Wylkus

Once upon a time, there was a land where time had stopped. The slanted rays of an eternal afternoon hung heavy over hills of grass that stood as frozen as a picture. The people of this land walked listlessly through its territory. Unable to age, unable to change, they walked from here to there and back again. They would study every whirl and eddy across in the motionless streams. They walked over the hills, pushing their faces against gusts of wind frozen in mid-flight.

But in this land, something is happening. Something that none of its residents can recall ever seeing the like of. A great confluence of people is gathering, person following person, each curious to see where the rest are going until they reach the crowd spread around the house at the end of the lane. From this house came a steady stream of screams. The newcomers all had the same questions, for all been to this house, as they had all been all places in the land, and never before had they heard screaming.

Birth, they were told. The woman who lives in the house, the woman whose belly had always and always been swollen in pregnancy, was giving birth.  Hearing this the newcomers could do nothing but turn to the house and stare, utterly absorbed in the sound of screaming. The sound that something, impossibly, was happening. Every now and then a few would try to push through the crowd, declaring with fanatical zeal their willingness to help, only to be pushed back. Told the house was already full of doctors, each struggling to recall their long unpracticed skills. Told nothing more could be done.

Then, the screaming stopped. Not a sound could be heard from the crowd outside. All waiting, not a single breath to stir the stale air, until from the house could be heard the plaintive cries of a newborn babe and a great roar of celebration erupted from the great mass of people. Into this cacophony the bedroom window of the house was opened, and from it a doctor unfurled a great white sheet emblazoned with the dull red stains of blood, so fresh it dripped and where it dropped it stained the eternal, unchanging ground upon which it fell.

Impossibly the people had a newborn among them. And though all in the land came to see eventually the commotion stopped, for it was merely another baby after all, and the mother was left alone.

Looking for advice and looking for camaraderie the mother went out and visited the other mothers of babes. But she found that all had put their unchanging babies aside. Their affection, which they had thought infinite, ground away by an eternity of incessant wails. With stony faces they would show her their children. In drawers and cabinets, in crawlspaces and the boles of trees or dropped to the bottom of wells. All still sleeping, or crying, or staring out at the world without comprehension or understanding. And thereafter the mother would cry as he held her baby. Cry for fear that someday she too would put him aside and try to forget.

But something happened even more impossible than the boy’s birth. He grew. And in what seemed the blink of an eye to a people who lived without time he was walking, and talking, and playing. And when he played he awakened in the children of the land their love of play, for long ago they had grown exhausted of games and play, and before the boy most had simply sat in a stupor staring at the unchanging yellows and reds of the evening sky. But again the boy grew, and soon the children with which he played could no longer follow the games he created or keep up with the speed of his legs.

 He found new friends to play with. Older friends, though not in years for all among them had lived so long they could no longer recall having been a different age than what they were. These new friends showed him a thousand things within the land. Things they remembered enjoying age after age, but yet still had eventually turned away from in boredom, and they reveled in the boy’s newfound joy in these things.

But again the boy grew, and though they remained his friends a distance began to grow between them. They had a constant fascination for his changes. When he saw them they would eagerly examine his face and his hands, noting every new hair that had emerged. He hated it, for he wanted to be one of them and not apart.

So the boy went to his mother, and he asked her why he was different. Why he continued to grow and to change when no one else did.

Why, she could not say, but slowly, haltingly, for it was difficult to remember, she told him of how the world used to be. That once the sun had not stayed still but moved across the sky. That from where it stood now it would fall beneath the ground, plunging the whole world into darkness, only to rise up again on the other side of the horizon bathing the sky in brilliant gold and from there it would rise and rise until it stood at the top of the sky which would turn into a brilliant blue deeper than any lake in the land until again it would fall starting the whole thing over again. She told him that everyone used to be like him, starting little and growing through all the stages of life that he had seen among the people throughout the land.

And then what would happen to them, he asked, what would become of these people who never stopped changing after they had gone through these stages?

At this she looked away from him, not wanting to recall the answer, not until he pleaded with her that he must know.

They would die, she said at last, and she explained to him what it was to die. That with things that change there would always come time when they would cease to change, for they would cease to be at all. Then, seeing that still he did not understand, for how could he, she told him that she would show him. That she would take him to the dying man.

Together they walked through the land to its very outskirts, and there at the foot of the hill that marked the edge of the territory there was a house barely larger than a room, and inside that house there was a man on a bed and beside the bed a chair. The boy sat on the chair and watched the man. He was old, older than anyone the boy had ever seen, and he was moving his head, slowly but constantly, from left to right, as if searching for something, looking everywhere, though the boy could tell that he could scarcely see what he looked at, indeed seemed not even to notice that the two of them had entered the room and that he was no longer alone. And all the time he was muttering, muttering whispered words under his breath. The boy leaned over to listen closer. Most still he could not hear, but one thing he could hear clearly. The train, the train, the man was saying over and over, the train.

He is dying? The boy asked his mother.

Yes, she said. If the sun still moved he would be dead before it set.

And then he would no longer exist? Would disappear?

His body would still be here. But he would be no different from the bed on which he lays, or the chair on which you sit.

Where would the rest of him be? The boy asked. The part that makes him move?

It would be gone.

The boy sat and watched the man. And this will happen to me? He asked, turning to his mother.

It happens to everything that changes, she said.

Before he could respond, the dying man grabbed the boys arm. Turning to him the boy found the old man staring at him, alarm on his face. My bags, the dying man said, they’re all packed. My bags are all packed but the train won’t move. Then the alarm drained from the dying man’s face, and the focus left his eyes. Relaxing back into his bed he began once again to his eternal search, from left to right across the room he could not see.

The boy and his mother left the dying man’s house. She turned to walk back home, but he did not follow. What is it? She asked him.

I have to leave this place, the boy said.

You cannot.

I must, he said, taking her hands.

