Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove (1985), by Larry McMurtry, is the most critically acclaimed western. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986 and is McMurtry’s magnum opus. More literary fiction in a western setting than a cowboys-and-Indians romp, Lonesome Dove tells the story of two ageing ex-Texas Rangers who lead a cattle drive from south Texas to the wilderness of Montana. It examines friendship, love and death through a host of larger-than-life yet painfully realistic characters. Texas Monthly calls it the state’s hero myth. 

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are the co-owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium, renting out horses and cows in the dusty border town of Lonesome Dove. In their youth, they were Texas Ranger captains, who fought Comanches in the state’s frontier days. Now Texas is becalmed, and the buffalo are nearing extinction.

Quick-witted, charming and thoughtful, McCrae spends his days indulging in alcohol and prostitutes while pining for an old flame who married a horse trader twenty years before. 

Woodrow Call is a tough and determined leader of men, with an iron sense of duty. He is stubborn and pragmatic but socially inept, particularly around women, and refuses to face his past mistakes.

McMurtry claimed the idea for two opposing men – the pragmatic and the visionary – came from Don Quixote. McCrae is an Epicurean, Call a stoic, and, although they are very different, their many conversations echo those of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The call to adventure comes from their friend Jake Spoon. After ten years of absense, he appears in Lonesome Dove wanted, having killed a dentist in Fort Smith. Spoon tales of unclaimed land persuade Call and McCrae to leave Lonesome Dove and bring two thousand cattle to the last frontier. They hire a team of cowboys and set off.

The novel follows a host of characters including wistful whores, naïve sheriffs and sadistic bandits. The plotting is excellent. McMurtry’s narration is omniscient, slipping in and out of characters thoughts and opinions with ease. His dialogue and characterisation are superb, and often hilarious. The characters are not mere archetypes or cliches but bring a host of quirks and insecurities to the table – many with crippling emotional depth. 

Larry McMurtry, 2000:

“It’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.”

Lonesome Dove does not paint the romantic picture of the Old West, so loved in the genre, nor does it indulge in hellish depictions in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, though there is violence aplenty. Instead, McMurtry paints the Frontier as-is: a time of adventure and possibility, but also immense hardship and cruelty. The innocents suffer most.

McMurtry wrote one sequel – Streets of Laredo (1989) and two prequels; Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997). I have read the latter, which is nearly as good and features more of the Native American perspective. 

Larry McMurtry of Archer City, Texas (1936 – 2021) – who later co-wrote Brokeback Mountain – began Lonesome Dove in 1972 as a screenplay. He sold the rights to Universal Pictures. The leads he envisioned, however – John Wayne and James Stewart – rejected the script. Twelve years later, McMurtry bought back the rights for $35,000 and rewrote it as a book. The gamble paid off – Lonesome Dove was an immediate success and spent 52 weeks on the bestseller list.

In 1989, CBS adapted Lonesome Dove as a TV miniseries starring Robert Duval as Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow Call, Diana Lane as Lorena and Donald Glover as Deets. The script maintained much of the book’s dialogue and was nominated for 18 Emmies, winning seven. It revived both the Western genre and the miniseries format. Four adaptations of the Lonesome Dove tetralogy followed but were subpar.

Standing at 843 pages, Lonesome Dove is one of those rare books which is easy to read while bearing literary clout. It is among the best books I have read, and will likely read again.

 Sources: Texas Monthly

See Also:

• Don Quixote

Don Quixote

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel Cervantes is the most famous novel in the Spanish language. Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616) wrote two volumes, the first 1605 and the latter 1615. Widely cited as the first ‘modern novel’ for its satirical and self-referential approach, Don Quixote follows the misadventures of a mad knight and his simpleminded squire in post-medieval Spain. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue. 

Alonso Quixano is a middle-aged country gentleman in an unremarkable part of Spain. Retired, he spends his days reading chivalric romances – sensationalised tales of knights and damsels in vogue at the time. Then, after one book too many, an epiphany strikes. He should become a knight-errant too – and embark on a crusade to rid the world of evil.

