Leviticus

By Some Idiot

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This is the third and final part of my 'Apocalyptic Mess' series of reviews.

But before we get going, here's a slide show.

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A sunny afternoon break at home... I might sit at the kitchen table.



Where's the lighter?



"And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtle doves, or of young pigeons. And the priest shall bring it unto the altar..." This is so boring.



"And when any will offer a meat offering unto the LORD, his offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil on it, and put frankincense thereon..." Hang on. Wouldn't the frankincense ruin the smell?



"And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thy offerings thou shalt offer salt." Well, God is clearer on that than he is about homsexuality. Note to the religious: Salt everything!



Fuck. This is like a cookbook from Hell.



Hmm, Leviticus 11:17 reckons that the 'little owl' is an abomination. Ramon Insertnamehere will agree.



Wait, so if you come across a leper, the Priest has to actually yell: "Unclean! Unclean!" God this is fucked. This is doing my head in.


Ooh! The cricket's on!


*

I am going to open my review of Leviticus (which I stupidly read three times, just trying to get my head around it) with a lengthy extract. Perhaps make a cuppa, settle yourself in, and take your time reading this. It is a large slab taken from Chapter 26 of Leviticus - the last chapter, and it is God's words. In this extract he explains what he will do to you if you don't abide by his rules, as detailed in the previous chapters of Leviticus (which I will come to after the extract.)

You ready? Here goes. Leviticus 26: 14-38

14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;

15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:

16 I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.

18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.

19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:

20 And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.

23 And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;

24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.

26 And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

27 And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me;

28 Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

29 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.

30 And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.

31 And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

32 And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.

34 Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.

36 And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.

37 And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.

38 And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.

Oh man, how cool is that? See, this is why I love the Bible. It is written exquisitely, and with such evilness and spite and it delivers such forceful language and concepts. If I encountered the most hideous and sick criminal, never would I have been able to conjure such an imaginative punishment for him as "...ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat."

And what a remarkable character the LORD, Yahweh, is! He's like Darth Vader multiplied by a zillion..."I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you." Bwahahahahaha!

It's powerful and inventive stuff and at times a delight to read; up there with Shakespeare even, and I am fortunate to be an atheist who can read this and feel nothing but entertained.

But of course, herein lies the problem. 'The Bible' is taken very seriously by many millions of people as a divine document. We swear by The Bible in court. It is placed in hotel rooms, in courts, in parliaments. It is 'holy' in the minds of many who, in its name, have fought wars, and killed, and maimed, and stopped homosexuals from getting married, and insisted they teach Creation in science classes.

And so the religious, if they do believe The Bible is in fact the divine word of God, must take God's threats seriously. He will chastise you for your sins, so you better do what he says to do, and avoid doing what he says not to do, otherwise you may have to eat your children.

But don't panic, because the preceding 25 chapters of Leviticus contains all his rules so if you study them, you'll know what to do and what not to do.

For instance: Homosexuals? Abomination! You're fucked. Very clear on this. "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination." (18:22).

But the LORD is even clearer on who else is fucked, and they are no more or less fucked than the gays.

Those who get drunk in a church (10:8)
Those who touch a dead camel (11:8)
Those who eat a bat (11:9)
Those who touch a woman who has given birth in the last week (12:6)
Those men who don't have a shower after ejaculating (15:16)
Those who touch a woman menstruating (15:19-20)
Those who eat blood from anything (presumably, the meat should be cooked well) (17:10)
Those who ask a woman to get naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Those who eat from a fruit tree that is not more than three years old (19:23)
Those with tattoos (19:28)
Those men who get naked with a woman that is menstruating (20:18)
Wizards (20:27)
Anyone who works on the Sabbath (too many references to list)

If you fall into any of the above categories you're likely to have God's face set against you and be slain before your enemies.

Please understand and appreciate this. The above rules (plucked from about 1,000 rules contained in Leviticus) are given no more or less importance than the homosexual issue, which brings me to something that has been noted many times before but I now want to give it a name: The Great Christian Squirm.

The Great Christian Squirm (GCS) is prevalent amongst all the religious except for maybe those nutters who hang about with the 'God Hates Fags' signs at US army funerals (they are the only True Believers I can name).

The GCS is when anybody both religious and who think the Bible is holy, whether they be fundamentalist or recreational, pick and choose. "Homosexuality is wrong," they may say, but have they eaten fruit from a tree less than three years old? Have they touched their wives after giving birth? Because as I say, Leviticus is clear on both topics. So they squirm out of it by saying, "Oh, but that's the Old Testament, and you have to look at the Ancient Greek translation of the word 'fruit', oh and Jesus changed everything and umm, you have to put Leviticus in context of the times and ummm..."