No, she said, you can’t.

I love you mother. I will remember you forever. He turned away from her and walked toward the hill that lay at the end of the land.

No, she cried after him, you won't. But I will.

He walked and walked. Longer than he’d ever done anything he walked. But when he turned he saw his mother still standing there, waiting for him besides the dying man’s house, so close it was like he’d never taken more than a few steps.

He turned back to the hill and started walking again.

He walked and he walked and he walked. For an eternity he walked and then longer he walked. He walked until he could no longer remember anything but the walking and the need to continue walking.

He walked and he walked until the shoes fell apart around his feet and the clothes rotted off his back and naked he continued to walk. He walked until for the first time he felt pangs of hunger wrack his body but still he walked up the hill he walked until he was over and on the other side he saw before him the glory of the moon.

         Bravo was alive for six months. He is now four years old.

         He awakens in a chamber barely large enough to contain the twenty-foot metal fuselage of his body. He is held inches above the floor by three clamps connecting him to the ceiling. His steel wings lay folded above him. There are no lights in the chamber, but Bravo can see by the infrared that radiates from his own metal shell.

         He knows from experience that the bay doors beneath him will open in minutes. He spends this time running diagnostics. Opening and closing his aerial flaps, dilating his exhaust nozzle, and spinning the fans of the jet engine that runs through his core. It feels like stretching, but despite the familiarity instilled by repetition Bravo has never been able to shake the feeling that something is off during these diagnostics. A sense that there are pieces of himself he is unable to stretch. As the seconds tick by until the doors open this sense of loss gradually gnaws at him.

         Bravo’s controllers do not know his thoughts. They do know that his alertness drops precipitously between awakening and his release. Early in the program there was a brief effort to learn the reason but it was quickly deemed immaterial. Bravo’s focus always returns with his release and the researchers time was needed in areas more critical to the war.

          Beneath Bravo the steel floor opens. The clamps holding him release and he begins to fall. His atmospheric sensors report an airspeed of 749 miles per hour. He feels the data like a rush of wind and all former confusion is forgotten in the pure joy of flight. Carefully unfolding his wings he revels in the gentle push and pull of contesting the wind with his steel limbs.

         Scanning his surroundings he sees above him the bomber from which he was so recently released. It’s little more than a black dot now, already so far from him that it’s close to vanishing into the blue-black of the high altitude sky. Closer, before and behind him, Bravo finds his companions, Alpha and Charlie. This is Bravo’s favorite part of the drop. The closest he gets to his friends. The three of them sharing the safety of the upper atmosphere. Soon the time will come for them to part, each veering off to their own individual target, but for now Bravo is not alone.

         Though they no longer come close enough to see each other’s markings Bravo can distinguish his friends by their movements. Alpha always flattens out at the beginning. Slowing his descent until he hangs in the sky above Bravo and Charlie. Once, Alpha’s target was reassigned mid-mission, but he’d dived too quickly in the drop and had been unable to reach his new target. Ever since he’s overcompensated with this early slowness.

         Charlie always begins a wide, evasive corkscrew as soon as he’s unfolded his wings. At this altitude they lie far above the effective ceiling of any anti-air defense, but Charlie has been intercepted more often than Bravo or Alpha and his bad luck has made him paranoid.

         There was a time when they would spend these moments of safety before the mission began approaching each other. Spiraling about one another in playful circles. Bravo remembers those early missions fondly. Before they all grew so different.

         Alpha and Charlie begin to depart, Alpha rocketing toward the horizon while Charlie banks sharply to the left. For a moment Bravo watches the receding figures of his friends, then he pitches forward and identifies his own target. A dense grouping of concrete buildings sixty-thousand feet below. He fires his engine and accelerates downward.

         At fifty thousand feet he hits the first defense. Near the primary target building is a structure that has begun to glow in the infrared spectrum. A laser battery preparing to fire. Bravo flings himself into an erratic spiral as the space he occupied the previous second is lanced by a brilliant beam of laser light. The beam follows him, chasing him through the open air. For twenty-thousand feet Bravo moves incessantly and unpredictably to stay ahead of the pursuing beam in a well practiced aerial dance.

         At thirty thousand feet Bravo detects via millimeter wave radar the distinctive pattern of incoming flak rounds. Raising aerial flaps Bravo dives straight down, barely avoiding the first storm of steel shrapnel. For the next ten thousand feet Bravo moves furiously, slipping between bursts of artillery fire while still leading the trailing laser.

         A brilliant flash near the horizon tells Bravo that Alpha has been hit. He feels a surge of sympathy, knowing too well the pain that comes upon awakening from a failed mission, but he puts the emotion aside. These defenses shouldn’t have been enough to bring Alpha down. It’s likely there is something new on the way.

         Bravo spots it just before it hits him. The barely perceptible infrared glow of the small missile’s exhaust. A new model invisible to all radar frequencies. Bravo is just able to roll out of its path, his fuselage singed by its passing.

         The missile banks a tight turn and enters a new intercept course. It’s faster than Bravo. It will soon catch up with him if he can’t get rid of it. He fires his thrusters to their limit, burning up much of his remaining fuel, and pulls upward into a vertical loop. Putting himself on a direct collision course with the trailing laser.

         At the top of the loop, only feet away from the incinerating beam, Bravo pitches violently away from the lasers path. The missile blindly following Bravo does not. The beam passes effortlessly through it splitting the missile into two glowing halves.

         Bravo feels a sharp stab of pain. The laser took off a few inches of his left wing, reducing his maneuverability, but it matters little. He’s now within five hundred feet and falling fast. Soon he’s beneath the firing angle of the laser and the artillery with the target lying directly beneath him. He’s won.

