TReehouse Magazine: Magazine of Possibilities

Saturday, 13 March 2010 06:50

Fatuous Gymnastics and Modern Love

By David Paul Kleinman

Modern Love You despise your wife. She knows. You know she knows. Your daughters know, and you know you are programming them to find men who despise them because daddy dislikes mommy. You find another woman and become enthralled. You feel lust at the mere thought of her. She is everything you have ever wanted. Smart, pretty, funny, bawdy. The few times you meet the energy is too much to handle. You flee in a cyclone of guilt and lust. Your wife senses something, but she sticks with you because you earn the bucks and raise the kids. She smokes pot, cases QVC, and watches The Insider.

Tuesday, 18 May 2010 15:52

Inanity Fair: Dead Dogs and Pole Dancing

The headline was…well, I was going to say priceless—but I found it kind of depressing as well.

Here it is, verbatim: “Travolta’s dogs killed; Miss USA pole dancing.”

No, I didn’t lift that from The Onion. It appeared under the “Entertainment & Community” section of The Virginian-Pilot’s web site.

According to the first brief that followed, the driver of a service vehicle at Bangor airport accidentally struck and killed John Travolta’s dogs last Thursday.

How sad, you say. Or perhaps if you’re of a darker turn of mind, you might say, it’s just as well—he’d probably already condemned the animals to a life of scientology. Still, if a story about a celebrity’s dead pets qualifies as “entertainment” these days, we’re a lot closer to complete cultural decadence than I thought we were.

Miss USA pole-dancing? That’s another matter! I want see that. (Not for prurient reasons, of course, but because the images subvert with sweet irony the sexist beauty-pageant paradigm.) I also wanted to find out whether the pole dancing had anything to do with the dead dogs.

Turns out the headline was bit of false advertising. The pics show virtually no skin at all. “That’s fun,” the newspaper’s anonymous commentator reassured us. “Still, Miss USA officials are investigating.”

What a silly institution that pageant is. Thank goodness our daily newspapers and television shows uphold a higher cultural standard.

- TR

The headline was…well, I was going to say priceless—but I found it kind of depressing as well.

Here it is, verbatim: “Travolta’s dogs killed; Miss USA pole dancing.”

No, I didn’t lift that from The Onion. It appeared under the “Entertainment & Community” section of The Virginian-Pilot’s web site.

According to the first brief that followed, the driver of a service vehicle at Bangor airport accidentally struck and killed John Travolta’s dogs last Thursday.

How sad, you say. Or perhaps if you’re of a darker turn of mind, you might say, it’s just as well—he’d probably already condemned the animals to a life of scientology. Still, if a story about a celebrity’s dead pets qualifies as “entertainment” these days, we’re a lot closer to complete cultural decadence than I thought we were.

Thursday, 03 June 2010 16:48

Death and a Missed Morning Coffee

Head: Death and a Missed Morning Coffee

By Laura Johnson Dahlke

When a young woman dies in an automobile accident, someone knows what to do. Someone knows how to notify the next of kin, write the obituary, set the funeral arrangements, prepare the program, dig the grave. Someone knows how to put together her broken body in preparation for the visitation and burial as if she was unmarred by the ravages of the accident. With surgical scalpel, scissors, suture, and clamps, the mortician will remove her blood and pump her veins with embalming fluid, sew her mouth and eyes shut, cover her bruises and crushed bones with costume make-up.

Someone knows that comforting the next of kin often makes mention of a Christian god, a god that the victim may or may not have believed in, that the world lays claim to or denies. Someone thinks it’s all god’s master plan—that she was moving toward the accident—her entire life a karmic dance that ended with that final stomp—a head-on collision with a semi.

Someone will go through her clothes hanging haphazardly in her closet. They’ll touch her blouses and remember how she loved this one or that. They’ll donate her shoes—the Converse, the flip-flops, the boots, the heels. They’ll deem her wedding dress disposable since she died divorced and put it in the give away pile; they’ll box her pregnancy clothes and regret that her 4-year-old and infant no longer have a mother. Her Wet n’ Wild make-up, Beautiful perfume and Victoria’s Secret lotion will be tossed out.

Someone out there believes she and the driver of the other vehicle, the 55-year-old unharmed male, were meant for each other. That all their lives these two people were destined to meet, like star-crossed lovers, bound to each other in arcane ways, like the mystery of birds taking flight, like volcanoes erupting, like the earth orbiting the sun. That she was bound to him in a macabre, unknown death wish, like they signed a contract from the beginning of time that is written somewhere on the rings of Saturn. Like the only thing that ever mattered was when they intersected, that he was the only man that could ever tame her. He was the only man that ever mattered.

