Forget it, Jake.

 A friend of mine is screenwriting these days. I can't say much about his work except to say that I think it's very good and pays very conscious homage to its inspirations, among them the classic movie Chinatown. Reading Jon's work, inspired me to go read Robert Towne's script for the movie. I've dabbled in screenwriting, but I don't think you have to to appreciate the brilliance of the work. There's a reason people call it "the greatest screenplay of all time," and a good summary of it (and the screenplay itself) is here. Spoilers may follow, reader, so proceed at your own risk.

I'll have to re-watch the movie, too. Some people will think this is crazy, but I think I like the screenplay more than the movie, which i acknowledge is among the Greatest American Films. What strikes me about the screenplay, reading it all the way through for the first time, is how it does so much with so little; part of the art, as I understand it, is to not just move the story along with brief scenes and only a few lines of dialogue, but to see if you can pack the dialogue with the weight of the enormity of what's happening in the life of the character. Too, Towne uses every ingredient to its fullest. For example, the opening scene with the cuckolded husband, Curly, not only establishes the kind of dirty work protagonist detective Jake Gittes does for a living, it establishes Jake's character, his cynicism, and sets up his relationship with Curly, which will be used much later in the film to make a much needed getaway - well, two getaways, one that succeeds and one that fatally doesn't. 

The other thing that strikes me about the screenplay is how dazzlingly complex it is. Count the crimes being committed that Jake uncovers, layer by layer - adultery, murder, theft on an enormous scale, graft, fraud and, well, you know if you've seen the movie. This rot and corruption, and the paranoia it creates, was so much a part of the American 70s zeitgeist, created in part by this movie, which mirrored what was happening in the lives of the nation, and it's rarely been so perfectly expressed. 

Last point: I love that the movie creates personal symbolism with its title and references to Jake's earlier work in Chinatown. Because it is personal symbolism, the movie might have been called "Beverly Hills" or "Venice Beach." Maybe those locations don't suggest, as Chinatown does, the experiences in Jake's background that cause Chinatown to become a symbol of corruption, of a place or situation where an investigator, a crime stopper, cannot do his work, a place where things get turned upside down and where someone trying to help instead harms, but I love anew how vaguely this is demonstrated. Chinatown is Jake's - what - his Vietnam, his Marathon, his private hell, and now we, and all of America, are in there with him.

Dispatches from Pluto

What guy hasn't thought about ditching the urban life for a country estate where he at least partially subsists on the birds and deer he took with his own hand? Richard Grant, a British dude living in a 400 square foot apartment in NYC, pulled the trigger on that dream, and his book answers the question, what happens when a British guy and his girlfriend, both living in NYC, buy a 2 acre spread with an aging but otherwise gorgeous home in the Delta backwater of Mississippi? 

The book covers his first year there trying to understand the accents, and the culture. He learns to shoot, hunt, fish, and be friends with completely nice people that are otherwise at least mildly racist. A good chunk of the book is him navigating being friends with people that will drop everything to help a neighbor, spend a day with a chain saw helping him deal with a dead tree, never shows up without food and booze, then casually drops the N word in conversation. 

He also gets familiar with systemic poverty that exists alongside the plantation homes owned by himself and his friends. He hangs out in majority black dive bars, where the conversations sometimes don't sound that different from what you would expect in the trailer across the street with a confederate flag hanging on the front porch. 

Overall, an excellent book with a lot of insight into cultures in my own country that I'm not that familiar with.

Swede Levov. Rhymes with "the Love."

Let's remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers - laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together.

Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral is my first Philip Roth, and what a doozy. I am left feeling its brutal themes long after having turned its last page, in part because of the way the narrative unfolds - with some of the ending up front - and in part because I am trying to absorb what the author has to say. American Pastoral is about the destruction of a man, about the collateral damage done to Seymour "Swede" Levov in the battle between the Greatest Generation and their Baby Boomer offspring during the turbulent 1960s. And that is a vein mined deep by Roth, who, from the viewpoint of the so-called Silent Generation, takes in not just the Greatest and the Boomers but the Depression-era adults and comes squarely down in favor of the older, squarely incriminates and condemns the Boomers and their enablers for selfishness and nihilism.

