Mad, bad, and brilliant.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages rated 4.03 by 3930 litizens.

Genre: Non-Fiction. Species: musings.

DNA: Teutonic.

Verdict: Mad, bad, and brilliant.  

Tagline: ‘Nietzsche will teach’ya.’ 

Nietzsche (1844-1900) has two reputations: First, as a harbinger of Naziism with his Übermensch, and this book folds into that.  It is sometime erroneously supposed that he meant by the title that the Übermensch need not be bound by any morality.  As is often the case with popular interpretations, he means the opposite.  That the ordinary moralism of churchmen, editorialist, school teachers who label things ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is superficial, failing to plumb the depth and complexity of the lifeworld.  In reality evil can come from good and good from evil, rather than being opposites these two intersect, interact, and sometimes one nurtures the other: yin and yang.  If we accept and stop with the simple labels of these everyday moralists without question, we will never understand the deeper and disturbing reality.

His second reputation is as an obscurantist.  It is certainly true that he makes demands on readers.  Mainly because he so categorically rejects conventional wisdom, but also because he is not a systematic thinker (like Kant, Hegel, or Marx). He rejects and reviles such an approach. He contradicts himself, is inconsistent, and is incomplete and admits it, because life is like that. 

But, if a reader relaxes and lets him flow there are rewards to be had without subscribing to his weltanschauung

Part of his message is that a lived morality must be self-consciously chosen by the individual, akin to the message in the book of Matthew of the New Testament:  Don’t do things because Christ tells you to do so, do them because they are right.  It is a message as old as Aristotle: do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason (because it is right).  Nietzsche thought only a few people could accept this responsibility and do it.  They who can do so should be, in fact, are the leaders of society.  This kind of selection is only possible in authoritarian, aristocratic societies, so like Tocqueville, he preferred that social structure, in contrast to Matthew who thought everyone could and should do this or Tocqueville who did not assert his preference onto others. Nietzsche has no such restraints.   

(By the by, this same message can be found in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, but Nietzsche reviled Kant so much he would not admit it.  Nietzsche often refers to the Chinaman, and that is his racist contempt for the man from Königsberg. That is, Kant was so determined to maintain the consistency of his elaborate system that it became detached from reality, like the European stereotype of a Chinese emperor.)

There is no doubt that Nietzsche was not a man of our time and the pygmies have made careers out of proving that obvious fact.  For him race, class, gender all had decisive meaning. He justified slavery. Smelled the herd in democracy or socialism. He regarded women as barely human.  He drank deeply of Richard Wagner’s music, imbibing a heady Teutonic mysticism, which he denied while wallowing in it.  Some of this is shaded by contemporary translators who elide, soften, gloss, mute these declamations.  

All that said, still his prose burns bright.  Here are a few illustrative passages with my comments beneath, after the dash. 

Preface. ’all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.’

– it takes time for new ideas to be accepted, but once they are accepted, they wander further all around the world. 

’22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist  from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but ‘Nature’s conformity to law’…exists only owing to your interpretation…. Scientific findings are not matter merely matters of fact, but a human interpretation and invention.

– truth consists of concepts not naturally occurring facts, e.g., an average, the atom, gravity, ….all are concepts.

28. ‘But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his ‘ll Principe’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo,  perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of contrast he ventures to present – long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, most wanton humour.’ 

– Machiavelli’s prose has a cadence, true, but the air of Florence was seldom fine along the sewer the Arno often was. 

42. ‘as far they allow themselves to be understood – for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle – these philosophers of the future’

– did he anticipate the wizard Martin Heidegger who do not want to be understood because that would reveal that there is nothing behind the curtain to reveal. 

44. ‘Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future – as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken?’  

– ditto above.

46.  religion represents a suicide of reason 

– compare to H. L. Mencken on the body count of religions. 

’63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously and even himself – only in relation to his pupils.’ 

– few meet this requirement.  

144. ‘When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is “the barren animal”.’

– sounds like a contemporary US Republican which party will soon ban women from higher education. 

146. ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’

– you become what preoccupies you. 

169. ‘To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.’

– talk can be a way of not communicating. 

206. ‘The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man….’   

– ever more about ever less.

‘the objective man’

‘the lulling poppy of scepticism’

 ‘the conceited ape’

‘a kind of safety police’

214. ‘we firstlings of the twentieth century’

‘good conscience is the respectable pigtail of an idea.

