The Golden Ass

This is a rambling collection of shaggy tales whose unifying thread is Lucius, a young man with a misplaced interest in magic. He seduces a maid named Photis and convinces her to steal a shape-changing ointment used by her mistress to transform herself into a bird.

When Photis brings the wrong stuff he makes an ass of himself, literally, and falls in with bandits, catamite priests, and various other captors. Twice he defends himself by defecating on his tormentors, and narrowly escapes castration, butchering, and a starring role in a sex show.

Occupying a central portion in the book is the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The latter has never seen her husband, who visits her only under cover of darkness. Convinced by her jealous sisters that he is a serpent who must be killed, she lights a lamp while he is asleep and discovers that he is a deity, a beautiful winged man. Cupid flees, and his mother, Venus, exacts retribution. Eventually Jupiter puts an end to the quarrel, and Cupid and Psyche are reunited.

Other tales of greed, cruelty, murder, cuckoldry, and divine meddling are recounted. In an ursine equivalent of the Trojan horse, a bandit named Thrasyleon allows himself to be sewn up in a bear hide to gain admittance to a rich man’s home. Thelyphron’s nose and ears are cut off by witches and replaced with wax replicas.

Miscellaneous Notes

Lucius is rescued by the divine intervention of the Egyptian goddess Isis, who at the time was not a mythological figure in the same sense that Cupid and Psyche are, but actively worshipped throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Romans often diluted their wine with hot water.

Sex is described in mock-heroic terms, either as a wrestling match or form of combat:

"Engage," she said, "and do so bravely. I shall not yield before you, nor turn my back on you. Direct your aim frontally, if you are a man, and at close quarters. Let your onslaught be fierce; kill before you die. Our battle this day allows no respite."

Despite such raunchiness (remarkably vital after 2000 years), I found the book rather shapeless and hard going in places. The combination of magic, gods, and alien culture makes it difficult to understand the author's intentions, and the literary nuances are lost on anyone without a sound knowledge of the classics.

Background

The Golden Ass (aka Metamorphoses, not to be confused with the Metamorphoses of Ovid) is the only Latin novel from the classical period to survive in its entirety. “Its later influence on the vernacular literatures of Europe has been immense,” writes P. G. Walsh, translator of the Oxford University Press edition. Boccaccio imported several of the tales into the Decameron, Bottom is transformed into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a scene in which a drunken Lucius carves up three wineskins, mistaking them for ruffians, is replicated in Don Quixote.

The book’s author, Apuleius, was born in present-day Algeria during the 2nd century AD, educated in Carthage and Athens, and resided for a time in Rome. Though he lectured in Greek and Latin, Punic was most likely his native tongue. A Platonist and devotee of Isis, he was once indicted on a charge of magic (employing love-philtres to induce a rich woman into marriage).

The first English translation was by William Adlington in 1566 and is available here, at the Gutenberg Project. Many other translations are available, some fairly literal, others taking liberties to communicate the style and flow of the original.

An informative discussion of the book can be found here.

Hotel Honolulu

The narrator in Hotel Honolulu is a writer "with a hard-to-pronounce name." He grew up in Medford to become a "grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He arrived in Hawaii at age 49 having left "a house and a wife and a whole life in London."

Now he is the manager of a hotel, which becomes for him "a house of fiction," a collection of tales about himself, the owner, the staff, and the guests. Many of these stories are lurid – lots of sex and corpses. Some are told in a single chapter, others are more expansive. Unifying them are the evolving and somewhat parallel stories of the owner (he marries a whore) and the narrator (he marries a whore's daughter).

The owner is Buddy Hamstra, nicknamed Tuna, a wealthy foul-mouthed joker who won the hotel in a poker game. One of his favourite pranks is putting dogshit in hair dryers. He says to his latest wife, "I wouldn’t piss up your ass if your guts were on fire." Theroux tempers such crudeness (and there is plenty) with numerous literary references, in particular to Tolstoy ("Tolstoys 'R Us"), Henry James (he "would love Hawaii"), and Stephen King ("a modest talent").