You can't have it both ways, dudes. Either the book is the Holy and Divine Word of the everlasting creator LORD, or it isn't. Either you take it ALL, or you take none of it, so if you even dare say, "It is okay to touch my wife after she gives birth," then I say to you, "Then you cannot have Creation, you cannot have The Ten Commandments, you cannot have Noah's Ark and you cannot have the Resurrection."

It is also in Leviticus that slavery is given the go-ahead:

"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession." (25:44-45)

I would suggest that all religions, at least in Western society, these days find slavery abhorrent. But there it is, in the Holy Bible. Watch them squirm. Watch them tell you that that bit no longer applies, but that other bit does.

Sorry Christians. If you're telling me that Mary was a virgin, then I can have slaves.

*

As a stand-alone book Leviticus is a dismal faiure. Moses the dumb-arse is on Mt Sinai and God is telling him his rules. That's kinda it. Chapter 26 with all the evil bits is the only entertaining part because the rest of it is rule after rule after rule. It's an empty book - empty of relevancy, empty of entertainment, empty of art. The first eleven chapters is all about burnt offerings... how to slaughter the lamb or the goat or the ox or whatever, which parts you can eat and which parts you can't, when to offer a lamb and when to offer a turtle dove and so on. There's a few chapters on leprosy and boils, a bit about some extra piety required of the Priests and repeated over and over and over is shit about the Sabbath. I tell ya: Moses must have had a keen memory to remember all these rules. It's not like he was taking dictation or anything.

There's only one 'story' in the whole book, in chapter 24, concerning a little half-caste kid in the tribe who blasphemes. God tells Moses to have the kid murdered. "And Moses spoke to the children of Israel , that they should bring forth him that had cursed out of the camp, and stone him with stones. And the children of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses." (24:23)

Leviticus is of no interest to anyone really, except for maybe orthodox Jews who want to stick to their kosher cooking and need to know when all the holy days on the Jewish calendar are. That's all it is. The whole fucking Leviticus is just one boring and irrelevant rule after another rule.

There are some nice rules that God laid down, though they are few and far between. One which I can't find now was a very direct commandment to be nice to kids and I appreciated that, even though in Exodus God was quite happy for kids to be murdered as long as they were Gyppos. There was also some stuff about looking after family and neighbours if they encounter financial misfortune... you know, like, give them a job, or lend them money, and feed them, and that was nice, but, all in all, it was mainly about how to prepare meat. That's the over-riding and dominant feature of Leviticus, followed a close second by Sabbath rules.

So why did I read it three times? Well, bereft of art, entertainment and relevancy, I found it interesting that we, us humans, as a people, as a species, are capable of believing this stuff to be Holy. I had to keep reading to appreciate how truly bizarre we are. Humans are a fantastic bunch. We are capable of anything.

Night

By Elie Wiesel

This is Part Two of a three part series of reviews sub-titled 'Apocalyptic Mess'.

It is also Part One of a series of five reviews of books I purchased for only $5 a book at the wonderful Book Grocer.



This is an account of the writer's time in a Nazi concentration camp.

I am not Jewish, or religious. I am not German, or Polish. I am not an ethnic supremacist, or belong to a persecuted minority. I am not a child of war, I have not lived in a war zone, I have not been sent to a war. I have not lost any member of my immediate family to a violent death.

Who am I to comment on this story?

I can only understand the holocaust in either political or philosophical terms. And of course by 'understand' I mean 'not understand'.

I'm just another voice who in exasperation, at the loss of anything else to add just says, "Lest we forget."

In my review of Blood Meridian I complained that, "It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story."

That's why this book is so horrible. Because it is our story. It comes from Earth. People reasoned a genocide. They used the word 'solution'. Unlike the cartoon directionless psychopaths in Blood Meridian, these people had a reason for their actions. Some people, in time, made a reason for genocide.

I can't score this book. I won't.

This is not a book to read because you want to, it's a book to read because you have to.

Blood Meridian

By Cormac McCarthy



This review is part one of a series of three reviews to be posted in the next few days under the sub-title ‘Apocalyptic Mess’.

Being that I discovered McCarthy early in the year via ‘No Country For Old Men’ and ‘The Road’, and being that I also fostered an appreciation for Western movies in the past six months or so, it seemed fitting to wind up these two interests with a western by Cormac McCarthy (before moving on to my next phase, whatever that is).

I was looking forward to this book, especially because many McCarthy fans (including our comrade ‘Tiger In A Tube’ ) nominated it as his best work.

