The Professional

Frank Hughes is a war vet and old friend of Doc Carroll. He's doing a magazine piece on Eddie Brown, a 29-year-old welterweight whom Doc has been managing for nine years.

He was Doc's fighter. It is what a painter does in his paintings so that you would know them, even without his signature, and what the writer does in his writings, if he is enough of a writer, so you know that no one in the whole world but he could have been the writer.

Eddie's not just a better boxer than the current champ, he's a decent hard-working guy. He's not a showboat. He's as mild-mannered as his training camp diet -- stewed prunes, dry toast, soft-boiled eggs. Everybody likes him, and now he's got a shot at the title.

The month-long training camp and the fight itself are seen through Frank's eyes. We meet an assortment of colourful characters:

Johnny Jay - Doc's pail man
Memphis Kid - Eddie's sparring partner
Barnum, Polo and Charlie Keener - managers
Penna, Schaeffer, Cardone and Booker Boyd - fighters

Only a few of them truly understand the sport of boxing, which is "just too intricate for the average person, fight fan or not, to comprehend." To Frank and Doc, the same seems true for just just about everything else in the world. "Dreadful" is Doc's favourite word.

Frank and Doc live in hotels and do a lot of drinking and telling of stories -- about the war, about boxing and baseball. Like the time Doc opened his door and an enforcer named Razor Pete took a swipe at him with a knife. Doc drops him with a couple of punches, then politely lifts him to his feet and assists him to the elevator. He and Frank visit Razor Pete's boss, a gangster who wants a piece of Doc's fighter. The gangster compliments Frank's writing, Doc returns Pete's broken knife, and they have a friendly drink together and talk baseball.

Years later Frank bumps into Razor Pete, who is in poor health by then. He's asthmatic and has a bad heart. He offers profuse thanks for a glass of water.

It's a manly world where politeness is not a sign of weakness.

Hemingway

Papa's influence is obvious from page one. The author, W.C. Heinz, met him during WW2, and when The Professional came out in 1958, Hemingway immediately cabled him from Cuba, saying: "This is the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter."

This edition includes a foreword by Elmore Leonard, who became acquainted with Heinz after he too wrote a congratulatory letter. Leonard mentions his own debt to Hemingway, and remarks that Heinz was "the all-important link, the next step" in his own development as a writer. The two met later when Heinz came out to Detroit to interview Gordie Howe, who lived a few blocks away from Leonard.

Heinz passed away just last year. He's been inducted in the Boxing Hall of Fame, and his "Death of a Racehorse" is considered one of the best sports pieces ever written. His collaboration with a physician resulted in the novel MASH, which appeared under the pseudonym Richard Hooker.

Descartes' Bones

A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

Descartes is:

a) the father of modern philosophy
b) the intellectual father of modern France
c) the author of one of the most influential books of all time
d) as peripatetic after death as before

Who would have guessed the last point? In 1650 Descartes died in Sweden, where his remains stayed for 16 years until exhumed and returned to France. But upon opening the casket, the skull was discovered missing and the rest of the skeleton to be in poor condition. Many of the bones had dissolved into dust.

The unravelling of this mystery spans several centuries, and sounds as fantastic as a Dan Brown novel. When the skull was finally located, it was covered with graffiti -- a poem in Latin and the signatures of successive owners.

This part of the story reminded me of the bizarre travels of Einstein's brain, and the stuffing and mounting of Jeremy Bentham's body topped off with a wax head, which itself has wandered off on more than one occasion.

But no less fascinating is the role that Descartes' bones continued to play in advancing science. In telling this part of the tale, the author elucidates some aspects of the Enlightenment, drops in on the French Revolution, and spends time with Broca, Cuvier, and other famous figures. Phrenology, the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and the weight of Byron's brain are just some of the odder corners of science visited.

The world's greatest assembly of scientists had reached a conclusion, one that rested not on an ideal of certainty but on the modern notion of probability. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

This is a great book. Check out its website.

Aqualung

Walking home at night, the weight of the tank on my shoulder, I'm thinking about partial pressures, and residual nitrogen, and how your mouth resembles a second-stage regulator.

All around me houses are hunched like wrecks at the bottom of the sea, lovers inside groping for each other like divers at 20 fathoms.

Bottom time, you and I once referred to it with sly smiles, but that was long ago, and still there are months of decompression ahead of me.

Now the raw winter wind slices at my eyes so I put on my mask and gaze up at the inverted sky, where an ocean of air ends in breathless space.

Finally I arrive home, and swim inside through a gash in the hull.

