No, not "book club" as in "book organization." I mean "book club" as in a club made out of books which we will use to bang each other over the head with regarding suggestions for "must read" books. Comic strips, comic books, and even fortune cookies are fair game…anything with the printed word.

One I’m currently reading is titled "Savage Girls and Wild Boys" (wait for it, Rico…this isn't something to be added to your "Girls Gone Wild" collection). The subtitle is "A History of Feral Children."

It's a surprisingly analytical book about children who have been found roaming wild, often being raised by wolves or bears, and sometimes entirely on their own.

After reading this, the major questions you might ask yourself are:

1) What makes a human a human?
2) Is language necessary to have an internal experience of being human, self-aware, etc?
And this was the big one for me:
3) What exactly does culture add to our lives, and what does it take away?

In many places in this book, by contrasting totally un-cultured humans with cultured ones, it's easy to see human culture as little more than a virus that is implanted into us to make us work better for the culture rather than to make us work better for ourselves. We are captured from day one, and always, of course, because it is "for our own good." Well, yes. Learning language is a vital gift. And yet there is a terrific story in the book of one boy (Victor) who made a good case for language getting in the way of our experience of the world.

And regarding culture in general, there are some interesting observations including the description of an orangutan who was trained to sit down at a table at fancy dinner parties (for the upper class gentry, of course) and pour tea with all the care and aplomb of a human. And the author then questions what is the difference between a human and an orangutan learning the same rote rules, methods, and habits? By such examples we can see how truly silly, even regressive, much of our culture is, but it is civilized. And yet with civilization comes a dullness that at least some (but not certainly all) of these feral children show by contrast.

What I see is culture getting implanted in us like a virus and we never have a chance to say yes or no. We are made slaves of the culture. And this is surely one reason these feral children have fascinated people. They remind us of something deep inside ourselves that lurks. It's something that is not necessarily savage. Rather, it's real, unhidden, and honest. The savagery of so-called civilization is well-documented. Civilizations will often simply hide its barbarity under formal rules. But many of these feral children exhibit an honest savagery. It's refreshing compared to us Machiavellian humans. Something noted again and again about such children is their almost utter lack of guile. They are neither good nor evil. They are beyond that. They are nature.

Anyway, the first 128 pages are fascinating. I haven't read a book anything like this. There's a chapter titled "The Child of Europe" that is boring and just runs on way too long. But those first hundred pages or so are gems.

Your next logical reading assignment, should you decide to accept it, is Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

quote:

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!

Night-Song in the Jungle

I've read about 25% of The Jungle Book, and it's really very entertaining. Just FYI. I'm going to revisit the 1967 Disney Movie this weekend maybe as well.

Two books I can't recommend highly enough:

1) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini—probably one of the most beautifully written, well-crafted works of fiction I've ever read. If people were smart, they'd make this book required reading in schools tomorrow.

quote:

When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father's house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing. I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll maker's instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had simply grown tired and careless.

Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the neighbor's one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to, but if I asked, really asked, he wouldn't deny me. Hassan never denied me anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot. Hassan's father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer. "And he laughs while he does it," he always added, scowling at his son.

2) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Not since Tom and Huck, Vorenus and Pullo, Thalo and Brad, Kirby and Lee has there been a better buddy story. Backdrop is the Golden age of Comics. Absolutely magnificent character rendering, like a latter day Dickens, but with even better Jews.

quote:

From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists—Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy's closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women's clothing, the dents in men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy—but he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets, and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.

.
I thought Kavalier and Clay was great until the last section, when whoever-it-was left town. The book went off into a different story then, and fell apart for me.
.

Wow. Thanks for the great book recommendations. I still hope to get to that Somerset Maugham novel, but last time I checked, the library didn't have it.

I finished "The Jungle Book" this morning and can highly recommend it. I'm starting on Rudyard Kipling's "Kim" and am about 85 pages through it. So far so very good.