Here it is: An amoral 14 year old sociopath known only as ‘the kid’ joins a mob of violent scalp-hunters, lead by a sadistic maniac called Glanton and an enigmatic Kurtz-like hairless man known as ‘the judge’ who may or may not exist.

By jesus it was violent.

...one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew...

And gory.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts. Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out of their grinning mouths.

McCarthy dishes up many impossibly long sentences.

They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren plan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

And describes a landscape that is alien to me, I think.

They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian...

Using words I’ve never heard (dictionary.com and wiki - thankyou).

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows...

*

The book is gripping and moving but that’s all I can say in support of it. They're like a band of Ivan Milats lead by Kierkegaard’s evil twin from a parallel universe running around mid 19th Century USA/Mexico brewing their own mini-holocaust by senselessly slaughtering and scalping Mexicans, pilgrims and Injuns. Did I mention how violent it is?

The judge is the best character, even though his soliloquies make little sense, and even though he may not exist (is he the kid's mind's creation? Is he Satan?). He’s a bisexual, a pedophile, he's highly educated, multi-lingual and one of the more sadistic characters of fiction. His habit of making sketches of artefacts (whether they be an old shack or an animal or a child or whatever) before killing/destroying them is a fascinating quirk.

Coming across ancient Indian rock-carvings:

The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out those certain ones into his book...

...then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been.

His only explanation for this is:

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

And in relation to his extreme sadism, he offers:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.

But the main chracater is the kid who, in the absence of anything better to do, joins this gang of murderers. We follow the kid’s formative years but when he joins the gang, we actually lose him as a central character for about 150 pages. At first this bugged me, but I realised in the end that it was McCarthy’s greatest literary achievement in the book. By dropping the kid out of the narrative we could watch everything that was happening just as the kid was experiencing it. By the time he's freed from the gang and we’re back into his mind, we understand his trauma and total inability to cooperate with the world. Maybe McCarthy shut us out from his thoughts for 150 pages because he had none. Maybe. For, had he got to figurin' things, maybe he'd make a lousy genocidal maniac. Or maybe McCarthy just wanted us to concentrate on the horror.

*

I can see why the book is lauded. It’s a massive and profound work. But, I have a problem with it.

Germaine Greer in her brilliant essay, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ (I don't care what you say or whether you agree with her essay or not... Greer’s concept is brilliant and important) she posits that:

We hate this country because we cannot allow ourselves to love it. We know in our hearts' core that it is not ours.

But offers this as a way of overcoming it:

If we climbed out of the recreational vehicle and sat on the ground, we might begin to get the message that we can't afford to hear, the message that, since contact, Aborigines have never stopped transmitting. The land is the source of everything;

I argue that Greer is a writer who speaks in the language of myth. I might write an essay on this one day. In short, my summary of her life’s work is that she talks in an ancient and abstract tongue, and too many attack her because they try to understand her in the context of current affairs, hard news and facts. It’s not what she’s about – or at least, it’s not what she means to me. When Greer said, “The animal kingdom got its revenge,” she was not saying (as the hopelessly stupid Helen Razer insinuated) that the animal kingdom got together and hatched a plan to kill Steve Irwin. She was in fact rising to Irwin’s own mythological ubermensch ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ with words appropriate to that mythical superhero's death. They got their revenge on the Crocodile Hunter, not the husband / father.

Same goes with her use of the words (above) ‘hate’ and ‘land is the source of everything’.

I know what she means. At least I think I do. We are as much a product of the land we inhabit as we are our genetic breeding and our expreiences and circumstance. We store within us all that is abstract and transcedental as well as material in these matters. And yet, we deny it, or at best, try to ignore it, but we cannot escape it.

As such, we are a cocktail of both nature's peril and beauty.

Which brings me back to Blood Meridian. I cannot accept such amorality. It is inferred that both circumstance and land created these monsters, but there was no let up. Glanton cared for a dog. That's all we got. The rest cared for nobody and nothing. They existed trapped in one dimension only - as psychopathic maniacs and had no other traits. A glimpse of camaraderie here, a hint of self-awareness there, all to be eradicated a minute later. It’s not good enough to say: “As long as they were employed to slaughter injuns, they couldn’t afford another dimension”, because, hell, even Ivan Milat may have liked ice-cream or Bon Jovi or something.

In a way, they act on the Greer model – they tear up the country that is not theirs by slaughtering the people that are its custodians, but unlike the Greer model, there is no redemption or lesson, nothing to reflect upon, no message in the dirt or the wildflowers, no second to sigh at a sunset or admire the guile of the wolf or the resilience of the quarrey.

