::Robosexual::

The Plague

     I am, to my eternal lament, cursed with a preference for grim, nihilistic stories which has endured since my earliest days with literature. My earliest book reports are on Slaughterhouse Five, Brave New World, 1984, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and other books involving a breakdown of the basic principles of life and morality. I don’t know – I guess I’m just an apocalypse junkie. In any case, this preference eventually led me (as it would) to Camus, whose L’Etranger is one of my very favorite books along with the book I am currently recommending, La Peste (The Plague).
     This is not a philosophy textbook, an exercise in existential theory like The Myth of Sisyphus. It can be taken easily, and not wrongly, as a gripping medical thriller with extended metaphysical ramblings. The characters are foremost, however; the plot proceeds, of course, but the real story is not found in the search for an effective serum. In brief, the setup is this: a strain of pneumonic plague begins to infect the residents of the walled coastal Algerian town of Oran. The gates to the city are shut and the populace must ride out the plague as it kills mercilessly and indifferently. The parallels to existential philosophy are not obscured: trapped in a place where life is taken without reason, with no means of communication with freer souls, everyone in Oran is essentially in limbo – alive but with no reason to think they will stay that way, each person must face his or her death and the death of their loved ones and attempt to reconcile it with their way of life.
     That is where the meat of the story lies – in how the various people live under constant threat of death. Some succumb, some rage, some contrive to escape, but as days grow to weeks and months and the death toll rises and grows closer to home, there arrives a general feeling of apathy and vague, inescapable dread. Some boundaries in society are broken down – the rich are no less likely to die than the poor, for instance – but others are reinforced or created – the religious quarrel with the nonbelievers over the cause of the calamity. On that topic, there are two great pillars of chapters which occur near the beginning and end of the book, which give in detail the sermons given by the city’s eloquent and intense preacher. Both deal with the basic theological quandary of questioning God’s will and intent. After a particularly devastating scene of death, the city’s leading doctor and the preacher have a philosophical falling-out, in which the doctor refuses to believe in a god that allows an innocent to suffer so.
     The various schools of thought about Oran and its inhabitants’ condition are not merely referred to, either. As much as an objective observer can, the narrator describes others’ specific responses to imminent death, and it is difficult to fault any of them. One man was here on a business trip for only a few days; is it cowardly for him to want to leave Oran to return to his fiancée? Another, antisocial and obsessive, finds the sense of community brought about by being doomed together heartening; is it selfish for him to feel this way? Many, many things are addressed, and well, in this book. It’s good to read it slow and digest – it can quicken thoughts in you that you didn’t even know you had. I for one still cannot imagine what I would do in that predicament.
     With all this talk of metaphysical tangents, accounts of sermons, and growing apathy, this book must sound to you like an incredible bore. Not so. The book is beautifully written and translated, and every chapter is a joy. The narrator is very human, but also quite detached and brings with him an incredibly dry sense of humor. Even the minute descriptions of disinfectant procedures and the means of collecting, burying, or burning the dead are pervaded by phrases and observations which bring a smile to the lips. I have to caution, however, that this book is a bit of a commitment. It’s not Ulysses, but the general heaviness does not lend itself to summer poolside reading. Nonetheless, The Plague comes with my highest recommendation. Get ready to get depressed.

Found Magazine

     I’m really not sure how common knowledge of Found is. I've seen it in many places but few people I know have heard of it from anywhere but my own self. I just yesterday bought a Found compilation, a “best-of” in art-book type format at Urban Outfitters (that place is like a bookstore now), so I think that a lot more people are going to be in the know.  That’s not a bad thing, but it’s always a bit sad when something you thought was special just for you turns out to be special for a whole lot of people. In any case, the idea behind the magazine is this: people from all over the world basically just send in stuff they found – not mattresses or cats but photos, notes, letters, and such, and a couple guys in a basement Xerox them and cut and paste them into a more easily perusable form. I first encountered it at issue #4 (they are released twice yearly, maybe?) and now there must be eight or more. I can't reproduce much here but you can go to Foundmagazine.com and they have plenty for you, and maybe even some back issues for oder, though most are out of print I believe.
     There is a huge variety of things to be found – one page may be all notes left on cars which have been parked badly, another all stickies left on cabinets after one night stands. There are letters to lovers in prison and estranged parents, grocery lists and crack budgets, valentines and hateful diatribes. Some are bigger than others: I recall one find where a guy was renovating his apartment and found a box in a secret wall compartment, stuffed to the brim with letters. They were from a girlfriend, and the lovers’ mutual travels had separated them but they kept in touch. Over the letters their whole relationship unfolded: the easy, optimistic beginning, the distance building, the frustration at separation, the eventual revelations of infidelity (on his part), but the letters don’t stop – they seem to have been written almost every day (or more) for years. Tracking the trajectory of the relationship (unfortunately only a small excerpt was provided) was interesting and saddening, but the worst part was that the guy’s letter writing slows and stops to his girlfriend’s dismay, and after a time her letters to him remain unopened. There are a bunch of sealed envelopes in the box and I don’t think the finder had the heart to open them up.
In any case, that’s the kind of thing you can expect in these pages – though certainly not all the finds are tragic records of a doomed romance. It’s fascinating and rather addictive, like sour cream & onion lays, you can always go for one more.  Images courtesy of foundmagazine.com, hope they don't mind.

Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World"

    Certainly most are familiar with Conan Doyle as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories – a most entertaining series, but he also wrote other things. Among these is the short novel “The Lost World,” about a secluded area of South America in which dinosaurs have continued to exist, as well as other things. The story was written in the 20s and has since has been adapted into various forms, hacked and redone so many times and ways that it has become cultural knowledge, practically, without our even knowing. Jurassic Park owes a great deal to it, obviously, as well as many adventure flicks - as in Indiana Jones and such. Like Jules Verne’s novels, with which it is often confused, it is a sort of timeless, archetypical adventure, and its age has not reduced its charm and thrill.
    The narrator is a man who wishes to win the fancy of a certain lady – a lady who is enamored of the men who, as they often did in that age, went off into the wild to hunt tigers, or discover savage lands and kill the inhabitants thereof. In short, she wants a man like me. Regardless, he decides that he will accompany the indomitable Professor Challenger on a foray to what the Professor has reported to be a strange and wonderful land where prehistoric lizards still roam. They are joined by another, more skeptical Professor and a famous big game hunter who hopes to bring home his rarest trophy yet. The book is ostensibly in the form of press releases sent back by the narrator to the newspaper for which he reports, though it only shows itself at the beginning and end of each chapter, in which the narrator describes breathlessly how eventful the past days have been and warns this may be his last transmission, respectively. In any case, the writing is very good turn-of-the-century style, what you would expect to find in any given Holmes story. It is not so florid that fast-paced action is disrupted by the long-windedness of the author, as sometimes can be the case in that era, but rather is only just sufficient to describe the scene while leaving something to the imagination. The plot is simple on a higher level (adventure to dinosaur land!) but is quite detailed, and one becomes caught up in the petty bickering and constant verbal sparring of the two professors, or in the wonder and growing familiarity with danger that the narrator develops. Day-to-day action is interesting and logical, though usually encapsulated enough that it doesn’t entice you to read just one more chapter.
    All in all, The Lost World is a great sort of afternoon-by-the-pool or sitting-at-the-coffee-shop read. Not too serious, but good and complex enough that you won’t feel like you’re reading fluff. It’s a classic, and its only like 100 pages to boot. Grab one of the thrift editions for a buck fifty, it’s well worth the investment.

 

Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

    H.P. Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors.  My dad gave me a few books probably five years ago, and while I enjoyed them at first read, they have grown on me quite a lot and I have reread some of the stories dozens of times.  This particular book is a "best of" collection, though as is often the case with such compilations, it is missing some of Lovecraft's best stories and there are some questionable inclusions.  I also had a few other books, however, so I did not miss out on any of his best work due to some incompetent editor.  Lovecraft writes in a style that is archaic and scholarly, making it difficult for some to like, or even comprehend.  Ten-dollar words are used liberally in rather long sentences, and one's vocabulary will be stretched by the sheer amount of negative superlatives he packs into every story.  There isn't a situation he writes about in which there isn't something eldritch, indescribable, abhorrent, ghastly, grotesque, insidious, fearsome, or just plain terrifying.
    Some of his best stories are only a few pages long, some were published as novellas.  The quality of writing is the same.  Listen to this paragraph from "The Picture in the House":

    Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.  Two hundred years or more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread.  They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

    That story is only six pages long, but imagine maintaining that kind of momentum through fifty pages in "The Shadow Out of Time" or a hundred in "The Mountains of Madness."  It's kind of a marathon sometimes, but often have I found myself battling my drowsiness at 3 AM just so I can read the last chapter of "The Thing on the Doorstep."  The breadth of scope he is able to use is impressive, too: some stories are told entirely in a bar to a friend, regarding the possibly unholy inspiration in a local painter's work, while others cross thousands of years and miles, addressing cosmic horrors and the danger of total destruction of the human race.  Unfortunately, his work was dreadfully underappreciated when it was published in the late 20's, and he ended up dying at 46 in poverty and obscurity.  Don't make the same mistake the 20's did!  This is some seriously good literature, and besides, shouldn't everyone read the original "Re-Animator"?

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus

    I just finished reading this book, famously written basically as a rainy day activity (we shall all write a ghost story!), after picking up the dollar edition at the University book store.  In addition to being an unforgettable moral tale with many tragic and relevant characters, it is also written in the archaic mid-1800s and turn of the century style which attracts me so much.  H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker, and to some extent H.P. Lovecraft all have a verbose, complicated structure to their writing, daunting to some people but exhilarating to me.  I realize that Shelly finished this book nearly 80 years before most of the others came out, but I am lumping them together by century.
    Unfortunately, these writers have been obscured by the modern incarnations of their masterworks - complicated tales of human genius and perseverance, reduced to hopeless cliches.  Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde... how many monster movies have cashed in on the brilliance of these creatures' creators and their ability to strike a person so profoundly?  In any case, it is not as if the books have been transformed into the movies, one can still buy, borrow or steal the original texts and party like it's 1899.
    One thing I did not expect from Frankenstein is its unrelenting pessimism and tragedy.  The book starts out quite normally, but past a certain point, each page sends the characters spiralling ever further downward.  It really is a bit of an epic story, it spans a long period of time and many places.  I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll keep that part secret, though I wish I could remember where some of the more memorable passages were so I could quote them.  Certainly the part where young Frankenstein (teehee) sees the tree in his backyard "utterly destroyed" by a bolt of lightning and there begins his movement towards what might be called the dark side of science was one of my favorite parts.  I highly reccommend this book, more so because you can get it practically anywhere for a dollar or two.  It isn't very long, though dense, but it shouldn't take you more than a few days' good reading to do.  Get on it!