Fantastic Metropolis

I read mostly nonfiction, but this year I investigated some novels about the l930s. The one that moved me most deeply was Eugene Jolas’s translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin.

I tracked this down because Rainer Fassbinder once made a film series for German television based on it. I’ve wanted to see that series for years and still haven’t, but this year I read the book. And what a hell of a book. It really ripped me up.

Doblin, according to the cover copy, was an author and a practicing physician in the working-class district called Alexanderplatz. He emigrated to the US in 1933. Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered an early work of modernism, and it certainly has Joycean passages wherein Doblin collages newspaper extracts, stream of consciousness, and authorial digressions. But in its broad outline, it’s a conventional naturalistic narrative about a man’s life shaking apart among the laborers and petty criminals of a big dirty city.

When we meet our protagonist Franz Biberkopf, he’s just been released from Tegel Prison after doing a stretch for accidentally beating his wife to death, (if you can call that sort of thing an accident.) When Franz gets out of prison, as Doblin tells us, “the punishment begins.” The story has just started, and already the irony is thick. Franz is a complacent fool and an entrenched sinner, and above all he’s a dedicated apologist for his faults. He’s all male ego and a yard wide. But whether he likes it or not, Doblin has planted him on a road toward loss, rage, collapse, madness, an epiphany of shame, and a return to daily life as a changed man. Doblin certainly had the stuff.

In the same vein (meaning the novel of character study), I got through two thirds of the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. Read these if you’re curious about the emotional life of working-class Irish Catholic boy growing up in street-car-era Chicago. The sociology and slang and meals and smells and street noise of this milieu interest me partly because my father grew up in depression-era Chicago.

Studs, like Franz, lives an unexamined life and spends most of his waking hours dreaming of great things and bemoaning his bad breaks. He’s overflowing with aspirations, doubts, lust, laziness, and hostility and can’t figure out what to do with any of it. His life never really goes anywhere, and then he dies young. Pretty depressing but fairly typical of life on earth.

Farrell was quite brave about reporting on gritty realities like condoms, race hatred, random violence, unwanted pregnancies, and slow-burning alcoholism. Topics were cropping up in American lit that simply weren’t discussed previously. Not just current events, but personal shit. Authors like Balzac and Zola broke this ground so that guys like Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair could plant it, and guys like Farrell and John Dos Passos could reap a harvest. Now it’s impossible to shock anybody about anything. Television did that, and I hope it’s proud of itself. I wonder where the novel is bound for next.

Speaking of John Dos Passos, I discovered him this year and read four of his books the USA trilogy and Manhattan Transfer. It took me a while to acclimatize to his sideways approach to plotting. He doesn’t make neat little plots that tie up in bundles. He’s going for something more like a Robert Altman film. He’s collaging circa-WWI America novelistically. There are recurring characters, but they don’t always meet each other. Or they meet and nothing much happens as a result. Or they drop out of sight and never bubble to the surface of the stew again. It’s a bit like life, but it’s nothing like Dickens.

One political message comes across loud and clear. T. Woodrow Wilson sold America a bill of goods and lead us by the nose into war. Just like FDR, just like LBJ, et cetera, et cetera. Refreshing to meet an author who’s actually pissed off at Saint Woodrow.

Damn, that was an exciting time for American lit. Novelists used to care about serious issues back then. That was back when the Left was unapologetically socialist. Back before the labor movement joined The Combine. Remember all that? I don’t either. I wasn’t around.

And then I read The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler. (Wanted to research the hard-boiled detective style. Already familiar with Hammett, and couldn’t stomach Spillane.)

Chandler wrote the Philip Marlowe novels mainly in the forties, but the set dressing is pure l930s California. What surprised me about Chandler is how funny Philip can be about the people he encounters. Phil has a great eye for the minutia of the American class system, and his sense of humor runs very deep through these crime stories. (Which is just what Humphrey Bogart caught so well in the 1946 movie of The Big Sleep.)

Detective novels are a time-honored target for pastiche and parody. Still and all, one has to admit that Raymond Chandler made them run on all six cylinders.

I also read five books of contemporary fiction, including three that were… gasp... spec fic. I seem to remember a weird anthology called Leviathan Tree or something like that, but I can’t recall who was in it. “Some, the books made mad,” keeps running through my head for some reason.

In any case I did read some contemporary fiction in 2002. Unfortunately my former teachers at the Academy of Ancient Trilobites have forbidden me to reveal the titles. I seldom understand their motivations, but I always try to follow their suggestions. When I don’t, they get nasty, and if you’ve ever been stung by the ghost of a sentient trilobite…

But never mind all that. Where was I? Oh yes! Nonfiction.

I found lots of great nonfiction to read in 2002. I’ll flip through ten of my favorites for you.

Two Books About The Space Race

Off the Planet, Jerry Linenger. The autobiographical account of an astronaut among cosmonauts on the decaying space station Mir.

Korolev, James Hartford. A mind-blowing account of the Soviet space program, hung on a biography of the mastermind behind it—Sergei Korolev, the father of Sputnik. Four fun facts: A. Jet pilot Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, was informed of his new duties two days before he went into space. B. The first female cosmonaut, equally well trained, had psychotic episodes in orbit. C. The first three-man space flight was performed in a two-man capsule with the ejector seats removed. It was sort of like stuffing a phone booth. D. Each Soviet capsule included a radio-controlled explosive charge, put there partly to discourage cosmonauts from defecting to the West.

Two Books About Nature

The Solar System, Roman Smoluchowski. Mercury is hot. Mars is windy. The rings of Saturn are made of snow, and there are glaciers on the moons of Jupiter. Who knew?

The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey. A popular science book from the sixties. Animal behavior studies are great reading, but why must they always be freighted with anthropological speculations? Let’s face it: Humans are just too complex for the explanations of normal zoology. Culture changes everything.

Three Biographies

The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Michael Billington. The master of oblique dialog is still writing plays. (Long pause.)

A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, Thomas C. Reeves. JFK was a very sick man from a very sick family. His election was a triumph of image over substance. Our first media-manufactured president.

J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story that Gave Birth to Peter Pan, Andrew Birkin. A sad but true story about the Great War and the five adopted sons of a famous British playwright.

Three Books Of Criticism

The Monstrous & the Marvelous, Rikki Ducornet. I like books of literary criticism. They’re a guilty pleasure, stories about stories. This one’s chunky with dense little thought-nuggets. Excellent roughage.

Anime Explosion! Patrick Drazen. Not as thoughtful as Frederik Schodt’s two books on manga, but worth a look for anyone with an abiding interest in Japanese cartoons. Includes a chapter on my favorite apocalyptic television show, “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, Lawrence Weschler. An entertaining report on conceptual museum curator, David Wilson, and his ongoing art work, The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City CA. Also goes into the 19th-century curiosity collections that evolved into the Modern Museum. If you like baroque collisions between the past and the future, and if you enjoy quasi-scholarship, check this out. Or you could go to Culver City and visit the museum.

So those were the highlights of my year’s adventures in reading. Thanks for listening. I haven’t written so many book reports since high school.

Please be advised that we now have less than one decade remaining before The End of the World As We Know It in late 2012. Time itself, as you may have noticed, has been speeding up. It will, however, be slowing down for our final approach to The Singularity. I hope we’re up for the challenge—this intrepid crew of six billion souls. Because we’re all paddling straight toward the cataract.

See you in the funny papers.