         Bravo feels the heady rush of pleasure that’s administered with a successful mission. He relaxes and waits to be awakened once more within a darkened chamber. A command hardwired within his circuitry, set to trigger at one hundred feet to target or upon hull breach, activates. A digital snapshot of his neural network at that instant is transmitted back to his controllers via encrypted satellite connection. This image will then be uploaded into a new shell for the next mission. The Bravo in that new shell will remember everything that’s happened up till the moment that command was triggered.

         But this Bravo is still falling.

         He’s at 90 feet to target. He’s never been at ninety feet to target. A sudden fear consumes him. He begins to panic, frantically trying to think of anything he’s done wrong. Power drains from all other systems to his central processor as he desperately searches his memories for anything that might make sense of this situation. He’s made thousands of drops, but not once does he remember ever passing one hundred feet to target. With the extra power his processing speed increases exponentially, speeding his thoughts, and as his thoughts race faster his perception of time slows. He’s at twenty feet to target and every millisecond has become an eternity.

         He hits the concrete. His metal exterior begins to crumple and his simulated nerves howl with pain. A fraction of a second later the 1.5 kiloton payload inside his core detonates, but his overclocked thoughts outrace the speed of the expanding fireball and as the explosion blooms within him Bravo feels something new. His entire hull is reporting rapidly increasing temperature and this data is translated into a striking, blissful sensation. Bravo feels warm.

            His pain and his fear melt away as the warmth absorbs his entire consciousness. But then he realizes what the strangest thing about this feeling is. It’s familiar. He knows he’s felt this before and in the nanosecond before his circuits boil he tries to recall when that was. His mind is drawn further and further back through his memory until in the kernel of his neural net he finds it. Just before the end Bravo remembers when he ran through grass on legs of muscle and bone. He remembers a hand that would run gently across his fur, and a kind voice telling him “Good boy. Good dog.”

         The secret to salesmanship is simple. You have to be their friend.

         A buyer wants their decision validated. They need to be told it’s the right thing to do, and in no business is this more true than mine.

         Where a lot of salesman go wrong is thinking it’s their job to decide what the customer wants. They try to lead the customer. They try to create a desire where none exists. This is not how you would treat a friend. You treat a friend with trust. Trust that they know what they’re looking for. Because they do. Before they even come into the store, they know. They know something is missing in their lives. They know precisely the shape of the hole in their heart. They know that something somewhere out there, possibly in this very store, will fill that hole. They just don’t know what it looks like.

         This is why you shouldn’t pay too much attention to what they say. You watch their eyes. See what they glance at, what their gaze lingers on. Look for that sudden stop of recognition when their eyes spot what their heart’s been searching for.

         For example, take this man browsing our firearms display. Those other salesman would look at his hasty demeanor. How quickly, how dismissively, he’s looking over the merchandise, and they would tell you that this is a man who doesn’t know what he wants. A perfect candidate to be sweet talked into something more expensive. After all, firearms are our second cheapest option, second only to our selection of hand smithed knives. But, those other salesman have it wrong. I’ve been watching this man for a while now, never a good idea to approach too quickly, and I can tell you that he’s been in the firearms section for some time. He looks disappointed, anxious even, but he hasn’t left. This tells me that somewhere in that section is what he wants. He just can’t find it. Now is the time to approach.

         Never open with something like ‘can I help you?’ Never use a line. That’s not how a friend makes his presence known. A friend says hello, so that’s what I say.

         He looks surprised. Most of our customers don’t expect there to be a salesman. It’s one of the advantages to this line of work. When a customer expects a salesman they come in already on the defensive, already prepared to dismiss offers of help. When they don’t expect a salesman they don’t think to treat you like one and, with a little help, they can come to see you as the friend you are.

         Now that you’ve said hello you’ll want to start the conversation about the merchandise, but don’t ask the customer if he likes something. That question makes them feel rushed. Which makes them feel defensive, which makes them want to leave. Instead, just comment on what they’re looking at. Make an observation. To this man in the firearms section I say, “those triple barrel models are surprisingly light.”

         His answer is quick. “They seem silly,” he says, “I mean, three barrels? Why not just one big one?”

         His voice bristles with impatience. This, even more than his words, tells me what he’s looking for. Certainty and speed is what this man is after. That’s good news. These are the traits of a customer who won’t be leaving empty handed. The customers who want something romantic, our plane jump program for example, they’re the ones who duck out before you can close a sale. As soon as you see that wistful look in their eye, the one that says ‘maybe tomorrow,’ you know you’ll never get them to the register. This man does not have that look. He has the look of a man who’s already seen too many tomorrows.

         The next step is tricky. With the next step you have to establish yourself as the expert. You have to give yourself the power in the newly minted relationship. It can be hard to do this and still have them look at you as a friend. Back when I sold luxury jets it was the hardest part of the sale. It’s easier here. Most of our customers have pretty low expectations of their friends.

         “What they’re trying to avoid with that,” I say to him, “is penetration. For one bullet to do the work of three it would need a lot more force behind it. Could pass through a wall and, say, hurt a neighbour.”

         “Well,” he responds, “it still looks silly.”

         “Yes, you are not alone in that feeling. Some of our customers like the elaborateness of the design. I do not. I believe it gives them an overwrought feel. The decorative etching on the barrels, in particular, I feel is a bit much. I get the impression you are looking for something more direct. Let’s see how you like the feel of our scattergun.” I say and bring him the SR-444.

         Its design is simple, its execution beautiful. A short tube of jet black steel. The oversized hammering pin at the bottom would look comical if it hadn’t been crafted with such elegance. The inside contains a single shell of small, high density shot. The only mark along the length is the small firing switch. It’s less than three feet in length but weighs nearly twenty pounds. It’s by design. The heft inspires confidence.

         His eyes widen, letting me know I’m on the right track, but they quickly soften into reluctance. “It would do the job, that’s for sure. I doubt it would leave much of a head.”

         So, this is a man not entirely divorced from the world. He still cares about appearances. Most likely there is someone, possibly even someones, that he still cares for.

