Amo, Amas, Amat, and More (1985) by Eugene Ehrlich
Good Reads meta-data is 329 pages, rated 3.80 by 188 litizens.
Genre: Reference.
DNA: Latin.
Verdict: nihil obstat.
Tagline: ab initio.
Reading a history of Latin last week reminded me of this well-thumbed book on the desk reference shelf, and so, in an idle moment, I retrieved it. It is an alphabetical list of Latin tags. It has a detailed index for seekers of the right phrase.
It makes an important distinction, that partly justifies the exercise, between the translation of a Latin idiomatic phrase and its meaning. The example is ab asino lanam, literally ‘wool from an ass.’ Ehrlich renders it equivalent to the English idiom, ‘blood from a stone.’ The meaning is that the impossible cannot be done. That is a salutary reminder that some of those magisterial Latin tags come from the barnyard.
The cover boasts an introduction by William F. Buckley, Jr. What wise and witty things might this über maven offer to those of us who do not have the good fortunate to be him? Hmm, 0 is the answer. It runs to just over a page and is mostly about his favourite subject, himself. What a surprise.
Considering that the book has been in print for 40 years, I expected more raters on Good Reads. The WorldCat lists in 1445 libraries in 13 editions. By contrast Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin is found in 800 libraries.
It starts in the Vatican Library, a place I would like to see, where a woman, having gained the necessary permissions, is consulting…a cookbook. It went down hill from there.
Titillation without substance follows for hundreds of pages. All the women are mysteriously beautiful. The men are handsome and, well, manly. The sex is plentiful. The stereotypes are working overtime. All the many murders are elaborately gruel, gruesome, and detailed. A more descriptive title would have been A Season at the Abattoir.
Leaden prose, place name dropping but no ambience. All the ingredients for well received book on Good Reads: Vacuous and trite. (My, I am feeling grumpy today.) Instead of plot or character we have an enveloping conspiracy of the unnamed and unseen others.
First in a series for those strong of stomach and weak of mind.
David Hewson
***
Written in that fractured thriller style back-and-forth between characters and settings that leaves me cold.
I chose it for opening scene in Vatican Library, but it is just a site for some gaudy, gruesome, and cheap thrills. Might as well have been an abattoir. I tried to read it years ago and stopped, trying again to get my money’s worth out of it, a duty not a pleasure, interest, or diversion
Pel and the Precious Parcel (1997) by Juliet Hebden
Good Reads meta-data is 176 pages, rated 3.33 by 3 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: France; Species: Burgundy.
Verdict: Hooray for Pel.
Tagline: He’s back!
The irascible Inspector Pel who never has a good word to say about or to anyone is on the job, and, as usual, he won’t let go. Sergeant Misset is a lazy incompetent; the weather is damnable and damned; and the witnesses are witless, but Pel keeps on keeping on.
When a group of armed men in hooded black clothing rob the cargo hold of a plane on the airport apron, they take only one package. Which package is that? Why, the one containing perfume samples! Perfume!
As he reached for his 30th Gauloise of the day, Pel could hardly believe his ears. The plot thickens when a technician finds that the listed weight for the parcel on the cargo manifest far exceeded anything such a volume of perfume could weigh. What was in the parcel?
Those in the perfumery and the family that owns this private business are clueless, so they say. But Pel knows a lie when he hears one and presses on, because someone knows something, and he will ferret it out with his usual distempered determination taken out on those around him, that is, all save Madame Pel in whose presence he goes all docile and devoted. Had he a tail then it would wag in her presence.
In several of Pel’s cases there is a long echo of the Debacle and the Occupation, as there is here in a minor key.
***
This is number 20 in the series, the third by Juliet who took to the typewriter when the founder Mark hung up his keyboard. There is only one Pel no matter the name on the cover.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 24m, rated 6.1 by 445 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: USSR.
Verdict: Lugubrious.
