Come si dice "Realpolitik"?

The Prince and Selected Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli; Philosophy; +5; The Prince at BrothersJudd

The Prince is a dense read.

The Discourses are a lot more fun. They're little fun-size candy bar versions of the same basic ideas expressed in The Prince. So, yes, they cover the same general territory, but they're fun-sized. Also, they resemble candy bars. Much more pleasant.

Machiavelli's repuation as a heartless arse is really so undeserved. It's not, however, surprising. He's relentlessly blunt. He doesn't mince words, he doesn't pretend that politics is idealistic, or that politicians (statesmen, princes, whatever tickles your pickle) are altruistic. Even in an age when we are constantly reminded that these are basic facts of life, his writing is like a series of slaps to the face.

Both The Prince and The Discourses are written as advice to statesmen, but they read as explicit warnings to the people. Do not trust your government. The state does not care about you. You are a pawn. The object of the statesmen is to protect himself; the object of the state is to perpetuate itself. All things we pretty much know, but to be reminded of them in the blunt, realistic terms of a man telling the rulers how to defend themselves, enrich their states, and manipulate their people, they sound particularly chilling.

It's not shocking that he's been vilified as the originator of underhanded, manipulative politics; a sort of demonic precursor to Ludwig August von Rochau and his realpolitik. But that's not really fair. The real villains are... well... us. Humans in general; the politicians who behave so badly, and the people who have spent millenia studiously allowing them to do so. All Niccolo, and later Ludwig, did was to record faithfully the modes and functions of the real world.

But, in another lesson from Niccolo: tough titties. Them's the breaks. It sucks. Get over it, get with it, and get ahead of it.

He's the Man with the Plan

Beowulf; anon.; Epic Poetry; +11; Paula Stiles at Suite101

What can you say about Beowulf? It really is the sort of thing where people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing that they like.

I happen to think it's great fun. There's just something about epic poetry. After a while, you just sort of sink into it; while it takes a while to get into the rhythm of the words, once you do... It's transporting. Really otherworldly.

Of all the epic peoms I've read, of which I'm not claiming to have read many, this is by far my favorite. I've got a thing about Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic myths. I love them. Love them, the way some people love crystal methamphetamines. I go a little crazy when talking about them, reading them, or listening to them- so much so that I've pretty much been banned from discssing them around any of my acquaintences. Ah well.

But when reading something like "Beowulf," I really can't see, no matter how hard I try, how anyone can be bored with it. It's got everything: hot babes, manly men, evil monsters, big battles, stuff that goes "bump" in the night. This poem and its A-S,N&C bretheren are much, much closer to occidental society's prototypical blockbuster than many people seem to think. In terms of entertainment, we owe a lot more to the barbarians of the frozen seas than we commonly acknowledge.

I only wish this poem could supplant "The Odyssey" in remedial english classes the nation over.

Well, that's not quite true. "The Odyssey" is fun, too. I wish "Beowulf" could be given a little more attention outside of college Medieval History classes, though. It's too much fun to be allowed to languish.

Paris, Now Also City of Nightmares

Perfume: The Story of a Murder; Patrick Suskind; Mystery/Thirller/Horror; +10; Stephen Silver at sfsite.com

I've always been fond of identifying obscure literary devices at work, so on that count this is my all-time favorite book. The entire book (the whole fucking thing) is synesthetic. Absolutely everything that can be, is described in terms of scent. Viewed strictly from a lit-crit perspective, it's a stunning achievement. I keep rereading this book, trying to deconstruct his use of that device. It's so smoothly done, so closely and carefully and consistently (just a little polysyndeton there) woven into the story that it's... It just blows my mind.

It's also a fun excuse to talk about the Synesthetic Metaphor, my absolute all-time ultimate favorite literary device. This device seems uniquely suited to the English language, which is possessed of one of the broadest vocabularies on the planet. While not as well-suited to the creation of new words as, say, German, English almost madeningly adept at appropriating foreign words. (Ex: schadefrude, chef. Interestingly enough, both these words have strictly English equivalents, which are far less popular: epicaricacy and cook ((the noun)), respectively.) In 1920, W. P. Reeves wrote that English was "overlaid with more foreign words than any [other] living tongue..."