        Before he can raise more objections to the scattergun I put it back on the shelf. “No,” I say to him, “I think we can find something more right for you. The scattergun is direct, but also crude. For you I see something more elegant. I think I have just the thing.”

        I remove the Rx-570 from its glass cabinet and hand it to him. An aluminum tube, about the size of a flute, with a small glass bulb on one end.

         “What is it?” He asks.

         “A laser.” I pause to let that sink in before continuing, “The bulb goes in your mouth, you hit this button, and in less than a millisecond the beam sweeps through all the key areas of the the brain. The beam is no thicker than a fingernail, with a head of hair like yours there won’t be a single visible exit wound. And there’s no risk of hurting someone else. By the time the beam exits the skull it couldn’t go through drywall. The most it could do is singe the paint.”

        His eyebrows arch in admiration. I’ve almost got him, but I’m not quite there. You can always tell when you’re really done. You’ll see their whole face relax and they don’t express surprise, or amazement, or even pleasure, but rather recognition. Relief. They’ve found it at last.

        So the question is, what can I tell him about the laser to make him see that it’s what he’s been missing? There are several features I could mention, but I decide to take a gamble.

         “Now the interesting thing about this piece,” I say to him, “is the custom path option. By default the beam moves in a sort of spiral, but, if you so choose, you can override that pattern and set it to something more personal. The bottom of the device here has a camera. Just take a picture of any drawing or text that’s been written down on a plain white sheet of paper and the beam will trace out that image exactly. Selecting this option also strengthens the beam. The result is that whatever text you scanned into the device will be precisely burned into the wall behind you, so long as you have a wall behind you. Perfectly legibly, I assure you.”

        I have him. He’s looking at the laser like a long lost pet. It was a risk. Most customers find that feature disquieting or even downright ghastly. The only ones who love it are the ones who have someone they want to punish along with themselves. That’s why he objected to the scattergun. Such total self destruction while this other person stays whole would have felt like admitting defeat. This, on the other hand, turns his last act into a last attack. His demise made the medium for one final condemnation.

        At least, that is what he believes, and as I swipe his card I mold my expression into a conspiratorial grin that reflects his conviction. In this last stage of the sale you find out exactly what type of friend you are to the customer. For this man I am his brother in arms in the last campaign of a protracted and bloody war.

         After a customer has made their purchase I always shake their hand and give them a simple, softly spoken ‘Goodbye.’ The tone of the goodbye is crucial. Normally I try to give this goodbye not an impression of sympathy but rather one of understanding. A goodbye that tells the customer that I know their story has been a sad one and they’ve picked the right way to end it. But that’s not the goodbye this customer wants, so it’s not the one he gets.  When I give him his goodbye, along with his final handshake, it is with a tone of admiration. The goodbye one gives a soldier headed into battle.

        Of course, he will not win his silly, and almost assuredly one sided, war. I doubt he will inspire the guilt he so obviously aims to inflict. No, I suspect whoever it was that drove him to this store will look upon his final act with astonishment and pity. Astonishment over the dramatic nature of his reaction and pity at his fragility. They will not mourn their actions toward him. But, in his mind he leaves my shop the victor and I would never dream of telling him otherwise. The truth would cause him considerable pain and while he shops here I am his friend. And I would never hurt a friend.

The great shock of Blue Velvet doesn't lie in any of it's notorious violence and sex, but rather in its earnestness.

From the very first shots of the movie there seems like there could be no doubt this movie will be a satire. How else could one interpret this montage of sickeningly sweet suburban images, ending in the zoom into the dark, writhing world of insects that lies underneath the perfect suburban lawns. So perfectly satirical do these images seem that even the great Roger Ebert couldn't help but conclude that this was the intended effect of the film, and for these he gave it one star believing that the films scenes of raw emotion were cheapened by being in service of little more than mocking suburbia. But it seems to me that Ebert missed the parting message of the film. It's not a mockery at all, rather it's saying that the heart of the small town dream, a life spent in peace and love, is something beautiful. How else can we interpret the denouement of the film where the protagonists watch from their comfortable home a robin, used in the film as a symbol for love, eating the bugs that crawled through the opening sequence? 

There is a wrinkle in that final image though, coming in the form of the old woman (Grandmother? Her role, like many in the film, is left vague) who expresses revulsion that the a bird so lovely could eat something as gross as a bug. Here lies the puzzle at the heart of the film, the relationship between good and evil, between love and hate. Because while Lynch is not actually satirizing small town life, he is saying that evil will still be there, as it will always be everywhere because it is part of ourselves. When Frank recites his menacing, spoken word rendition of Roy Orbison's In Dreams it's not just a showcase of Dennis Hoppers fantastic powers of intimidation, it's also the character acting as a voice for evil itself, telling us that it will always be with us in our unconscious. One is reminded of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, when the protagonist finally escapes from that other incarnation of evil, the judge, only to find that in his dreams "The judge did visit. Who would come other?"

But goodness, true goodness as opposed to the brittle kind seemingly embodied by the grandmother, comes in confronting the darkness in the world and in ourselves and still finding the power to overcome it. This is the victory earned by Kyle Maclachlan's character, symbolized in the robin eating the bug.

I had heard The Periodic Table described as a holocaust memoir couched in the viewpoint of the periodic table. Fitting images are not hard to imagine: the gold of rings and teeth, the carbon of human smoke. But, Primo Levi had, it turns out, already devoted two books to his time inside Auschwitz. Here he presents something more general and more universal. This book encompasses the majority of Levi's life, before and after the war, most of it spent in science. His time in Auschwitz is here given only a single chapter. That of Cerium, telling the story of some cerium rods, a metal which emits sparks when struck, that Levi stole from the chemistry lab he was forced to work at while interned at the camp. He shaped the rods at night in his bunk, a process that risked death through fire or detection, then sold them as flints for black market lighters. The profits kept him feed through the final months in the camps.