In the end the narrator becomes a beekeeper. It's not too different from being a hotel manager: the staff do all the work.

Miscellaneous Notes

The hotel has 80 rooms, the book 80 chapters. The name of the hotel's bar is Paradise Lost. One of the hotel's signature dishes is Serious Flu Symptoms Chili.

Referring to some of the characters in the novel, the narrator says: "If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories." Some of their names: Clamback, Fishlow, Godbolt, Lionberg, Malanut, Figland, and Kamakawiwo'ole, a 650-lb Hawaiian singer who needs a forklift to get around.

The narrator provides a blurb for a novel by Ruth Jhabvala, upon a request from Jackie Onassis (who, after the death of her second husband, worked as an editor for Viking and Doubleday). Does she represent a royal figure in this beehive of a novel? The Kennedy lineage figures elsewhere in the book.

Leon Edel is a Henry James scholar who grew up in Saskatchewan, attended McGill, and was living in Hawaii at the time of his death in 1997. Theroux makes him a character in the novel. Edel, says the narrator, is "the only person in Hawaii who knew me – and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction."

Whereas Theroux's travel books are sometimes referred to as "travel novels," Honolulu Hotel, a work of fiction, is semi-autobiographical. Thus, much of his work is about himself. But then what writer's isn't? Theroux does so more provocatively than most.

Theroux is a beekeeper. The brand of honey he produces is called Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.

Excerpt

"Man, he got one big book, howlie bugga." "I never wen see no book." "In he office." "Bugga office?" "Yah. Howlie bugga office. Big book. Hybolical book." "Eh, no easy fo read, yah." "Too much easy for howlie." "Yah." "Yah. Bymbye, da howlie bugga be rascal." "Frikken big rascal."

The book is Anna Karenina. The "howlie bugga" is the narrator. Like Paul Theroux, he is a "frikken big rascal."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin Interview

Gould's Book of Fish

A Novel in 12 Fish

This is an outrageous fictional account of the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould, who in the early part of the 19th century was transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) for stealing a coat.

The Commandant of the penal colony is a felon himself, having appropriated the identity of a dead English lieutenant. He corresponds with the lieutenant’s sister, who later turns out to be a famous English opium-eater. He wears a gold mask to hide his chancre-ridden face, and diverts himself by riding a locomotive around a circular track and gazing at painted vistas provided by Gould.

The Surgeon, who has hopes of being admitted to the Royal Society, enlists Gould to paint fish, and sends barrels of pickled heads to an English phrenologist. When the Surgeon meets an untimely end, his bones get sent to England too, resulting in a comic scientific mixup.

Gould becomes obsessed with fish. He confuses the people around him with the fish he is painting. He lives in a saltwater cell. He turns into a fish. His book finds its way into the hands of a 20th century purveyor of fake antique furniture named Sid Hammet. Sid turns into a fish.

Each of the 12 chapters is named after a fish and accompanied by a beautiful reproduction from the real William Gould. In the hardcover version there are magnificently marbled endpapers, which resemble a tidepool, and ink colour varies by chapter, reflecting the handmade ink that Gould himself is using. The writing is ornate and grotesque:

As I bob about my cell now I think back on it, we were not surprised when we felt upon us as an implacable hatred the malignant stare of that unholy army of the persecuted—filthy little clawscrunts & half-starved wretches, their pus-filled eyes poking like buttercups out of scaled scabby faces, their misshapen backs hacked & harrowed out of any matural form by endless applications of the Lash; brawn-fallen, belly-pinched wrecks of men bent & broken long before their time, the one I thought the oldest only thirty-two years of age.

This is an entertaining, though at times mystifying, recursive fish story.

