A New Feature: Insert Name Here

I don't know what to call this one, but inspiration hit when I saw a copy of George Orwell's Burmese Days on my bookshelf. Most people know Orwell from 1984 or Animal Farm. Before he wrote either of the books that was turn his name into an adjective, he wrote this novel, inspired by the years he spent living and working in colonial Burma. I'd never the hell heard of it before my Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature professor assigned it, but it's very good. So the idea behind the feature is that it profiles lesser-known works by well-known authors. The Blue Castle instead of Anne of Green Gables. The Town and the City instead of On the Road. Sometimes, they're lesser-known for the fact that they aren't very good. Sometimes, they're lesser-known because the other works are so big they overtake the ones that don't fit in.

This is the case with Burmese Days, I think. Unlike Orwell's two better-known works, this one is utterly realistic and set in the time in which it was written. Everything in the story could have happened exactly the way it did. In fact, one gets the impression that elements of the story happened throughout much of the British Empire in Southeast Asia.

The story centers around Flory, a man who's about 35 and has lived in Burma much of his adult life, working for a timber company. He hates it. He hates, most of all, his British co-workers and the stifling society that they've imported there. Forced into an unfamiliar environment, they've clung to their British ways, and that includes a strict social hierarchy that native Burmese do not have a place in. There are so few British people out there that doing whatever you want isn't really an option.

Flory has, against all odds, made a Burmese friend, but it's not a friendship of equals. Dr. Veraswami admires the British a great deal and admires Flory, too. He sees him as more of a powerful ally than a true friend, and early in the story, asks for his help in getting admitted to Flory's social club, as there's a man in the area who is seeking to discredit him. Yet, this would never fly with the racist members of Flory's club, putting Flory in the unenviable position of having to hurt a friend to placate people he can't stand.

In the midst of all this appear Elizabeth. Women were apparently rare enough in colonial Burma, and single women were downright oddities. Elizabeth runs practically straight into Flory on her first day in Burma, and Flory grasps at this straw immediately. From a few comments she makes, he senses that she's an intellectual, one that could be a true partner to him and enjoy the native culture as much as he does. The tragedy of this story is that he has the entirely wrong idea about her. Elizabeth hates books and art, has no interest whatsoever in native culture, and simply wants to find a husband.

All these controversies that suddenly boil over into Flory's previously dull life take a heavy toll on all those invovled, and Burma ultimately winds up chewing up Flory and spitting him out. It's an excellent picture of a culture clash. The British tried to impose morals and customs on a setting that couldn't accomodate them, holding dances when there was no one to dance with, demanding ice for their drinks when it had to be imported, refusing to mix at all. But even truly mixing wasn't an option, because of everything that had happened before. Previous waves of British people had made it perfectly clear that they viewed Burmese as inferior to themselves, so most Burmese either hated them for their arrogance, exploited them for their money (like Flory's Burmese consort), or revered them as something just less than gods, as Dr. Veraswami did.

Flory even came to feel that leaving wasn't an option. At some point, he realized that he wouldn't fit in to true British society any better than he'd fit in to the imported version or to Burmese society itself. He talked of realizing, all at once, that his youth had gone and that Burma was now his home, for better or for worse. Despite the fact that none of his colleagues come off well, and that history shows how the various colonial experiments worked out, one can't help but feel a bit sorry for them in spite of themselves. All of his co-workers were alcoholics of one degree or another, and the scenes in the club are always full of bitter, angry talk about the natives and the weather. He writes of the fate of those that wind up going back, to live in boarding houses and talk incessantly of their lives abroad until cirrhosis claims them.

It's been years since I've read Orwell's better-known works, so it's hard for me to judge this against them. But taken on its own, I thought it was a fascinating depiction of life in the British Colonies, with fully developed characters and an interesting plot. I'd reccommend this one as worth a look.

Now, does anyone have an idea for a name for this feature?

Books of a Feather: Forces of Darkness

I came up with this one late last night, and decided to look at several series of books, rather than individual books. Forces of darkness are primarily the provenance of fantasy. Realistic books contain nasty bosses, catty rivals, or heinous ex-boyfriends, but not any real evil, generally. So the books I picked to discuss are the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, the Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

The oldest of these is the Prydain books. Written in the 1970s and 1980s, these are the most like classic fantasy. They tell the story of Taran, an orphan raised by an enchanter whose main duties involve the care and feeding of an oracular pig. In the first book, his charge wanders off and he chases it away from the enchanter's farmstead, far into the woods...and smack into the crown prince of the realm. He is able to prove his worth to this man and assist him on his journey. As Taran matures, he grows into a worthy fighter and adventurer and is aided by the companions he meets in the first book. With the exception of the peripatetic, introspective Taran Wanderer, all of their adventures come in thwarting one man: Arawn Death-Lord, King of Annuvin, who seeks to destroy and conquer Prydain.