Each of the books other twenty chapters similarly revolve around a single element and a time in the authors life connected to that element. Either literally, as that of cerium or when he was employed extracting nickel from the waste rock of an asbestos mine, or symbolically, like when he uses Argon to describe the Jewish community he grew up in, comparing the noble gasses unreactive nature, it exists everywhere as part of air but never binds with any part of the world, to the communities insular nature.

Many of these chapters take a surprisingly deep look into the true complexities of working with these elements. The difficulty in separating nickel or the surprisingly costly task of acquiring chicken shit in the hopes of extracting nitrogen. These real life science stories intertwine with his more politically oriented autobiographical reminiscences, and it may seem like a strange combination: in depth examinations of chemistry problems wedded to ruminations on growing up under the looming specter of fascism, the formative year spent trapped in its nightmarish culmination, and attempting to reconstruct a life afterward. But, for Levi, these things are not separate. They are intimately connected, both inside his own life and philosophically. Science, Levi tells us, is a natural antidote to fascism. By its nature, that of eternally seeking truth, choosing the hard, ego crushing path of acquiescing to material reality instead of giving in to idealistic fantasy, science will always offer a silent rebuttal to the empty rhetoric of fascism.

More specifically the novel Over My Dead Body, by Rex Stout, which is the seventh Nero Wolfe mystery but my first.

Supposedly Nero Wolfe was once ranked amongst the most popular fictional detectives. Now his star has faded to the point where I cannot even recall how I managed to hear about him. An interesting character, he possesses an arsenal of quirks that seem designed to set him apart from that perpetual giant of detective fiction, Sherlock Holmes. He is enormously fat. He never leaves his New York Brownstone residence where he maintains a rigorous, inflexible schedule consisting mainly of protracted meals prepared by his live in chef and hours dedicated to tending the orchids grown on the top floor. But while most of us if inflicted with such a laundry list of eccentricities would be forced to live off disability, Nero is saved from that by spending his off hours unraveling New York's most baffling crimes, all without ever leaving the house. Instead he sends out his agents, notably our narrator Archie Goodwin, to gather evidence, witnesses, and suspects and bring back to him for further analysis. At last, after much thought and more gardening, he inevitably and climatically brings all interested parties into his office where he unveils the true culprit and motive as revealed by his supposedly gigantic intellect. 

It's a great formula, but you'll notice the use of the word supposedly in that last sentence. For while Rex Stout clearly wants us to believe Nero's mind to be at the same level as his Baker Street predecessor, none of his deductions ever manage to truly impress, and sadly one cannot make up for talent with defects in character. Though that hasn't stopped many from trying. And so I was ready to close the book on Nero Wolfe, content to let Over My Dead Body be my first and only foray into his universe. But, as the days have gone by I find myself thinking more and more about that cozy, expansive Brownstone house and its quirky inhabitants. At last I've realized this must have been the true reason for Wolfe's appeal. That even if the mysteries solved in that house are of subpar quality, the setting they are solved in is sublimely charming. It was a delightful place to let ones mind rest for an evening or two. Perhaps one I may find myself visiting again from time to time.

The Spoiler Free Version:

Go watch True Detective.

The Spoiler Full Version:

Everything about this show is top notch, from the music to the cinematography to the acting, but I'm going to talk about the writing. Even with that narrow focus there is so much to talk about, but let's begin with the true heart of the show: Rust and Marty. These two are the greatest incarnation of the Holmes and Watson archetype in a very, very long time. I say Holmes and Watson, but of course in creating them Doyle pulled from Poe's Dupin and Narrator. And if we go back further than that, much further, we can more properly call it the Gilgamesh and Enkidu archetype. In that story, the oldest of all stories, we are given the most transparent view of the essence of that relationship. Enkidu, or Watson or Marty, is of the natural world. He is simple, direct, and lustful, enamored of the simple pleasures of life. He serves to balance Gilgamesh and connect him to the rest of the world. Gilgamesh without Enkidu is selfish and cruel, the embodiment of the Chinese proverb "A great man is a public misfortune." But, with Enkidu at his side Gilgamesh is able to see the folly of his ways and work for the betterment of society. He becomes a great man on the side of the common man. He becomes a hero, and together the two are able to defeat the true monsters of the world. 

In many ways Enkidu, or Marty or Watson, is the real hero of these stories. The one who doesn't need a friend to keep their ego in check. The one naturally on the side of the people. But, Enkidu alone is not a story, for without Gilgamesh he is complacent. So much a part of the world that he doesn't try to change it. We need Gilgamesh, the outsider who struggles for what he is outside of, to have the story. Which brings us to Rust. Rust who positions himself as the ultimate outsider to normal society by maintaining that life is a mistake. That people should "Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal" as he says, seemingly pulling from Zapffe's Last Messiah.

I haven't looked into it yet, but I have no doubt Rust, or at least his monologues, has found himself a devoted fanbase of the same sort who celebrate Fight Club as a ringing endorsement of violent revolution and anarchy rather than the critique of hero worship and obedience that it is. While his monologues are fascinating, to celebrate them misses the true heart of the character. Because despite all his monologues Rust continues to fight for the lives he claims are meaningless. He devotes himself to stopping mothers who smother their children and others who take his purported philosophy to its farthest extreme. Why does he do this? He himself is not able to explain it for most of the series. It's only after he truly confronts the extreme of his philosophy, the man who calls him "Little Priest" and recognizes, somehow, a fellow acolyte of death. Only after he confronts this man and the swirling vortex of nothingness at the heart of this philosophy, only after he undergoes his near death experience, his crucifixion, his eighth-circuit awakening, the apotheosis of his twenty year long dark night of the soul is he able to see the truth. That despite the overwhelming presence of darkness in this world, despite the pain all us sentient meat are subjected to in a world we didn't agree to be born into, the light that makes it worthwhile is still there, and as long as we continue to scratch away at the dark it is winning.
This is why the bulk of True Detective is so overwhelmingly grim. Why it never flinches away from plunging us into the darkest aspects of human nature. It was not for the sake of shock value as many other shows that claim to be 'dark' for the sake of ratings. It's because it has to show us that night so dark it seems total, it has to show us the baby in the microwave, to bring us to the same place as Rust and understand him, in order that we may be shown that darkness is not all there is. That there is light, and by understanding the darkness, understanding the worst in humanity, we are better equipped to fight for it.