The plot is simple: an American Jewish guy from New Jersey grows up excelling at life and fathers a daughter that turns on him in horrific ways. But for Roth the plot runs into the internal mechanisms of not just the Swede, whose emotions run deeper than expected, whose thoughts and intentions are so admirable, but the grandfather, up from his bootstraps, Swede's wife, a reluctant beauty pageant queen, and into post-war American New Jersey itself. And of course the narrator, who is obviously fascinated with his characters but not afraid to reveal his alliances, his story is told, and its twofold in its themes: the post-modern condition of not being sure what you really know about anyone, the barriers to knowing, and the narrative of American history from immigrant to post-immigrant to post-post immigrant. Great stuff. A little self referential and redundant - maybe because the Swede in his anguishes recrosses so much of the same ground. What next for me and Roth?

Eye on Updike

I've avoided reading Updike for years. My only impression of him was "A&P" in high school. But I kept coming across him in my reading as one of the great male American novelists, a Christian writer, a master with language, and, after asking advice, took the plunge. Rabbit, Run. Delightful! Couples - amazing.

As a reader and writer, I love stylists. I love prose. And Updike has that in spades. That's one third of the reason we read Updike, from what I can tell, the other two-thirds being his subject matter and the depths of wisdom, the literary artistry, his work contains. But that prose. Sometimes I can identify in the writers whose work I fall in love with at least one paragraph or turn of phrase that I can point to and say, "That's it, that's where he got me, right there." I think this might be the Updike, from Couples:

The couple Foxy's parents had been had vanished. The narrow shuttered frame house on Rosedale Street. The unused front porch. The tan shades always drawn against the heat. The electric fan in the kitchen swinging its slow head back and forth like an imbecile scolding in monotone. The staticky Philco conveying Lowell Thomas. The V-mail spurting through the thrilled slot. The once-a-week Negro woman, called Gracelyn, whose apron pockets smelled of orange peels and Tootsie Rolls. Veronica their jittery spayed terrier who was succeeded by Merle, a slavering black tongued Chow. The parched flowerless shrubbery where Elizabeth would grub for bottlecaps and "clues," the long newspaper-colored ice-cream evenings, the red-checked oilcloth on the kitchen table worn bare at two settings, the way her mother would sit nights at this table, after the news, before putting her daughter to bed, smoking a Chesterfield and smoothing with a jerky, automatic motion the skin beneath her staring eyes: these images vanished everywhere but in Foxy's heart. She went to church to salvage something. Episcopalianism - its rolling baritone hymns to the sea, its pews sparkling with the officers' shoulder-braid - had belonged to the gallant club of Daddy's friends, headed by caped Mr. Roosevelt, that fought and won the war.

I like to joke with my wife and the librarians - anyone that will listen, really - that I read "dirty books," and Couples is as dirty a book as any I have ever read, but with great purpose; probably the best thing written about it is this 1968 review by Wilfrid Sheed. And now I have to find and read Wilfrid Sheed. That's how it works.

Strip Away

This quote from a Sports Illustrated piece on Dustin Pedroia by Tom Verducci reminds us why sports writing is some of the best writing:

Strip away the television ratings, the attendance figures, the merchandise sales, the gambling, the beer ads and the rest of the variables that measure the import of professional sports in our culture. Think about what's left: how we connect emotionally with the games. On that level baseball, perhaps not in popularity but in esteem, occupies a unique place. It remains for many children the portal to organized sports, and if they're lucky, when they grow up they never stop seeing baseball through 10-year-old eyes. It is an uncomplicated, unchanged kid's game that does not require tremendous height or weight.

