LookingLand

I spent most of Sunday gnashing my teeth. the reasons why are pointless to explain (same o'crud). then I did the stupid thing of reading myself a bedtime story so depressing that it carried my mood overnight and now I am officially in the glums.

The book, Dennis Brandt's Pathway to Hell isn't spectacularly written ~ it's rather short (barely over 200 pages), and isn't exhaustive about much ~ but that made it perfect for me: no long explanations of campaigns I already know too well, no endless nattering about hardtack. instead it's a true chronicle largely in Angelo Crapsey's own words from his letters and diary, documenting in the most painful way imaginable, his slow decline into self-destructive dementia.

Crapsey's story is unique as far as books of the war go, though there's unfortunately nothing unique about what happened to him. It tells the story that Paulson's Soldier's Heart tries to tell, but doesn't.

When I think back on the origins of Reconstruction, I think i wrote it in part because this book hadn't been written. Crapsey's story is more heartbreaking than any novel anyone could ever write: a disaster that could have been avoided a hundred different ways. The circumstances of his bizarre upbringing at the hand of a religious whack-job father, his fervor for the Union, his abolitionist sentiments that sour after emancipation drags the war into a seemingly endless slaughter, the shame of his surrender and imprisonment ~ all of it horrible, horrible ~ and then to come home to the father-figure and friend he looked up to the most only to find himself rebuffed, feared, and ostracized. And finally the everyday event that led to Crapsey's end is so banal, almost ~ so utterly human in its simple cruelty. It isn't any wonder he blew his brains out. Twenty two years old.

Of course I imagined a different end once upon a time for Reconstruction which is in many ways this same story: an endless cycle of addictions, an abusive marriage, desolation, death. Even I was never so brave to actually make any of that stick, though. I had to find some hope in there somewhere. So I did.

But there was none for a lot of young boys like Crapsey. Even Howard Bahr didn't shrink from drawing us a picture in The Judas Field (which is maybe why I didn't like that book as much as I wanted to ~ it hit a nerve with me).

So yeah. I don't know why I am writing this except to wonder at the meaning of it all. I really seem to be out of touch with the world in so many ways. I don't see that improving, either, and it concerns me from time to time.



from LookingLand.com

Nucleus LiveJournal Plugin © Evgeny Lykhin

Can't get my car to start this morning. Yesterday it was -17 and it cranked over okay, but today at -21, it just ain't going to happen. I'm waiting to see if, when the temp gets up to at least 0 (we're supposed to have a high of 8 today!), I can get the poor thing on the road. If not, I get to work on Saturday. Which completely screws up my anticipated 3-day weekend, but oh well, what can you do?

So while I'm trapped here and AAA is so clogged with calls that I can't even get through and I'm stuck in my house (which is about 54 degrees right now ~ 4 below what's comfortable for me, so I'm going to have to turn the heat on, God forbid), I thought maybe I would do some blogging since I've neglected it for a while (being too busy and overwhelmed with other nonsense as of late).


The last book I read in 2008 was Howard Bahr's The Black Flower. I am a huge fan of Bahr, though have read his books sparingly and over long periods (I want to make them last and I'm now down to only one, so he better write another). The Black Flower was his first novel and I remember distinctly passing it over when it first came out because I was turned off by the paperback artwork (which I did not reproduce here, though it's the edition I own). I made the lousy assumption (judged it, I confess) that the tacky exterior was indicative of a tacky interior (and my apologies to Mr. Bahr because I know the photo used on the paperback cover was his own).

Anyway, after reading The Judas Field (the cover of which appealed to me), I was so impressed with the writing, I collected all of Bahr's other books ~ and it was a treat to end the year on such a positive note. The Black Flower reads like a great first novel. There are parts of it that seem a bit disconnected from the whole as though they were written independently before the whole thing was put together ~ so it is a bit disjointed in places, but Bahr is still amazing with a turn of phrase and his occasionally long-winded metaphors are never overwrought, always worth labor of reading. His descriptions of battle and its aftermath as not so evocative of Crane, though people naturally make the comparison. But where Crane's impressions come from inside Fleming's naive observations, Bahr's impressions seem to come from inside the exhausted veteran perspective of men who've seen it all and worse and just want a cup of coffee: good, bad or indifferent. To me, it's a whole different world. Fleming doesn't want to die. Bahr's Bushrod Carter just wants to get it over with if it's got to happen. Bahr's female characters feel a little flatter to me, but I like them and can appreciate the challenge. Writing women in this era is always a battle between prissy wallflower and full-blown virago, it seems.