– loved all the above bons mots.

219.  ‘The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow and it is an opportunity for disguised malice.’ 

– the mediocre scholar delights in deprecating great achievers. 

228. virtue has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than anything else.

– ditto 

English happiness [utilitarians]

footsteps to self-knowledge

239. unlearns to fear

– this one reminds me of a passage in Machiavelli.  

252 ‘They are not a philosophical race – the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom Schelling rightly said, “Je méprise [I despise] Locke”; in the struggle against the English mechanical stultification of the world…’ 

253.  ‘There are truths – which are best recognised by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits.’

– intellectuals can’t see the obvious. Instead all too often offer elaborate explanations of the dead obvious. 

260. master-morality; slave-morality

‘According to slave-morality, therefore, the “evil” man arouses fear, according, to master-morality, it is precisely the ‘good’ man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.’

  • what rouses the mediocre scholar is not an evil man but a good one, whose example is an embarrassment to his small mind, so he endeavours to bring the great low.  

273. ‘A man who strives after great things, looks upon everyone whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance – or as a temporary resting-place.’

  • users all.

274. ‘He who does not wish to see the height of a man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground – and thereby betrays himself.’ 

– the valets of the world, pace Hegel. The 3rd reader! 

***

While browsing in the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn I came across this cantankerous old frenemy.  Idly, I picked it up and flipped a few pages and started to read, and kept reading, so I decided to buy.  I once had a copy of it in a collection of his works that I shed when I downsized from the university office, thinking I would not get back to it.  

P.S. Nietzsche did warn us in the Genealogy of Morals about the blond beast of prey that pounces on a population with terrible claws driven by insatiable egoism.  If any of that sounds familiar go the head of the class.  

P.S. The opening quotation is from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), Bruce’s song.  

The Incomparable One

Pitching Man (2009).

Meta-data is a runtime of 55m (not on IMDb). 

Genre: Documentary.

DNA: 108-stitches. (If you know, then you know; and if you don’t, then you don’t.)

Verdict: Incomparable.  

Tagline: If you quit, then the bastards win.

An hour spent in the singular company of Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige from hungry poverty in Mobile Alabama to international celebrity on the strength of a fastball that no one, including Joe DiMaggio, could hit.  He become the Major League’s Baseball’s Rookie of the Year at age 42.  The Jolter was one of many who said Paige was the most difficult pitcher he ever faced, and even a windbag like Dizzy Dean said Paige was from another planet.  

Know a man by his enemies: Taylor Sphinx (the tyrannical owner of the Sporting News) despised Paige. That is one for Satchel. Know a man by his friends.  Bill Veeck was his best friend.  Add another credit for Satchel. Here’s another for him: Teddy ‘Baseball’ Williams used his own induction speech at the Valhalla of Cooperstown to advocate the inclusion of historic black players and he named Satchel Paige as the best pitcher he had ever faced, and he saw a 42-year-old Satch.    

All things considered in long hindsight the most remarkable thing about Paige was that he never complained about the constraints that racism put on him.  He just got on with what he did best – pitching. He was no civil rights campaigner like Jack Robinson. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from that comparison but perhaps a reader does.  

I saw him pitch an inning once in an exhibition game when he must have been sixty, and he struck out the side on nine pitches.  I lined up for his autography later which he kindly provided but that artefact is now lost, perhaps it was kept by a buddy who lined up with me.  

All talk, and more talk.

Friendship’s Death (1987). 

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 18m, rated 6.5 by 754 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Cheapo.

DNA: Jordan.

Verdict: As static and wordy as a Mamet play.

Tagline: I knew it! She’s a machine.

Two people talk in a tatty Thistle hotel room during Black September civil war of 1970 in Amman Jordan while conflict rages outside (boom, crack, wham).  The man is a cynical Scots journalist who, in the best tradition of the profession, makes up reports without leaving his room.  The woman claims to be an ambassador from an alien civilisation whose astro-limo misfired and dropped her in there instead of the USA. A miss is as good as 10,000 miles. Her code name is ‘Friendship.’  No Gort in sight.  

They talk and talk and talk, and talk some more.  The talk is full of learned references without any momentum.  It just goes around in circles.  Off camera each does leave the room.  

But mostly, they talk and talk…zzzzz….