A Gracious and Dignified Lie and the World's Secret Nobility

I finally got around to checking out the "historical espionage novels" of Alan Furst, starting with the one that usually comes most recommended, The Polish Officer. I was not disappointed and will be reading more Furst. In a nutshell, he covers the clandestine aspects of the Second World War with great depth and accuracy, which naturally unfolds intellectual and emotional aspects of the war that would otherwise have been unexplored. In the case of The Polish Officer I am struck not so much by what Furst explicitly details but by what he implies, by what he reveals; through the actions of his protagonist he describes the heart of a nation constantly besieged by stronger neighbors, a stalwart, fatalistic strain of subversion and resistance. Alexander de Milja begins the novel as a cartographer. He ends it as a survivor, a man who has escaped death so many times through luck or happenstance that it no longer bears meaning. What does bear meaning, however, is the struggle -

"I have to keep fighting," he said. "The Germans, the Russians. Perhaps both. Perhaps for years and years. But I might live through it, you never know. Somebody always seems to survive, no matter what happens. Perhaps it will be me."

Along the way, Furst also reveals adeptly the emotional states that accompany espionage in times of desperate struggle, the individual and sexual longing that comes out of the intense anxiety and boredom of waiting for cataclysm, the shame and pride, the pain and discomfort. He touches gracefully areas of the spy's life normally summarized. This is accomplished in part not only by the actions of the main characters but the minor characters that exemplify the WW II theme of "ordinary people responding to extraordinary circumstances." "Strange, he thought, how you stumble on the world's secret nobility when you're not even looking for them."

For me, personally, there are always small moments in the course of the prose in which an author cements his or her work to my heart. Here is one:

The waiter came with coffee, real coffee, very hard to get in Paris these days unless you bought on the black markets.

"We're not serving sugar tonight," the waiter explained.

"Oh, but we don't take sugar," Genya said.

The waiter nodded appreciatively - a gracious and dignified lie, well told, was a work of art to a man who understood life.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I read Tom Sawyer last week. The last time I read the book was at least 30 years ago. I think we can make an argument that Twain's classic is the original "guy" book. Just think about what Twain covers in a relatively short book.

• Rebellion and disobedience


• Adventure travel


• A girl you can't live without


• Pirates!


• Murder


• Friendship

I could continue, but I've made my point. Twain essentially provided the blueprint for every "guy" book that would follow.

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

• A 2000 inning long baseball game.....check.
  
• Time travel......check.
  
• Native American mythology.....check.
  
• A slightly odd church that lives life 12 hours offset from the rest of the world....check.
  
• Finding the love of your life. Again. Or previously....check
  
• Learning that getting what you’ve always wanted doesn’t necessarily solve your problems....priceless?
  

This is just a fantastic book. I finished it last night and I’m ready to re-read it starting today. W.P. Kinsella, who wrote “Shoeless Joe,” which was the basis for the movie Field of Dreams, gives us another fantastical story of magic, love, and life wrapped around the mythology of baseball, and once again set in a Midwestern corn field.

I am uncomfortable with the way Richard Condon is largely remembered.

Richard Condon is my favorite writer right now. I just put down a fourth book by him (An Infinity of Mirrors) and started a fifth (Winter Kills) and I am convinced - was convinced after The Manchurian Candidate, Prizzi's Honor and Arigato - that I want to read every word this man ever wrote.

So my iniative into "the Condon Cult" is well underway. And I'm actually a little thrilled to be in on the conspiracy, to be a fan of a writer with a "cult following" - you always hear about these things but rarely see or remember them - one whose books are largely out of print but are remembered by dusty dealers in used book stores.

But as a new convert, a zealot perhaps, I have to say I'm uncomfortable with the way Condon is largely remembered and portrayed.

He seems to be remembered mostly for The Manchurian Candidate - a fine book, to be sure, but one that blurs in the memory of most with the movie (admittedly, a good movie).