Tagline: [Ask the bear]
An American journalist finally gets permission to enter a restricted area in the Appalachian Mountains, but before he sets out he is abducted and…. [Who knows.] But he has little memory of this excursion. It might have been a dream. Off he goes to meet many hillbilly stereotypes, including an idiot savant of mathematics destined to be an actuary.
There is a reference to genetic manipulation of bears to increase intelligence and that may have something to do with the restrictions. Yes, brown bears.
***
The A.I. subtitles were nearly unintelligible but amusing. I never did figure out the plot. Nor did the poor quality of the video help.
Some Soviet filmmakers masked criticism of their own society by setting stories elsewhere, especially in science fiction, and this might an example of that. By the way, this also occurred in the States, the examples being the Twilight Zone or Star Trek on themes no commercial sponsor would otherwise accept.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020) Dorosute no hate de bokura
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 10m, rated 7.3 by 8,900 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Time Travel (sorta).
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Fun while it lasts.
Tagline: What’s 2-minutes among friends?
The owner of a very small cafe is surprised, then stunned, when he turns on the computer screen to see a video message from himself! From the 2-minutes in the future! What to do?
Well, Present-He does what Future-He tells himself to do, and inevitably the secret gets out to his cronies who usually gather after-hours at the cafe. Shenanigans ensue as they learn how to stretch that 2-minutes into ever more time. Ergo, it is not exactly time travel, because they are in the future and present at the same time. This duplication confuses both them and the viewer.
The shenanigans includes intercepting a payoff to gangsters who come looking for the dosh. All that excitement alerts the Time Police who also show up to put things right, but, well, by then things have gone pretty far…and some of the characters like it.
***
It zips along with high octane, leaving no time to question the origin of the first video and its follow-ups, which multiply from ever further in the future. Pedants need not apply.
Oh, and the reference to Droste cocoa powder governs proceedings. (Intriguing, no?)
There is lots of bumf in reviews about the technical aspects which left me cold, but the gist of it is that it was shot in a single take using a cell phone camera.
The End of the Lonely Island (2017) Gu day zhong joie
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 1m, rated 5.3 by 22 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: People’s Republic of China.
Verdict: Huh?
Tagline: Windows 95 strikes again!
Chinese AI is the villain called TESS (aka Windows 95) which has unleashed a worldwide epidemic that kills all and for which there is no remedy. One response is to launch a deep space mission to find another planet to despoil and another is to wind back the clock somehow on the Lonely Island of the title where there is an abandoned research facility that might have a key, a cure, or an Act III. Our heroine goes to the island while her beau rides the rockets.
Now I may have muddled all that because I found it hard to follow, it being fast and cryptic, and short.
The cinematography is superb, and likewise the acting. I hardly recognised her from one emotional state to another. The chap shows less in a stoic kind of way. Plus I liked the street views of Shanghai.
However, I never did figure out the plot, despite what seemed to be good subtitles by an AI program! Sounds of irony off stage.
The intel on IMDb says it is an independent production, a rarity from the PRC.
Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 3.68 by 424 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Magic unrealism.
DNA: Filipino.
Verdict: I warmed to it, slowly.
Tagline: Can’t tell the players without a scorecard!
Estranged son flies to Manila at the invitation of his father, who is absent when he arrives. He falls in with some of his father’s drinking buddies. That is one thread.
We already know that father has been kidnapped by a pair of incompetent and spontaneous lowlifes with the aim of selling him to some mad and bad Muslims who specialise in decapitations. Meanwhile, father is locked in a room. The Imam they approach tries to stop their crazy plot and reports them to the police. That is thread two.
Thread three is a Philippine Army solider with uncanny, preternatural marksmanship who is recruited by the Dirtiest Harry of them all for a special police coven consisting of bruhos, that is, witches, of which this soldier is one whether he knows it or not; hence his ability. This is the magic part of the realism.