At least she does not lecture the viewer, as is the preferred method of exposition by a considerable number of contemporary film makers, who in an earlier age would have gone to the priesthood to denounce our sins numerous: ecological, climatic, racial, social, technological, inequitable, venal, mortal, and more.

By the way, this alien did not travel light, sporting new clothes in nearly every scene with perfect makeup.  

When Tilda says something like, ’I appear to be a human, but that’s a veneer; inside I am a machine.’ I said: ‘I knew it all along, Tilda, you are a machine!’  

Fun in Prague

State of Emergency (2024) Vyjimecny stav

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 41m, rated 5.4 by 115 cinematizens.

Genre: Satire; Species: dramedy. 

DNA: Czech.

Verdict: [Gasp!]

Tagline: The story must go on…and on.

Czech Radio correspondent from a civil war in the Middle East makes a surprise return to his home in Prague, fearing his wife’s infidelity during his long absence.  She, too, is a journalist at Czech Radio. 

His fevered imagination misinterprets everything and he goes ballistic, confirming his worst fears, but he has to keep up the pretence of reporting on the spot from a state of emergency in Arabia.  Ingenuity and laughs follow, as does his wife’s incredulity, exasperation, (im)patience, and then enthusiasm for the project.  The deception is a circle as the television news plagiarises the radio news which plagiarises the news services and the television which plagiarises both. And repeat.  

Some of the humour is adult, and there is some gratuitous violence at the end, but the result is upbeat.  If you have seen His Girl Friday (1940) you get the idea, and if you haven’t: why not?  

There is side story with a school teacher about disinformation that seemed tacked on and not integrated, and the final shootout started as farce and ends up with cadavers.    

Most of this dramedy takes places in the apartment so there was no Prague travelogue to remind us of our visit there. 

 ***

Speaking of patience, mine was stretched.  This was the finale of the Czech & Slovak film festival at the local Dendy, it began an hour late while we sheep sat and waited. Grumble, grumble.  

Grave matters indeed.

Grave Expectations (2025) by Rob Johnson.

IMDb meta-data is 290 pages, rated 4.31 by 55 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Diverting.  

Tagline:  Ineptitude has a few rewards. Very few.  

Three hapless friends, having tried their luck at bank robbery and failed miserably, end up running a funeral parlour somewhere near Gatwick southwest of London.  They aren’t very good at that either.  

Then Madame Lash threatened to dob them in for their failed bank robbery, unless they help her…rob a bank.  Well, they do have form and it is the same bank.  What follows are wheels-within-wheels as the villains scheme against each other even more than the bank.  

Then there is Alicia, the morgue technician in the basement of the funeral business where she rules the domain of the dead.  I would have liked to read more of her exploits.

I read it pretty much in one sitting during our visit to Bathurst in western NSW.  It is third in a series about this triumvirate.  

‘Let us now praise famous men.’

Amid the idiocy of current news I find respite, even comfort from that phrase for it reminds me of what some people are capable of doing.  The phrase is a passage from the Book of Ecclesiasticus also known as the Wisdom of Solomon. (The Thought Police who react to the use of the noun ‘men’ are advised to take up the matter with the author, Solomon.) 

Today the three men who come to my mind were Dwight Eisenhower and John Steinbeck, and Bob Hope.  I don’t suppose the names mean much to most people these days, and so I will venture are few words of introduction.

Eisenhower was a general on whose order 1.2 million soldiers invaded Normandy France in 1944.  Later he was a two-term president of the United States.  When he retired in 1960 he made a pilgrimage to France. It was not a victory lap.  There were no parades.  He did not go to Paris to receive accolades.  Rather he went to the war cemeteries in Normandy sixteen (16) years after the fact.  The pictures need no annotation.  These men died on his order and he knew it, just as he knew some of them personally.  

John Steinbeck was a writer, mostly novels, but also journalism.  In that same war, at forty plus years old, he followed twenty-year old American solders into battle.  The dispatches are collected under the title Once There was a War for the literate. Bob Hope was an entertainer, a comedian.

Without a doubt the most compelling of many remarkable accounts is his observation of the comedian Bob Hope in an army hospital ward.  Read it and weep.  

We have need for more of their kind today.  These three needed no gold to affirm their worth, neither in their own eyes nor ours.  

Talk of a military parade reminded me of Eisenhower who needed no such parade, and a conversation with a reader at breakfast the other day called John Steinbeck to mind,  When Eisenhower comes to my mind the first thing I remember is his face in the city of the dead in Normandy, while with Steinbeck it is report of Bob Hope among the dying.   Morbid I suppose, yet uplifting, too.  