Quixano adopts the more knightly name ‘Don Quixote’ and sets off on his quest, to the chagrin of his friends and family. The aged workhouse, Rocinante, is his steed and local peasant, Sancho Panza, his squire.

The problem is, Don Quixote lives in a world where knights-errant are a thing of the past. People brush off his old-fashioned speech and claims of virtue as curious at best and dangerous at worse. For fifty-two chapters, Don Quixote embarks on various misadventures that often do more harm than good. To the self-obsessed and gallant knight, inns are castles, prostitutes princesses and windmills giants. Panza, though recognising his master’s madness, follows anyway in the hopes of his promised governorship.

But while Don Quixote is insane, on matters unrelated to chivalry, he proves astute and wise. One of the book’s best passages is when he lectures Sancho Panza on the merits of a good governorship and the need to use proper speech. One does not ‘fart’ but ‘elucidates’. 

The first instalment of Don Quixote became so popular that one Alonso Fernandez de Avellandela wrote a fraudulent sequel. While claiming to be authentic, it was, in truth, a poor work of fan-fiction. Most notably, Avendella reduced Panza from a nuanced spewer of proverbs to a one-dimensional oaf.

Catching wind of the fraudulent sequel, Cervantes (right) published the ‘true’ second volume in 1615. While retaining the original’s humour, it takes on a more modern and philosophical tone. The first book exists in-universe and Don Quixote meets people who have read the same book as the reader. He even addresses the fraudulent Avellandella sequel. No work of fiction had taken this metafictional approach before, earning the book its ‘modern’ reputation. 

Twin ironies beset the story’s legacy. Cervantes satirised the chivalric romance, yet Don Quixote gave the genre a second wind. Cervantes despised Avellandella’s fake sequel, yet it is only known today because he addressed it.

Don Quixote is episodic. Each adventure is more or less self-contained, which is helpful because the book is over a thousand pages long. I read the Edith Grossman translation (2004) over a year – though apparently, each translation has its flavour and character. Of course, nothing can match the original Spanish. Across the Hispanophone world, students study Cervantes as English speakers do his contemporary, William Shakespeare. The English words quixotic and lothario, and the phrase ’tilting and windmills’ come from Cervantes.

Don Quixote is a marvellous work. Humour dates quickly, yet, Don Quixote is genuinely funny to this day – not an easy accomplishment for a book written four centuries ago. 

See Also:

• Santiago
• How California Got Its Name

Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Can’t Get You out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021) is a six-part documentary series by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It explores the challenges and adaptions of power structures from 1945 to the present day with a focus on Britain, the USA, Russia and China. Through extensive archival footage and a haunting soundtrack, Curtis explores how corruption, finance, conspiracy theories and behavioural psychology twist and defy individualism to uphold the interests of the powerful. 

There are six episodes:

1. Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain – covers growing frustration with the old power structures in the 1950s.
2. Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing – examines the failure of 1960s revolutionary movements like the Black Panthers and the Red Army Faction.
3. Money Changes Everything – the effects of dropping the gold standard, and how money replaced the idealism of the 60s.
4. But What if People Are Stupid – the alliance between business and politics in the West, China’s abandonment of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
5. The Lordly Ones – how Britain made mythologies to obfuscate their bloody past.
6. Are We Pigeon or Are We Dancer? – computers, technocracy and the creation of the world today.

Curtis presents a gloomy worldview. Idealists might seek to change the world, but power always wins in the end. Eerie sound production – reminiscent of 1980s science fiction and often bizarre or juxtaposed music conjures an unsettling atmosphere – the modern world is a dystopia where our leaders have no ideals or vision of the future and the masses shuffle about in a dull and meaningless existence.