There's no way one can read more than a chapter or two of Rudyard Kipling and not get a sense of the idea of castes and classes. If you grow up in such a system, it apparently seems the most natural thing in the world. And that is scary. It makes one realize that any brutal idea is only a consensus away.

The idea of caste itself inherently challenges the idea of no-caste. Isn't the latter just another learned thing, another convention?

Well, is it? The caste system in India is grounded in religion. So it's no use saying that there is some eternal principle that makes it obvious that no-caste is the way to go because it is via (supposedly) eternal principles that such castes were justified in the first place. So how do we justify our morality if it is not based in objective, eternal, god-like things? And keep in mind that we seem to come up with much better morality when we are not restricted to such hardened things as eternal, god-like laws. After all, if Old Testament law was so god-damned perfect we could, and should, still be governing by those conventions. We should be stoning people for parking violations and such. Could it be that our sense of the eternal and the righteous is seriously flawed?

Of course it is. A child could see this, and yet adults are blind.

Rudyard Kipling's "Kim."

Okay, I finished this book this weekend. It's a good story. It's quite a spiritual story. Although Kim is the main character, you could almost say the story centers around a (Tibetan) Buddhist lama. He's quite an interesting old man.

Quibbles: The character of Kim isn't that deeply explored. He remains somewhat of a mystery and a bit of a stereotype of the crafty street urchin. And the book is hard to read at times because I found Kipling's style of dialogue hard to follow. It was hard to tell who was talking to whom much of the time. And I would say that the plot is a bit short of action much of the time. For those looking for great action and adventure, this ain't your book. This is a slower, almost psychological study of India and the people in it. But it's very good in this regard.

I'm going to rent the 1950 movie with Errol Flynn (as Mahbub Ali) and Dean Stockwell (as Kim). I'll let you know how that turns out.

Thrillers/Detectives: I love Donald Harstad's books ,with the sympathetic Carl “I don’t do heights” Housman as protagonist. And of course Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books are great. And Dick Francis--fabulous.

Science Fiction: Frederik Pohl’s Heechee series: 1.Gateway, 2. Beyond The Blue Event Horizon, 3. Heechee Rendezvous. And there’s a fourth, that I haven’t read.

Humor: Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.

Why did Guinevere cheat on Arthur?

Was she a slut or was it for love? Or was it not for love but for adventure, for that thing we call "romance"? Maybe a woman can't ever be content unless she has men competing for her. Or maybe a woman can never let a man be content.

Arthur never beat her. Arthur never abused her. He loved her as perhaps no man had ever loved a woman in all the fairy-tale stories ever written. So why this deceit which began the rot of that magic time of Camelot?

I'm reading an old book about the King Arthur Legend. It's full of stories of knights that I have never heard of. But what a grand time it was for that one shining moment in Camelot. It was a magic time, but any magic time if it ever flirts with becoming too perfect is eventually torn asunder. That is the way of fairy-tale stories, or nearly any stories. It seems destiny itself is not content with happy endings. Destiny will not rest until everything has at least a chance of moving towards chaos and blood.

Guinevere, if she was feeling a little lusty, would have been better off using Excalibur for purposes not originally intended. And surely Lancelot could think of something better to do than to stab his king and his best friend in the back. There was no shortage of beautiful and available women for grand knights. And he was no rube. He did not just fall off the turnip truck. A knight of his caliber would have attended many tournaments and tasted sweet victory again and again...in all its flavors, including the female ones. Am I to be persuaded that he fell in love? No. I cannot be persuaded of any such thing. Perhaps a man can never be content playing second fiddle if he thinks he has what it takes to be first fiddle. It was a power play for Camelot and the kingdom itself.

I thought one of the better movies portraying the Arthurian legend is the made-for-TV one called "Merlin" in which Sam Neill plays the title character. 1981's Excalibur is another worthy effort at telling the Arthurian legend.