The Harry Potter plotline also, of course, is a coming-of-age story. But by the time it was published, readers liked to understand their evil a little better. The Prydain books belong to the protagonists, to Taran and Gwydion and all the friends they meet on their journeys. It's not until the very end of the final book that we come face-to-face with Arawn, and then he's killed almost immediately. In Harry Potter, evil gets a bit more of a backstory. Voldemort can be understood in ordinary psychological terms as a sociopath. Anyone who's ever watched one of those A&E specials on serial killers will recognize Voldemort's background: raised in a cold and stark environment, has an utter lack of empathy for others, sees his fellow humans as tools rather than people, conceals all of this with a smooth charming facade. It's easier to understand how he gained so many followers this way. Dumbledore himself explains that he attracted those with a bent towards cruelty who wanted new outlets as well as the weak who sought protection and glory that they were unable to get on their own.

What remains obscure is Voldemort's point of view. We know only that he disliked "mudbloods" and Muggles. His insistence on racial purity can't help but evoke Hitler to a modern reader, but it's absent the ideology. It's easy for the reader to understand the psychological reasons for supporting Voldemort, but harder to understand the intellectual reasons. The Death Eaters clearly had wonderful group cohesion, but the goal towards which they were working always remained somewhat murky in my mind.

His Dark Materials probably portrays the forces of darkness most realistically. They aren't united, for one thing: sometimes they work together, but they remain distinct entities with their own viewpoints. They're also composed, mostly, of ordinary people. They also believe that they're right, and carry out the most monstrous deeds convinced that it's a means to an end. The gruesome research of severing the bonds between human children and their "daemons" (an external part of themselves) was done to help people, much like experiments on lab rats, except in this case, they had no choice but to use humans, as no other creature has a daemon. The head of these experiments is also the protagonist's mother, and is one scary lady when we first meet her. But, surprisingly, she winds up repenting before the books are over. Lyra's father, on the other hand, seems at first a positive figure, but the pendulum swings several times before his own end.

Lloyd Alexander also plays somewhat with the idea of good and evil being inherent in everyone, particularly in the second book. This is probably the main flaw of the Harry Potter series, though. None of Harry's friends are seriously tempted in any way by the Death Eaters, nor do any of the Slytherins ever express so much as a glimmer of desire to support the Order of the Phoenix. My friend Sophie wondered why they didn't just lock up everyone who was sorted into Slytherin as a precaution and be done with it. The worst Harry ever faces is the transference of Voldemort's soul as a result of the curse that failed, but it never serves as any sort of temptation.

I think the closer definition of the forces of evil is part of a trend twoards greater realism in fantasy. Most of the popular recent fantasy books have been set in the modern era. The protagonists drive cars and watch television. In The Amulet of Samarkand, even the secrecy of magic was gone, so that being a magician was rather like being a plumber or a doctor. It's a fine line, for going too far with that will make the fantasy cease to be compelling. But perhaps modern readers want to see themselves in what they read, rather than getting swept away into another world.

D'oh! Booking Through Thursday arrives a day late

Driving home from orchestra rehearsal tonight, I had no idea what I was going to blog about tonight. None. I've thrown all my "get out of jail free cards." My book is slow going, and I already wrote about how it was slow going. There's not a whole lot else going on right now. No house fires or robberies or anything like last year. Then I realized something. Yesterday was Thursday, and I didn't do BTT! So here goes:

I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book just because I got a free copy of it. However, some authors seem to feel that if they send you a copy of their book for free, you should give it a positive review.

Do you think reviewers are obligated to put up a good review of a book, even if they don’t like it? Have we come to a point where reviewers *need* to put up disclaimers to (hopefully) save themselves from being harassed by unhappy authors who get negative reviews?

Well, I've never been lucky enough to be in this position. LibraryThing has never picked me (this month it's my fault, I forgot to ask for books). And my blog has not garnered so much attention that publishers are beating down my door begging for opinions on their latest offerings. But just intuitively, I would say that the answer to this question is a resounding "NO!"

A couple of years ago, I attended a museum conference that featured a presentation by one of the leading museum evaluators in the state. She titled her presentation "Does This Make Me Look Fat?" and explained that sometimes museum evaluation (of exhibits, programs, etc.) can be frustrating because her clients weren't coming at it with an open mind. Just like when someone asks that question, there's a response they're looking for from the evaluator. Maybe they just want to hear how wonderful they are, or maybe they're trying to win an argument with someone else in the institution ("See, I told you two hours was too long for the toddler program! She agrees with me!")