Putin’s nationalism is a façade to shroud the corruption that defines post-Soviet Russia. What the CIA attempted in the West through MK Ultra is realised through the social programming of the internet. China abandoned Marxism in the 1980s and built a totalitarian state based on money, control and little else. As they instil helplessness and suspicion, conspiracy theories ultimately serve the interests of the powerful.

Can’t Get You out of My Head presents its ‘emotional history’ through intertwining narratives of individuals who tried, and often failed, to challenge the status quo. These include both politicians like Jiang Qing – wife to Mao Zedong, and lesser-known, but no less significant figures such as Michael X, Afeni Shakur, Abu Zubayda and Eduard Limonov. A key theme is the struggle of individualism against collective authority and how, in the end, the latter always wins.

It’s a lot to take in. But, despite everything, Curtis ends on an optimistic note. If we can get ourselves into this mess, we can get ourselves out. What we need is new ideas. The documentary’s strength lies in explaining the way the world is, through an untold narrative that is both unique and compelling. It is not, however, an easy viewing.

Links:

• Internet Archive
• Thoughtmaybe
• Watch Documentaries

Books I Read in 2020

You would think, 2020 being what it was, this list would be larger. Apparently not.  Much of my reading was spent on work-related books not listed, and the 945 page, but yet unfinished ‘Don Quixote.’ As a result, my list is somewhat shameful in scope. My aim is to read 10 in 2021.

February

• The Epic of Gilgamesh (c.2200 BC). The world’s oldest recorded story. Listened to as an audiobook. 5/5.

March

• Conn Iggulden – The Falcon of Sparta (2018). A fictionalised account of Xenophon’s Anabasis. 4/5

June

• John Man – Amazons: The Warrior Women of the Ancient World (2018). An accessible survey warrior women in mythology and historical societies from Scythia to Dahomey. 4/5

July

• Herodotus – The Histories (430 BC). I didn’t ‘finish’ this book so to speak but read large chunks as a reference. Covers the Greco-Persian Wars in detail and explores of the known world of the 5^th century BC. 5/5.
  
  See Also:

• Books I Read in 2018
• Books I Read in 2019

Parasite

Parasite (2019) is a film by South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho and the first non-English language film to win Best Picture at Hollywood’s Academy Awards. The film examines the effects of wealth disparity through two families on opposing ends of the social spectrum.

Parasite was an Oscar darling. As well as Best Picture, it received the following awards and nominations in 2020:

• Best Director: won
• Best Original Screenplay: won
• Best International Feature Film: won
• Best Production Design: nominated
• Best Film Editing: nominated

It was the first Korean film to ever win, let alone be nominated for, an Academy Award.

The Kim family live in a semi-basement apartment. They are resourceful but uneducated. Their fortunes turn when son Ki-woo’s friend offers him a job tutoring the daughter of the affluent Park family. Ki-woo accepts, but to do so he must pass as a university student. Once in, Ki-woo helps his family get hired too, all lying about their qualifications and relation to one another.

The Parks live in a mansion designed by its architect former owner. They can afford tutors for their children, a chauffeur and a full-time housekeeper. The Parks are friendly and ‘nice’, though haughty and naïve. ‘She’s nice because she’s rich…’ Mrs Kim comments. ‘Hell if I had all that money I’d be nice too. Nicer even!’

Tonal shifts mark each act. While starting as a black comedy, the film takes a sinister turn and effortlessly blends thriller, horror and gothic. Careful attention is paid to its pacing and no camera shot, no line of dialogue, is without meaning or consequence. Symbolism abounds. The official premise describes Parasite as a ‘pitch-black modern fairy tale.’

An issue with film these days is a lack of originality. Nine out of ten of the 2010’s top-grossing films were either reboots, sequels or (in the case of Star Wars) both. Superhero flicks, or most big-budget all-ages action-adventure films, are often too predictable. Even if a film makes is visually stunning, well-acted or slick, it is all for nought if the audience immediately knows how it will end. The more films one watches, the more one notices clichés and tropes. Conversely, shoehorning twists or deux ex resolutions ruins a narrative if the unpredictability makes no sense. To work, a twist must be both surprising and plausible. Parasite achieves the balance perfectly.