The nearest I’ll come to saying something religious is to concede that there is something in the dirt upon which we are raised that melds to us. Human nature is inextricably linked with nature full stop. Physics, biology, geology are siblings to philosophy, art and human experience.

Maybe that's why my tolerance of religion and new-age spiritualism is ZERO, and why I find it all to be abhorrent, childish nonsense. Because it assumes we belong to Jesus, or the Lord, or to some other sentient designer such as the new-age cosmos with its reliance on fate, destiny, 'meant to happen' fucking garbage junk philosophy, and that souls or spirits exist on higher plains extraneous to the planet on which we are rooted to... all these beliefs, whether they be Christian, Islamic or Wiccan remove us from the land, from our experience, from our instinct and most importantly, from the magic that is life. They are trying to relocate us to a place that cannot and does not exist.

We cannot help but belong to the land - the laws governing our existance insist on this and the human mind on some transcedental level knows it and works with it. The same laws apply to all of us and we offer varying results and interpretations back. Blood Meridian lacks this. Just like the Old Testament, it peddles an absolute that's beyond our potential. It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story.

But it was cracking entertainment.

B Minus.

Glossary just from the extracts above (fairdinkum, every page had some word I didn't know).

Midden: Dunghill or refuge heap.

Fontanel: One of the spaces, covered by membrane, between the bones of the fetal or young skull.

Viscera: The organs in the cavities of the body, esp. those in the abdominal cavity.

Spume: Foam, froth, or scum.

Weft: A woven fabric or garment

Groundsel: Any composite plant of the genus Senecio, esp. S. vulgaris, a common weed having clusters of small yellow disk flowers without rays.


Zinnia: Any of several composite plants of the genus Zinnia, native to Mexico and adjacent areas, esp. the widely cultivated species Z. elegans, having variously colored, many-rayed flower heads.


Gentian: any of several plants of the genera Gentiana, Gentianella, and Gentianopsis, having usually blue, or sometimes yellow, white, or red, flowers, as the fringed gentian of North America.


Gibbous: (of a heavenly body) Convex at both edges, as the moon when more than half full.

Spancel: a noosed rope with which to hobble an animal, esp. a horse or cow. In his case, he has made a verb of it.

Chert: A compact rock consisting essentially of microcrystalline quartz

*

Apologies to Tiger In A Tube because this is the second novel listed in his Top Eleven of which I've had ill words to say. But he'll forgive me because us Richmond supporters, in the lack of success, only have dignity left.

True Grit

By Charles Portis



Loved it.

I've been going through a John Wayne phase. You can buy his films cheap if you buy them in bulk. Across three collections, I scored about 30 the Duke's films for just $80. For a little under $3 a film, it's great value. I've been going through them slowly in the past few months - some are absolutley fantastic (The Searchers and Rio Bravo are standouts so far) and some are fucking retarded (Rio Lobo... write it down; write the words 'Rio Lobo' down, commit them to memory, and make a pledge to never see that movie). The other night I got to 'True Grit' and was about to hit 'play', but then remembered I owned the book. "What the Hell," says I, "I'll watch another film tonight, and actually read True Grit before I watch the flick," (this then lead to the Rio Lobo disaster of 2008. Seriously, I can't begin to describe how pathetic Rio Lobo is. As a 19 year old girl I met recently would say, "It was AIDS.").

The book starts: "People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood..." and from that very first few words to the very last, the book was UNPUTDOWNABLE.

It is told in the voice of the fourteen year old girl, Mattie, whose father was killed by one of his workers, a man called Tom Chaney, "...a short man with cruel features."

Mattie, though young, has an exacting or calculating manner about her to the point that I surmised she had Aspbergers, and with a mix of that need for exactitude along with guts, skill, wits and a Presbyterian's old-testament longing for revenge, she doggedly hunts down Tom Chaney.

I'm not being flippant on the Aspberger's line either. I don't know if that's just the way Portis writes or whether he's brilliantly skilled at bringing a unique young girl's voice to light, but, Mattie is brilliantly formed, so unique, in a kind of manner that's not quite right but nor is it bad, or wrong, or off-putting. No, Mattie is just, well, umm, not cold as such, but full on. Fortunately, her single-mindedness is taking us on a great adventure with what could only be described as a noble cause... the taking down of a violent killer in revenge for her father's death.

To hunt down the man, she enlists the services of a mean Marshal renowned for having 'true grit'. This is 'Rooster' Cogburn (the John Wayne part), and along with a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBoef (who is hunting the same man for killing a Senator back in Waco, Texas), the three hunters go deep into Indian-held territory.

It's a classic Western. It's also a classic moral tale, a classic chase, a classic adventure - it's romance free but sexy as fuck. It's got shootouts, dead horses, skeletons, rattlesnakes, Indians, double-crossers, executions... everything you want.