If he is remembered after that it is for Prizzi's Honor - again with a movie, a movie I have no intention of ever seeing because I want its characters firmly in my mind the way they are, not as John Huston, no matter how much I admire that filmmaker, presented them.

Beyond that Condon seems to be remembered as a writer that's difficult to categorize but one that mostly produced thrillers with political and satirical elements. The adjectives typically attached to him are "paranoid" and sometimes "frenetic." His sometimes long, cataloguing sentences are often described. Sadly, there is also a cloud of plagiarism hanging over him in one notable instance.

Granted, I am only four and a quarter books into his 20-some piece body of work, but I am uncomfortable with that general portrait of this man, who I think is a master of prose, who creates amazing characters with exceptional clarity, writes beautifully about men and women, plots and paces marvellously, and puts the most astoundingly perfect dialogue into the mouths of his characters.

In short, I feel Condon is being remembered as gimmicky, like Hunter S. Thompson or Thomas Pynchon, when he is an absolute master of writing, an artist that elevated the novel of entertainment to artistic summits. He is a jewel worthy of his following - a following that seems to be dying out.

Here are a series of disappointing interviews with Condon and Don Swaim (I'm not sure who that is). In them, they discuss the places Condon lived, food, the fact he composed on the then-new word processor - anything but the fucking quality of his writing and the treasures that are his books. I want to shake my computer and scream. Were I to have a couple hours with Condon I would ask him how he came up with certain ideas, how he brought to life certain characters, how he tunes his characters' dialogue, and what kind of sophisticated, worldly man is able to dream up such assassins, reprobates, perverts, Nazis, gamblers, murderes, officers, gentlemen, heroes, schemers. I would ask him his opinions on the world, I would ask him of his own substance.

I would ask him who the writers are that inspire him and upon which he models his own work - in short, I would not be asking him whether there were any good fucking restaurants in Dallas.

Richard Condon is my favorite writer right now and I will carry his torch held high til he is better illuminated in my small corners of the world.

The Plot to Kill Jackie Robinson

I picked this up at a used bookstore and it's the best $3 I've spent in a long time. It's film noir, on paper, as the author really captures the feel of the times in this hardboiled crime fiction set in NYC in the months leading up to opening day, 1947, with Jackie Robinson playing first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It's a good story that moves along quickly, and would make one hell of a good movie. ESPN, are you listening?

Under the Dome

1070 pages, yet it felt like a quick read. How does Stephen King do that? I read it in about a week. The basic plot - an invisible force field cuts a small New England town off from the world. Imagine living in a snow globe. How would you react? How would other react? At one point about half-way through the book I almost quit. It was so dark, and so depressing, the evil in men’s hearts so domineering, that I really didn’t want to read any more about it. Luckily, that is the point where good starts to make its presence known. This is not scary in the Salem’s Lot or Pet Cemetery sense. It’s scary because King has nailed human nature in this book, and it isn’t pretty.

Eric Ambler Moves Us Even Closer to Evil

My consumption of Eric Ambler novels continues with The Schirmer Inheritance, an excellent novel. Ambler's gifts seem to include detailed knowledge about various places in Europe and their tangled history. In Schirmer, he is covering some of the same ground as his classic Coffin for Dimitrios in that his protagonist, a stable, unextraordinary attorney, is attempting to unravel what happened to specific people during a time of upheaval and war. In this case he is on the trail of a German paratrooper that went missing in Greece during the last stages of World War II and may be the inheritor of a large American fortune. He is, but he's also the inheritor of something else - a bloodline of strength, mercenary ability and moral ambivalence.

I like many things about this. First, I love that Ambler is moving us closer to evil; he takes someone from an ordered world and immerses him in the chaotic. As with Dimitrios, his protagonist is attempting not so much to impose order on the lawless world of war and crime - for then this would be a more standard police novel - but simply to understand it, to describe it, to give it the option of revealing itself. This makes these novels as much about character as plot, about plumbing the depths of a human heart involved in political machinations and consequences - the stuff of first rate spy fiction.