The synesthetic metaphor, often as simple as the phrase "sweet sounds," is terribly common. It's also incredibly effecient. By modifying "sounds" with "sweet" the writer is able not only to imply a technically harmonious composition, but an emotionally gentle and pleasing one as well. In the case of third-person limited narrative, it is especially useful.

Compare: "James played the harmonious melody, enjoying the soothing effect it had on his troubled soul, small though that should be."/"James removed himself to practice, the sweet sounds providing small consolation." The synesthetic metaphor implies all of the same technical and emotional content as the more prosaic version, while allowing for greater amounts of information to be added in a smaller amount of space. It allows the prose to be evocative rather than descriptive; it goes to the heart of the "show, don't tell" dictum.

Synesthesia itself is also a wonderful component of most "purple prose." That's a style with a really bad rap, I know, but it can be well-done and when it is, it's truly wonderful. There is a certain richness to synesthetic description which cannot be equaled with regular prose. Dark sounds, golden sounds, drab sounds and other variations on "visual hearing," just like "auditory gustation" ("bombastic spices"), or "oflactory sight" ("rancid scene," "balmy tableau") come closer to describing the intangibles of an experience than even a good string of abstract nouns. In the case of "gustatory olfaction" or "olfactory gustation," one can attribute the effectiveness of the description to the fact that taste and smell are fairly unified biological processes, broken apart rather cruelly by language; the synesthetic metaphor that reunites then doesn't so much blend two different senses as it does reunite the two parts of a single sense.

So why is snyesthesia so very evocative? Probably because it comes closer to a right-brained perception of the world than most other linguistic devices. Language is, after all, a child of the left brain. The left brain thinks in terms of order and classification. The right brain, on the other hand, thinks in terms of undefined sensations. Simply by using words, one moves a perceived thing (be it a sight, sound, smell, taste or even an emotion) from the right to the left brain. By using a descriptive method that defies the logic of the left brain, one forces the right brain to take part in understanding that perception. It creates a more complete and sense-oriented understanding of the thing described, one that touches not only the analytical mind, but the emotional, instinctual one.

Rock on, synesthetic literature!

Opine Much?

Anthem; Ayn Rand; Literary Fiction; -2; BrothersJudd

Sometimes I have trouble seeing the forest for the trees. Sometimes, however, I take the time to try and see and the forest... And someone comes along and bashes me over the head with one particularly large tree. Oh, Miss Rand, why must you bury your incredibly sexy story beneath an almost impenetrable layer of bombastic philosophizing?

I myself am of the opinion that the philosophy should serve the story. A good story, well presented, ought to reveal the intent, the thought, the meaning behind its inception, without forcing that meaning down the reader's throat like Syrup of Ipecac.

I happen to believe in some of the over-arching ideas of Objectivism. I don't see anything wrong with glorifying individual human beings, I am a die-hard capitalist and a serious believer in social Dawrinism. I do, however, find myself sometimes a little nauseated by the extreme fervor with which Miss Rand espouses her views. Seeing as she was born and raised in Stalinist Russia, I can't blame her for being a little strident and hysterical- I would be, too. Especially if I were espousing her viewpoint during the Cold War and in the midst of the American hippie movement, that gleefully blithe petri dish of sideways collectivism. But still... It's not really a novel. It's a polemic, and a vitrolic one at that. I'm wandering into review territory here, I really ought to back off.

Still, there's something about her attitude that bothers me. She's all about the rights of the individual, about not interfering with individual liberty, choice, etc. She's behind my all-time favourite quote on the issue: "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

Putting that idea up against the things she says in her books, and here I may actually be thinking about The Fountainhead more than Anthem, I have to ask... Doesn't an individual also have the right to betray himself? How can you support individual rights on the one hand and spew venom against those who don't live up to your ideal of the individual on the other? If you criticize those who don't follow your own ideal, you're not really supporting individualism. You're supporting a different form of collectivism. You should all be different, just like me.

That Unworshipped Saint

The Constant Gardener; John le Carre; Thriller/Mystery; +12; Lucinda Labes at The Ecologist

There's a reason this man is my favorite novelist. He's one of the best fucking writers I've ever read.

