4th March: The Wild West

The thing this week's novels had in common was the confrontation of civilised and barbaric forms of human life, or at least what are called such in our culture. In 'The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky' by Stephen Crane, it happens directly and by completely devastating the idea of barbarism, while in 'The Law of Life' by Jack London, 'barbarism' is meant to be contrasted with the reader's own culture, and while it definitely degrades the former for some degree, it also leaves space for musing.

The town marshal and his newly married wife are representing the wilderness of Yellow Sky and the spreading civilness simultaneously – on the train and at home, respectively. The story actually concentrates on the way how sophistication (and thus civilisation) wins over barbarism. We may see it on the train already, but it’s the end of the story which is devastating for the latter: it demonstrates that no self-confindence is unbreachable if it’s hit at the right point, even by chance (and the only way to improve its probablity is being more sophisticated). It's also worth observing that any kind of behaviour connected with childish activities may look ridiculous in an instant to anyone when confronted with adult matters.

The second story about the former indian chieftain however, makes only a slight judgement about barbarism, referring to the narrow-mindedness of the old man’s ideology. The narration is intended to be neutral, and there are no things in the forest that would make a contrast. It could be seen as a comparison between the values of pagan religions and Christianity – obeying nature and living in harmony versus reaching for Heavens and incurring all the illnesses of a misused body and mind. The average reader however – and the century in which the story was read may not make a difference – is probably not impartial enough to make objective judgements on the story, and it’s also questionable if the writer was. It may be an effective tool to write a neutral narrative while letting the prejudice of the audience to do the rest.

25th February: Two Tragedies

I think I'm supposed to find some parallelism between this story about the leaping frog and the hanged man at the bridge. While the former seems to be utterly funny and pointless, and the latter a deeply emotional and mournful one, I'm not to be distracted easily.

The point I'd like to make first is that – while I may be completely wrong regarding this story – sometimes a piece of literature may have a desired effect other than entertaining, even if there's no definite message. Due to this nature of the effect, it would be hard to express its essence; perhaps an adjustment in the way we see the lives of different people. In both stories I think, we've got protagonists who made the right decisions in the beginning, but then, they forgot to pay proper attention and made bad mistakes. One can find real tragedy in the leaping frog’s story by ignoring the comfortable set of a supposedly fictitious story in a supposedly fictitious story and the fact that Mr. Smiley hasn’t got any particular features to deeply sympathise with. It is funny though that the reader enjoys a writing that (s)he more or less agrees to be pointless and basically boring.

A completely different, yet interesting issue of the second story is that whether the imagined escape is unreasonably long considering the few seconds of fall in which it was experienced or not. Probably the best answer is that the writer didn’t care, and nor should he. Many of us have already experienced dreams that seemed scores of minutes long, while they occurred in just a few minutes’ sleep, and that phenomenon may be strengthened further by extremes of danger. It’s also somewhat surprising that the dénouement surprises most of the readers, although several clues are given. The most important perhaps is the ticking of the watch that seems to slow down infinitely, and the environment being a bit surrealistic during the escape. Half of the readers may take those as regular exaggerations, and half may concentrate too much on the success of the protagonist; as for me, I’ve fallen to both.

18th February: Slavery.

I have to tell I read the two excerpts without having an authentic image about slavery in America. The most serious material I've seen in the topic was probably that quite naturalistic film I saw when I was 13 or so. (The film itself was about a black American woman being sold by a black master to another black master, but I can't recall much more about it.) I had, therefore, to rely on my sense of realism in order to decide what I should think about the two stories.

The first one by Harriet Beecher Stowe was hard to believe even in the beginning, but it deliberately passed the line of realism afterwards. One may accept that the slaves of the household were favoured by the masters (at least for the sake of comfort), but I just can’t help visualising the whole scene exactly like a Walt Disney-cartoon. You can almost see the floating smell of the cookies, and you most probably wouldn’t be suprised if one of the ill-behavioured slave kids – isn’t their behaviour surpassing any expectations regarding a situation like this? – would emerge and float around smiling along the trail of smell. Even if the surreality of the chapter doesn’t ring a bell, you may wonder how come that slaves are free to bake the things they please, and even if their master could be that permissive, how committed the author can be to reality if she depicts the life of slaves as such an idyllic business in an age of actual slavery.

The other excerpt by Harriet Ann Jacobs featured a favoured slave from the household, too, yet in a much more believeable way. Her master – like most of mankind – being unable to deal with the situation of possessing other people, acts with some hints of controversy. While most of us would consider him cruel and hypocrite, he seems to believe that he’s doing his best to his slaves. This is what allows the slave girl to rebel against his master almost directly without making the story too romantic or killing herself – we could call this set-up a stroke of a genius, provided it wasn’t a true story.

20th entry – an extra one

On our last skills development seminar we were given an article about the German government considering outlawing paintball after a school mass murder. It wasn’t the first time, as I recall, when German politicians were acting very funny; it’s about obvious that they just don’t care what they are going to ban to reassure the public after such an incident and before the elections. But then, we were asked what could be done about those mass murders performed by students, and I guess there are some things definitely to be banned, thinking about prevention.

I’ve found two major problems regarding violence in entertainment, but I’m not sure which one is the more dangerous. The older one is the issue of popular action movies. In order to sell them year after year, you have to make the action more violent, the gory scenes more authentic, and the murders crueller. The same level of violence just won’t work for too long. What won’t change is the fact that the audience still aren’t allowed to try what they’ve seen, however cool did it seem. It generates aggression for sure, and after a certain level, some kids will be more or less unable to control it.