Second, his protagonist, the attorney George Cary, I described as "not extraordinary." He's not, but he's also not a wimp or a patsy, nor simply a device to reveal his opposite. Cary is in fact a survivor of World War II like so many 1950s men, an aviator. But Ambler makes the analogy that while Cary has always experienced danger and destruction, it was from far away, from the safety - comparative safety - of a bomber. He clearly draws the distinction between one who flies, Cary, and one who jumps from an airplane into the thick of things, his prey, Franz. He holds these up to us as juxtapositions so that evil can be more clearly illuminated. My point is by making Cary as complex a character as Franz, Ambler sidesteps a silly convention.

Last, there's a major female character as well, Maria, George's interpreter, that hides all of her characteristics and at which the reader's brain picks like a loose tooth. She surprises in the end with troubling implications. The truth is, I'm not sure what to do with what Ambler's given me there - Maria succumbs to evil and despises herself for it; is it because her life has punished her and twisted her so that she can only worship strength? Her humanity is one of the concealed casualties of war and politics and again we should be grateful that Ambler shines his light on it, however grotesque. Didn't see that aspect of the ending coming and was sort of disgusted when it came. Regardless, more Ambler in my future.

Missed It By That Much

2nd Manassas is a somewhat overlooked battle in the American Civil War. That is a shame, because it provides a compelling drama in the brilliance of General Lee’s leadership, contrasted sharply with the utter incompetence of General Pope on the Union Side. This richly detailed account gets deep into the weeds of regimental level troop movements, but does so in a way that maintains a focus on the fact that these are real live people fighting and dying on the battlefield.

I never really understood 2nd Manassas prior to the book. It doesn’t have that one majestic battle that is associated with the more famous Civil War events. Instead, it is comprised of clashes set over several days. Lee just misses the chance to destroy the Union Army here. It is amazing how often the survival of either the Union or CSA armies in this war came down to a matter of just a few minutes. Both sides missed numerous chances to end this war years before the final surrender at Appomattox. A delay of less than 1 hour by Jackson on the final day may have cost Lee a chance to pin the Union Army in, and destroy it. Who knows what the US would be like today if that had happened.

Even though this campaign is a resounding victory for Lee, it is a victory at a steep cost. The losses and attrition resulting from the battle, and the march through Manassas to Maryland, would severely impact Lee’s ability to achieve victory at Antietam later in the fall.

Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of 2nd Manassas

The Forever War

A 1974 book about an inter-stellar war that goes on forever, with an enemy we don’t understand, fought by soldiers that were drafted, and led by officers that are idiots. Vietnam anybody? Anybody?

This parable of the follies of war is as relevant today as it was in 1974. By taking the never ending war to a ridiculous extreme and by applying the paradox of near light speed travel to the protagonist, we get a hero who lives through the entire 1000 year war, while only aging a few years himself. The difficulties of integrating back into a culture that has gone through several generations while you aged two years also lets Hadleman say something about shell-shocked Vets that volunteered to go back to 'Nam 2 or 3 times.

Tea Party sympathizers, if they can even get through an anti-war novel, will recoil in horror and how humanity solves its war problem. Everybody should read this book though, especially those that won’t get it.

You know what I never used to like that I like now?

The Lockhorns. When I was young I was horrified by this comic strip. Now that I am older and have been married a while I find the whole thing a lark. I mean it's obviously satire to me. Maybe because the characters are such caricatures of married people, I can look at the whole distortion and laugh. Even Wikipedia's description is funny:

-Leroy Lockhorn - The man of the house who drinks a lot, plays golf too much and chases everything good-looking in a skirt.
-Loretta Lockhorn - The woman of the house is a shopaholic, who drives terribly and does most of the handiwork around the house because either Leroy is too lazy to do it, or because he feels she should earn all the money she spends.
-Loretta's Mother - Never named and rarely seen (usually only during the Christmas season when she comes to stay), but hated mercilessly by Leroy.
-Marriage Counselor - Whom Leroy and Loretta routinely see but to no avail.
-Arthur the Bartender - Local saloonkeeper to whom Leroy often bemoans his circumstances.