I feel a little squirrelly giving this a +12, the writing is actually much better than that, but the subject matter is so depressing. I swear on the grave of my father's father I wept three times in the course of reading this. The movie, predictably, killed it. What a surprise. Great actors, really, and a very good script, but there's something about the book, about the way le Carre writes... His world becomes so very, very real and it's so easy to get lost there. His writing sort of carries you along.

But as for being lost... One is lost in this story. One is totally lost during this story. Everything makes sense by the end, but emotionally... One starts, remains and ends lost. It's because le Carre makes the reader at one with his main character. I don't know of any other author who does that so well- or of any other writer who drops his protagonists into to such dark, twisted messes.

I always think of le Carre in terms of Fleming, and Fleming in terms of le Carre. It's a theme I'll probably return to. They really are the best example of the two sides of their shared coin. They were born about the same time, they both worked for Biritish Intelligence, and they both went on to write a large number of novels about intelligence work. They both created characters who became archetypes in the spy genre. Fleming's James Bond and le Carre's George Smiley seem to typify the two major views of intelligence work. I want to ramble, but I shouldn't.

Scout Up a Gem of a Dill Sauce, Would You?

To Kill a Mockingbird; Harper Lee; Literary Fiction; +8; Jerry Stratton at FireBlade

It really is the school system in this book that gets me. I don't think it's gotten much better. The big problem, I think, is fear; the teachers are afraid they aren't good enough, so they can't allow their students to be intelligent. If anything, as our bureaucracies have become more and more invasive and standardized testing more and more important, as teacher's freedoms in the classroom have become more and more curtailed, the level of fear of incompetency and the unwillingness to let students follow their own intellectual instincts have only grown. It always makes me think about "No Child Left Behind," that piece of lovely brilliance designed to give us a definitive and positive answer to that immortal question: "is our children learning?"

My Love, I'll Drink You

Poison Study; Maria V. Snyder; Fantasy; +3; T. M. Wagner at SF Reviews.net

Commander Ambrose was so overboard. So totally overboard. That character was just silly. And when Yelena gets a bite of food laced with "My Love" and just has time to call out the name of the poison to Valek, who is falling in love with her- oh, that was cute. Not.

The whole book is so overboard! I'm not sure I'd actually choose to eat My Love rather than read it again, though. It was a fun little story, I absolutely flew through it. But it's one of those books, you know? You get into the rhythm and the world of it, and you sort of float along, but it takes a long time to really get into it, and then something will happen to pull you out of that zen zone- sometimes it's external, sometimes its a jarring phrase on the page, and then you realize that the book just isn't that good, at all, and why were you so engrossed in it? And then it takes actual work to get back into the story! That happened to me alot; usually I was shaken out of the story by an awkward sentence or phrase.

I mean, really... Fun story, bad writing.

It's a major pet peeve of mine and something that I've been noticing a lot in SciFi and Fantasy. Those two genres just don't seem to have the same level of quality control in publishing that Literary Fiction does. Or perhaps it's just that I am less picky about the SciFi and Fantasy novels I grab off the shelves, as opposed to my habit of only reading "established classics" from LitFic.

One Down, Many To Go

The DaVinci Code; Dan Brown; Thriller/Mystery; -13; Laura Miller at Salon.com

I hate everything about this and I probably always will. The only good thing about it is that the movie gave me another chance to worship the glory that is Audrey Tautou's screen presence.

But seriously- is there anything in this book that wasn't already easily available knowledge? There's nothing intellectually brave or forward about suggesting that a 30-something rabbi was probably married and probably had kids. I think that's a little like suggesting your local mafioso might eat gabagool for lunch every once in a while; suggesting that the fellow in question is a mafioso is likely to draw more gasps than pointing out his dietary habits.

And there's the rub. The church leaders who seem most threatened by this book are the ones who seem unable- or unwilling- to grasp the idea that if Jesus was indeed real than he was most likely nothing more than the historical equivalent of any modern, extremely charismatic and successful counter-culture preacher.

That was about twelve hours of my life I will never, ever get back. Ever.

Although, as much as I hated the book, it did move pretty darn fast. I do admire Brown's pacing.