Marbled endpapers

Historical Note

Several times the novel mentions Colonel Arthur, the Governor of Van Dieman’s Land. He was recalled in 1836 and the following year installed as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Arthur’s replacement was Sir John Franklin, who governed until 1843, when he was removed from power without warning. Stung by this disgrace, Franklin set out two years later on his final expedition from which no one survived.

The book concludes with a doctored biographical note on Gould. His real bio can be found here.

Cubaism

At Biran she knelt before the shrine where the great man had been educated, but not for the reason the soldier thought. She'd been feeling unwell since joining the convoy at Guardalavaca.  Perhaps it was the bilious colours of her hotel, a clunky Soviet-built affair in the Brutalist style. Or the memory of an American Airlines jet at Holguin, parked next to a sign that said, "Socialismo o muerte."  The soldier, standing in the shade of a tree with strangely geometrical five-sided fruit, shifted his rifle restlessly.  Would he shoot if she threw up?

"He had relatives here."
"Well, it's where he was born."
"No, not him.  He was a communist, you know."
"Of course, he was, but what kind? Analytic or synthetic?"
"You're thinking of someone else."
"Orphist, then. He was elected, right?"

"So we're off on an adventure," she said, climbing into the SUV.

The Losers' Club

Martin Sierra, a would-be writer with a dead-end job, has accumulated a mountain of rejection slips, and is in love with a woman who is in love with another woman. He cruises the personal ads and the club scene in NYC's East Village, which is weird beyond belief -- transvestites, retro-punks, rockabilly boys with "elephant trunk haircuts," nuevo-hippies with "fruit-coloured granny glasses, top hats, and love beads."

He meets Amaris, who's into vampires, and Lola, a painter who takes him to a graveyard to introduce him to her parents. When she shows him her paintings of dismembered NYPD officers, she nudges him and says, "Is mah' clit showin' or what?"

There are some very funny lines in the book. Some typical examples:

"And that was Atomic Bitchwax from their 'Total Castration' CD," Starr would announce. "Catch them later this month at the Fierce Pussy Festival, along with The Post-Christ Disciples, Screaming Headless Torso, and Shirley McDicklips and the Ass Clamps." * * * * On the corner of 6th Street, ragamuffin skate punks congregated, soliciting funds, while up the block, a high-spirited gal with neon-green hair and yellow day-glo lipstick hawked issues of a revived journal entitled, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. "Fuck you, sir?" she cried to the impassive pedestrians. "M'am? Fuck you?"

The author, Richard Perez, cites Bukowski and Henry Miller as influences, and lists as favourite books Lolita by Nabokov, Nausea by Sartre, The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson.

Author Interview

Through Siberia by Accident

Dervla Murphy is a beer-swilling cigar-smoking travel writer with more than 20 books to her credit. She is also an eccentric Irish granny who prefers travelling by bike. She does not own a car, microwave, washing machine, computer, TV, or central heating.

The misfortunes she has suffered during her travels are many:

Afghanistan – broken ribs, scorpion bite
Albania – three attempted robberies
Cameroon – “triple tooth abscess”
Ethiopia – dislocated knee, robbed by bandits
India – heat stroke, mumps, brucellosis (brucellosis!)
Laos – torn tendon in right foot
Madagascar – gout, more broken ribs, Hep A
Nairobi-London flight – life threatening clot in leg
Pakistan - amoebic dysentery
Rumania – robbed by police, concussion, fractured coccyx, broken foot
South Africa – tick bite fever, shattered left arm
Zimbabwe - malaria

In 2002 she crossed the Russian Federation by the Baikal-Amur Mainline, her intention being to cycle through a portion of Siberia. In this she was prevented by a couple of injuries that occurred before her starting point was reached. Instead she continued to travel by train and boat in the Baikal and Sakha areas.

She extols the friendliness of Siberians, and falls under the spell of Lake Baikal and the Lena River. Her observations are intelligent, well-informed, and contain none of the usual whining often found in travel writing. She complains about toilet facilities only once. She is gutsy, pragmatic and open-minded.