The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock by Frank O'Reilly

This is the definitive book on The Battle of Fredericksburg. Incredibly detailed, exhaustively researched, and vivid in its description of the horrors of war. In a lot of ways, it’s the ultimate anti-war book. I can’t imagine reading this and thinking the carnage is cool. Although it delves deep into the minutia of troop level movements and battle strategy, Frank’s writing style keeps you completely engaged, and his extensive use of directly quoted accounts from the participants brings a real humanity to this 150 year old battle. Also, if you are ever in Fredericksburg and have the opportunity to take a tour of the battlefields led by Frank, don’t skip the chance.

One Vast Anguish

I read Madame Bovary because of de Maupassant and I read de Maupassant because of Maugham. I was not disappointed in Bovary. I’m not sure if everything of Flaubert’s is like this but Bovary was everything I hoped it would be and some things I didn’t expect. Some observations.

Madame Bovary is a surprisingly modern novel in that it identifies a problem familiar to modern readers. It’s about an unfulfilled woman, a woman who yearns for some kind of actualization but, denied this, seeks it instead first in fantasy, in “emotional affairs” and then in outright physical adultery. You can argue all you like if Emma Bovary does this because she is stupid or cruel, fed by romantic notions, confusing material affluence with intellectual and spiritual achievement or if, as I see it, her time and place, 1800s France, left her no options – Emma’s choices are to become a nun or a wife, and the maker of a modest home at that. Her husband, Charles, spends his days as a country doctor traversing the land helping people and being a figure o f importance. Emma sews.

Not the kind of plot I usually dig, but what really kept me turning the pages is what usually keeps me turning pages: the language. My God, the language! I don’t know how Flaubert reads in his original French but in the English translation of Lowell Bair it is…

Not too beautiful. It’s clear, has a nice flow, is relatively simple, makes terrific use of observation, of detail, of what I think is called le mot juste, “the right word.” Isn’t that how it’s done, whether you’re Flaubert or anyone else, whether you’re producing capital-L Literature or advertising copy? At times it is plain, at times soaring, Flaubert simply puts it together in a way that I love. He describes Emma:

Accustomed to peaceful sights, she was drawn to scenes of contrast and unrest. She liked the sea only because of its storms, and verdure only when it was scattered among ruins. She had to be able to extract some kind of personal benefit from things, and she rejected as useless anything which did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic and she sought emotion, not landscapes.

Again, with just the right detail, he so perfectly captures her character and state of mind:

Her carnal desires, her longing for money and the melancholy of her unfulfilled passion merged into one vast anguish, and instead of trying to distract herself from it she concentrated her attention on it, stirring up her pain and always looking for a chance to suffer.

It’s also wonderfully erotic in that restrained 19th century way. This is among its sexiest passages:

The bed was a large mahogany one, shaped like a boat. Red silk curtains, curved at the bottom, hung down very low from the ceiling beside the flaring headboard; and there was nothing in the world so lovely as her dark hair and white skin against that crimson background when, in a gesture of modesty, she brought her bare arms together and hid her face in her hands.

I think I also didn’t expect the book to be so wise. It’s full of knowing observations about the world and the psychology of its characters.

What next? An investigation into Zola. Then, perhaps, more Flaubert? More de Maupassant surely? And who are Flaubert’s great–grandchildren? Who is continuing to turn out prose and stories like that? Maybe what’s on display are the principles of writing and storytelling that I enjoy in anyone’s hands.

Faulkner As Is

I have a well thumbed copy of the Collected Stories of William Faulkner, Vintage edition that I have spent time with sporadically for years. Every time I pick it up I read a little more, always planning to spend more time on Faulkner, explore the novels beyond As I Lay Dying, which I’ve read twice, and never quite getting to it. Time to change that.