They talk mean. The Texas Ranger wants the killer to pay for the high-profile crime of murdering a Senator (and his dogs) back in Texas but young Mattie wants him hanged for the crime of murdering her simple and honest father.

"I want him to know he is being punished for killing my father. It is nothing to me how many dogs and fat men he killed in Texas."

"You can let him know that," said Rooster. "You can tell him to his face. You can spit on him and make him eat sand out of the road. You can put a ball in his foot and I will hold him while you do it. But we must catch him first."

I like the way Portis brings in characters for cameos (if you ever read it, watch out for the bloke 'Stonehill' who in just a few pages becomes one of the best fictional characters I've known). I like the way Mattie interacts with these cameos. The night before she leaves, she decides to sleep in the stable with her horse Little Blackie rather than waste money at the boarding-house for just a few hours' sleep (her financial acumen is a recurring theme).

The watchman was an old man. He helped me to shake out the dusty quilt that was on the bunk. I looked in on Little Blackie at his stall and made sure everything was in readiness. The watchman followed me around.

I said to him, "Are you the one that had his teeth knocked out?"

"No, that was Tim. Mine was drawn by a dentist. He called himself a dentist."

"Who are you?"

"Toby."

I can smell Hemingway...

Rooster, though mean and violent, has a heart under it all. Discovering two young boys torturing a mule, he frees the mule, gives the boys a' whippin' and says to one of them, "See that you mend your ways, boy, or I will come back some dark night and cut off your head and let the crows peck your eyeballs out."

It's at times a violent book, and perhaps the only time we ever get a sense that young Mattie feels fear is when an interrogation of two young cattle-thieves goes wrong. One of them, Moon, who was shot earlier, starts to spill the beans, and suddenly the situation spirals out of control. Fingers are chopped off, guns are fired, people are stabbed and Mattie records, "My thought was: I am better out of this. I tumbled backward from the bench and sought a place of safety on the dirt floor."

As Moon lays dying, he talks of his brother.

I said, "Do you want us to tell your brother what happened to you?"

He said, "It don't matter about that. He knows I am on the scout. I will meet him later walking the streets of Glory."

**

That'll do for extracts. You have to read it. It can be done in one sitting. One rainy afternoon, or as I did it, one empty evening tanked on coffee and Dunhills with an old cat beside me, occassionally strirring.

I wonder what it is I suddenly, in my late 30's, like so much about the Western? For starters, I like the names of things. Daniel Webster's Cigars, Stonehill's Livery Stable, The Grangers Trust Co. of Topeka, Kansas, and my favourite in this book, a reference to a company called 'The Great Arkansas River, Vicksburg & Gulf Steamship Company'.

I like the simple food they eat. Oh, I love gourmet chefs' stream-of-consciousness "agitated greens with Nicaraguan virgin jus" type stuff, but I also like meat and three veg. I think I even like it more, the older I get, and as these western stereotypes range across the land, whether the law or the lawless, they drink their coffee in the morning, their whiskey at night, and in between there's some salted pork, bread and maybe a bite of corn. Many smoke.

These Western stereotypes also have a pleasing mix of anarchy and freedom, but tinged with a sense of community, hard-work, morality and 'what's right and wrong'. Oh, there's a bit too much God-fearin' and that Old Testament rhetoric but I'm prepared to look past it and suggest that for then, back then, in those times, it was intellectual solace (no excuse now).

In the end maybe it's the stereotype itself that attracts me. I spent much of my late 20's banging on about post-modernism, about challenging the hegemony, bringing down stereotypes, throwing history away - stomping on it first - and starting anew with a Foucaultian Utopia where gender, race, class, sexuality, sanity and culture hardly exist beyond their entry in some dusty Museum's ledger.

But now suddenly I'm all, "Fuck it. A man's a man."

That's not denying variations thereof, nor does it condone violence or the evil that men do. Hell, it's the opposite. Sheikh Al Hilaly and his 'uncovered meat' fable diminishes the manliness of him and his flock as far as I'm concerned because real men act like real men, not like budding Satans with unbridled lusts for domination.

But saying a man is a man is a man is just saying, ecce homo, and, well, that's just how it is, and we all, deep down, know what 'being a man about things' infers.

It's the Western that right now exemplifies this for me, and this book is a highly entertaining Western.

I give it a B+.

(PS: The film 'True Grit' was a bit of a let-down of course. It was okay, but, it was largely ruined by a completely inapparopriate soundtrack (which seemed to never stop) that was lithe, light and fluffy - totally at odds with the themes of the story. Also, and I guess it's just because of when it was made and what audience they hoped to reach out to, the film, rather ironically lacked the very thing it promised most: grit.)