Fiskadoro

This is a post-holocaust tale published in 1985, just before the end of the Cold War. It's a mythopeic and hallucinatory work that questions the nature of reality, especially when memory fades and history is lost.

Fiskadoro is a 12-year-old boy living near Key West, now renamed Twicetown after being hit by two missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The warheads were duds.

Life is simple and uncouth, facilitated by the forgiving climate, the sea loaded with fish, and the debris of a pre-holocaust world. People use odd names, like Flying Man and King David Rat, and speak a mangled patois: "All I own do is gepback home."

Woven into the narrative are several journeys, the most important of which are the first two:

1. Fiskadoro, an Orpheus-like figure, is being taught how to how to play the clarinet by Mr. Cheung. He's captured by swamp-people who erase, among other things, his memory.

2. Mr. Cheung's grandmother was one of the last people to escape from Saigon before it fell to Communist forces. Now she is scarcely cognizant of her surroundings. Her long ordeal is described in detail.

3. Mr. Cheung himself travels to another island in pursuit of knowledge--a book that will explain the nuclear holocaust. He "believed in the importance of remembering."

4. Mr. Cheung's half-brother is "a famous, almost legendary figure" whose current name is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He recounts an odyssey to the mainland where he and his shipmates are captured by gamblers. He wants to obtain the drug used by the swamp-people to obliterate memories.

Fiskadoro is not a slice of sci-fi. It is a gritty surrealistic tale, closer to a novel like Fishboy by Mark Richard than McCarthy's The Road or Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The author, Denis Johnson, is an award-winning poet and novelist. Some of his other novels are Already Dead, Recusitation of a Hanged Man, and Tree of Smoke.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they smoked their cigarets in the old days...

Radio Cuba

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking is a writer of cosmological space westerns, the most famous of which is this book, A Brief History of Time. His use of literary devices such as imaginary time and virtual particles makes our universe seem like the world of Bizarro in Superman comics, or an updated version of Alice in Wonderland.

Characters

First of all there’s Newton, a rather nasty fellow who pursued counterfeiters all the way to the gallows. Einstein was much nicer, but he disliked gambling, especially with dice. Heisenberg couldn’t make up his mind about anything, Godel proved nothing was provable, and Feynman said everything was possible. Fortunately most of these guys have a sense of humour, like the comedy team of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow.

The villains of the book are as odd a bunch as you’ll find this side of a pack of cards. There’s a secret society of Mesons, and a couple of clowns named P-Brane and Glueball, and the weak but chubby Massive Vector Bosons.

Then there’s the Quarks, a slippery bunch named after a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and described by Hawking as “somewhat metaphysical.” Thus did modern literature influence particle physics – not just in the trivial matter of names, but in the very subjectivity of existence.

Or to put it another way, stream-of-consciousness helped pave the way for quantum mechanics.

Plot

This is your basic coming-of-age story.

Quotes

A black hole has no hair.

String theory is rather like plumbing.

The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

The total energy of the universe is exactly zero.

Why do we remember the past but not the future?

An ordinary particle moving forward in time is equivalent to an antiparticle moving backward in time.

Black holes are not really black.

The Author

In my copy of this book, the previous owner had left a newspaper clipping dated 1995. It announced Hawking's second marriage. His first wife was quoted as saying that Hawking “is in the grip of forces that he can’t control.”

Of course, that is literally quite true. In 1963 he was diagnosed with ALS and given no more than two years to live. Yet despite being almost completely paralyzed and no longer able to speak, he's become a world-famous theoretical physicist and cultural icon. He’s addressed NASA, experienced zero-G, and appeared on numerous TV shows, including a famous episode of ST:TNG.

His picture on the book’s cover -- a crumpled body against a backdrop of stars -- sums up the pathos of human existence.

A Brief History of A Brief History

1988 - A Brief History of Time
1996 - The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Edition
1998 - A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition
2005 - A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow)
2008 - A Brief History of Time: 20th Anniversary Edition

More Cosmological Westerns

Interested readers might try the Shrodinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, and The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind.

The Road to Oxiana

In 1933 an Englishman named Robert Byron began a pilgrimmage to Persia, or what is now called Iran.

His main interest was Islamic architecture, and one of his goals was to reach the ancient river of Oxus (now called the Amu), which at the time marked the boundary between Afghanistan and the former USSR.

His description of this journey has been called the first modern travel book for its unique combination of humour, erudition, and splendid writing. His influence on Bruce Chatwin is immediately obvious.