I guess my appreciation of Faulkner’s stories has grown with each reading and, in the case of many of these stories, re-reading. I think most of us think of Faulkner as a great “Southern writer” most known for setting much of his work in the same continuum – the recurring characters and lineages of the fictional Yoknopotophaw County, in Mississippi. But he’s so much more than that; he’s the Nobel-winning author that made significant contributions to literature in time, pace, setting, psychology and character – and this, too, obscures him, for at the one end of appreciation he is too small and at the other too big.

What you need to get under you is just that these stories are so damn good, by themselves. For starters, there’s the language. Always, the language, the prose, the ability to make great sentences. Here’s one that blew me away the other day, from “Victory:” “The dark earth bites into the sun’s rim.” A sentence like that, you can hold in your hands. More:

The sun is setting. The village rises in black silhouette against the sunset; the river gleams in mirrored fire. The bridge across the river is a black arch upon which slowly and like figures cut from black paper, men are moving.

Faulkner puts his words together the way a poet does, he selects details a poet would notice that convey a world of meaning and upon which entire scenes and experiences hinge.

So he’s a great writer. But he’s also very accessible. That’s key, I think. My most recent re-readings have driven home to me that though Faulkner is a giant among literary figures, his works are also entertaining and readable and, dare I say it, good examples of Virile Lit. For he writes stories about thieves, con artists, tough men, stories that wouldn’t be out of place in the Western or crime genres. He has here a number of amazing stories about war and about a fictional tribe of native Americans – read “A Courtship” for a story that could have walked out of the pages of a 1930s adventure serial.

I’m not saying they’re all adventure stories, but he maps the human heart the way James M. Cain does. Ostensibly, Cain’s work is “crime fiction,” but that’s just Cain’s particular perch, from which he navigates the terrain of his characters, and often the crimes Cain portrays are not transgressions against the law at all – they are the crimes of basic humanity, greed, emotional violence and manipulation. Faulkner is the same way – you’ll just never find them together on the same shelf in the book store.

What I think Faulkner achieved, what I will read more of to find out, is a perfect balance between literature of great artistic merit, heavy language, and work that is enjoyable, even thrilling. If so, it’s no wonder he is numbered among our greatest writers – but don’t let the fact that he is canonical keep you from appreciating him just as is. That’s my intention.

More thoughts on Bond.

For most of my young life I was a chronic hero-worshiper. I have been half-heartedly trying to determine if I was excessive in this and if I am still prone to it. Naturally, my heroes these days are more diverse. But when I was young they were fairly common and shared a number of traits in that they were all strong, erudite and principled men. These days, I number my mother, my wife and my children among my heroes, as well as men and women that are very simple in their heroism in that they don't conquer worlds so much as behave with consistent kindness, love and endurance.

I've written about this in the past but when I was a teenager I was madly in love with the idea of James Bond. As I said, I wanted to be like Bond - except for the womanizing part; I wanted to be admired by women and have relationships with a woman but not prolific in my use of them the way Bond was. Maybe it's because I've been making a lot of "your 15 favorite" lists on Facebook but I thought I'd dash off a few more thoughts about what for me was an important influence and what remains a beloved literary figure.

The Bond novels are all delightful and present a more complete and complex picture of the cardboard god the movies have made him out to be. If you're only going to read one Bond novel to get a feel for these works I'd have a hard time narrowing it down. My finalists would include You Only Live Twice because it captures almost everything one loves about them - the sense of getting inside the foreign and exotic that Fleming brought so naturally to the setting, the sex, martial arts and gunplay, the bizarre (perennial bad guy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is in his element here as a reimagined Japanese warlord on a private volcanic island of poisonous flowers) and the tender (the novel's coda in the fishing village is Fleming reaching beyond pulp into artistry). I'd also have to consider On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the same reasons and the depth it brings to Bond through his association with the woman he would actually marry, Tracy (she's gunned down shortly after) and The Man With the Golden Gun because it is a tight, well characterized tough guy novel with Fleming;s gift for characterization and character background amply displayed. I'd also have to throw in From Russia, With Love for its cleverness (Fleming unfolds the tale with multiple perspectives, Bond's but also the Soviets and the femme fatale, Tatiana Romanova).