Bahr's story here is pretty simple: following the messy Battle of Franklin, the army lands on the doorstep of an estate that gets commandeered as a hospital (if you follow that link you can see a picture of the actual plantation house where the story takes place. Actually, there's a really cool one here). What happens next is predictable, but so well-drawn you forgive it for being cliché: yes, the whole wounded soldier/nurse thing. But here the nurse doesn't want to fall in love in spite of her emotions, and honestly, I wasn't sure how it was going to end, which made restraining myself from reading forward too quickly a real trial.

I had a lot of problems with how The Judas Field ended. It was conclusive and completely realistic, but it made me angry (sort of in that good way that a book ought to provoke ~ and then again sort of in a way that annoyed me because I couldn't see why it had to end as it did). The Black Flower is similarly conflicting, but I felt like it was clearly "right". It felt right. Hard to talk about without giving anything away here, but I don't want to spoil it.

So that's my long spiel for the morning. If you love amazingly sensory, great writing, read Bahr's work.

from LookingLand.com

Nucleus LiveJournal Plugin © Evgeny Lykhin

~ and you can't really help it. it has that sort of car-wreck fascination from which you just can't tear your eyes away. this has been my fodder for the last few nights. in the realms of the truly abhorrent.

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 8. ~ Christmas with Robert E. Lee by Helen Topping Miller. i can't begin to imagine what compelled this author to pen such a wretched text. i was hoping for some treacle, but instead got a full-on helping of pathetic privation and disgrace (and endless pages of expository dialogue during which General Lee's children go on endlessly about stuff they all already know). man, this was a doozy: bad writing, a depressing, bad story, and some bizarre characterizationss. worse still, i have the sinking suspicion that everything in this slim volume was documented, right down to the Arlington carpets curled under against the wall because they were too big to fit at the shack at Washington College. i honestly couldn't tell if this was written to illicit sympathy for the Lees or in the spirit of some wicked schadenfreude. someone just spork my eyes out, please.

no. 9 ~ Madame Surratt: a drama in five acts by James Webb Rogers. oh. my. word. i'm not even sure i can begin to decribe this meta-theatrical pantheon of bad taste. the plot is inscrutable, the parade of random historical personages (including ~ oh wow ~ George Washington!) is bizarre (francis scott key and powhaten and patrick henry also make appearances ~ there is also an allegorical fantasy sequence, not quite but almost a ballet, in which actors representing the dissenting states comes back to the Union). honestly, i have no idea what to make of this mangled apologetic of southern honor that simultaneously damns the assassination and begs sympathy for its perpetrators. the dialogue is truly, pricelessly, dreadful: warbling Shakespearean monologues full of bombastic overbloated metaphors. this is my favorite exchange:

BOOTH: Richard the Third is on the boards to-night, and you shall learn the lesson while I play.

POWEL: Impossible, for I return to-night.

BOOTH: Whither?

POWEL: To my command.

BOOTH: Then wherefore did you come?

it is, in fact, so absolutely dreadful, i feel i must make use of it. immediately! i'm soooo working this in to my book somehow. if you would like to see for yourself this horror in all of its glory, feel free to read it online! (i love openlibrary.org).

and because we need an accompanying picture, here's something pretty and also slightly educational:



this carte-de-visite played a big role in the conspiracy trial.
it was found in the Surratt house with John Wilkes Booth's photograph
placed behind it. the prosecution kept trotting it out as
if it were some profound piece of evidence. it becomes an interesting
fixation during the course of the testimony.
anyway: it's Thursday and you know what that means? Update Day for Reconstruction. hopefully it's palate cleanser for inflicting bad books on you!