John D. MacDonald was a prolific crime/detective novelist. I read and enjoyed several of his books but I never read any of the Travis Magee series.

I had started reading his novel "Murder in the Wind" but didn't finish it. Several years later possibly like five years went by when I finally picked it back up. When I was done the next day and I mean the next day that morning in the newspaper they reported that John D. MacDonald the author had died.

I was not sure if I had caused his death or prolonged his life.

quote:

I'm reading an old book about the King Arthur Legend.

"The Once and Future King" by T.H. White? "Idylls of the King" by Tennyson?

The script of "Camelot?"

quote:

A law was made a distant moon ago here,
July and August cannot be too hot,
And there's a legal limit to the snow here,
In Camelot.

The winter is forbidden till December,
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order summer lingers through September,
In Camelot.

Camelot! Camelot!
I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But in Camelot, Camelot,
That's how conditions are.

The rain may never fall till after sundown,
By eight the morning fog must disappear.
In short there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happy ever-aftering
Than here in Camelot.

Camelot! Camelot!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Camelot, Camelot,
Those are the legal laws.

The snow may never slush upon the hillside.
By nine P.M. the moonlight must appear.
In short there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happy ever-aftering
Than here in Camelot.

But then the fall:

"Guinevere, Guinevere,
In that dim mournful year
Saw the men she held most dear
Go to war for Guinevere."

And finally:

"Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot."

There's no ideal that can't be spoiled. It's the human condition, and that's why the story resonates to the present day.
.

"The Once and Future King" by T.H. White? "Idylls of the King" by Tennyson?

The script of "Camelot?"

It's an old book titled "The Legend of King Arthur." I forget who the publisher is, but it has not other information in it other than it was produced in the U.S. It looks to be a book from the 1950's or so.

At Project Gutenberg you can find Le Mort d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, which I guess is one of the canons of Arthurian legend, although I admit very little knowledge of all this. I've only just begun to explore it a bit.

You can find a lot of information on the Arthurian legend here, including explanations about the various foundational texts and the various versions of the legend, both early and late period. The Vulgate Cycle is apparently one of the definitive sources of the legend. This seems to be a horribly organized website, but this Age of Chivalry page seems to be a good point of departure.

And does anyone know if this or any other version of the Tristan and Isolde story is worth watching?

That's a wonderful poem, Markle.

There's no ideal that can't be spoiled. It's the human condition, and that's why the story resonates to the present day.

Apparently in the early legends, Camelot started to fall apart when Arthur unknowingly slept with his half-sister. In later versions of the legend, it was the Lancelot/Guinevere betrayal and the quest for the Holy Grail that caused the downfall.

Yeah, there's no ideal that can't be spoiled. And perhaps deeper than that is that this world does not lend itself to unspoiled ideals. They have to be so carefully-crafted and protected. It takes a lot of energy and conscious intention to do so. And in the very act of trying to do all this, it's easy enough to unleash some very dark forces including a smothering conformity, fundamentalism, and lack of creativity and fluidity. Maybe Camelot came crashing down because it made itself vulnerable by trying to be what cannot ever be. And yet we'd be stupid not to try, I think. Who wants to stay forever a monkey and do little more than throw shit at each other? (Not that humans don't do this in much more sophisticated and disguised forms, of course.) But in the end, it seems the story is about the personal ideal needing to exist in oneself. It's a voluntary thing. The ethics of the knight are things that somehow have to stand up via their sheer obviousness. They have to seem self-evidently right. And when something happens that is self-evidently wrong (Lancelot boinking Guinevere), I would say that it does not spoil the righteousness as much as it spoils the idea of self-evident righteousness. Camelot was all a convention. It was a splendid, wonderful convention, but a convention nonetheless. It had to fall. But still, maybe it fell to make way for something else that was truer. And we are all questing in one way or another to discover this. If not, we are dead.

