Bai Xiany­ong is said to be the best styl­ist among today’s Tai­wanese writ­ers, and among the best writ­ing in Chi­nese today. This is not some­thing I’m in a posi­tion to judge. This nov­el trans­lates well, part­ly because the sub­ject mat­ter, the sub­cul­ture of gay hus­tlers in Taipei, is eas­ily com­pared to sim­i­lar set­tings in Europe or North Amer­ica. Chi­nese soci­ety, for most of the thou­sands of years of its his­tory, was not infect­ed by the bar­baric homo­pho­bia that obsessed Chris­t­ian Europe. Unfor­tu­nately, Euro­pean cul­tural norms, and of course the vicious gay-hatred of Com­mu­nism on the main­land, have had their influ­ence, and today the gay sub­cul­ture of Tai­wan occu­pies much the same social posi­tion that it does in Amer­ica. Bai’s hus­tler char­ac­ters could as eas­ily be found in Toronto’s Church and Welles­ley vil­lage, or in West Hol­ly­wood. The per­fume of Chi­nese imagery, of jade and plum blos­soms and so on, makes it seem a bit dif­fer­ent. So do the numer­ous ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese pop cul­ture. Is it a good nov­el? Yes. The char­ac­ters seem real, and you care about what hap­pens to them. I rec­om­mend it.

14797. (Akdi Ros­tag­no, Julian Beck & Judith Mali­na) We, The Liv­ing Theatre
14798. (Will Bunch) The Media Is Help­ing Bush Scare the Pop­u­lace [arti­cle]
14798. (Lisa Finnegan) No Ques­tions Asked – News Cov­er­age Since 9/11 [intro­duc­tion and chapter
. . . . . out­lines of book to be pub­lished in Decem­ber, 2006]
14799. (Robert Bowring) Chi­na’s grow­ing might and the spir­it of Zheng He [arti­cle]
14800. (Jon George) Zoot­suit Black Read more »

Stephen Fry has the kind of effort­less tal­ent that makes me envi­ous. He is a bril­liant actor and come­dian (Black­ad­der; Jeeves and Woos­er; A Bit of Fry and Lau­rie), and fine writer of fic­tion, non-fic­tion, screen­plays and plays (I’m in the mid­dle of his nov­el Mak­ing His­tory). Nat­u­rally, such a per­son would be expect­ed to write an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy. But I was unpre­pared for the extreme hon­esty and sparkling wit of this book. It’s devot­ed entire­ly to his child­hood and teenage years, always the most inter­est­ing parts of an auto­bi­og­ra­phy, if it is hon­est. His descrip­tion of his first expe­ri­ence of feel­ing love is among the finest I’ve read. His self-eval­u­a­tions strike me as spot-on, his con­fes­sions to mis­deeds are not twist­ed into self-glam­or­iz­ing. The book is absolute­ly engross­ing. For the aspects of human cul­ture that offend him, he reserves a spe­cial, elo­quent anger: Read more »

This is Jon George’s sec­ond nov­el, which I read eager­ly after being very pleased by Faces of Mist and Flame. This one is much more com­pli­cated, jug­gling sev­eral char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. The plot involves a sud­den alter­ation in the fab­ric of real­ity, expe­ri­enced by the whole earth, a char­ac­ter try­ing to pin down the nature of psy­chic abil­i­ties, and char­ac­ters flash­ing on events in the past. Among those events is the assas­si­na­tion of SS–Ober­grup­pen­führer Rein­hard Hey­drich, who was per­haps the prin­ci­pal archi­tect of the Holo­caust. This fas­ci­nated me. I not only made a study of the Wansee Con­fer­ence, where Hey­drich con­sol­i­dated his plans, but a friend showed me the exact spot in the Prague sub­urb of Kobylisy where he was shot by Czech par­ti­sans. I will rec­om­mend this nov­el, espe­cially to any­one who has already read Faces of Mist and Flame, with the caveat that its nar­ra­tive com­plex­ity requires more atten­tive reading.

14749. (Cory Doc­torow) Some­one Comes to Town, Some­one Leaves Town
14750. (Joseph Kage) Chapitre Pre­mier: Esquiss­es de la vie Cana­di­enne sous Le Régime Français
14751. (David G. Hub­bard) The Sky­jack­er, His Flights of Fancy
(Bernard DeVo­to) Mark Twain At Work:
. . . . 14752. (Bernard DeVo­to) The Phan­ta­sy of Boy­hood: Tom Sawyer [arti­cle]
. . . . 14753. (Mark Twain) “Boy’s Man­u­script” [frag­ment antic­i­pat­ing Tom Sawyer]
. . . . 14754. (Bernard DeVo­to) Noon and the Dark: Huck­le­ber­ry Finn [arti­cle]
. . . . 14755. (Bernard DeVo­to) The Sym­bols of Despair [arti­cle]
14756. (Robert Graves) I, Claudius
Read more »