: D

last night we took a break from work to go downtown to a Borders that is closing and is having a 40% off sale. unfortunately there were no books i desperately wanted (it was getting picked clean since the sale started saturday). but i did get a copy of Far Away, So Close, which i had been wanting, so that's cool. anyone who doesn't know Wim Wenders's work needs to go out and get some. immediately.



one of my favorite scenes in Wings of Desire
(which is the "prequel" to Far Away, So Close) is this one
in which the angel Cassiel listens to the interior
monologues of various people in an immense library.
absolutely gorgeous.
meanwhile, i am loosely doing the 50bookchallenge again this year, i guess. i think i mentioned somwhere earlier that i wanted to focus on fiction, and especially fiction in the era/genre i work in, so i am off to a good start in that regard. catching up on the year's books:

no. 1 ~ Wicked Water by McKinley Kantor. this is a pretty straight-up genre western which made it somewhat disappointing. well-written and page-turner paced, it nevertheless had that sort of fluffy quality that meant i never really cared about any of the characters. i also think, after following the hired killer and the bimbo chanteuse through the first two thirds of the book only to switch over in the end to some new sheriff's pov (Roscoe, no less!), was jarring and somewhat of a cheat. the revelation of the killer's ocd about running water was also pretty lame. a couple of great scenes and otherwise really great writing made this worth while (at least it was mercifully short).

no. 2 ~ Among the Camps by Thomas Nelson Page. here's another one of those writers someone never told me about. i picked up his stuff in the garbage basement at half price books and while it's definitely victorian and rather saccharine, it's right up my alley. this book in particular was a series of short stories about towns under occupation during the war. at least one of them (a Christmas story, no less, called "A Captured Santa Claus") is noteworthy (and might make a great short film). another one about an annoyingly cute girl and her kitten turned out to be really wonderful (shades of Mikhail Sholokhov's "The Colt", but with a happy ending). i'm looking forward to trying on one of Page's novels next go-round.

no. 3 ~ The Judas Field by Howard Bahr. it took me what seems forever to finish this book. not because it was bad, but because it was so good i didn't want it to end and i feared it would end badly. i'm still iffy about the conclusion because i think the way the events unfolded could have (maybe should have) been done differently for it to have been really satisfying. i won't say more because i don't want to spoil it and i Strongly recommend this book to anyone with even a middling interest in this genre (Civil War/Reconstruction). i would also not hesitate to recommend this to people who don't know diddly about it.

Bahr's mostly seamless storytelling is amazing in its "wholeness" without bogging down in the exasperating detail that usually drives me around the bend in books about this era. it's also mostly restrained about the violence (oh, there's violence a-plenty, but he doesn't get so gratuitous that you feel like the book is just an endless excuse to talk about people's heads exploding). finally, one scene in which Cass Wakefield is visited by a priest whose church he has insulted (a scene of note in its own right) is worth the whole read. it's rare i find something that i feel is "startling and beautiful" in a book, and this qualifies: it's subtle and human and poignant (and i don't use that word ever lightly).

while the epilogue does feel a bit long-winded after all that needs to be said has been said, i can't fault Bahr's indulgence too much ~ the rest of the story is pretty spectacular. two thumbs up and despite my grousing about the ending, i wouldn't hesitate to put this on my list of top Civil War fiction written in our own time. easily.

lots of work to do this week. the gears are still spinning in my head around projects. had a long weekend of frustrations, but i am slowly getting the horse back into the paddock for another attempt.
: D

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 57 ~ A Soldier's Heart by gary paulsen. coupled with an article from the Journal of Urology (don't ask, i work in a library, i just come across things) about Joshua Chamberlain's pelvic wound, it was a thoroughly demoralizing evening of reading last night. paulsen's book is, hands down, the most depressing Civil War story i have ever read. and get this: near as i can tell, it's geared for pre-teens. the story isn't much and hashes a number of tired stand-bys: kid runs off to enlist, lies about his age to get in, suffers the trials and boredom of warfare, sees things that would raise hair on a billiard ball (one particular description of what happens to horses under cannon fire will stick with me forever now, thank you, gary). the kid is wounded horribly and makes it home, but the final image of the book (gadzooks), is him sitting on the bank, thinking about "pretty things" and checking the condition of a well-oiled .36 he's brought with him to his solitary picnic.