Fresh off of reading Rudyard Kipling's "Kim," what an utter piece of crap the 1950 movie is so far. Did they read the book? But I'll give it a chance.

FYI, Markle, that book I'm reading is actually titled "King Arthur and His Knights." It's published by the Goldsmith Publishing Company of Chicago.

This book seems to be a fairly standard retelling of the Arthurian legend. But I have the distinct feeling that there are so many versions that it would be hard to track them all. In fact, there's simply nothing keeping any of us from writing a good episode and adding to the legend. That seems to be how it was done.

Most of these stories are pretty "fairy-tale-ish". They're just a bit goofy. Too much magic, too little art. The authors of these stories introduce the idea of a white stag that runs out of a fairy forest and they think they've done enough work to make for a good story. The knights go chasing, run across some castle filled with evil men, or beautiful women (usually) both, they fight and fuck. (The fucking isn't explicitly implied. It's just that these stories are always full of a knight and a princess who instantly fall in love upon gazing upon each other for the first time. But I think the fucking is implicitly implied.) And that is about all you get sometimes. Not much. But even it's simplicity has a certain charm to it. But I ran across one story that had a bit more thematic meat to it. The story is called "The Knight of the Sparrow-Hawk." I haven't actually read this version that I found on the web. But it appears to be the same one with the same general plot.

"Kim" got better. And then at the end it got worse again. But I have to admit that it would be a real challenge to write a screenplay from the book. You'd pretty much be left to invent composite characters and invent story lines just to try to get across the general flavor of the book which, as I mentioned earlier, isn't exactly action-packed. What they did was to try to turn it into a buddy-buddy movie – which "Kim" actually is to a great extent. But in the movie the buddies were Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn) and Kim, even though in the book it looked for a time like Mahbub Ali might kill Kim. The real buddies in the book were the lama and Kim.

This 1950 effort didn't get across the general flavor of the book. But it came close at times. But what it ended up being was more like a series of unconnected scenes from the book. The story as a whole didn't work at all. And yet if you look at the musical, Les Miserables, you know that a quite complex work can be condensed down from a book that is not full of immense peaks and valleys but is rather more of a flat plain but with a lot of detail.

This movie might be interesting to children, but I can't really recommend it otherwise.

I just finished "The Second Jungle Book," and I think it's even better than the first. I highly recommend both to all.

"Classical Drawing Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice."
by Juliette Aristides.

This is my new favorite art book. A must for anyone who loves to draw, or who perhaps loved to draw in the past, but lost the spark.

A remarkable book because it's not just a how-to, it's a kind of personal philosophical VISION of what drawing is, what training is, and a kind of rediscovery of traditional values about creating great fine art.

Parts of this book had me saying aloud "YES! YES!", and other parts had me going "HUH?" But it was a joyous ride. Part theory, part practice... a very satisfying read. Energized me to pick up that sketchbook and get out there and draw again with gusto.

I will get that book. Thanks for the tip, brother.

As a child, I drew a lot. I copied Rembrandt etchings, and also comics from the newspaper.
I don't have a natural talent for drawing, though I 'm not quite as hopeless at it as Van Gogh was.
I also painted in oils, copying Van Gogh landscapes. My mother still has a couple of my efforts hanging on the wall.

At the moment I'm happily studying Latin in my free time (found a great course on line). These days I have a great desire to study, and life seems short. I also wish to learn mathematics and ancient Greek.

At the moment I'm happily studying Latin in my free time (found a great course on line). These days I have a great desire to study, and life seems short. I also wish to learn mathematics and ancient Greek.

Brother Yabor, you are a scholar indeed, and a soul who is awake. By the way, I hope you two share some of your sketches or paintings. If you do, I promise to reciprocate and write some bad poetry. Remember, that was supposed to be an inducement, not a threat, but I understand how that could be understood differently.

Latin for fun? I think we have a potential thalo.net shooter on our hands. I'm going to be keeping a close eye on you, Yabor.