Frankenstein

By Mary Shelley


THE PROS

The story itself is fantastic. Obviously, we all know the basics. Brilliant but mad Dr. Frankenstein makes a monster out of spare parts, it goes on a murderous rampage, the doctor gets on to the drugs, cue moral lesson #17 “Be careful what you wish for...” , some parallels with Actaeon getting eaten by his own hounds and about a hundred other metaphors, life lessons and subtexts ranging from Christian sexual dysfunction to, “Oh no, I ruined my soufflé... I’m Frankenstein!”.

But my knowledge of the tale was based on the B-grade cartoons and movies of my childhood, and The Munsters, and I was pleasantly surprised that at every corner I really didn’t know what was going to happen next.

I always thought Dr. Frankenstein was an old man. Oh no, in the original, he’s a gifted young University student when he brings the monster to life. I also thought he had a dumb hunchbacked assistant. Nope. And I also thought he ran through cemeteries gathering spare parts. Wrong again. In fact, Frankenstein is very vague as to how he gathered the parts, saying only that he, “...collected bones from charnel-houses...” and, “...the dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials,”. As for the process of bringing a monster into the world, he simply announces that one day he realised that he “...possessed the capacity of bestowing animation,” and, “...having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.” That's about the sum total of information we get regarding his creation. As for the particular science of the creation, we get nothing. Nothing at all. Still, good on Mary Shelley for not boring us with complex scientific wish-wash, and in a way, the lack of science and procedure helps the story chug along (something Hollywood needs to re-learn... yeah, I’m looking at you George Lucas).

The night Frankenstein finally animates his monster, his first reaction is: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?... Breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Cue memory of creations gone wrong in our own lives: In my case it was my Year 7 Woodwork assignment. I spent months creating a swan. I chiselled its wings, smoothed its face, put a little of myself into every sandpaper scrub and when I handed it in the teacher said, “What is it? A turtle? I’ll give you a C.” The next project was a tray. I failed, and started to become more bookish.

Anyway, after the monster comes to life, what does Dr. Frankenstein do? Instead of immediately putting the monster down, he runs into his bedroom and goes to sleep, leaving the monster to fend for itself. The most awesome moment of the book then takes place. The monster works its way into his bedroom.

“He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped...”

Even reading it now, and knowing what we do of the poor monster’s fate, it’s a powerful scene. What’s both tragic, and in its way quite hilarious, is that Frankenstein not only escapes, but he actually kind of just gets on with his life for a few years, only occasionally wondering what ever happened to that monster thing he created.

We discover later that the monster at that point didn’t even know what he was, or what anything was, including ‘life’, which reminds me of the great monologue by the whale, suddenly ‘invented’ and dropped from the sky in Hitchhiker’s... (I fear this reminder also exposes me as part-nerd).

“Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!”

Heh.

But back to the horrror.

The fact the monster was smiling at his creator makes the scene all the more tormenting to me.

So anyway, a few years later, Frankenstein’s little brother gets murdered and by chance he discovers the monster was the murderer.

A confrontation occurs between Frankenstein and his monster; the monster demands a wife, otherwise there’ll be more killing. Frankenstein acquiesces, but changes his mind just before completing the bride, so he chucks the bride-parts into the ocean.

Of course the monster gets mighty pissed off and goes on his murderous rampage. The story then takes us as far as the North Pole where there’s plenty more excitement to be had.

There’s a great scene on Frankenstein’s wedding night, where instead of screwing his wife (who he’s been waiting to marry since childhood) he instead patrols the corridors of the inn, high on drugs, carrying a gun and ready to shoot the monster. I couldn’t help but detect a fear of sex in the whole scene and in fact, once I got to that bit, I realised that on just about every page of this book there’s plenty of subtext to rummage through, as well as some impeccably created mythology that we can use to both reflect and admire.

The fact that much of the imagery from this original tale still permeates our culture is testament to its many layers.

Also, published in 1818, I wonder if it's the first book to ever provide us with the oft-employed horror cliché of a lightning bolt illuminating a spine-chilling visage for an instant?

“I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently: I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon...”

In fact, there’s a lot of horror clichés that could probably be traced back to this book and of course Stoker’s excellent ‘Dracula’, but I suppose back then when they were released they weren’t clichés at all. One imagines this book would have once been considered truly horrifying.

THE CONS

Oh, it’s all so POMPOUS. Unlike Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ , it’s ability to scare is diminished by the pompous upper-class twittery of the language Shelley writes in.