That's the problem with sending out review copies: they will get reviewed. Not every blogger will love every book. It's still ultimately just one opinion, no matter how educated and respected that opinion is. A lot of people really liked Jennifer Weiner's new book. And I'm sure plenty of people hated the Motley Crue autobiography. Knowing that won't change my mind about either book, though. So I don't think reviewers should feel obligated to give a positive review. I also think reviewers should own their opinions if authors complain to them about being reviewed badly.

A Bad Time to Bog Down

Of all the months of the year in which to bog down in a book, NaBloPoMo is probably the worst. Yet that's what's happening to me right now. Normally, I don't "bog down" in books. If it's not engaging, I pull out the bookmark and go on to the next book. But this book is different. It's by Tony Horwitz.

His other two books have been awesome. I just wrote about the one. His other book is a journey through the lands that Captain Cook explored. He visited Australia, Tahiti, Tonga, the obscure country of Niue, and Hawaii. He also went to Cook-related sites in England and met with Cook scholars and enthusiasts. He spent time on a ship designed to give modern people the experience of life at sea in the 1700s (he said it was very difficult and uncomforatble). What I loved about his books was the way he showed the connections between the present and the past. He spoke with people who had been directly influenced by the Civil War and by Cook's journey's, for better or for worse. He got inside of the heads of the people who'd lived the initial events through primary sources, explored the gaps between modern perception and their lived reality, and was able to paint a picture that included everybody.

This book is about the conquistadores and the discovery and settlement of the New World. But so far, the modern people are not in the story much. Or maybe it's that the people he's met just aren't as memorable. I read the other two books very quickly. It's taken me over a week to get halfway through his new one, A Voyage Long And Strange. I do intend to keep going with it, but why, why did I have to pick it up during NaBloPoMo?

Fear and Loathing: On the Job Market 2008

Here are some highlights of my recent job hunt:

1. Chainsawing my resume to exclude my graduate degree and all my publications and presentations, in order to make room for my mad Microsoft Office skillz and my vast knowledge of phone-answering techniques. I'm a blink away from writing on there that I have over 25 of experience in answering phones. I think I was about five or six when my parents started letting me do that, so it's not a lie.

2. Filling out a lengthy questionaire at a temp agency about the types of welfare I've received in the past year, watching a video that offered interview tips such as "Be on time" and "Thank the interviewer for his or her time," browsing a catalog of $8.00/hr jobs advertised as being on the bus route, then being told with a straight face that my lack of administrative experience will be a problem because "companies come to us to get the best."

3. Being told by another temp agency that they did not have any jobs. None whatsoever. At least they leveled with me!

4. Talking with a friend who recently had a position open at her job. She told me that they have put all hiring on hold, that one of her other co-workers just left so she's down to one part-timer and herself. She told me that the state arts agency taht partially funded the position I was applying for has gotten massive cuts and she doesn't know what's going to happen. On the bright side, she is a delightful person and it's always nice to talk to her, even when she has bad news.

5. Visiting the website of a professional organization that updates their job listings weekly and realizing that there have only been two new postings all month.

6. Spending all day filling out forms on the websites of two branches of the nation's armed forces (because they won't accept a normal resume). These forms contain much of the same data that's found on my resume, but are not customized for my field. So there's no way to tell them about my presentations and publications, just a way to express my utter inexperience at operating a backhoe, drill press or snowplow. A month after I filled one of these out, I received a letter in the mail congratulating me on the fact that they had not, in fact, decided to use my electronic form as e-kindling. Maybe by next summer they'll call me for an interview.

7. Checking in on my jobs newsgroup and realizing the postings there are as sparse as the ones on my professional organization's website. This is particularly bad because the moderator casts a broad net that encompasses the federal and state jobs websites, all of the postings on all of the professional organization websites (there are local, state and regional orgs for every part of the country), sites like idealist.com and museumjobs.com, international postings, and postings that seem to contain inside information.

8. Realizing, depressingly, that the days I get up early and devote myself to job-seeking are yielding the exact same results as the days when I slack off.

Folks, it's rough out there. This is possibly the worst time to be looking for a job since the late 1980s. My field is tight during the best of times, but charitable giving is usually the first thing people cut when looking to save money, foundations aren't seeing the income investment that they used to be, and governments often cut cultural funding first.

Yet it seems that once you go a particular route in life, it can be difficult to change course. If you try to switch to a different field, you're up against people who have degrees, experience and connections in that field while trying to show why you're a better fit than they are. Even survival jobs can be tough. No employer wants to act as a holding pen, and you may get the bizarro experience I did of being both overqualified and underqualified for a job at the same time.

