belated Wednesday reading post, etc.

[kindkit]

1) Currently reading:

The Dark Descent: The Evolution of Horror, ed. David G. Hartwell

I have a weakness for horror fiction, at least if it's not too gory (I can't watch horror movies because all they are is gore). Standout so far is the extraordinarily strange Victorian children's story "The New Mother," by Lucy Clifford, in which the mother of two naughty children warns them that unless they behave "I [shall] have to go away and leave you, and to send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail."


Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45, by Brian MacArthur.

Gory and brutal enough to be horror fiction, except that it was all real. It's a gripping and informative book, although marred by MacArthur's tendency to unquestioningly reproduce what survivors had to say about the innate barbarism and cruelty of the "Japanese character." Coming from survivors, men who endured atrocities (and who also were products of an era when that kind of racism was the norm among white people), that sort of thing is somewhat excusable, but the author of a modern history ought to do better. The war crimes the Japanese military committed against its prisoners need to be contextualized and understood, not dismissed as innate cruelty manifesting itself. (I still think MacArthur's book is less racist than a lot of others on this topic, though.)


Recently Finished:

The Last Lost World: Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.

I finished this in the sense of giving up and setting it aside. The authors are trying to reproduce what Stephen J. Gould did so well: explaining the science of a phenomenon while also elucidating the history of how it's been understood. Unfortunately, the Pynes are no Stephen J. Gould. There's not enough actual science in the science-y part, and the Pynes try to connect the science with the history of science via a series of relentlessly labored metaphors of rifts, ice, and so on. It's all too high-flown and artsy to no good purpose, and I say this as someone whose education was all in the humanities rather than in science.

The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories, ed. Peter Haining

A nice collection. The story that has stuck with me most is not any of the very modern ones, but John Buchan's classic "The Grove of Ashtaroth," about a white settler in southern Africa who falls sway to a mysterious presence inhabiting a grove on his property. It's kind of racist (not particularly about Africans but about the settler, whose Jewish ancestry, we're told, makes him susceptible to the influence of strange gods), but there's a moral ambiguity that's refreshing in this kind of story. It's also pretty homoerotic, which is always a plus for me.


What I'm reading next:

I'm not sure, actually. I have many (too many) books floating around that I've acquired and not yet read, so I should get to those.


2) Last night I watched The 49th Parallel, an early Powell and Pressburger collaboration. It's very much a propaganda film, tracing the nefarious deeds of the survivors of a German U-Boat who are stranded in Canada and trying to make their way into the then-neutral United States. There's a lot about the evils of Nazism and the virtues of democracy, with occasional hilarious-but-not-really ironies like the condemnation of Nazi racism that coexists with the fact that the only characters of color with speaking parts are servants, or the paean to Hutterite religious settlements as anarchic utopias where everyone is free to work as they see fit . . . except the women, whose job is to look after the men. But it's got good acting. Eric Portman is fantastic as the chilly Nazi Lt. Hirth, Laurence Olivier chews some scenery to great effect, and Leslie Howard steals the whole film as Philip Armstrong Scott, a genial, "decadent" English expatriate writer who sometimes seems as though he's five seconds away from inviting his Nazi guests--he doesn't know they're Nazis--to join him in an orgy. It's very pretty, too, with lots of rugged Canadian landscapes in black and white.

3) Food: Yesterday I made these chocolate lambic cupcakes with raspberry cream cheese frosting as a way to use up the half bottle of lambic that has been taking up space in my fridge since New Year's Eve. They are delicious. I'd recommend only making half the quantity of frosting, though, as I now have a container of unused frosting in my fridge. It's too delicious to throw away but I don't know what I'm going to use it for.

And currently I'm making baked beans. It's been cold here, which has made me crave the winter foods of my childhood.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

My dad was in a Japanese prison camp in Burma for eighteen months. In his war memoir he wrote (among much else), "Another area of our inconsistent treatment was in the behavior of our guards. Some were consistently brutal, some occasionally so, and a few were generally friendly and interested in us. These latter taught us a bit of Japanese and learned some English from us, and we communicated surprisingly well, though it took time (of which we both had plenty). They wanted to know about our families, the schools we went to, what position in baseball each of us played, and all about our sex lives."

I don't think I've seen the MacArthur book -- have reserved it at the library.

[kindkit]

That's fascinating. Secondary sources occasionally mention that some of the guards were friendly, but usually and for obvious reasons they go into much more detail about the brutality.

Did your dad publish his memoir?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

No, the memoir hasn't been published -- that's something I'm meant to be working on, but there's a long list of such. Dad died just this last June, at nearly 94. We also have a long series of letters between him and his father during the war; Dad kept his father's letters to him as well as carbon copies of the ones he wrote (he had a small typewriter with him) and when he was shot down all his effects were sent back home, so they were kept safe. They start in September of 1942, and he'd joined the RAF in the summer of 1941, before the US was in the war (later transferring to the Army Air Corps), so presumably there's a bunch missing from the beginning.