Waves (2024) Vlny

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2h 11m, rated 8.1 by 1,600 cinematizens.

DNA: Czech & Slovak.

Genre: Docudrama.

Verdict:  Remembered. 

Tagline: 20 August 1968.

Mirroring the macro in the micro, the film covers the last days of the Post War Communist regime, the short-lived Prague Spring, and the Soviet repression.  The microcosm centres on a technician employed by National Radio, who has tenuous custody of his younger brother after the accidental deaths of their parents.  His aim is to keep younger brother out of a state orphanage in the workers’ paradise, which institutions are more like labour camps than schools. 

Trying to protect his younger brother from his own foolishness, older brother gets enmeshed in spy-and-counter-spy. All the individuals are trying to survive in the whirlpool, or even to protect others, but, well, it just isn’t possible. (The only cardboard characters are the thugs, and, as always, there is never a shortage of such ‘willing executioners’ per Christopher Browning.)

To the regime, having a cookbook in French is suspicious, kind of like having a tattoo or writing a school newspaper op-ed.  One hopes hours were spent trying to decode the recipes for proof of treachery. (In East Germany the Stasi did just that.)

The film integrates archival footage very well at several points.  I caught glimpses of many places we visited in Prague a time ago. One of the sites was the Monument to the Victims of Communism, which is regularly defaced by those who lament the passing of that regime.  That vandalism seems to emphasis the point of the memorial.  

During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia had the reputation of being the most tolerant of the Warsaw Pact regimes.  Even so between 1948 and 1968 there were 18 re-parenting wellness camps for tens of thousands of political prisoners who did forced labour, some in uranium mines free from nanny OHSA regulations to be sure. None of the camps were in El Salvador. The following data cover the 20-year period 1948-1968 by this lenient regime against a population of 9-millions.  For political offences: 

205,486 arrested,

170,938 forced into exile,

4,500 deaths in prison,

327 shot while trying to escape, and 

248 executions for political crimes, including a defiant school teacher, a woman.  

See Jana Rehab, Czech Political Prisoners (2012) for many more gruesome details. 

It is worth remembering that this horror story followed on the heels of the Nazi occupation and dismemberment of the country with attendant genocide, slave labour, and forced relocations.  No doubt some thought these to be the good old days, too.

I viewed the film in part in juxtaposition against the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

***

I made the acquaintance of some of these 1968 displaced persons while I was in grad school.  What was curious was that the 1956 Hungarian refugees resident in the vicinity, were hostile to the 1968 Czechs for reasons only they knew.  But the hostility was evident even to this outsider. 

Now and again I try take advantage of the Dendy Cinema multiplex nearby until I review at the screenings.  However this one was part of a Czech & Slovak Film Festival and not the usual Hollywood sound and colour pablum, so off I went.  We are going to see another, lighter entry soon.  

By the way, it was a full house in the largest theatre so the event was a success for the organisers.  Well done.  

A matter of time, or space.

Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008) by K. A. Bedford.


Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 3.58 by 531 litizens. 


Genre: krimi.


DNA: WA aka Sandgroper.  


Verdict: I couldn’t resist the title.


Tagline: ‘Are we there yet?’

‘It’s a job,’ says the technician who needs both the money and the distraction that work brings.  The machines themselves are simple but the regulations from the Department of Time and Space are not.  Then there are the punters who can be unbelievably stupid. Just as they drive cars like the fools they are, so, too, they drive the time machines!  


Quick primer on Time Machines for those who skipped that class in Future History.  They travel in Time, that is why they are called time machines. Doh!  They do not travel in space.  If your time machine is parked next to the car in your garage in Perth, that is where it stays.  You can set it for 1660 or 1912, yes, but when it arrives at that time, it is still at that very same spot. Most time travel is backward (1) where people go back to change things for better (and always fail: Kismet) and (2) tourism to witness events.  There is little forward time travel since there is no tourist draw, and most do not want to find out about themselves in the future.  Yet there are exceptions. 


Technician is having a bad day: Very. His McKinsey manager is tsk tsking about his Key Performance Indicators. His estranged wife wants more money.  The new apprentice is even more hopeless than the last one.  No matter how expensive the beans, the workshop coffee machine produces brown dishwater. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, they do. His latest repair job is….  Well, his latest repair job revealed a corpse in the time machine. Ah, that would explain why it didn’t work. Usually a corpse in a time machine is a bird, rat, or a cat. Not this time. Bad, very. 