There was some­thing absolute­ly won­der­ful about the kind of sci­ence fic­tion that was pub­lished in the Amer­i­can SF mag­a­zines in the 1950’s. While the “main­stream” fic­tion writ­ers strug­gled to obey increas­ingly rigid notions of “real­ism” and the short sto­ry vir­tu­ally dis­ap­peared as an art form in the lit­er­ary world, Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ers flour­ished in their small ghet­to, free to let their imag­i­na­tions roam, and free to sat­i­rize soci­ety with infi­nite jest. That won­der­ful cre­ative caul­dron gave us Theodore Stur­geon, Philip K. Dick, Avram David­son, Edgar Pang­born, William Tenn, Alfred Bester, and many, many more. These were among the finest writ­ers Amer­ica ever pro­duced. There was one writer that almost all these men looked up to and admired, and that was Cyril M. Korn­bluth. Sad­ly, his career end­ed with pre­ma­ture death in 1958, after only sev­en years of writ­ing. But in those sev­en years he pro­duced sev­eral mas­ter­pieces in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fredrik Pohl —such as the bril­liant satire of adver­tis­ing, The Space Mer­chants, and the remark­ably pre­scient Glad­i­a­tor-at-Law. He also pro­duced sev­eral fine nov­els on his own, much more bit­ing (per­haps because Pohl’s mel­lower per­son­al­ity influ­enced the col­lab­o­ra­tions), as well as a pletho­ra of bril­liant short sto­ries. ‘The Lit­tle Black Bag’ and ‘The March­ing Morons’ are per­fect exam­ples of his superb artistry.

A fine intro­duc­tion to Kornbluth’s work would be this nov­el, The Syn­dic, pub­lished in 1953. It posits a future in which gov­ern­ments have col­lapsed under their own weight of bureau­cracy and been replaced by the Mafia. In 1953, it was far-out whim­sy. How would an East­ern Euro­pean read it today? The real plea­sure in read­ing Korn­bluth is that his sharp satire is deliv­ered in a crisp, pure­ly col­lo­quial style, as if Damon Run­yan where writ­ing soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence Fic­tion. A seri­ous writer, today, would make heavy going of this stuff, stretch­ing it out and fill­ing it with styl­is­tic tricks and learned ref­er­ences. Korn­bluth wrote like an expe­ri­enced bar­ber.… a few deft strokes with a very sharp blade, done like mag­ic, and over before you can catch your breath. Fifty-three years have passed since this nov­el hit the stands, and it is not quaint. It’s still a good, clean shave.

In the late 1960’s, there was a wave of “sky­jack­ings” — where lone gun­men would force air­planes to fly to Cuba. This book was a con­tem­po­rary psychiatrist’s attempt to ana­lyze the moti­va­tions of the Sky­jack­ers, based on inter­views with them in jail. In most cas­es, Cuba sim­ply extra­dited them to Cana­da, which then extra­dited them to the Unit­ed States. Even at the time, it was under­stood by every­one that the sky­jack­ings were not ini­ti­ated by, or encour­aged by the Cas­tro regime, which was actu­ally rather embar­rassed by the phe­nom­e­non. The author rejects the idea that there was any seri­ous polit­i­cal moti­va­tion behind the sky­jack­ings. In most cas­es, the polit­i­cal procla­ma­tions of the per­pe­tra­tors were far too shal­low and sil­ly to be tak­en seri­ously as motives. He goes through the per­sonal his­tory of each sky­jacker and finds that they are remark­ably uni­form. The typ­i­cal sky­jacker was the child of a vio­lent, bul­ly­ing father and a deeply reli­gious moth­er, who sub­se­quently failed mis­er­ably in carv­ing out any kind of suc­cess. They were usu­ally obses­sively reli­gious, and social­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cally extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Their sex­ual lives, most of the time, were pathet­ic. After some par­tic­u­larly dev­ast­ing fail­ure or betray­al, they quite spon­ta­neously con­cocted a scheme to cre­ate a dra­matic event that would some­how, they felt, resolve their dif­fi­cul­ties, at least in a sym­bolic sense. The idea of the sky­jack­ings seems to have occured to them sim­ply because oth­ers had done it, and it was a big thing in the news. The sim­i­lar­ity to the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­files of ser­ial killers, dis­cussed in Elliott Leyton’s work, is strik­ing. Ley­ton would have had a more com­mon-sense approach to the case his­to­ries. Hub­bard used his data to con­coct a rather lame the­ory from the pseu­do-sci­ence of psy­chother­apy which was then still very influ­en­tial. But the case his­to­ries speak for them­selves, and it’s inter­est­ing for a read­er in 2006 to be remind­ed that air trav­el was not par­tic­u­larly safe forty years ago.

This is an extreme­ly imag­i­na­tive and well-writ­ten nov­el, pulling togeth­er sev­eral themes that would not nor­mally work well togeth­er. Doc­torow com­bines a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of life in Toronto’s pleas­antly chaot­ic Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket neigh­bour­hood with night­mar­ish fan­tasy ele­ments that have the feel­ing of the grim­mer parts or Norse, Ger­man or Native Cana­dian folk­lore, and throws in a lit­tle cyber­punk, as well. These dis­parate com­po­nents are not set apart in blocks, but flow and blend into each oth­er on a para­graph-by-para­graph, some­times a sen­tence-by-sen­tence basis. I won’t sum­ma­rize the plot: it will just sound arbi­trar­ily grotesque, and will not give you any hint of the human­ity and the effec­tive lan­guage of the book. The book gives me some hope, because I was feel­ing that Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ing in North Amer­ica was mori­bund, and this is an exam­ple of a return­ing vigour.

14719. (Bri­an Doyle) Easy Avenue
14720. (Mary Mapes) Truth and Duty ― The Press, the Pres­i­dent, and the Priv­iledge of Power
(Wal­ter Mosley) Future­land: Nine Sto­ries of an Immi­nent World:
. . . . 14721. (Wal­ter Mosley) Whis­pers in the Dark [sto­ry]
. . . . 14722. (Wal­ter Mosley) The Great­est [sto­ry]
. . . . 14723. (Wal­ter Mosley) Doc­tor Kismet [sto­ry]
Read more »