Thread four is Monique at the American embassy who deals with Americans who get into trouble in the Philippines, and there are a lot of them: drunks, pederasts, and kidnapees. Her ‘trailing spouse’ (official Foreign Service terminology) hates Manila. Her adopted children are rebellious. She has somehow started an affair with Dirtiest Harry. To say the least, they are a mismatched couple even when they couple.
It adds up to a lot characters to keep straight without a scorecard.
Cockfights, earth tremors, terrorist explosions, gold lined hotels with golden toilets, all add to the local colour. The combination of opulence and corruption would make The Felon in Chief feel right at home.
All these threads, and perhaps some I have forgotten or missed among all the superfluous detail, come together with a boom and a high body count. It did so with very little investment from me.
Set out in that chopped up, asynchronous, billiard ball style favoured by thriller writers who prefer to leave connecting the plot dots to readers. With all the cutting back and forth through time and space, I lost track of, and for a time interest in, the characters who tumble out of the pages. I stuck with it because of the exotic locale – The Philippines. It is richly textured of that place, sometimes too much for my taste, e.g., the details of slaughtering a pig…in a hotel room!
Pedants note: On the front cover the title has a hyphen as ‘Moon-Dogs,’ while on the spine (and in the text) it is ‘Moondogs.’
Moondogs are those brights spots around the moon or a blurred halo behind it, also called paraselenae for those who must know and are too lazy to consult Wikipedia. The term is used only once in the book, that I noticed, and then is in no way significant.
Good Reads meta-data is 275 pages, rated 3.42 by 857 litizens.
Genre: Not-fiction; Subspecies: Therapy.
DNA: British.
Verdict: Utopia?
Tagline: From Rousseauean to Hobbesian.
Author had a mid-life crisis at 40; quit his prestigious, high-paying job, sold his nice cottage, and went bush. Influenced by a steady diet of doomsday and gloomsday reading and viewing, Author decided to see what it would be like to live without civilisation for 18 months.
Though the word ‘utopia’ appears with references to Thomas More and Vasco de Quiroga,* the experiment was explicitly not utopian in that there was no masterplan, ideology, aspiration for perfection, but rather a trial-and-error approach; emphasis on error. Author supposed that a small number of volunteers, about a dozen, would take themselves off to the wilderness and by good will and common sense they would cooperate to survive and prosper. Huh? Yep. How did he get to be 40 if he was that naive? That is what he thought. He financed the project from the cottage sale and slowly recruited others to live rough in the Scottish Highlands. Yep. They would be an autarky and autonomous. As if.
Is it then any wonder that the book opens with the author in a psychiatric hospital reflecting on this experience. Indeed the whole book itself seems to have been a therapeutic exercise. Interspersed with a chronological account of the experiment are discussions with his therapist.
He discovered that Jean-Paul Sartre (p 184) was right about other people. Six, eight, ten people gather and Author proposes that each night they discuss and decide what to do tomorrow. One says that is oppressive. Another asserts spontaneity will suffice without this exhausting organisation. A third says this or that needn’t be done at all. A fourth suggests praying to the Great Spirit. Another is passive-aggressive silent. And so on. After six months of this, Author is losing his grip and running out of money. He wanted to get away from it all only to discover that ‘all’ came along for the ride.
There are several references to Henry Thoreau but none that mention either the income he had from the family business of pencil manufacturing to buy what he needed for his forest living or the fact that while in the woods, in the best tradition of college boys, he sent his laundry home for his mother to do. She also sent lunch to him everyday in that forest deep and dark.
Dylan Evans
There is no index nor a map, or any illustrations.
*On Quiroga (1475-1565) see Toby Green, Thomas More’s Magician for an account. In short, Father Quiroga tried to institute a modified version of More’s utopia as described in Utopia with natives near Mexico City. That connection probably explains why one edition of More’s Utopia has cover art depicting the Aztec Mexico City. Regrettably I have never been able to find a specimen of this edition, seeing only internet pictures.
Good Reads meta-data is 333 pages, rated 3/39 by 246 litizens.
DNA: Colombia.
Genre: Novel.
Verdict: Meh.