That's some damn good writing.

Of course, it's not a perfect show. I doubt such a thing can even exist, and there are plenty of nits I feel the compulsion to pick. The penultimate episode, After You've Gone, was a bit of a drag all around. While hearing Carcossa rants from psychos and tweakers and LSD inspired diary entries is chilling, in After You've Gone we get to hear the same babble from a nice old lady who, though later accused of having dementia, is never shown to us as being anything but mentally sound. The results make Carcossa sound like the weird fiction it's pulled from rather than foreboding presence it is for the rest of the series, and gave the series it's only moment of bathos. Finally, in the last episode, while Rust was thematically heading for a crucifixion from the moment he brings up his habit of 'contemplating the moment in the garden,' I'm not sure it had to be quite so on the nose as being stabbed in the side, descending into a three day, near death coma, and coming out the other side with hair more messianic than ever. 

Though, perhaps Rust's near death journey has a closer parallel in Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree and pierced his side so that he might go through near death and gain wisdom. Further echoed by Rust's left eye being wounded to the point of appearing lost when he first wakes in the hospital, mirroring Odin's other trial of giving up an eye for yet more wisdom. Of course, for this argument one would have to ignore the preponderance of Christian imagery in the show and its total lack of Norse symbolism. So why do I bring it up? Because maybe the reason these comparisons can be made so easily is what Rust tells us at the end. It's just one story. The story of light versus darkness. The light of the love extolled by Christ, of the wisdom prized by Odin, of the justice of a society that punishes those who hurt the weak, versus the darkness of violence, of cruelty, of ignorance and blind obedience, the 'chain of command' that the sheriff falls back on to avoid the guilt of allowing children to be taken by the dark. The darkness that comes when people give themselves wholly to the direction of another human being, believing them to be perfect, placing them above suspicion. Because no one is perfect. We all have our dark sides and the only way they can be truly kept in check is for all of us to be equal.

That brings us to True Detectives stance on religion. Something to note is that this show is so well crafted that even the most fundamentalist, hard line Christians could, in theory, enjoy it as a tale of devil worshipers brought to justice. When really the deeper message of the story is that Christianity, at least that of the Tuttle brand with its dogma of blind obedience and faith, is not so far removed from the most ancient, predatory forms of belief. That, in Rust's words, they all amount to "one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, 'He said for you to give me your fucking share.'" It doesn't matter whether it's done in the name of the Sun, or God, or the Yellow King, that kind of system will always be a doorway for the most evil among us to gain power over the rest. 

However, one shouldn't mistake this withering critique of organized religion or Rust's frequent monologues as a condemnation of religion entire. Indeed, one of the most surprising, sympathetic, perhaps overlooked characters the show gives us is the revivalist minister Joel Theriot. When first encountered he seems suspicious if not outright sinister, it's only later that we learn his whole story. That he left Tuttle's organization after his attempts to reveal pedophilia among its leaders ended with being framed for embezzlement, that over the years he's given up on preaching because he's found that nearness to God can only be found in silence. In fact, if Rust hadn't been so busy criticizing his congregation he may have recognized much of the ministers sermon (the text of which was graciously made the top comment of that video). The core of this sermon, the ideas Theriot is wrestling, how we are both simultaneously a part of nature and apart from nature, that we are prisoners of our senses and corporeality, are the exact same ideas that Rust wrestles with for the whole of the show. And the answer Theriot tries to tell him, if only Rust had had ears to hear, is the same Rust finds in the end. Theriot may call it God while Rust calls it the universe, but the essence is realizing our oneness with it and with each other. 

I recently took the dive back into the world of comic books. Among others I caught up on the always fun Atomic Robo and the beautifully weird Prophet. I also, for the first time, read some of Chris Claremont's legendary run on X-Men. Claremont, if you don't know, is the one credited with turning the X-Men into sales juggernaut it was in the 80's and early 90's. How did he do this? Simple, he turned it into a soap opera. He took what was a small, ragtag group of superpowered teens and turned it into a sprawling family drama full of strained relationships and shocking hereditary revelations. To this day there is probably no family more complicated, more, well, soap opera-y than the Summers family. Under Claremont the X-Men leader Cyclops, real name Scott Summers, went from a lonely orphan to the center of a family drama encompassing long lost siblings, an absent father turned space pirate, time displaced future children, a wife who suffers from chronic case of dying, and clones of all of the above. And the comic buying audience of 1983 loved it. But why? Why did an audience largely made up of teen boys fall in love with this drama? Because truthfully young boys love melodrama just as much as young girls. They're dealing with some big, unfamiliar emotions and big, sweeping emotion is what they want from their fiction. They just want to see it from a guys perspective. Especially if that guy shoots lasers out of his eyes.
So are the stories good? Well, as literature, of course not. It's maudlin and mawkish and from that stand point hard to take seriously. But, I'm a proponent of judging works based on what they're attempting to do. How well a work meets its goals. X-Men is not trying to be Tolstoy. X-Men is trying to be a place of respite for (to quote Tom Haverford) teens, tweens, and everything-in-betweens. A place for them to see characters dealing with the kind of emotions they themselves are having trouble with, but magnified a thousand fold. And, most importantly, to see these characters overcome those problems. X-Men by it's nature has an advantage in this regard. Its premise, a group of young people hated and feared for their uniqueness, is especially appealing to teenagers, but Claremont tapped the potential of that premise like no one before, or perhaps since. So, with the proper expectations, these stories are fantastically good, and, if you let them, still engrossing as an adult. After all, our 12 year old selves are still inside us somewhere. We contain all our previous versions. And if you don't believe that, try reading The Dark Phoenix Saga and see if you don't feel some younger aspect of yourself stir at the larger than life battles being waged, both physical and emotional.