My sole complaint is her continual fussing over pets. No incident is too trivial to report on:

As I drank, the pup farted – potent farts which at first provoked only laughter and comically expressed disgust. Then, as they increased in volume and frequency, filling the cabin with asphyxiating fumes, the consensus was that he should be exiled. Tears gathered in the little boy’s eyes. But I had finished my beer, and thawed, and was returning to the platform where the pup could sit on my lap because Baikal’s wind would disperse his wind. When I had found the most sheltered corner he gazed up at my face with a puzzled expression. No doubt I smelt wrong, foreign. Soon he struggled to be free, loudly relieved his bowels behind a milk churn and thereafter farted no more.

Murphy undertook this trip in 2002, when she was in her early 70s. A few years later she returned and completed it, the results being published as Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals.

The Real World

A voice hisses in your ear: "If you're not at the table in two nano-seconds, you're dead meat."

You jump up from the computer and dash out of the room.  You can feel the floor vibrating behind you from your father's heavy tread.

He is a big man with round shoulders and a round back. At the table he hunches over his plate, his head bobbing as he eats.

You mother says, "What were you doing, dear?"

"Just goofing around on the computer."

She shakes her head in disapproval. "You spend entirely too much time on that thing, Donald. You're going to lose touch with reality."

You roll your eyes. If anyone's unreal, it's your parents. Sometimes it's almost as though they occupy a different universe, one which intersects yours only at the supper table.

Take your dad, for instance. Sets off every day briefcase in hand, crisp and alert, and 10 hours later returns home looking like he's been mugged. Who knows for sure where he goes or what he's been up to?

Your mother on the other hand might as well belong to another species. The stuff she does! Cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry. Bizarre!

"Donald."

Maybe  they're not even your parents. Maybe they're aliens.

"Donald?"

From another dimension. And those aren't their real faces, they're masks. Latex masks they peel off every night before climbing into bed and--

"Donald!" hollers your father.

"Yes, dad?"

"Fer crissake, kid, your mother's talking to you."

"Oh, sorry. What is it, mom?"

"There's something your father and I want to tell you."

A horrible thought enters your mind. "Oh no, you're not pregnant, are you?"

She smiles and shakes her head. "How would you like to take a few days off school?"

Your eyes bug out in disbelief. "Seriously?"

"We thought it might be good for you and your father to spend some time together."

"What?"

You mother reaches out to reassure you. Her touch is cool and slimy. "At the office," she says

Your father seizes another lungfish from a platter and bites its head off. "Time you see what the real world is like," he grunts.

Descartes

The Life and Times of a Genius

One of my favourite biographies is a life of Pepys by Claire Tomalin. Pepys lived in the 17th century and was a child during the English Civil War, of which Tomalin said something quite remarkable: the intellectual revolution accompanying it was so profound that it is difficult to understand how people thought before it occurred.

That remark was much in my mind as I read this new biography of Descartes, who also lived in the 17th century. It was a time when religion and science were closely linked, and science itself based upon the discoveries of the ancient Greeks, filtered through centuries of Scholastic thought.

People believed the sun revolved around the earth, and that angels, humans, and animals were linked in a “great chain of being.” There were four elements in the universe (earth, air, fire, and water), and four humours in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), the balancing of which was necessary to maintain good health. Vying with this traditional approach to knowledge was “a heady mixture of notions, beliefs and practices from cabalistic, occult, astrological, alchemical, hermetic and magical sources.”

Into this array of the hidebound and the bizarre stepped Descartes, whose great contribution to science was the assumption that "the natural world can be examined and understood as a system of matter in motion obeying natural laws, without the need for any invocation of supernatural forces or agencies."