For starters, we can’t discern between characters and narrators because they all talk in exactly the same Lord Snot way as each other.

The whole Frankenstein family speak in identical Pompous Twat... and for fuck’s sake, SO DOES THE MONSTER. After going missing for a few years after his 'birth', the first time we hear words come from his mouth he sounds like he has a silver spoon rammed deep up his arse:

“All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.”

Now, an eloquent monster is fair enough, but it’s a great leap of faith I’m forced to make that in only two years he has gone from ‘Ugga ugga ugga’, to learning the alphabet by eavesdropping on a family ,and then, for his first book, reading Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ (no joke, that’s how the monster got to be so well spoken in the course of a couple of years). But when Frankenstein responds with:

“Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of Hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes!”.. I began to realise that Shelley only had one style of writing, and it was coming out of the mouths of not just these two characters, but every other character as well, and the narrator(s). There doesn’t appear to be one linguistic differential between any of ‘em.

Add to that, Frankenstein is a fucking girl and it’s like Shelley grabbed a discarded Jane Austen character from the Austen family’s garbage bin, put a dick on it, called it a mad scientist and made it her central character.

Another thing that bugged me was its lack of sexual tension. The Magic Faraway Tree has more eroticism than this book, and so does Toadie from Neighbours and that tea-towel on my kitchen bench. Like, there’s none. You’d think, given that Shelley used to hang out with the likes of her libertine husband Percy and his best mate, the sister/bear-fucking Goth pinup boy Lord Byron, she’d give us a heaving bosom or a nod to someone’s virility or even a well-turned ankle, or a sweaty bicep, but no, it’s all just so chaste. In a sense, I ended up coming to the conclusion that the whole book was one giant reflection of Mary's own sexual dysfunction and/or disinterest, and I offer this un-researched and ill-informed scurrilous piece of gossip: Mary Shelley was a dud root.

Perhaps her only sexual reference was attributing these words to one of the narrators (a sea-captain who finds Dr. Frankenstein floating on a slab of ice) in a letter to his sister... “I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil... I desire the company of a man...”

So Shelley has a bit of gay fantasy, but, you know, that line was on Page 4, and that was the end of that!

I can’t help but compare it to Dracula, which was both scary and sexy. Frankenstein is neither. It’s a little creepy at times, and even sad, but never really chilling and certainly not steamy.

Aside from the monster’s demand (not desire, it was only a demand) for a wife, there is zero reference to anything even vaguely approaching sex and in that, the book lacks a certain spunk. Even death is treated in a most inartistic and mundane fashion. So analysis of our two favourite themes in art, in life, in being a human – sex and death – are absent from this book (which is the complete opposite of the Holy Bible, which, is slowly dawning on me as the greatest documentation of our human lusts and our fear of/ obsession with death... and yet the pious amongst us would claim that the very opposite is true of these two publications).

Once this lack of primal themes started to sink in with me, Shelley’s Frankenstein started to bug me. Bataille would have not got past page 3.

**

I’ll leave the conclusion to the monster himself, in perhaps his finest soliloquy. This one actually affected me strongly because it reminded me of people I have met in my life - the ones that tend to fuck things up for everyone else.

“I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. .. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself...”

**

I give it a C Minus.


Mary Shelley - a dud root

Top 11 Novels

It's been a while. This happens to me. About once a year, I stop reading for a month or so. I read newspapers, and sports statistics, and get into the footy finals and stuff like the Olympics and that, and the whole book thing winds down. But, I'll have two new book reviews next week... maybe even three (I'm on a novel, a science book and the Bible all at once).

In the meantime, because nobody asked me to, I'm going to be one of those 'list' people and I'm going to have a stab at my Top 11 novels. I have linked them all to Amazon, just in case you are swept away with interest and feel like buying them for yourselves (but please try to buy them at Readings first). I've also linked the authours to their wiki entry.

1. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

2. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

3. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

4. The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

5. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima

6. Journey To The End Of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

7. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

8. L'assamoir by Emile Zola

9. Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis

10. The Tree Of Man by Patrick White

11. Blindness by Jose Saramago

(Apologies to George Orwell, Red Badge Of Courage, every other Dostoyevsky novel, Auto da Fe, some Nabakov books, Enid Blyton, The Enormous Room, Steinbeck, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Wizard of Oz... you all made the shortlist)

There's only so much one can say about another's list, so instead, please feel free to put your own Top 10 list in the comments (novels only).

If you think my list sucks, well, get fucked.

Madman's Island

By Ion L. Idriess

I was by myself last night because I wanted to watch Richmond play Geelong with no distractions and I had to stay at home anyway because I had work to do. Anyway, Richmond got hammered, and some locals had earlier asked me to go the pub later on.