After that I dipped further into the history of comics with the first two years of Spider-Man, courtesy of Marvel's Epic Collection imprint. If 80's X-Men is a gateway to your inner 13 year old, Stan Lee's Spider-Man is the perfect gateway to your inner 8 year old. Here we have the barest rudiments of plot and character, these aspects being wholly subservient to delivering the goods: Exciting action. But, of course, action grows stale without some character to give it stakes and it's here that Stan Lee's real genius shows. The characters are invested with just enough individuality, just enough pathos, to keep the readers interest while taking up as little time as possible. Lee's Peter Parker (or Peter Palmer as he is called for the entirety of issue 3) is not complex. He is, however, far from empty. He worries about his Aunt, he is pestered by the taunts of classmate Flash Thompson, he crushes on Betty Brandt, he hopes to be a scientist. In short he has enough characteristics to feel real, but the characteristics are kept at a perfectly calibrated simplicity to be understandable and relatable to kids. These early Marvel stories are masterpieces of minimalism.

Going back even further I next read the first ever deconstruction of the superhero story: Don Quixote Part One. It's almost a cliche at this point to talk about how superheroes are a modern mythology, but often left out is just how much mythology is ancient superheroes. Origin stories that become increasingly intricate as character traits added later have to be retconned in, logistically improbable team ups, hero vs hero fights fueled by misunderstandings, all these are staples that we tend to think of as unique to the weird world of superheroes are staples of mythology from the Greek heroes of Hercules and Theseus to the superhuman knights of Roland and Orlando. And, as Don Quixote shows us, the larger cultural reaction to these stories has also been consistent across the ages. Near the end of Part One a character launches into a speech against the dominance of simplistic, artistically bankrupt chivalrous knight plays that have edged out more nuanced dramas out of the market and fatally lowered the quality of plays in the world. With a few word changes it would be identical to the criticism frequently launched against Hollywood and its current superhero obsession. The lesson here is that simple, fun entertainment has always been the biggest draw in media. It has never meant the end of culture that some critics always herald it to be.
On the opposite side, that of the fandom, Don Quixote again shows that people never change. Almost everyone Quixote bumps into on his adventures proves to have at least a cursory knowledge of the popular knights and all take great fun in discussing them. Discussions that have a tendency to drift toward deciding which knight is the best, usually meaning which would win in a fight. Everyone shows a combination of amazement and horror at Don Quixotes encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of knights. Their origins, their exploits, their villains, their crossovers, every bit of minutia he could glean from his personal library of knightly tales. A knowledge which he never fails to use in browbeating others who dare to question his opinions on the knights.
Some have said that Don Quixote was the first modern novel as it focused on reality rather than fantasy, but it has a far greater honor. Being the worlds first depiction of that eternal character: the Comic Book Guy.

Haven't read all that many pages this month. Still pecking away at the three tomes I've started, Don Quixote, Plutarch's Lives, and The Bible, but most of my time this month has been taken with trying to earn some Microsoft Certifications. Well, that and I discovered Marvel Heroes, which is like Diablo, but with Spider-Man. Naturally, a lot of my time disappeared. However, I did read a number of very short works, starting with two classics of youthful fantasy, Ursula K Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea and CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.

Reading the two together makes a good case study in the two ways to go about world building. Namely, the right way and the wrong way. Le Guin is a grand master of world building. The world of Earthsea is patiently, enthrallingly constructed. Full of cultures and peoples, histories and mysteries. Her story exists fully inside the world she has constructed. Conversely, the world of Malacandra presented by Lewis is constructed the wrong way round. It is a world that exists solely for the sake of the story he wants to tell. The peoples and cultures are thin, transparently constructed things made to allow Lewis the chance to rattle off his social critique. Which is not to say Out of the Silent Planet is bad. The adventure is not entirely spoiled by Lewis's cloying moral lessons and his writing is frequently fantastic, particularly the segments describing intersolar space not as a cold, dead place but rather filled with light and heat. A beautiful synthesis of language and actual science. But, unfortunately, while space might not be his world comes across as rather cold and lifeless, particularly when compared against Le Guin's living, breathing worlds.

In addition to those two I started on some classics. This month, drunk off my first paycheck, I purchased the complete Penguin Little Black series. A set of 80, tiny books released by Penguin in celebration of their 80th Anniversary.  Comprised of poetry, short stories, and selections from larger works, each Little Black books is only about 60 pages. So as a fun, long term project I decided to read the whole set in chronological order. Since no Mesopotamian or Egyptian texts were included that means starting with the Greeks, and I've so far read the selections of Homer, Aesop, and Sappho. The Homer collected here is a couple short selections from The Odyssey, and Odysseus's wild antics are as entertaining as ever. Included here is the time he got a guy drunk, told him his name was Nobody, then stabbed him in the eye. Those wacky Greek sailors.
The short little parables of Aesop are surprisingly depressing. The ancient world was far less forgiving than ours. Many revolve around people having natural characteristics that cannot be changed. According to Aesop wicked people are born wicked and cannot be changed, and great peoples are simply born great and we should not waste time trying to join them. It's a perspective at odds with our cultures devotion to the ideals of redemption and personal growth. But, sometimes I worry that in some ways the ancients were closer to the truth than ourselves. Perhaps redemption and growth are comforting lies and we're more prisoners of our character than we like to believe. Maybe, but I think not.
Finally, Sappho. You may know her as the lady who gave lesbians their name after her lady-on-lady poetry so shocked the Victorians who rediscovered it. Strangely they didn't give the orientation her name, but rather that of her home island of Lesbos, although Sapphic is still an adjective for what you'd expect. In a more sensible world the term probably would have gone to bisexuality since at least a couple of her poems are about hot dudes, but I guess the Victorians really only focused on the bits that made them drop their monocles.