Tagline: Everyone did it.
In 1990 Gabriel remembers with a lifelong family friend, Sara, a Jewish refugee, the death of his father Gabriel Senior In flashbacks we learn something of her flight from Germany in 1935 as a tweenager, and then Gabriel Senior’s troubled life during La Violencia of the 1950s in which 180,000 died when zealots on both sides thought murdering children was the best longterm strategy to defeat their opponents.
In the late 1930s there were resident Germans in Colombia, among them many enthusiastic Nazis, then came a small influx of refugees, mostly German Jews, and after the war a few more Germans, including fervent Nazis. During World War II many of the Germans, both residents and recent immigrants, were sequestered together – Jews, Nazis, and neither, usually in hotels or resorts and they lost many of their assets. Colombia had been quicker than many Latin American countries to join the Allies. (Some of the resident Germans ran or flew in local airlines and were perceived to be a threat to shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Panama Canal, either a directly or as a source of intelligence, though that is not mentioned in this novel.) Colombia was also quick to join the United Nations in the Korean War.
Forced together this mix of Germans was volatile, but the novel makes little use of that obvious fact. But it does emphasise the mutual denunciations by informers. Instead the villains are the blacklists that were used to identify enemy aliens. The logic is convoluted to this reader
Yet somehow Gabriel Senior survived La Violencia, though maimed, and rose to eminence as a jurist and spawned a son, Junior, though there was little affection between them. The aforementioned Junior, a journalist, convinced Sara to allow him to write her biography. When it was published it all but disappeared until Senior, that very distinguished jurist, published a poisonous review of it. That made it an object of curiosity and sales increased. That also meant they no longer spoke to each other.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
The puzzle for Junior is why his father, who only read classics from the Ancient World, bothered to weigh in on his little book. But that emerges with persistence and patience, not my best qualities. There are occasional references to events in Colombia’s recent history that mean nothing to me, but would to a Colombian no doubt.
The style is vague, elliptic, dense, and asynchronous. The author is unfamiliar with the concept of a topic sentence. Paragraphs run on and on combining description, dialogue, several points of view, many subjects, and then end, and another starts. The sort of obscure prose that appeals to jaded literary awards panelists. I found it hard to follow and even harder to care about this array of narcissists.
Last Stop, the Twilight Zone: The Biography of Rod Serling (2014) by Joel Engel.
Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.81 by 59 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: The one and only.
Tagline: Next stop.
Version 1.0.0
Born (1924-1975) the second son to a comfortable, well-off family in Binghamton New York, which was a small company town based on a shoe factory whose owners practiced Quaker philanthropy with its work force. Idllic images of towns and villages were born from that experience to return in scripts years later.
Even as a five-year-old he craved the limelight and was forever thereafter trying to be the centre of attention. A school teacher guided that incessant demand into plays and debate, and later into journalism. He edited his high school newspaper and was class president, having campaigned hard for the honour. At 5’ 4” both the high school football and basketball coaches rejected him as too small. That put a chip on his shoulder.
The day he graduated from high school in 1943 he enlisted in the US Army and volunteered for the most rigorous training as a paratrooper. Only 1 in 8 of volunteers succeeded, and he was one of them. He made 37 jumps, including two in combat conditions in the Philippines with the 511th PIR where 400 men of this unit were killed or wounded. There are some remarkable scenes in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead of such combat. The fragility of life was another recurrent theme in Twilight Zone born of this experience. He also took part in the house-to-house fighting to liberate Manila from the suicidal Japanese defence. He had two wounds, one a knee that forever gave him pain and which occasionally even as he recorded the prologue to the Twilight Zone would seep. In addition to the two Purple Hearts, he had earned a Bronze Star.
He went to Antioch College on the G.I Bill and set himself to write for radio, starting with the campus radio. Again guided there by a teacher. At the time cheapskate sponsors came up with the idea of having listeners submit scripts to anthology programs, and Serling did so, winning more than once a cash prize, and more important, the glory of having his words broadcast into the ether. He loved both the money and the glory. There was no looking back from that. The anthology format went into Twilight Zone.