The other problem is the astonishing illiteracy about firearms, nourished by popular movies and video games. In a typical one of the latter, in half an hour of game play you get shot, let’s say, two hundred times. It would take about three to ten bullets to get yourself killed, but you can replenish health by using med kits, so you may get shot unlimited times without dying; which is truly ridiculous in a graphically realistic environment. No wonder if kids think that with a sub-machine gun in your hands you get invincible.

On the contrary, playing paintball, the very-very first thing you are going to learn is that you will be shot and you will be incapacitated, however smart and agile you are. Paintball could be an ideal of shooting in entertainment: it concentrates on discipline, punishes aggressive behaviour (nowadays there are usually no fully automatic paintball markers either), and generally enforces sportsmanship.

 

19th entry for 30th April

I read 'The Ten Thousand' by Michael Curtis Ford last week. Despite its several hundred pages, it didn't take more than a few days to read, since it wasn't a masterpiece of fiction; however, as a fairly authentic historical novel, it satisfied my brief interest in Greece of the 4^th century B.C. and its means of warfare.

The ancient world hitherto – probably due to its paganish image – was somewhat repulsive for me, but sooner or later you find something interesting in most of the cultures you find. Since as a teenager, I was quite interested in warfare, I find this interest gently renewed every now and then. This time it was the hoplite phalanx that took my attention, along with the routine and discipline it had needed in order to work perfectly; as well as its extreme efficiency when well deployed against non-phalanx armies.

Of course, this leads to the battle of Thermopylae and the Spartans, or rather, I’d better admit that the whole thing came up after watching the movie ‘300’, since in the latter years, I’m paying attention to popular culture – it is quite dangerous not paying attention to the world, isn’t it? Interpreting the movie itself is not an easy task; as an action movie, it’s evidently about making money and pleasing people with the spectacles, first of all. However, some critic implied that despite its semi-historical fantasy comics style, it could be considered realistic if it was meant to screen the Spartans’ impression about the battle. Make an authentic movie about it, and 21^st century people will experience something totally different than the Spartans did at the time. For example, all the things the Persians deployed are nothing new even for an illiterate audience. That is why all the fantasy, all the visual exaggerations of Spartan strength, and the understatement of other Greek hoplites (not even depicted as hoplites) could be authentic from the Spartan point of view; even if the Spartans themselves are altered a bit to obtain the audience's sympathy.

18th entry for 23rd, April

Whipping Star is a novel I’ve bought with the same pack as the Márquez novella this February. This story from Frank Herbert takes place in a universe quite different from the one of Dune (I was a little surprised to learn that Herbert has made up several different sci-fi universes). This one has much more resemblance to our 21^st century even though it includes a dozen of sentient alien species and the possibility of instant communication and travel through unlimited space,introduced by some of those aliens.

For me, the most important feature of the novel was showing how astonishingly one-sided and narrow-minded could be the human point of view on the Universe, since we are perfectly unable to look at it as other than a three-dimensional system of objects and radiations. It might be nothing else but our very own model of physical reality, based on how our senses and brains instinctually map our environment. Agent McKie is ordered to negotiate with a Caleban, a kind of creature no-one has actually seen so far. As it later unveils, their form of existence, however material it is, cannot be comprehended with the sensations and concepts we’ve made up so far. Their conversations take place in a metal ball, a self-propelled ‘house’ the Calebans create for communication with other sentient species (not all the story takes place in the ball, however). Although Fanny Mae – as she, confusingly, calls herself, probably because name is a new concept for Calebans – is obviously a superior intellect, they’re both struggling very hard to understand each other and to make themselves understood in the humans’ language; all because of the very-very few common concepts between their ‘cultures’.

Finally, with the help of an accident, McKie understands some of how Calebans apprehend the Universe (thus he’ll be able to solve the story’s crisis), and the reader is given a clue as well, but I’m sure it will make even more sense if I re-read that chapter a few months later.

17th entry for 16th April

After finishing the complete Dune saga by Frank Herbert last December, I supposed I'll find myself uncomfortable being left without the 'never ending story'. I was fourteen when I bought its first volume, inspired by a computer game's unusual atmosphere. I was amazed after the first few pages. I loved the whole concept and all the ideas of that 'irregular' type of future. In Dune, most of the technology we'd imagine in our futures – including computer technology – was made obsolete by the very thing it was supposed to surpass: the well-bred and well-trained human body and mind.

Then, there was much more to come. All the thoughts, conversations and acts of those super-conscious characters are so inspiring that they enhance one's intellect on an unconscious level. I've never experienced that reading any other novels. It was somewhat surprising to learn later that it was an effect on which the author has banked upon writing Dune. It wasn't a book to tell me all the mysteries of the Universe, of course, but from time to time, I continued getting new pieces of the six-volume saga and reading them, getting that special state of mind and way of thinking again for a few weeks at a time. I was more than twenty when I had a final restart in reading the series, feeling able at last to comprehend every single sentence of it. What have I learnt of this story of five thousand years? I guess there's no way of telling it without telling 'just read it all'. It doesn't cover even the whole of the human world, yet it seems to penetrate through all the frivolous problems of the 21st century.

After all, it has left a feeling that it has taught me everything I'll need to live without the story that took eleven years to read and seemed never to end. Reading some of Herbert's short stories in English, however, I just can't refuse reading some of his other novels without translation.