I said, “I’ve lived in this town for two years and been to the pub only five times. For a reason. I hate it. It’s a cesspool of drunken fuckwits and the chicks are bogan slappers and half the guys wear those pants that are halfway down their legs like retards and surely their mothers couldn't sink so low as to love them... but thank you anyway for the kind offer.”

But after the footy I decided to man the fuck up and go to the fucking pub ‘cos I live in a small Australian town and it's What You Do.

All the people I knew there were dancing. Ugh. I didn’t recognise the music. It was that ‘RnB’ stuff that sounds like cats dying on top of a synthesiser. So I got chatting to this nice couple I know that blessedly were not dancing, and the bloke had his sister visiting. She was a journalist, and a fucking beautiful one at that. We got stuck into the wine, and argued about Oxford Commas.

“No!” she said of the Oxford Comma.

“You can’t stop us,” I said, “Me and my fellow Oxford Commarians. We’re coming. We will pillage, transform, and revolutionise the printed word”. Ah, it was highbrow for a while... and I was thinking, "Jeez, the pub's shit but I've found a nugget of gold with blonde hair and black stockings."

But then it turned. It descended into wine-induced madness, so much so that neither of us could speak properly and the next thing I knew I was playing pool with the journalist’s brother and some bogans from Colac and then the next thing I knew I was in bed alone and the bed was spinning faster than a Sunbeam blender.

I didn’t even try to pick her up. I’m an idiot. Though a rejection was probable, I shoud have at least given it a shot. But even if I got lucky, I would have fallen off. Her.

I don’t drink very well. I like coffee and cigarettes, and ecstasy, but if there was no alcohol left in the world I wouldn’t give a fat rat’s arse.

So anyway the point of all this is that today, Sunday, I couldn't muster the energy or will to do just about anything, and that included reading the two highbrow books I’m currently devouring. So, I crawled to the local second-hand bookstore, grabbed this book at random in the ‘Antiquarian Australian Fiction’ section (attracted by the title), brought it home, put myself in pyjamas, got the potbelly going and read all 238 pages in one sitting fuelled by Lipton’s Tea, Nescafe Espresso (the green label one), a pack of Dunhills and ongoing tomato/avocado on toast.

It was a fucking ripper. Set in the early 1920’s, and allegedly a true story with only minor embellishments, the main character Jack and this other bloke called Charlie are mining prospectors who are dropped off on Howick Island (north of Cairns) to follow up a rumour that there's tin on the island. The boat that drops them off on the desolated island is due to pick them up in a month.

But things go awry.

1. There’s a little bit of tin, but not enough to warrant a mining plant.
2. Charlie, a WW1 veteran, forgot to bring his medication which causes severe mood swings.
3. Charlie secretly decided he was never going to leave the island anyway – he wants to be alone for the rest of his life.
4. The boat doesn't turn up to collect them.


Charlie is the ‘madman’ acknowledged in the title. Without his medication, and scarred by a combination of WW1 and roaming the country by himself (sometimes living long periods with isolated Aboriginal tribes), as well as his physical sickness, he goes mad and tries to kill Jack.

Jack, who is only young, has to hide the whole time over the other side of the island and teach himself how to hunt and fish and survive in the mangrove forests, and also avoid being killed by crocodiles, sharks, stingrays, sand-fly swarms and even opium smugglers at one point, as well as his nutcase fellow island dweller.

He spends every night alone, hiding in a cave, a little scared.

“...on very windy nights a vast murmuring would come sighing over the island from the mangrove forest. In gusts, it would come, in sobbing shrieks that died away among the boulders. No wonder the legends of primitive man are full of ghostly things.”

Charlie’s madness is cyclical. The best twists in the story come when Jack, who spies on Charlie for safety, observes that he’s calm. When he’s calm, Jack actually goes and hangs out with him for a few days and they get along just fine but once he notices the mood swings starting to come on (probably PTSD or something) he has to go over the other side of the island and hide for his life because Charlie comes looking to kill him.

It’s riveting! It’s a gem!

But more importantly than the story itself, is the act of reading a cliff-hanging adventure novel on a chilly Sunday afternoon in your pyjamas by the fire. I ask you, is there a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon? I may not have had the pleasure of shagging the journalist, but what compensation!

God I love books.

I give this one a B.

In finishing, here’s a scan of one of the pages.

Two things to note.

The illustrator obviously didn’t bother to read the book. Jack often mentions the length of his beard but the picture shows a freshly-shaven man.

Secondly, I love seeing notes other people have written in second-hand books. I laughed and laughed when I saw the graffiti.