Dahlov Ipcar, A Dark Horn Blowing

Dahlov Ipcar (b. 1917) is perhaps best-known as an artist, and secondarily as a writer and illustrator of children's books.  A fine retrospective is The Art of Dahlov Ipcar (2010) by Carl Little. Though she published some thirty books for children, and three young adult novels, she wrote only two books for adults, the novel A Dark Horn Blowing (1978) and a collection The Nightmare and Her Foal and Other Stories (1990), the latter including sixteen stories dating from 1958 through 1988. 

A Dark Horn Blowing is a short novel written in four voices. The first voice is that of Nora, the mother who is magically taken away from her husband and newborn son to Erland to care for the newborn prince of the dying Queen of Erland. The other voices are that of Nora's husband, Eben, who is turned into a goat by the scheming witch Bab Magga; Nora and Eben's son Owen; and the Erland baby prince Elver who Nora calls Eelie. What Ipcar has skilfully done is to take various storylines from folk ballads and weave them together into a setting based upon a mix of English and Scottish folklore and Norse mythology. The result is a fine novel of the interaction between mortals and the fairy world.

Childhood's End Trivialized

When I learned that the SyFy Channel would be showing in December 2015 a six hour mini-series of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science fiction novel, Childhood’s End (1953), I decided I would read the book before I watched the adaptation.  I’m glad I did.  If I’d seen the mini-series first, I would have been far less likely to read the book, and that would be a shame. 

Clarke’s novel may have its faults, but the mini-series makes a travesty of the novel. Part of the appeal of the novel is its scope, and the fact that it presents characters in their appropriate storylines and then leaves them. The mini-series shortens the timeframe of the novel, and gives the characters a youthful long-life, so that it can attempt to build human moments into the narrative.  It doesn’t work—everything seems contrived . . . as in a screenplay. In an attempt to make the story more personally relevant, SyFy has emptied the heart of the story.  Characters are altered into cliches, and milked for situational suspense, without significant context or explanation.  Elements that are barely hinted in Clarke’s novel are expanded to annoying vacuity, like the person of faith who can only see the Overlords as demonic. One character even says “no one should have to apologize for their faith.” This is the screenwriters projecting themselves into the story.  This is not Arthur C. Clarke.

Read the book, by all means.  It’s an interesting take by a person of science into thoughts about the future and destiny of mankind.  But avoid the mini-series. It is a manipulative, soulless, simple-minded, train-wreck sequence of special effects, designed to distract the brain from thinking about the very issues is superficially presents. 

Reality Out of Joint

When the everyday world feels, as it often does, ridiculous and bewildering, I grab another Philip K. Dick novel to read because the act is therapeutic.  Living in a Philip K. Dick novel for a short while makes the real world seem almost reasonable by comparison.  Thus I’ve read a lot of Philip K. Dick novels.

This time I grabbed Time Out of Joint (1959), the story of Ragle Gumm dismantling his 1950s world to realize that his reality was only a construct to shield himself from his harrowing situation in the mid-1990s.  This novel was Dick’s first hardcover book, and it mixes (not quite successfully) his attempts at writing mainstream novels with the inventive outlandishness that makes his science fiction novels so interesting. 

But I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick’s mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?  Admittedly, Time Out of Joint is not top-tier Philip K. Dick, but the way that Hollywood films and television series have (again, with varying degrees of success) promulgated a Dickian worldview into the mainstream makes me wonder.  Time Out of Joint didn’t fulfill my need for reality-crushing paranoia this time.  Perhaps it’s time for a first-tier Dick novel that I haven’t yet read (Martian Time-Slip?), or a re-read of Ubik….

Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer

It's amazing to think that someone could write a whole book about the eight weeks that Oscar Wilde spent in Worthing during the summer of 1894, but Antony Edmonds has done so.  And it is a pretty interesting read, mostly concerning itself with one local sixteen year old boy, Alphonse Conway, whom Wilde befriended and seduced.  Alphonse was of a different sort from the rent boys that Wilde mostly entertained in London, but in the aftermath of the Wilde trials in early 1895, for which Alphonse gave a statement about Wilde's manual and oral stimulations, the shame forced Alphonse and his mother to disappear from the public record.  They presumably changed their names when they moved, possibly to Australia, as Edmonds details in some curious and frustrating detective work in an Appendix. One wishes to know what really happened to Alphonse after 1895, and hopefully the story will surface completely someday. Meanwhile, here is an entertaining discussion of Wilde's summer liaison.

When You're Feeling Down . . .

When feeling down, or braindead, from illness or any other cause, and I just don't feel up to reading real books, I turn to more eclectic fare like quote books, or commonplace books, or collections of graveyard epitaphs.  This time I tackled a collection of insults, The Ultimate Insult (1996), compiled by Maria Leach. Typically, the best quotes were on the topics of politics and religion.  I'll copy some of the best below.

Politics:


“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly, and applying unsuitable remedies.”   Ernest Benn

“My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humoured; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.”   W.H. Auden

“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are Conservatives.”  John Stuart Mill

“Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.”  George Jean Nathan

“All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.” James Reston

“Being in politics is like being a football coach; you have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.”  Eugene McCarthy

 

 Religion:

“Religion is the venereal disease of mankind.” Henri de Montherlant

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.” William James

“The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel, making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”  H.L. Mencken

“The impotence of God is infinite.” Anatole France

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place of so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.”  George Bernard Shaw

“In heaven all the interesting people are missing.” Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian businessman.”   H.L. Mencken

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”  Aldous Huxley

“Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.”  Richard Le Gallienne

“Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.”  Oscar Wilde

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylums shows that faith does not prove anything.” Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.” Thomas Szasz

 “Which is it: is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?”  Friedrich W. Nietzsche

“The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.”  H.L. Mencken

“If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.”  Voltaire

 Most of these comments don't really fit the bill--per the book's title--as insults. They are just truisms.