This is usually where the "loathing" starts to come in. If you troll job forums, you'll notice a lot of anger towards employers, people demanding things they probably know they have no right to expect out of pure frustration. It's hard to send out applications and never even get a response. It's worse when you've taken a step backwards in what you're applying for and still don't get anywhere. My friend Stella Devine is also looking for work right now, and I can sympathise with her when she says she's considered calling on apprentice welding and junior police officer positions, thinking "How hard could that be? Probably good money in that..."

Stella writes about the need to stay calm, above all else. Fear and loathing almost never lead to good decisions (see presidential election, 2004). But when the "jobs" special section of the newspaper is too thin to make a good bootrest, when the jobs websites for your field are on the verge of folding, and when every day brings worse economic news than the day before, it's a damn hard task.

Thinking Local

In conjunction with my post last week about local bookstores, I found an article in my local alternative weekly paper about a "think local" pledge. Apparently, if you're in my area, you can go on their website and promise to spend at least $100 at local businesses this year to be eligible for prizes. The best prize you can get, though, is a strong community. There was an interesting statistic on there: for every dollar spent at a local business, 68 cents stays in the community, as opposed to 43 cents at national chain stores.

For the non-Buffalonians out there, the good news is that this is apparently a nationwide initiative, aimed at creating a 2.4 billion impact on communities around the country this Christmas. It couldn't have come at a better time, with the grim news coming out of Detroit and Wall Street over the past six weeks. I had a hard time tracking down where people can go to make the pledge, though. The best I could do was this directory of alternative newsweeklies around the country. I'll definitely be making a pledge. I encourage everyone else to do the same!

Road Trippin' Through American Memory

One of the best historical books I've ever read is Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. I recommend it to everyone I know, and as I'm reading his new book right now, I figured I'd talk today about the book that got me interested in him.

I first noticed it in an airport bookstore and finally picked it up a couple of years later. It was much better than I'd ever imagined. Horwitz traveled through the American South to various places related to the Civil War, and also place important to race relations today. He went to a town in rural Kentucky where a white teenager had been shot and killed by a black teenager after a confrontation over the Confederate flag. He visited a woman in charge of her local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. He went to an "Afrocentric" high school and a KKK rally. He also traveled with a hardcore Confederate reenactor to museums and historic sites, all in the attempt to learn how the Civil War had impacted modern society.

As a lifelong Northerner, the answers surprised me. I never really thought about the Civil War at all, except when I was studying it. After all, it had little affect on my own family story. I can't claim any ancestors at all who fought in it. The only branch of my family that was even here at the time was up in Maine and had recently crossed the border from Canada. The other three sides would not even arrive in the country until almost fifty years later. So, it surprised me to learn how different things were in the South, at least for some people.

The book alternates between disquieting scenes like the one in Kentucky, where more than one person quoted speaks of the Civil War as though it had happened in his or her lifetime, and scenes in the "New South" that are disquieting for other reasons. Horwitz and his re-enactor pal visit "Manasshole" together, as part of his friend's annual "Civil Wargasm" week-long road trip. While the battlefield itself is preserved, it's ringed by clogged freeways and fast-food joints. Virtually nothing of Civil-War era Atlanta remains: what didn't get burned by Sherman got bulldozed by developers. In fact, in Atlanta, the primary image of the Civil War is Gone With the Wind. Horwitz visits several people who claim to know the whereabouts of "the real Tara" and speaks with someone in tourism who tells him that she repeatedly has to answer questions such as "Where are Rhett and Scarlett buried?" (facepalm!!!) He also visits a city historian, for the record, who states that he worked with Margaret Mitchell while she was writing her book and had assisted her in her meticulous efforts to ensure that everything she wrote was fictional. She combed old city directories to ensure that she didn't accidentally use the name of a real family, and toured the countryside to ensure that all her homes and locations came from her own imagination.

Horwitz also tackles the issue of commemoration: of what is commemorated, how, and why. He visits an interesting Common Council meeting in Richmond, VA, where they are trying to decide whether to put a statue of African-American tennis legend Arthur Ashe on the Confederate-dominated Monument Avenue. The discussion seesaws back and forth, between whites who favor the idea, blacks who think Ashe would be diminished on a "promenade of losers" (as one man calls it), people who thought his statue should be placed in a black neighborhood as a source of inspriation, and others who viewed that as more segregation. He also takes in a ceremony held at Andersonville commemorating the day the prison camp administrator Henry Wirz was hanged for war crimes. The ceremony is held annually by a group that is attempting to clear Wirz's name, at least partially on the grounds that he didn't do anything the North wasn't doing too.

I went to graduate school because I wanted to help engage people in history, and I think this is part of the reason I like this book so much. Horwitz has unearthed a lot of the people who keep history alive, for better or for worse. This book gets at the root of why the study of history is so important, and what it can mean to the individual.