family values,” whatever the fuck that means, fundamentalist religions, and a tame and docile population who’s being scarily and almost cartoonishly manipulated by the most criminally dastardly government this country has ever had. We dress alike, we talk alike, we are a big homogeneous bunch of domesticated cows in Pottery Barns.”

You go girl! Couldn’t agree more.

Nature Deficit Disorder

I have been dipping into Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, where I learned, amongst other shocking things, that the average 8 to 10 year old spends six hours per day watching T.V. or playing computer games - in front of a monitor, in other words. That same kid spends four minutes per day in unstructured outdoor activity, FOUR MINUTES! So, no splendor in the grass, no pondering cloud shapes, no making forts in trees, and no chance to make friends with nature …and yourself.

Meanwhile, I notice kids driving to school in this below zero weather - wearing shorts, with no coat. When I was a kid we didn’t wear shorts in the winter. Call me old fashioned, but we kind of understood that it was cold out, that cars sometimes break down, and that the cold was real, not some virtual projection of reality. Yeah, I know. I’m showing my age.

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, by Peter Parsons

“Pythagoras the philosopher, having disembarked and teaching letters, advised his pupils to abstain from beans.” This nonsensical little tongue twister is a schoolboy translation exercise, discovered among huge trash heaps of papyrus in Oxyrhynchos (literally “City of the Sharp -Nosed Fish”), an ancient site 100 miles south of Cairo. It is a slice of life that proves that even in the 2nd century AD, language learning involved pointless sentences that nobody ever used - sort of a Graeco-Roman Egyptian version of “La plume de ma tante est jaune,” or (one that has stuck in my mind all these many years after first learning German), “Das aufschnieden des Stieffels ist zu vermeiden.” (“The cutting off of boots is to be avoided.) Good to know that some things never change.

Tree of Smoke

“Dietrich Fest of Department Five of West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst boarded a night flight at the National Airport near Washington, DC, and for eighteen hours had nothing to do but read and nap and nothing to think about other than his father’s medical crises. Seven, eight months since the old man had seen the outside of a hospital. Gallbladder; liver; heart; a series of small strokes; hemorrhaging in the bowels with massive blood loss and transfusions; a feeding tube in his stomach; latest of all pneumonia. The old man refused to die. But he would. Perhaps already. Perhaps earlier while I dozed with a sagging head. Perhaps now while I look at a stupid mystery book. “Claude,” the old man had called him when he’d visited in October - wires and tubes exiting from him everywhere, blue eyes shining into space. “Look, it’s Claude,” he’d told the urine-smelling, otherwise empty room, and Fest had said, “No, it’s Dirk,” and his father’s eyes had closed.” (p.39

“Tree of Smoke”, by Denis Johnson, is a book which deserves more space than I am about to give it here. Having recently finished it, however, I at least want to give it a mention. The above extended quote is symptomatic both of the book’s greatness, and of its difficulty (and resultant negative reviews by some critics). What’s it about? It’s about Vietnam. It’s about covert operations. It’s about the role of intelligence and myth, stories and false stories, and the way channels of intelligence go up the chain of command, and then come back down again as policy, and how that policy can be influenced if the right sort of information goes up in the first place. The “right sort of information” is always that which resonates with the dominant myth/delusion of the times we find ourselves in.

“Tree of Smoke” is a bit like Syrania, where everything is relative and you’re not sure who to trust or who is in charge. It’s like Don DeLillo teaming up with Ernest Hemingway. Despite its difficulty, it would be easy to teach: there are numerous markers throughout the book which clue the reader in, such as here, early on, in a series of quotes which underlie the theme of illusions, ideals, and lies:

_ Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside - it was a dream. p. 32

The colonel said, “We’ve got to keep hold of our ideals while steering them through the maze.” p. 60

“Oh, well,” Sands said, thinking that when passion stirred Major Eddie’s heart, he tended to speak in a kind of poetry - you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying. p.58

“Eddie Aguinaldo,” the colonel said, “is the Filipino equivalent of a goddamn liar. Any other questions?” p. 59

Mazes, labyrinths, stories, misunderstandings, and deception form the backbone of the book. What troubles many readers is the interior nature of the narrative, and the apparent formlessness of the plot line. There is no consistent protagonist, and third person blends into first person narration quite seamlessly, as in the above extended quote where the hired assassin Dietrich Fest moves from observed (third person) to observing (first person). Dietrich Fest appears here, on p. 398, apparently for the first time, but in fact the reader is eventually able to see that he is the unnamed assassin from earlier in the book, this time seen from a different angle. In fact, not even Dietrich’s father recognizes him, mistaking him for his war hero brother, Claude, and further underlining the ways we fail to recognize those closest to us.