The opening scene shows the Kim family searching for a new wifi connection after a password encrypts the old. They are all capable workers, but in an economy where ‘an opening for a security guard attracts 500 university graduates’, their merit is irrelevant. Connections are paramount. Only through social connections can the Kims can find stable employment. The film’s stairway motif represent its characters’ social standing; whether affluence, near-poverty and destitution. 

Despite being one of the wealthiest nations in the world, South Korea suffers social inequality. In 2015 the top 10% controlled 66% of its wealth. Status and money are everything. Success depends on getting into the right university and the stress shows: South Korea has the second-highest rate of suicide in the OECD. In a society obsessed with image and hierarchy, however, the popularity of Parasite and its critique of social inequality shows people are changing the way they think.

 

Sources: IMDB, New York Times, VOA News

See Also:

• Top Films of 2019
• The Irishman
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Top Films of 2019

Here are my favourite  films of 2019 ranked from ten to one. Subject to my opinion and what I saw, of course.

Honourable mentions: Rocketman, Yesterday, Toy Story 4, Knives Out, Blinded by the Light, Little Women,  Avengers: Endgame (highest-grossing to date!)

10. The King

• The latest film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Immaculate set design and costumes and gritty fight scenes. Historically inaccurate at times and, though he gave a good performance I found (unpopular opinion) pretty-boy Timothee Chalamet miscast as the martial king Henry.

9. Marriage Story

• About a rich white liberal divorce with all the legal nastiness. Sad and compelling. Stars Scarlett Johanson and Adam Driver.

8. Dolemite is my Name

• Eddie Murphy stars as ambitious but down and out comedian Rudy Ray Moore in 1970s Los Angeles. With zero experience he directs and finances a homemade kung-fu themed Blaxploitation film. Murphy’s best performance in years.

7. Jojo Rabbit

• The latest from director Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnorok). A shy boy and proud Hitler Youth finds out his mother is harbouring a Jew. Waititi is hilarious as a camp Hitler, his imaginary best friend. Quite moving toward the end.

6. El Camino

• A sequel movie to the tv show Breaking Bad (2008-2013). Rivetting conclusion to Jesse Pinkman’s story.

5. 1917

• Two British soldiers travel through no man’s land to halt 1500 men from advancing to their deaths. Thrilling and harrowing: brings the horrors of trench warfare to life.

4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

• A colourful and violent ode to 1960s Los Angeles.

3. Joker

• A disturbed and impoverished clown turns violent. More psychological thriller than DC flick. Dark but engaging. We live in a society.

2. The Irishman

• Mob epic from Martin Scorcese. Suspenseful and thematic.

1. Parasite

• Well crafted, topical and deeply unsettling. A Korean language film and only non-English one to make the list.

What were your favourites? What should/will win Best Picture at the Oscars? What were the best foreign-language films?   Let me know in the comments below!

The Irishman

The Irishman (2019) is the latest film from director Martin Scorsese. Like GoodFellas (1989) and Casino (1995), it is a crime epic set in the glory days of the American mafia. Scorsese’s muse Robert De Niro stars alongside genre mainstays Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in their first film together. Steven Zaillian of Schindler’s List wrote the screenplay. Released on Netflix, it runs a hefty 3.5 hours. The film tells the story of Irish-American mobster Frank Sheeran and the 1975 disappearance of union boss Jimmy Hoffa. It is based on Sheeran’s biography, ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ – code for contract killing.

Frank Sheeran (De Niro) is a truck driver in 1950s Philadelphia when mobster Russell Buffalino (Pesci) takes him under his wing. Sheeran’s service in WW2 taught him Italian and desensitised him to killing. Through Buffalino he meets Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), charismatic and blustering president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the largest trade union in America. Frank murders on Hoffa’s behalf and builds a name for himself in the underworld until circumstance and mob politics force him to choose where his loyalties lie.