Worse, the corpse and machine seems to have come – sit down – from the future.


***


Technician is weighted down with the mandatory tiresome backstory. 


Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity came to mind.


Gave up in confusion, needed a flowchart, run-sheet, and a scorecard. About halfway my confusion became terminal.


Men not man.

Ross Macdonald, The Underground Man (1973).

Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages rated 3.94 by 2419.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: The Best. 

Tagline: It’s hot!

Lew Archer’s humane instincts put him in the middle of a martial dispute when feeding pigeons, while waiting for a bus, he shares his peanuts with a small boy. Soon he is in the crossfire between a loutish father and a battered mother as they quarrel over the boy. Knowing he should walk away, Archer does not.  

Ever the loner himself, Archer wants to help this broken family and so the inner knight errand mounts his faithful dusty blue Ford sedan and sets forth.  Once in, it’s all in for Archer. As he goes to and fro, asking questions against the background of a raging wildfire like a conquering army pounding and destroying all in its path slowly approaching the city. 

While the prose is spare the metaphors are rich (albeit sometimes too rich and forced) as Archer moves through the body politic of SoCal – noir in the sunshine, indeed.  Once broken, families repeat that break through the generations it seems.  The title should be ‘Men’ not ‘Man.’  Much of the action stems from fragile masculine egos.  

The people he questions seldom want to talk about the most important things. The façade of normality is just that, a screen. 

***

Ross Macdonald

I sometimes think Macdonald is THE krimi writer. One critic said he wrote the same story twenty-five times in varying ways. Each time with more depth, insight, or empathy.  It was story about a broken family.  

Sand gropers unite!

K. A. Bedford, Black Light (2015).

Good Reads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.22 by 45 litizens. 

Genre: Thriller: Species: Paranormal.  

DNA:  Black Swan. 

Verdict: A change of pace. 

Tagline:  Elves and demons rove Western Australia!  ‘Get your amulets right here! Three potions for the price of two!’  

A few years after The Great War, a widowed English novelist moves as far away as possible from bad memories to Western Australia, hours south of Perth.  She lives alone, hires servants, writes novels, wears old clothes (at times those of her dead husband), has plenty of money, never attends church, drives cars, does not coif her hair, is reclusive, each and all of these facts shocks the locals. They, however, are divided among themselves over which of her unnatural behaviours is the worst. So far she hasn’t started smoking or playing loud music, but can it be long before she starts this devil worship?  So they may well ask. The vicar reviles her wanton ways! He is small-minded hypocrite.  A touch of realism there.  

(A similar reaction to women of that time on the other side of the world is On the Rocks, discussed elsewhere on this blog.)

Then, unbidden, a favourite aunt from Old Blighty makes the two-week odyssey by air (circa 1926) to warn Novelist of impending doom!  Doom?  Doom.  However, once arrived, Aunt is so exhausted from the sojourn, confused by her fatigue, ill from motion sickness, disoriented in the unfamiliar surroundings that she cannot quite say what impelled (or paid for) her impromptu trek, apart from some strange dreams involving Novelist. These dreams, as she recounts them, are very detailed and accurate about places and objects auntie has never seen.  We have entered Spooktown in the Twilight Zone.     

Late 1930s

Side Bar: spiritualism reached a high in the years after World War I.  The wholesale slaughter of a masculine generation gave impetus to efforts to penetrate the beyond.  While many charlatans and crooks took advantage of that demand, there were also well-meaning people who explored the occult.  One of them is Novelist’s neighbour, who spends most of spare time, when not reading up on magic, building a time machine with correspondence from H. G. Wells. Get the idea?

The plot pot thickens when she receives first a menacing letter, then a threatening one, and finally a blackmail demand.  Since she has only been there a few months, none this makes sense…in this world.

Daunted, she nonetheless fights back with scant assistance and resources, not including the local plod whose only apparent interest is football.  Another touch of realism that. Being other worldly the story does not stick to Ronald Knox’s decalogue for krimis. Ergo, in the last 50+ pages all kinds of new information and characters enter.  It’s just not natural!  

***

A change of pace from my usual reading.  It is well written and thoroughly contextualised with differentiated characters. The detail is rich but not suffocating.  It ends on an open door that suggests a follow-up novel.