One of my favourite passages, which even my schoolboy French was able to comprehend, takes place in Damascus:

“Guide, Monsieur?” Silence. “Qu’est-ce vous désirez, Monsieur?” Silence. “D’où venez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Où allez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Vous avez des affaires ici, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Baghdad, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Téhéran, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous faites, Monsieur?” “Je fais un voyage en Syrie.” “Vous êtes un officier naval, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?” “Je suis homme.” “Quoi?” “HOMME.” “Je comprends. Touriste.”

It's a silly passage, but a good example of Byron's irrepressible wit, which runs throughout the book.

Sadly, the places he visited (Iran under Reza Shah, Afghanistan with Russia menacing the border) are no less volatile today. When he learns a rumour is circulating that he works for the Secret Service, he remarks prophetically, "Next time I do this kind of journey, I shall take lessons in spying beforehand. Since one has to put up with the disadvantages of the profession anyhow, one might as well reap some of its advantages, if there are any."

Back in England he spoke out loudly against the policy of appeasement, and in 1941 agreed to work for British Intelligence. The ship he set out on to return to the Middle East was torpedoed before it arrived. He was only 36.

The edition of The Road to Oxiana pictured above contains excellent introductions by Rory Stewart and Paul Fussell, as well as maps and several B&W photos of the buildings that Byron sought out.

If you enjoy travel writing, read this book.

Untitled

Outside, the city was lurching into stunned awareness. The clockwork began to turn, motors gasped like asthmatics, and smoke dribbled into the sky. People appeared on the streets as though propelled from cuckoo clocks, only to be packed into subway cars like cans on a conveyor belt.

Through this turmoil trotted Danny, as unconcerned as a hound free of its leash. He moved along board fences plastered with posters and curses, and came to a rail line which he followed over a canal of oily water by means of a blackened steel bridge.

This brought him to a section of the city composed of puffing factories and battered warehouses, and then to a suburb of row after row of grimy houses.

All day he walked, until at length the skyline rose behind him and the impatient grunting of autos diminished.

Computer Fungus

It was inevitable that this would happen, that an organism miles in length would eventually find its way here, a dump clogged with circuit boards. The fungal mat sent forth rhizomorphs that explored the fibreglass substrate and traced the metal rootlets within. The mycelium took on a geometrical shape, and the fruiting bodies became boxy and cubical with gills that resembled the metal vanes of heat sinks. Soon digital spores drifted across the landscape, and, after warm summer rains, hackers roamed the forest looking for mushrooms to incorporate into their computers.

Gravity's Rainbow

"A great steaming slagheap of a novel." That's how David Quammen puts it in one of his essays.

Paragraphs go on forever, scenes and POVs blur into an endless torrent. Characters flicker past with names like Lloyd Nipple, Ronald Cherrycoke, and Blodgett Waxwing. Four hundred of them, including an octopus and a guy who can change the colour of his skin. Take a trip down a toilet, throw pies at airplanes, relax at the Casino Hermann Goering.

When you come up for air you're dazed and blinking, disoriented by the encyclopedic detail, nasty sex, strange conspiracies, acronyms and aliases, druggie humour, snippets of German, and doggerel like "The Penis He Thought Was His Own."

Oh, and don't forget the formulas:

So Is It Any Good?

Imagine Richard Brautigan and Henry Miller co-writing an entire season of The X-Files and you'll get a notion of what to expect. Portions of the novel are absolutely brilliant. But it is such a convoluted work that you'll need to read it several times to get a handle on it. You'll need to study it. But look on the bright side. Master the book and you'll be able to teach the sucker at university.

Search for the word "Vsesoynznyy" in Google Books and read 2 or 3 pages for a sample of Pynchon at his best, an inspired mixture of farce and erudition.

Now decide. Is this, as some feel, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century? Or is it, as the 1974 Pulitzer committee said, "unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene"?

Need Help?

You can buy Steven C. Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel. You can also check out the following sources on the Web:

Character Index
Gravity’s Rainbow Wiki
NY Times review by Richard Locke
Ultra-Condensed Version by Glenn Davis
Some Things That “Happen” (More or Less) in Gravity’s Rainbow by Michael Bell

Edward Whittemore

A forgotten author whose work reminded me very much of Pynchon is Edward Whittemore, author of the hard-to-find "Jerusalem Quartet," which consists of Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. I've only read Jerusalem Poker, but I'd definitely put it in the same ballpark as the two Pynchon novels I've read, V and Gravity's Rainbow.

Whittemore was apparently as inscrutable as Pynchon.