When a young woman dies in an automobile accident, someone knows what to do. But I don’t. The morning I learned my friend T-- died in a car accident, I forgot to make my morning coffee. I roamed around the safety of my house with a harrowed heart, watching red cardinals pecking at the bird feeder out my front window. I read and reread the email sent by a mutual friend, the one that told me she died on Memorial Day with all the ferocious violence that comes from a head-on collision. Like a gravitational pull, I pondered the online newspaper report, lingering again and again on the word fatal and its impregnable decisiveness. My usual morning routine was shadowed as by a lunar eclipse.

Someone may think this small act of forgetting to make my coffee has deeper significance—that every minute decision moves us toward the totality of our predestined fates. After all, what if she left her sister’s house a moment later? What if she stopped for gas and a Coke? What if she took a different route?

Someone would say we’re no more than a predetermined collection of all our decisions, all our experiences, all our mistakes and successes. Somewhere, somehow, missing my morning coffee makes particles floating on the Milky Way change direction and thus changes my life. Skipping morning coffee unwittingly may have protected me from my friend’s fate—at least for today. Tomorrow, I’ll sip my coffee flushed with cream and ocean tides will bulge in high tide and crystalline waves will flicker with my fate.

Someone believes my beginning and end is also etched on the infinite rings of Saturn. Bringing the cup to my lips is like an amoeba swooshing in an ocean centuries before, like aboriginal cries, like the entire moon passing through the Earth's umbral shadow, like death from a head-on collision

By Laura Johnson Dahlke

Age, 36; Gender, female; Injury type, fatal; safety device, no. Accident occurred as VEH 1 was northbound on US 65 and crossed into the path of southbound VEH 2. Driver 1 was pronounced dead at the scene by acting coroner Deputy D.

When a young woman dies in an automobile accident, someone knows what to do. Someone knows how to notify the next of kin, write the obituary, set the funeral arrangements, prepare the program, dig the grave. Someone knows how to put together her broken body in preparation for the visitation and burial as if she was unmarred by the ravages of the accident. With surgical scalpel, scissors, suture, and clamps, the mortician will remove her blood and pump her veins with embalming fluid, sew her mouth and eyes shut, cover her bruises and crushed bones with costume make-up.

Monday, 14 June 2010 13:50

The Imperfectionists and Imperfect Book Reviewers

By Rick Skwiot

No matter what book reviewers have to say, I usually check what other readers think about a book on amazon.com before I buy it or borrow it from the library, being sure to read the sobering one-star and two-star comments. That’s because I’ve learned from hard experience that you simply cannot trust book reviewers and blurbers.

I’ve written about this previously, in a book review of Denis Johnson’s National Book Award-nominated novel Tree of Smoke. And I’ve read B. R. Myers’ deft analysis of critical pretentiousness and myopia in A Reader’s Manifesto, a must-read if you often find abundantly praised contemporary literary fiction dull. But I’m a slow learner in some things, and again recently fell for hyperbolic critical praise, this time dished out for Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. As a result I bought a new hardback copy, no less (but only because it was marked down from $25 to $13.50 and I got free shipping.) Money—and time—wasted. I know: caveat emptor. But the ongoing critical malpractice smacks of fraud and deceitful advertising.

Interlopers in Afghanistan

American and British Interlopers in Afghanistan

by RICK SKWIOT on JULY 29, 2010 · 0 COMMENTS

in AFGHANISTAN,BOOKS,LITERARY COMMENTARY,RICK SKWIOT,GEOPOLITICS

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan, by Ben Macintyre

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby

Western forays into tribal Afghanistan go back some two centuries and seldom have produced good results. But they have resulted in some good books, both fascinating and funny.

Josiah Harlan’s improbable life’s journey—from Pennsylvania Quaker to Afghani military leader and prince to American Civil War colonel—makes for compelling reading as crafted by Ben Macintyre in The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan. Harlan was likely the model for Daniel Dravot and in Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name, which was made into a marvelous film by John Huston in 1975, with Sean Connery as Dravot and Michael Caine as his sidekick Peachy Carnehan.

But it also serves as an indictment of British colonialism and a cautionary tale for Western nations trying to deal with Afghanistan and its tribal currents. However, Harlan’s story is so fantastic it would never have worked as novel—not believable. Kipling’s short story ”The Man Who Would Be King” seems more of a tall tale than realistic fiction.

A merchant seaman jilted by his fiancé in 1822, he vows never to return to the United States. Harlan jumps ship in Calcutta and passes himself off as a doctor to British rulers there. Over the next decades he ingratiates himself with Indian and Afghani royalty, leads armies, invades distant lands, becomes fluent in various local dialects, is thoroughly seduced by Afghan culture, and ultimately reigns as a prince of an Afghan land in the Hindu Kush. Along the way he studies the flora and fauna with scholarly interest and thoroughly enjoys himself despite brushes with death, disease and duplicitous potentates.