and the final kicker, of course, is that it's based on a real person. i should have known it was going to be pretty harsh. it opens up with a primer on post-traumatic stress-disorder and how there was no treatment for it back in those days. the "soldier's heart" refers to one variation on what ptsd was called back then. the most common clinical term was neurasthenia, which referred to a mysterious debilitating depressive malady with no particular discernible physical origins from which most of the post-war servicemen suffered. which brings us back to Joshua Chamberlain, who also suffered from a "soldier's heart" and was even put out of battle service for a spell to recover after a nervous breakdown following the battle of Gettysburg. he rebounded, but apparently suffered from lingering agony (and a number of surgeries) after being wounded, as well as having intensely dark periods for the rest of his life (like so many men did).

geh. this was a real horrorshow of a little book and a good reminder of just how screwed up people emerged from this war. there was some good stuff the book, extra points for never mentioning hardtack, but overall uneven in the writing (perhaps because it's a tad dumbed down for 10 year-olds). i admit, though, i was irritated by an endnote which says that the carnage at Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle in American history, killing more men in two hours than all the previous wars put together. i believe that distinction belongs to the battle at Antietam (which i previously mentioned in my post of september 17th).



in other news, i am drawing, drawing, drawing, trying to take some risks with my composition choices, though so far they are mostly safe. anyway, it's going well.

: D

was roused out of bed by a terrific storm at about 3:30 in the morning. stumbled around, closed windows, listened to the rain. now i am yawning like the grand canyon (so much for getting extra sleep on the weekend).

for my birthday i was gonna order a whole mess of s. weir mitchell's books, but after carefully pruning through them and making selections and going through every used bookstore online, i piled about $60 worth into my alibris shopping cart and then just didn't feel like ordering them.

yesterday i read (and for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 51 ~ New Samaria & The Summer of St. Martin by s. weir mitchell. this is two stories bound together. the first is really fun: a rich man has an accident in a far away town, is robbed of his identity, and forced to beg on the street with a man he had previously treated rather harsh. includes a hilarious confrontation with a cop, a circus clown, and the man all arguing over a gold watch. and a dog named Tramp (must'n't forget the dog!).

the second story is exceptionally (and i really hate to use the word) sweet. a general in the twilight of his years sits in a fog of nostalgia and is visited by the young daughter of a friend who thinks all her suitors are beneath her. they play a game in which they pretend he's 25 and courting her and she refuses him despite his most gallant attempts to win her affection. we later learn that he lost the love of his life and never married, but we don't what precisely happened. it's all very innocent and charming and romantic ~ if a little sad. then they go in supper together and there's no promise that their game meant anything more than that ~ but i'd like to think maybe it does (hey, Poppet married a woman 20 years his junior late in life, so it wasn't unheard of then for young girls to fall in love with charming generals without the match turning out to be a foolish disaster).

illustration from "The Summer of St. Martin"
i'm still reading Westways (it's a long book!). but as i was getting ready for bed, i was trying to think about what it was about mitchell's writing that compells me (subject matter, certainly). but mitchell is a weak writer in many ways ~ his characters tend to talk about nothing a lot and repeat themselves. he has a habit of writing whole scenes that explain what just happened in the scene prior. this is the first full-length novel of his that i have read and he didn't have this problem in his shorter works, so i'm assuming at the moment he was just better in the shorter form (short story, novella).

but his ramblings don't really bother me. he knows how to weave a decently intricate plot (Westways has several arcs going all at once), and his characters are both steady and alive. halfway through the book they've gone through a lot of changes, but you still recognize them all. mitchell was definitely a student of psychology and seemed to understand people well. where most victorian novels fail (creating wooden people with stilted language and cliched gestures), mitchell succeeds ~ even if he could use a winch to tighten everything up (already i think Westways could probably lose about 100 pages and not really miss it.)