Johnson’s ability to seamlessly shift his point of view can be confusing at first, but the technique is effective in dispelling the notion that there IS an objective story line in war, or in life. It’s a mess. It’s confusing. But it’s an amazing read, well worth the effort. The descriptions of place are rich with immediacy, and the dialog is flawless, but the main appeal of the book is its attempt to chronicle “the line between disinformation and delusion.” And, not to overstate the bloody obvious, but that line has been pretty much obliterated in the last eight years.

The Tourist

Dipping into Dean MacCannell’s “The Tourist, a New Theory of the Leisure Class” this afternoon, I came across this passage, marked by me these many moons ago, a thin blue vertical ink line in the left hand margin:

‘Experience’ is the basic term in the rhetoric of modernity. That touristic experiences fall short of ‘understanding’ (in the Weberian sense) is well-known. We do not, however, know the reasons why touristic experiences turn out to be so shallow. Common sense places the blame on the tourist mentality, but this is not technically correct. The tourist’s inability to understand what he sees is the product of the structural arrangement that sets him into a touristic relationship with a social object, in this case, work.

Upon reading this passage again, many years having passed under the bridge, I think of the amazing George Saunders, whose short stories are essentially about people whose jobs require them to fake authenticity, people who work in vast theme parks and government bureaucracies and pretend for tourists and/or customers, because that is their job.

How many of us work in the same line, really, pretending to be friendly beyond the bounds of normal reality, to keep the customer satisfied, because the customer is always right? Undergoing weekly, monthly, yearly evaluations to measure our efficacy? Going above and beyond to keep the customer satisfied, not just in a business sort of way, but also in a phony host/guest touristic sort of way, so that when you go in your bank they have cookies and cake and ice cream and pumpkins in the fall for you because, you see, you are just like family to us, or at least guests, so this is a small token of our appreciation for your business, because I guarantee you, at the other bank it’s the same, but there’s just balloons for the kids. So we see, really, that Saunders writes for us, and Saunders understands the touristic relationship to have extended into all of American work culture.

But read MacCannell.

Chabon teams up with Coen Brothers

This should be good! The Coen brothers will teaming up with Michael Chabon for the movie version of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”, an alternative-reality, hard-boiled detective noir thriller set in Alaska. Chabon’s book is the best thing I read all year. Of course, the Coen brothers know how to do film noir, as they demonstrated with their very first movie, Blood Simple, another of my all time favorites. So, despite the fact that winter is doing a serious number on my overall mood, this is something to be cheerful about!

Chabon endorses Obama

File this under “for what it’s worth” - Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon issues a rather introspective endorsement of Barack Obama. Hey, it means more to me than Oprah’s endorsement. But glitzy it aint:

“You know what I needed to do before I could decide to support Barack Obama for president? I had to give myself permission to feel hope. That’s almost kind of sad, isn’t it? I had to tell myself that it is OK. That it would be all right if I allowed myself to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation. That we can aspire to be more than merely secure or predominant. That we could apsire to build and to heal not just to patch and prop up. We can aspire to come together not just come to terms.”

Suffice to say that one rarely gets to hear an internal monologue during an endorsement rally…which might explain why a couple of the TV cameras clicked “OFF” about this time. Nevermind them, Mike. Preach, brother!!

“I had to allow myself to do something that felt really weird, something I had never done before in my entire life — to believe in a candidate for the president of the United States.”

The crowd starting yelling “We believe!”

January Thaw

Mist and ice all around with dripping gutters and general gloom.  Looks like all the snow will be gone this week, and we’ll be down to the mud for a while.  Perfect day to read a book… so I did.  Tomorrow it’s back to the grind … averaging seating charts, disaggregating data, that sort of thing.

I was so enthused with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union  that I decided to read his latest, Gentlemen of the Road, and put up a review here.  It’s a bit of a disappointment, actually, but a quick read.