The book as constituted was made possible by Macintyre’s 2001 discovery, in a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, of Harlan’s missing handwritten autobiography, unread since his death in San Francisco in 1871. The result is a great, page-turning adventure by a renowned British journalist. (I’ve reviewed two other Macintyre books here recently, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat.)

Another improbable—though hilarious—foray into Afghanistan, this time by two Brits, came in 1956, as chronicled by amateur traveler Eric Newby in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman decides to quit his job, kiss goodbye his wife and children, and mount an ill-conceived exploration of mountainous Afghani hinterlands with an eccentric foreign service friend luxuriating in Rio.

After two days of mountain-climbing school in Wales, they drive off toward Kabul. Within weeks they find themselves scaling 19,000-foot mountains, inching up near perpendicular rock with the aid of an instruction manual.

Along the way they are accused of vehicular homicide and beset by dysentery. They endure thirst, hunger and near death on icy precipices. They insult the natives and each other.

The subsequent account of these travels and travails, now in print for some fifty years, has influenced countless other bumbling travel writers. You can hear its echoes clearly—in concept, structure and humor—in Bill Bryson’s recent bestseller, A Walk in the Woods.

As rude as many an ugly American abroad, Newby and companion Hugh Carless angrily berate a Mullah who has just immersed their camera and packaged food in a river, and tell mocking Pathans to “____ off!” Carless cuffs a Tajik boy for purposefully leading them astray, only later to discover him the son of their chieftain host. They argue continuously with their balking Afghani packmen and between themselves.

Somehow they blunder on toward their whimsical destination, Nuristan, where no Englishman has set foot for 60 years. Facing for the first time sheer, ice-covered rock in a looming mountain, the blasé Carless remarks:

“It’s nothing but a rock climb, really.”

“I can see that.”

“Just a question of technique.”

A commodity of which they seemingly possess little.

Carless, who speaks fluent Persian, chafes Newby for his slow uptake with the language. Secretly studying a dubious language guide, Newby memorizes “basic” phrases, such as “I saw a corpse in the field.” Sadly, this phrase has occasion for use, when they discover a young traveler on the road “who has lost everything,” his skull bashed in with a rock.

Danger lurks everywhere for these unarmed and blithely confident Brits: not only crevasses and precipices but also thieves, bears, disease. Both Newby and Carless suffer from dysentery most of their hike and often go thirsty rather than drink from cool, inviting streams. Particularly after discovering the source of their contamination:

“‘You know those little huts they build over the streams,’ I said. There was one outside our house, built over the stream from which the drinking water was fetched. It was a pretty little hut; Hugh had particularly admired it. He called it a gazebo.

“‘What about them?’

“‘I’ve found out what they’re for. No wonder we’re getting worse.’”

To spin his seductive and tickling narrative, Newby employs understatement, self-effacement, savage wit, honed irony, and unrelenting honesty. The result is a web of foible, reluctant courage, stupidity, and curiosity—i.e., a human story, into which we are drawn by his endearingly flawed humanity.

At the center, however, always lies Newby’s curiosity. It impels him on his trip and keeps him trudging on despite bad food, bad water, bad weather, sleepless nights, blisters, scrapes, and threats to his life. He gives precise, detailed descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna—including the human animal: the Tajiks, Pathans, Kafirs, Rajputs, and others he encounters along the way. As when, at night, he enters a desolate Afghani town:

“A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted.”

But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is by no means a trifle, all laughs and landscape. Newby also recounts Afghan history, now made even more pertinent by the war there. Such as the 1895 forced conversion of tribal pantheists to Islam—this done with the swords of Abdur Rahman’s armies. Further, if one wanted to get an intimate picture of tribal life in Afghanistan before the onslaught of war three decades ago, this would be an excellent place to start.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush launched Newby on a career as one of Britain’s best and best-read travel writers.

By Rick Skwiot

Western forays into tribal Afghanistan go back some two centuries and seldom have produced good results. But they have resulted in some good books, both fascinating and funny.

Josiah Harlan’s improbable life’s journey—from Pennsylvania Quaker to Afghani military leader and prince to American Civil War colonel—makes for compelling reading as crafted by Ben Macintyre in The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan. Harlan was likely the model for Daniel Dravot and in Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name, which was made into a marvelous film by John Huston in 1975, with Sean Connery as Dravot and Michael Caine as his sidekick Peachy Carnehan.

But it also serves as an indictment of British colonialism and a cautionary tale for Western nations trying to deal with Afghanistan and its tribal currents. However, Harlan’s story is so fantastic it would never have worked as novel—not believable. Kipling’s short story ”The Man Who Would Be King” seems more of a tall tale than realistic fiction.