anyway, so he's good at characters and he's especially good at making storytelling easy (which, for me is a big deal because i can write and craft words, but i am not a very good storyteller). he seems so absolutely comfortable and confident that he knows where it's all going and when he needs something to happen, it does. it makes me reevalaute my own transitions in particular ~ i always feel like there's "stuff in between" that's missing. i really need to work on that.

wow ~ i'm still crabasaurus rex from yesterday (and the fact that today's class was spectacularly snoozey and long). and i've had entirely too much sugar. ugh.

so it doesn't make any sense, but to take a break from the research, i decide to read fiction on sorta the same generel subject. this one for the 50bookchallenge and as a cruise down roads heretofore unexplored:

no. 34 ~ Mr. Lincoln's Wars by adam braver. i bought this for a buck in the trash basement at half price books. i remember when it was on the new books shelf and having not heard one peep about it, assumed it bombed and was crud. well, the book calls itself "a novel in thirteen stories", but it's really just thirteen stories, which was a wee bit disappointing. also, braver's choice of subject matter is sometimes kinda eh and his contemporary writer's voice occasionally impedes (for me) on the setting. so i didn't love the content, but i think he's a really strong writer. even the stories i didn't like were very well crafted and the stories that i did like really stand out for me (two of the thirteen in particular made the whole book worthwhile). i could say more, but i don't have the energy to rage against the final story's final image (something i really didn't need in my head, ever ~ and don't go running out to read it because you'll regret it). hahahahahaha ~ so overall: nice writing, but sadly uneven.

the above book is dark and funny. i want to be dark and funny. maybe i should try writing dark and funny and see what comes of it.

picture of the day is the cover of the book of the day ~ it's such a lovely design i couldn't resist:

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 12 ~ The Autobiography of a Quack (and "The Case of George Dedlow") by silas weir mitchell. mitchell's stuff is so interesting. his preoccupation with the underside of the medical profession reveals the ways in which the culture of his generation had their own peculiar neuroses. not much to the story here. a young dissipated man takes up doctoring but doesn't actually want to do the work part of it, so falls into all sort of creepy schemes and winds up a homeopathic spiritualist who just dispenses pills and communes with the dead. of course he gets what's coming to him. my favorite phrase in the whole book is "the melancholy spectacle of my failure" (gee, i wonder why that is?). i already discussed George Dedlow before. while describing the story to someone this weekend, they pointed my nose toward Johnny Got His Gun. Honestly, sometimes i'm sure i have been living under a rock. now i have to read that before i can proceed.

anyway, having read his short stories and two novellas, i guess it's time to tackle a novel by mitchell and see if he can sustain over an even longer work.

no. 13 ~ Without Blood by alessandro baricco. a wee book by the author of Silk, which made my top ten of all time last year. i'm less enamored of this one, though its a powerful story, well told. unfortunately i sorta feel like it's a redux of The Night Porter, but watered down as a result of its non-specificity (in terms of time and place). i think baricco tries to give it a new twist by putting the character of Nina in control of the situation (control being a relative term here, since he defines revenge, by nature, as being a destructive force). i got impatient with the story, though it ended well (if not enigmatically). but The Night Porter is a much more powerful take on the victim/abuser complex.

wee warning to my flist peeps who read my film reviews and sometimes add things from my list to their queues: The Night Porter is an extremely difficult film (i couldn't even find a picture from it that i thought would be appropriate to post here). it's incredibly disturbing and i don't recommend it for the squeamish or the sensitive. it's been controversial forever, but i tend to think it's an important film (though have no desire to ever watch it again).

finished my contract, went to have pie with a friend.

i did a ton of reading this weekend. otherwise i didn't get any writing done, which is a shame. but i did turn over a dozen possible entry points in my head. i'm having a hard time placing the first scene. clearly i need to just start writing and see where it goes from there. i'm having a struggle getting my head out of 1862 and into 1874/75. it's just such a different world.

didn't read lj most of the weekend, alas. got a lot of catching up to do!

happy monday all!