He proposed to do this by jettisoning the past and starting anew, basing all science on what could be known for certain – hence his starting point, Cogito ergo sum. He promulgated this approach in his famous Discourse on Method, and applied it in his own investigation of the natural world, which included the grinding of his own lenses and the dissection of cadavers.

His Life

Descartes lived a rather adventurous life for an intellectual barely five feet tall. He spent several years wandering about the continent when it was embroiled in the Thirty Years War (1614-1648), which began as a religious conflict and devastated central Europe. He was, for a period, a mercenary, first joining the Protestant army of the Prince of Orange, and then the Catholic army of Maximilian of Bavaria. He was with the latter at the Battle of the White Mountain (near Prague) where the Protestant forces of Frederick of the Palatinate were routed. [Other sources have also placed him at the infamous siege of La Rochelle, where Cardinal Richelieu starved to death 20,000 Huguenots.]

The author of this bio, A.C. Grayling, has an interesting theory for why Descartes so often turned up in contentious areas in Europe. He may have been a Jesuit intelligence agent. Descartes was educated by Jesuits, who in turn encouraged the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to reclaim Catholic territories lost to Protestant forces during the Reformation.

If true, it may explain why Descartes spent the remaining portion of his life in the Protestant Netherlands. His pro-Habsburg Jesuit interests would not have endeared him to France, which had reasons of its own for opposing Habsburg ambitions. The need for caution was further underlined when in 1633 Galileo was tried for heresy by the Inquisition, and required to remain under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Descartes immediately abandoned plans to publish his masterwork, Le Monde, and changed residences frequently.

Whether or not Descartes was a spy, it was a good time to be in the Netherlands, which was not only wealthy and tolerant, but also enjoying the Dutch Golden Age. Descartes wrote all of his major works there, and shared with Rembrandt the patronage of Christiaan Huygens's father. It was there he met Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom he struck up a close intellectual relationship.

When he finally did venture back to France, he supped with Thomas Hobbes and met Blaise Pascal, who showed him the calculating machine he had made (“the first ever computer, based on the technology of knitting machines”). Improbably his life came to an end in Sweden, where he was enticed by Queen Christina to serve as her personal tutor.

Grayling points out several ironies here. Princess Elizabeth was the daughter of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, whom Descartes helped to overthrow at the Battle of the White Mountain. Christina of Sweden was her cousin, and daughter of the great Gustavus Adolphus, who brought Sweden into the Thirty Years War on the Protestant side. Christina was instrumental in ending the war, and after Descartes died she abdicated and converted to Catholicism.

His Legacy

Many of Descartes’s scientific notions were wrong. Indeed, some of them sound as unlikely as other crackpot ideas of the time. He believed that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul, that the motion of the planets is explained by vortices in a universal fluid, and that vision results from "pressure on the eye" by that fluid.

Despite these missteps, Descartes is today considered the “Father of Modern Philosophy.” Among other achievements he discovered the law of refraction and created analytic geometry, which is taught in high schools today. His Discourse on Method is one of the seminal texts of the modern world. After four centuries the book is still in print and taught in universities around the world.

King of Russia

A Year in the Russian Super League

Dave King coached Canada’s national team for nine years, followed by stints with Calgary, Columbus and Montreal in the NHL. Later while coaching in Europe he was courted by Metallurg Magnitogorsk of the Russian Super League, which includes such fabled teams as Central Red Army and Moscow Dynamo.

In taking the job King became the first Canadian to coach in the league, and led Metallurg to their most successful season ever. They finished first overall with only five regular season losses in 51 games. They also won the Spengler Cup, a five-team mid-season tournament played in Davos, Switzerland. However, they fared less well in the league playoffs. They were hit with a lot of injuries and went out in the semi-finals, losing 3 games to 1, all their losses being in overtime.