Digital ‘youthification’ technology makes De Niro, who is 76, and Pacino, 79, able to play younger men. Though De Niro’s face is believable – even his artificial blue eyes – his stiffness and gait betray his age. Surprisingly Pacino pulls it off.

The Irishman takes liberties with fact. Its source material is based on Sheeran’s confessions to lawyer Charles Brandt before he died in 2003. The 25-30 murders he details, however, are officially unattributed to this day, the insinuation the mob killed Kennedy is disputable. They did help get him elected, however. JFK’s father made his fortune bootlegging in the 1930s. In 1960 he promised the mob his son would overthrow Castro, and restore Havana to the gangsters’ playground of old. The Bay of Pigs Fiasco resulted. Former FBI agents claim Sheeran was simply a crooked union official. He was violent, sure, but never murdered anyone, or at least was never caught. De Niro stated he believed Sheeran’s account, though the film ultimately tells ‘our story, if not the actual story.’

The Irishman deals less with the mafia itself and more its characters’ journeys. Catholic themes of sin and atonement feature, as they do in many of Scorsese’s works. I loved Hoffa and Tony Pro’s ‘meeting scene’ in the third act and the haunting ending. De Niro and Pacino give their finest performances in years and Pesci, who left retirement for his role, is superb as calculating don Russel Buffalino. Though I am hesitant to say it tops GoodFellas without rewatching, The Irishman is easily Scorsese’s best since.

Verdict: 5/5

Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

‘Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.’

The final paragraph of the final chapter offers a fitting summary to Israeli professor Yuval Noah Harari’s magnum opus. ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ (2014) traces the human story, from our humble beginnings to our exceptional rise, by identifying a series of key biological, social and technological developments that shaped the world we know today. Harari explains why and how homo sapiens are, illustrating the big picture with pertinent and oft amusing historical anecdotes. In the spirit of Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’, it provides a scientific perspective on world history.

Sapiens has four parts:

• One: The Cognitive Revolution –sentience and self-awareness, language, hunter-gatherers and our role in the Pleistocene Extinction.
• Two: The Agricultural Revolution – farming, hierarchies and the stories which underpin them, writing, prejudice and injustice.
• Three: The Unification of Humankind – global civilization, money and commerce, empire, religion and ideology.
• Four: The Scientific Revolution – the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, capitalism, happiness the state of the modern world and our possible future

Harari’s premise is the impact of ‘shared fictions’: societies’ beliefs and values, the way we view the world, the ideologies we share and the stories and myths which uphold them. A corporation, a nation, a higher power or even money itself, is not real in the tangible sense, yet through shared belief in the system, it holds sway over our daily lives, unifies peoples and upholds social structures. In Harari’s view consumerism and liberal humanism – the dominant ideologies of today –  are just as much ‘religions’ as Buddhism or Islam, for they shape how we view and interact with the world and our fellow man.

Released in 2011 in Hebrew and 2014 in English, Sapiens was immensely successful. It sold over a million copies and catapulted Harari from an insignificant history professor to one of the world’s leading intellectuals. Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jared Diamond and Mark Zuckerberg are fans. While Sapiens deals with our human past, his newer books Homo Deus (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) deal with the future and present, respectively. I have not yet read them.

Despite his heavy-hitting concepts, Harari writes in an eloquent and accessible manner. His prose is thoughtful, punchy and descriptive, his content insightful and often provocative. This book will change how you view the world.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so many ‘aha’ moments in so short a time. It might be the best nonfiction I’ve ever read.

Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of world history at Hebrew University. He lives with his husband on a cooperative farm near Jerusalem and is an ardent vegan. He meditates for two hours every day.

See Also:

• Why Did Europe Take Over the World?
• The 1769 Transit of Venus
• Were We Better off as Hunter-Gatherers?