But for the movies, for my favorite, I'd settle quite comfortably on the film version of From Russia, With Love. I must have watched this on VHS a hundred times when I was a kid, always consciously (and hopelessly) copying Sean Connery's stride and attitude. I had an enormous crush on Daniella Bianchi, who played Tatiana. Most people when they pick a favorite Bond film quickly realize the Connery years were among the best and zero in on Goldfinger because it was seamless and nearly perfect as a Bond movie - and with good reason. But I'll take the ambiance and darkness of From Russia over the slickness of Goldfinger any day - I think without From Russia, With Love, there'd be no Portishead (no doubt this band also loved the Len Deighton novels and movies and more, too, but you get my point).

The Moore years were wasted ones and the years that turned the Bond movie franchise into a ridiculous mess, although my attitude toward Moore has softened - he recognized the Bond silliness for what it was and played it for laughs, appropriately; they become clever self satires in his capable hands. But the other Bond movie I liked and watched a lot as a teenager was The Living Daylights. For one brief moment there the movies looked like the novels. Everything about Timothy Dalton, Maryam D'Abo, the setting, the soundtrack (The Pretenders!!) was right.

I haven't been blogging, but I have been reading.

I suspect many of you have been anxiously wondering why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I mean, with everything going on in the world and your life, no doubt one of the priorities in your thinking has been, That guy that blogs excessively about spy novels and sports stories, what is he up to? I must know!!

A bulleted list, if you don't mind, of a few things in my stew.

-As titled, I haven't been blogging but I have certainly been reading at my usual voracious clip and in the usual genres, spy novels, adventure tales, history and sports.

-Robert Littel, the spy novelist. I'm not sold on him after Legends but I will give him another try with The Company or other work. One annoyance: why does the protagonist of Legends get recognized at every airport he goes to? Intrigued by this writer, though, great plotter, interesting characters, terrific realism; I'm not liking him as much as, say, Charles McCarrey, though.

-Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire, which certainly would be a no brainer for a reader like me in that this historic fiction about the battle of Thermopylae is on a list of required reading for the Marines and other branches of the military, thrilled me in some ways but seemed long winded to me in others. Maybe coulda been tighter for me personally, but otherwise a very good read, very good.

-John Irving. Sadly, I put down A Prayer for Owen Meany after a hundred some pages because I just couldn't get into it, couldn't get into the characters, couldn't muster the enthusiasm for the story. This is surprising to me for a number of reasons. One, I read The World According to Garp at least twice, loved it. Also The Hotel New Hampshire. So why couldn't I get into Meany? Is it Irving's changing style in this one of his later works or is it me, as a reader? I suspect the former. Two, I was surprised at this because Meany frequently makes people's short lists of Irving's great works.

-Bo, autobio of U of M football coach Bo Schembechler co written with Mitch Albom. Great read - I'm not normally an Albom fan - and an excellent companion to another great read, John U. Bacon's co-written, with Bo, sports/business book, Bo's Lasting Lessons. Everything you want in a sports book. But, you know, as I read it's a reminder about why sports is such a great creator of literature and content. Longer post on this later but sports as a lifestyle, a past time and as literature provides a ready made context for the conflicts that drive men; men in short love to compete and sports gives them a context that's safer to do it than war. The language used by men like Bo and OSU coach Woody Hayes, on display in this book, is couched in terms of warfare, but the critical difference, obviously, is that in football when you "kill 'em," they get back up and do it again. It's safe. I'm not knocking this - I'm a fan, too - I'm just pointing it out, probably redundantly for most of you.

More to come, got to get back into the habit of regularly blogging for all seven of my loyal readers.