Nineteen-year-old Evgeny Malkin was the star of the team, and King has a lot of good things to say about him. When the team played in Finland for the Tampere Cup, Malkin did “such dazzling things with the puck that the fans just stood up and applauded.” But it’s not just his natural skills that make him a great player. “Sometimes Russian players can be extremely dour. Malkin smiles all the time. He seems to enjoy practice. He loves to compete. He plays the game with tempo. He’s unselfish.” Eric Lindros played for King as a nineteen-year-old, and King ranks Malkin ahead of Lindros at that age.

At the start of the season King thinks the team needs more grit, and convinces the management to bring in a couple of warhorses, ex-Leafs Dmitri Yushkevich and Igor Korolev. It was a smart move, as both players made major contributions to the team. King is particularly complimentary about Yushkevich, who with a bad knee is “as close to a one-legged player as you can get.” His great heart makes up for this deficiency. During one game he's hit in the face with a puck. King says:

I didn’t think I’d see him for a while, but the next day, who’s there at practice? It’s Yushkevich -– and he looked like hell. If little kids on the street had seen him they would have run the other way. He looked like a character in a horror movie, with all those scars of his and now his face all lopsided.

Likewise Korolev. In the playoffs he’s cut by a skate and receives 23 stitches. “It was so bad that our doctor was practically throwing up.” Korolev refuses to stay out of the game and comes back “with a great big patch over his eye, blood all over his sweater and his face.”

Observations about Russian Hockey

Before the season begins a Russian Orthodox priest enters the dressing room and sprinkles the players with holy water.

Not only must teams travel vast distances for league play, but Metallurg's pre-season training took place in the Swiss Alps, and included an exhibition tournament in Finland, while mid-season dry-land training was located in Dubai.

For top-level players the Russian Super League is as lucrative as the NHL. Yet on some teams players went unpaid for months.

The amount of physical training is phenomenal. King says:

I’m no doctor, but we don’t have nearly as many groin strains here [as in the NHL] and I’m wondering if that has something to do with the tremendous strength the Russian players develop in their quadriceps... To a man, the leg strength of a Russian player will amaze you. The quadriceps muscles, which deliver so much power to the stride, are huge on virtually every one of them. Right from the time they turn eight or nine years old, they do an immense amount of work to build up their leg strength.

Also the whole approach to coaching is different:

The players rarely complain or give you any emotional reaction... I blame it on the fact that, starting at young age, coaches confront players one-on-one on the bench, in the dressing-room, or on the ice, scolding them harshly for mistakes. They rarely do it privately, so in order to cope the players simply don’t react. They absorb the comments and show their strength to their teammates by wearing a blank expression. I’ve seen grown men coaching young ten- or eleven-year-olds go nose-to-nose with a youngster, ranting and raving almost incoherently -– and the young player simply takes the medicine...

King decided to stay for the 2006-2007 season, but many of his top players had moved on, including Yushkevich and Malkin, who is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins. After just eight games King was fired. His record was 3-4-1.

Anti-Matter Cookies

Whenever my home is invaded by hungry space mutants, I'm ready at the door with a plate of freshly baked quantum snacks. Otherwise they'd start disintegrating the furniture! How do I manage it? Here's what to do.

1. As soon as the little darlings arrive, lock yourself into the kitchen, gather together any radioactive scraps you have on hand, and collide them in a blender until you've produced one cupful of assorted glueballs, semi-sweet quarks, and weak-vector bosons. Add nine cups of dark matter and half-a-teaspoon of Big Bang baking soda.

2. Mix all the ingredients together, form into vibrating strings, and place on a cookie sheet. Set your microwave at 10(12)K and cook for a fraction of a second, then let cool for 10-20 thousand million years.

3. Next, using N-dimensional space, loop back in time so you are waiting at the door with cookies in hand. When the kiddies show up -- their noses runny, their pockets bulging with wormholes and strange attractors -- you'll be rewarded by shrieks of delight.

4. Once the little tykes have gorged themselves, you can send them waddling back out into phase space where they can happily wreck the cosmos and rebuild it as many times as they want before bedtime.