: D

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 6 ~ Photographic Atlas of Civil War Injuries: Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens, Otis Historical Archives by julian e. kuz. the first of kuz's books (this being the big mamalinchi of medical photography). i confess i caved and ordered a copy of this one for myself. couldn't see my way around having it and the library wants their copy back. it cost me, but it's worth it. when you have a definiitive text, you have a definitive text. not much more you can say about it.

no. 7 ~ The Hawkline Monster: a Gothic Western by richard brautigan. i enjoyed this until the departure from reality was so great that it rendered the outcome utterly pointless. call me an old-fashioned girl, but i like my surrealism to have a throughline. this was entertaining and mercifully a quick read. if it had been any longer, i would not have had the patience for it. i guess overall that's a wee disappointing for a book i've been looking to read for over a year. oh well.

i love the idea of the three-story
yellow house in the middle of the yellow field
surrounded by a ring of snow.

no. 8 ~ Little Stories by silas weir mitchell. i have no idea what i find so fascinating about this guy's writing. there's nothing special about it. it leans a little dark and a little "fabulous". maybe just knowing the undercurrents makes it more fraught or something. this little book was interesting enough that i'll try one of his larger works. see what he can do.

no 9 ~ Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War by lisa a. long. it's taken me a long time to work my way through this one (and i confess i skimmed a chapter on gender and a chapter on race). although this book isn't what i thought it would be about, it's proved an invaluable roadsign for other, more relevent sources. i was looking for something more literally along the lines of the title, but this is an academic work on the body of early post-war literature and the mythologizing (and romanticizing) of the war, etc. it does talk a great deal about health, but the rehabilitation here is almost purely literary. very dense writing, but yielded a lot of interesting things (including dr. mitchell, above).

i'm glad i stuck with it even though it wasn't what i was looking for and will prolly talk about it more later.

i'll prolly finish Madden's Sharpshooter tonight. and here i thought i wouldn't step up to the challenge. i'm doing okay so far! whooo!

: D

and it's all sorts of snowing outside right now!

finished the contract.
almost finished the term paper (just need to write a conclusion this morning).
finished writing my Christmas cards.
finished paying my bills (geh).
finished reading March

for the 50bookchallenge:

no. 43: March by geraldine brooks ~ oh what a sore disappointment 2/3rds into the book when brooks decided to switch to Marmee's pov. oh calamity! and for no reason at all, really. we didn't learn anything new. in fact, it was mostly retread as the Marmster learns this and that of her husband's doings. and then we leap inexplicably back into Mr. March's pov (so inexplicably i had to read the start of the chapter three times before i was sure that was what we had done). brooks should have never done it. it was a cheap easy-drama trick just to put grace clement and marms together. boooooo. not to mention marms's is just a big whiner anyway (and i don't like the stuff that so distinctly references the original book ~ and this is all of it). if you skip those chapters, the book is excellent. it's never as excellent as its first chapter or the confrontation scene between Ethan and March, but it's very well written anyway and i'm glad i read it.

(checks off one more Civil War pulitzer).

in other news, the book had a slight setback this weekend, jumping up a dollar! now it's settled back down to $40.26 (and once again still dropping).

i saw Apocalypto this weekend (my respite from the toils of work was to watch a man fleeing for his life from bloosthirsty slave hunters ~ that's always a cheering thought). my feelings about the film are mostly all positive. it is bloody, i guess (i wasn't all that shocked, but then the south american natives be my peeps, so i guess i come from bloody stock and stomach it well). there was only one really silly gratuitous moment of spurting blood that i laughed outloud at. very few people in the audience, but they were a vocal crowd and cheered quite a bit toward the end. i permitted myself a little celebratory "wooo!" as well.

the ending of the film is really interesting, especially if you bother to think about the man who made it. but i really liked the choice and the subtle dig at western colonization.

go for the costumes and make up if nothing else. the outfitting of these characters is astonishing. it's a sumptuous film on a lot of levels, and if you have no previous exposure to Mayan culture, you're definitely in for some surprises.

and i just love raoul trujillo who plays the bad guy in this. i've seen an interview with him when he did The New World and he's such a contrast to the scowling severe characters he tends to play: a dancer with a very boyish cheery american voice.

more about other movies, the state of LookingLand, and where i am at in the grander scheme of things later.

happy monday all!

: D