Books Acquired:
Books Offloaded:
Progress Made:
Message from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig
Books Finished:
The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness…. Live then and never forget that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words — “wait and hope.”
—The Count of Monte Cristo
My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room. I sat; I waited; I watched; I kept myself awake. As we had been told, originally, long ago, to do; I kept my commission.
—VALIS
Right at the beginning of the month I knocked off three almost-finished books right in a row, boom boom boom. I was particularly glad to be done with The Black Count, not because it was a bad book, but because I have a tendency to get bogged down in nonfiction. Looking back I see that I started this one back in… em… June of last year. Yikes.
As you have surely forgotten, The Black Count is a biography of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas. Born in Haiti, Thomas-Alexandre was sold into slavery by his own aristocrat father — who, to be fair, later paid for him to be freed and brought to France. Raised as a scion of nobility, Thomas-Alexandre was a legendary man of action who rose to the rank of general in the French army, only to see his career undone by Napoleon, under whose regime racism thrived. (Reading this book confirmed me in my belief that Napoleon was an asshole.)
In the end it’s a sad story; Dumas is held prisoner in Egypt for years, during which his health deteriorates, and after his release is never the same. He dies young and is mostly forgotten; this statue in Paris commemorating him was destroyed in WWII and never replaced:
But he is immortalized in the works of the younger Dumas, who idolized his father. The Count of Monte Cristo is a thinly disguised portrait of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who was also an inspiration for The Three Musketeers and numerous other literary works.
I don’t think I’ll be penning any epic novels lionizing my old man, but in a way every word that I write is a tribute to his lifelong wish to communicate without knowing quite what it was he wanted to say. We have that in common, which is why this poem by Robert Kelly that Cecil sent out the other day hit close to home:
The Poet
I never believed I had something to say
but believed in what I said.—This sincerity, was it good for you?
For years and years I’ve gone on cutting
from the best leather and with skilful cobbling
shoes that fit nobody’s feet.
I used the blessed Momentum from these victories to jump back into Message from a Lost World, which I had abandoned half-finished many moons ago. It is not as pleasurable as Zweig’s fiction, which I exhausted long ago, and is pitched at a level of intellectual heft slightly above my own. But I feel like I am learning things from it, and there’s no arguing with writing like this, which comes from a piece about European thought written after WWI and before WWII:
I believe that we all feel everywhere today that electric crackle caused by the collision of antagonisms; and nervously we ponder if one of the two tendencies might prevail. But if so, which? Will Europe pursue a path to its own destruction, or will it become united? Forgive me if I do not say that reason will win and tomorrow and beyond we will see a unified Europe. an end to war, to internal politics and this destructive hate between peoples: I do not dare issue such a promise…. But a genuine conviction does not need to be confirmed by reality to know it is just and true…. Whoever can raise his thinking above the naked reality of the world as it stands now, will have created a state of personal freedom for himself that flies in the face of our preposterous epoch.
This serves as a good reminder that the current preposterous epoch is not the first one, that people have survived them before, and that “a state of personal freedom” is always worth cultivating.
Finally, I’ve been working my way through the October 1966 issue of the sci-fi pulp Galaxy. Among other things, it includes Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Recursion in Metastories,” which looks like this:
There’s also a long story by Anne McCaffrey, which I approached with some trepidation; all that dragon stuff never did anything for me. But “The Ship Who Killed,” about a sentient spaceship and its human partner who encounter dangerous religious fanatics while transporting a cargo of embryos, was surprisingly engaging. Most surprisingly, the human character is described as a “Dylanist”: “a social commentator, a protester, only with music…. A skilled Dylanist… can make so compelling an argument with melody and words that what he wants to say becomes insinuated into the subconscious.”
I like the idea that people in the far future will still be emulating Dylan, and still not quite understanding him. If he were just “a social commentator, a protester,” we would have lost interest in him by now. But the Arcata Playhouse was packed the other day for a show celebrating Bob’s 84th, and rumors are swirling about a Dylan tribute at this year’s Glastonbury Festival that may feature Timothee Chalamet.
And still the man himself lives on and continues to enchant and confound. Looking for Dylan news just now I came across this piece from the Abergavenny Chronicle, which I will present without comment, then toddle off to begin my day.
Abergavenny man claims Bob Dylan really does contain multitudes
ON his most recent album, Bob Dylan may have sung a song about containing multitudes, but after meeting him in the flesh an Abergavenny man has confirmed that the old song and dance man harbours a host of different personalities.
“It’s not like he’s mentally ill or possessed by demons or something,” explained semi-professional paranormal investigator Johnny Turnip. “It’s just when you speak to him face to face you don’t just see one Dylan, he keeps morphing into all these different Dylans. And it’s not just a mental thing. He actually visually transforms right in front of you, outfit, haircut, hairstyle, the whole banana!”
Turnip added, “One minute he’s the earnest and fresh-faced singer from the early 1960s, the next he’s the amphetamine fuelled, wisecracking ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ Dylan or the lonesome cowboy ‘Blood on the Tracks’ Dylan. And then he’ll blindside you by turning into the mid-eighties ‘Every Grain Of Sand’ Dylan and start quoting from the bible. He’ll follow that by knocking back whiskey, and clicking his fingers like the Frank Sinatra Dylan, or talking in tongues and sighing a lot like the world-weary elder statesman of the blues Dylan.
“It’s a lot of Dylan to take. Way too much to be truthful. Still, we weren’t all that shocked. The ghost of Dylan Thomas had warned us that Bob Dylan was a sorcerer and I knew from previous experience that practicing wizards and necromancers were usually a bit weird and in your face.”