Larry Gonick – The Cartoon History of the Universe

The Cartoon History of the Universe is a three part, 19 volume book series by American cartoonist Larry Gonick about the history of mankind up to 1492.  It presents detailed and well researched material in a humorous and accessible black and white comic style. Cartoon History was originally serialised as a comic book series from 1978-1990, when the first book was published.

• Cartoon History of the Universe I: From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great (1990)
• Cartoon History of the Universe II: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome (1994)
• Cartoon History of the Universe III: From the Rise of Arabia to the Rennaisance (2002)

A smaller two part series, Cartoon History of the Modern World takes off where it leaves, but is shorter and slightly more Eurocentric.

In Cartoon History, Gonick’s avatar – a frizzy haired Einstein-esque professor explains the historical narrative while the cartoon panels provide visual representation and gags. The often raunchy and irreverent humour ranges from absurdism to parody, anachronisms and dramatic irony. Running gags, like Byzantines’ penchant for eye gouging and Central Asian nomad’s adversity to vegetables, play a big part. Sometimes the events are funny in their own right. Who would know, for example, that (pre-Islamic) Meccan spies triggered war with Ethiopia by pooping in a church?

Despite its accessible style, content is factual and dense. Gonick explores the lives of history’s big personalities and ordinary men and women with an eye for economic trends and cause and effect. Interesting trivia and gory details accompany the main narrative, often as footnotes. Cartoon History’s topical weight and adult appeal distinguish it from less serious kids’ books like Horrible Histories.

Book One surveys the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and human origins in the first third before moving to the ancient Mediterranean civilisations, with a particular focus on Israel and Greece.

Book Two alternates between the great civilisations of Rome, India and China, including the origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese philosophies and Christianity. Jesus is portrayed in historical terms as a wondering Jewish preacher called Jeshua Ben Joesph. Gonick has received criticism for his skeptical attitude.

Book Three covers, amongst many, the rise of Islam, Ethiopia, North Africa, the Turks, Byzantine Empire, Crusades, Mongols, Black Death and the Renaissance. Having owned the book for many years I am biased, but do believe this is the best. Gonick’s artwork and humour are better developed, content is more varied and the time period is most interesting. The first volume ‘No Pictures Please’ is especially pertinent, giving an accurate explanation of the life and times of Muhammad and the origins of the Sunni/Shia split, all without idolatry.

Larry Gonick (1946-) was born in San Francisco and studied Mathematics at Harvard.  From 1977 onwards he wrote a series of ‘cartoon guides’ on a variety of subjects including algebra, physics, computer science and tax reform.  The Cartoon History of the Universe, which he serialised from 1977, was his most successful work, and named one of the top 100 comics of the 20^th century by Comic Journal. Jackie Kennedy was an early fan and helped get it published. Carl Sagan described it as “a better way to learn history than 90% of school textbooks”.

2018 Goals Reviewed

One year ago I listed five goals for this blog in 2018. Here is my evaluation.

1. Posting once a week: I failed to post every Monday, but stuck to a fairly consistant routine. Sometimes I posted on Tuesday instead. Aside from my holiday in May and Nanowrimo in November I did post once a week. Check.

2. Diversifying: In 2017 I wrote about history and current events. In 2018 I expanded into book reviews, anthropology and culture. Check.

3. Style Guide: Unfortunately I never get round to this – maybe this year. Miss.

4. Nanowrimo: Yes! I managed to write a 50,000 word novel draft in November for the National Novel Writing Month challenge.  If I am not too busy, I will do this again in 2019. Check.

5. Diligence: One year on and this blog is still going strong. I have far more readers than I did at the beginning of 2018 and am still updating regularly. Check.

All in all I accomplished 4/5 of my blogging goals. Not bad. This year I will stick to the same routine as 2018, blogging once a week on topics which pique my interest. Hopefully by 2020 I am still going. Happy New Year everyone!

See Also:

• My 2018 Blogging Goals
• How Nanowrimo Went