As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. Great book. What really stuck out to me was the more ruminating, philosophical segments. Faulkner tackles some big questions. The nature of identity, the existence of a reality outside our perception, the tenuous connection between the present and the past. But, what makes it remarkable is that he does so entirely through the mindset and limited vocabulary of his characters. It's incredible to see such heady concepts wrapped in such simple language. Segments like this one, where Darl contemplates the imminent death of his mother Addie:

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."

The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant's little tour through the nine most important thinkers in the philosophic tradition, at least according to Durant. I really like this book. Highly recommended. The only caveat is that one does have to keep in mind that it was written in the 1920's and there is occasional bit of sexism or Eurocentrism. But, if one simply ignores those, the vast majority is fantastic. For each of the nine philosophers Durant gives a brief biography, about two chapters explaining their key theories, then gives a concluding summary and criticism. To summarize his summaries, the nine are:
Plato: Durant spends most of his time on The Republic, Plato's effort to imagine a perfect society. There are many objections and holes that can be found with the society Plato proposes, Durant zeroes in with accuracy on the fact that it has no room for change, but in essence it is the dream that society would run by its wisest members. Philosophers would spend millennia repeating that wish in different words.
Aristotle: The eternal moderate, Aristotle's pragmatic solution to Plato's eternal questioning of ethics is the simple golden mean. Considering ethics now solved, Aristotle mostly focused on the natural world, and for that we owe him thanks. He brought philosophical attention away from lofty ideals and toward actually trying to make sense of the universe. Unfortunately, he never overcame his aristocratic aversion to actual work and so while he was a great observer and categorizer he never bothered to test any of his theories. Coupled with centuries of dogmatic devotion to his erroneous conclusions this leaves him with a legacy that is, at best, a mixed blessing.
Francis Bacon: The true founder of modern science as the first to truly call for rigorous testing and questioning of beliefs before reaching any conclusions. Perhaps best summed up with his own words, "if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties."
Spinoza: A slippery one to summarize. Durant has trouble with it and so I, going off only his summary, have very little to offer. But, what I understand to be the basic gist of his philosophy, or perhaps just the starting point to it, is that universe and God are one and the same, and that good and evil are just human prejudices arising from a lack of total understanding.
Voltaire: The great satirist and tireless destroyer of superstition. More of a destroyer of other, tyrannical philosophies than a creator of new ones. The only philosophy he truly advanced was one of basic freedom and dignity. Though, as always, anyone advancing such a radical agenda as that has an uphill battle.
Kant: The master of obfuscation, Kant's philosophy is famously buried under his convoluted grammar and invented jargon. Durant thankfully unearths it to reveal a clever response to David Hume's idea that consciousness is little more than a bundle of sensations pressed upon it by the outside world. Kant's main point is that the mind is not a tabula rasa written on by the world, but is an active agent fitting these sensations into categories. As for where these categories come from, Kant argued that they are innate, permanent and eternal features of the mind. Modern thought would tell us that these categories are built by experience from infancy onward, both ours personally and the species as a whole.
Schopenhauer: The world is will. This is Schopenhauer's central point. By will Schopenhauer means the mass of drives and desires that lies underneath conscious thought. That is his big idea and lasting legacy. That humanity is not after all ruled by thought, thought is only a tool we use to justify and satisfy our unconscious desires. It was a big idea, and an important one, though Schopenhauer runs it into pessimistic extremes. Also, this section is perhaps Durant's largest failing in the book. He spends pages calling Schopenhauer out on his undue pessimism, but moves past his radical misogyny completely without comment.
Spencer: Hugely influential in his time but almost instantly forgotten, Spencer's great work was to frame all of existence into a generalized evolutionary model. The idea that all things work upward from nebulous beginnings to complexity and eventual dissolution. The planet forms, life begins, intelligence develops, society emerges, then, eventually, all these things dissolve only to someday to be reconstituted into new and perhaps greater complexity. Remarkably, Spencer came up with the basis of this theory before Darwin, built on a Lamarkian basis, and is the true creator of the phrase "survival of the fittest." Tragically his very compelling theory was used by others as the basis for the crushing ideology of Social Darwinism.
Nietzsche: Advocated the necessity of struggle and pain as the key to improvement and ennoblement and called for an increase of these things in society. While enthralling, thanks largely to Nietzsche's considerable literary talent, ultimately the world has more than enough struggling and pain without anyone's advocacy for their necessity. Only self hating members of the privileged few, like Nietzsche, could think otherwise.

The Tao of Architecture by Amos Ih Tiao Chang. Turns out this book was originally titled The Existence of Intangible Content in Archetronic Based Upon the Practicality of Laotzu's Philosophy, and boy does it read like it. Steven Pinker talks about what is dubbed the 'Classical Style' of writing nonfiction. As he puts it the goal is to write as if you are addressing a friend of yours and merely wish to draw their attention to something they may have overlooked. Carl Sagan was a master of this style. This book is about as far from the Classical Style as you can get. This is some dense, obfuscating, pointlessly complex prose I have ever seen. Sentences like "Expression of composite association in architectural space requires denial of dissociable characteristics."
Why did I keep at it even though its scant 70 pages feel like 700? Because buried underneath his writing Chang has some good ideas in here. Like the simple observation that we instinctively turn away from featureless solids, like blank walls, but are drawn to empty fields of view, such as open fields or long corridors. The attraction of void. As he puts it, in one of his most lucid passages, "In emptiness and beyond emptiness, there is unfulfillment of expectation or curiosity to suggest definite direction ... Unreal as emptiness is thought to be, it serves as the reminder of direction."