While at college he met and married Carolyn Kramer, she a Christian and he a Jew. They compromised on religion and became Unitarians (who have no religion, people used to say). She brought a summer home on a lake to the union, but while in college to generate the income of a married man, Serling took a job test jumping parachutes at a nearby army base and then ejector seats. He succeeded 3 others, all of whom had been killed in tests.
First as an unpaid intern and then as a staff writer he worked for radio stations writing everything from advertising jingles, to reports of garden parties, the weather, drama, news bulletins, commercials, and comedy. Then came television with an even more voracious demand from words, and he supplied them. He now submitted scripts to television programs, amassing a volume of rejections, but enough acceptances to eke out a living.
He wrote 71 scripts for Kraft Television Theatre, and then came the 72nd, called Patterns (1955), a kind of Caine Mutiny set in the corporate world. It was triumph in the pages of the New York Times and he was a made-man. There followed another triumph with Requiem for a Heavy Weight (1956). His name now sold and he sold off 50 or more of his earlier rejected scripts as fast as possible to capitalise on his newfound fame. Many of these were mediocre at best and reduced his market value. This desire to spread his seed, despite devaluing it, is a recurrent tide in his life.
He wrote scripts about negro lynchings, hated of Jews, corporate corruption, government incompetence, quick-thinking women, incompetent bullies, and the like but found commercial sponsors insisted on watering the themes down to nearly nothing. To skirt this barrier he adopted the fantasy, science fiction cloak, encouraged by Desilu Productions, and produced the pilot of Twilight Zone in 1959. It lasted five seasons when a season was 39 episodes. By the end he was dried up, and accepted the termination, though he did not write them all he did read and edit those written by others whom he hired and directed, but he wrote the bulk. During its run in proved to be both a commercial and critical success.
Twilight Zone made him famous and wealthy. It is unlikely that any other writer ever has been so well known around the world. That celebrity also carried expectations, none of which he could fulfil in later years, and he knew it, but could not change his ways. The sirens’ song had done its worst to him.
Those successes enabled him to convince the producers to record the episodes to be screened again, the rerun. This was not the common practice at the time when one live airing was the norm. When taping started it allowed better productions, but once aired the programs were taped over for the next episode. Serling, and others, argued that saving taped programs for summer reruns recouped the cost of taping and, he argued, and also allowed the broadcast rights to be sold, which they were and syndicated to local stations.
Leaving aside the many details, what emerges is a man who was driven by an insatiable craving for external validation, and, in fact, could not live without it. Was this entrenched need a result of his height (he wore elevator shoes from high school on) or being a lifelong younger brother, or what?
When Twilight Zone ended he sold himself to the highest bidder, not because he wanted or needed the money, he was rich beyond Croesus, but for the affirmation. He did TV commercials, became a regular on daytime television game shows, hit on every woman that crossed his path from stewardesses to college students asking for an autograph to waitresses to secretaries and more, instructed his agent to say yes to every commercial offer, composed and tried to sell film scripts, teleplays, theatrical dramas, short stories, novels, and mostly failed.
He prostituted himself in every imaginable way to find approval, affirmation, and adulation, becoming just the kind of hollow man he had decried in his Kraft Theatre dramas years ago. What is worse is that he knew it but the compulsion was too strong. He was an unhappy man. An example of human bondage.
Even those projects that were completed and credited (and paid) to him succeeded, despite, not because his contribution, e.g., Seven Days in May. His name is there but he contributed little to it.
It is another example of a poor little rich boy’s search for happiness, and the failure of that quest. It is hard to sympathises with his emptiness, the more so, because it was all so repetitive. He learned nothing, and forgot almost everything.
What killed him in the end was one of the products that he advertised, cigarettes. He smoked 60-80 a day himself. That might almost be a Twilight Zone episode, killed by the golden goose.
