Walking on the Moon

Another Philip Marlowe novel – Raymond Chandler, of course.  Like The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, this is a mystery with Marlowe trying to get to the bottom of it.  As with the other novels, Chandler’s style creates a high contrast world of lush language and minimal, beautiful scene-setting.  Unlike those books, we get a version of Marlowe who is much more vulnerable.

In Farewell, Marlowe is much more in the world he’s exploring.  In the other books I often had the feeling that Marlowe was above the proceedings, even when he was emotionally invested.  There were moments of physical peril, but I never felt it.  More to the point Marlowe never seems to feel it.  That’s not the case in Farewell.

Marlowe’s always been human enough to make some mistakes – and he makes some doozies in Farewell – but he generally is the smartest and highest minded guy in the room.  In Farewell, I came away feeling Marlowe was letting his demons have their way with him more than usual.  And he suffers for it more than usual.

The suffering is never just a plot point; it is the natural consequence of sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong.  It’s Marlowe’s reactions to it that are interesting.  There’s the plot stuff, of course, but more interesting is how it changes him and how he shows it.  Viewing these changes through the stylized idioms of another time makes the workings a little harder to make out, but invests them with more iconic power as well.

As always, if you want a whodunnit, Chandler delivers.  He does so with so much style and literary power – and drive to say new things with a comfortable character – that I’m happy to read it if the case is unsolved.

Strongly recommended.

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Grapes of Wrath, which means that what I think of it doesn’t matter very much.  I have not come away from my recent brushes with Steinbeck particularly impressed, though I have enjoyed some of his work.  I confess that those brushes left me somewhat reluctant to read more of him, but after The Forgotten Man, I was kind of primed for the time period.

Grapes is extremely impressive.  It is well structured, well written, factual, and sympathetic.  It manages to capture the migration of poor farmers from the dust bowl to California and migrant farming during the depression at levels from the strain on individual families to the larger economic forces behind the change.  In fact, though I mentioned the dust bowl, Steinbeck doesn’t; to him, the economic forces were going to cause people to lose farms and migrate even without the drought and erosion of the dust bowl.

Capturing all this is a difficult balancing act.  Structurally, Steinbeck alternates chapters between the large trends and the plight of a specific family, the Joads.  The wide lens shows that the Joads are not alone in their plight and the close chapters show us the specifics troubles of a family in crisis.  He also moves the group successfully through the most informative points in the migration.  They aren’t placed at specific historic events like some early-thirties Forrest Gump, but Steinbeck brings his family into contact with realistic examples of the best and worst of the depression in California.  All the situations the family encounters follow from the real situations; everyone is motivated by real emotions and economics.  There are no mustache-twirling villains here, nor white-hatted heroes, just people dealing with real events as human beings.

Steinbeck’s grasp of the specific situations and the larger forces would make this a textbook if he didn’t populate the world with believeable characters.  There are certainly characters here who act as symbols as well as people, but with the possible exception of Casey the ex-preacher, everyone reacts like a person to the situations around them. The reality of the characters’ reactions helps make his large scale descriptions comprehensible, even as it humanizes their effects.

Despite craft that makes it appear as though Steinbeck is relaying truth to readers, he certainly has a point of view.  I believe he plays fair, explaining comprehensible and even sympathetic motivations for even the least likeable characters.  Still, he is on the side of government help for people in trouble and for those people banding together to help themselves at the expense of farm owners and financiers.

Personally, I am sympathetic to that position, but even if you aren’t Grapes is a vivid, thoughtful description of a trying time in America.  Themes and situations in here apply today as well as they did in the 30s.

Strongly recommended.

The Long Goodbye is the Raymond Chandler novel that most people have heard of that isn’t The Big Sleep. After reading Sleep I was pretty sure that I’d like anything Chandler wrote, and Goodbye didn’t change that impression.

There are many similarities between the two.  Chandler’s voice is the same voice, and Marlowe’s the same character.  There’s a mystery and dames and lots of stylized tough guy talk.  The Los Angeles  setting conveys a sense of place to the point that LA is nearly a character.  In short, all Chandler’s strengths as a writer are here.

The differences are in tone and theme.  The Long Goodbye really couldn’t be titled anything else.  The pacing and tone make the reader feel the passage of time; the plot proceeds episodically over weeks, not the frantic rush of many mysteries.  The revelation is slow and lurching, as one finds out secrets about ones friends and relations in life.

The titular farewell also echoes through the text.  This is a book about absent friends, and not idealized ones.  The friend in question wasn’t Marlowe’s blood brother, nor did they see eye-to-eye. Their connection was made by chance, and develops awkwardly in fits. Yet friendship and decency impose obligations and attachments on men like Marlowe even when the relationship is rough hewn and haphazard.

The two themes play off one another as Marlowe discharges his debts and pays his respects in the fits and starts by which our lives all progress.  Chandler’s exploration of these uses a a clever traditional mystery plot in his unique style.  I never try to figure out whodunnit, but I was pleasantly surprised by the big reveal.  The trip is more interesting than the destination.

Strongly recommended.

Amity Shales’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression takes a critical look at the handling of the Depression by Roosevelt.  Assessing Roosevelt’s economic policy from the a laissez-faire position is timely, and much in vogue, but such an analysis runs counter to the conventional narrative of Roosevelt’s presidency.  It needs to be exemplary to be heard at all, and this work isn’t quite up to that level.

There are ideas worth hearing here, though.  Hoover and Roosevelt both misstepped on what we know to be fundamental economic principals now, including freeing up the money supply in a recession, and made good faith efforts to get people working again through public works. The difference between the two was the extent to which Roosevelt was willing to push his agenda.  Questions about how far he was willing to push constitutional limits of federal power and trade collective versus property rights are interesting to hash out.  It’s also important to try to assess the effectiveness of those actions – moral or immoral.

As a collection of facts and context, The Forgotten Man is fairly sound, and though Shales seems to be sympathetic to the property rights side of the arguments, there seems to be major hunks missing or taken on faith.  I know this is not an economics text or paper, but I would prefer more concrete facts on the table regarding outcomes.

Similarly, it would be helpful to understand the key personalities more clearly so that their decisions are more fathomable.  Arguments about the defensibility of these actions must have come from these actors, and understanding their motivations and justifications is of considerable interest.  Shales goes more for breadth than depth here, bringing many different players on stage rather than deeply analyzing a few.

The choices of the players who get the focus is pretty unusual.  There’s a running narrative thread centered on Wendell Willkie who opposes Roosevelt in the 1940 election.  Willkie seems to be an interesting figure, from roots in the power utility to the sorts of changes that make a man a political contender, but as a laissez-faire standard bearer he seems to lack conviction and success.  There’s also a sizeable amout of aside time spent on William Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Again, an interesting figure, but strangely out of place in an economic story.

Now, perhaps I am misreading Shales intent.  Perhaps she intended this as a broad history of this period.  If so, her sweep seems to stick on a few areas; if not there’s many a quirky point that doesn’t seem to belong.

As I say, there are many interesting points made in the work.  I definitely learned things reading it, but, for me, it raises more questions than answers.

EJ Montini explains why you might run against one of the most popular presidential candidates in decades despite evidently having no voice in choosing your running mate and knowing you were going to lose a month out.  He’s a smart man, my cousin.

And you’re not likely to hear a piece of music described more obliquely than Warren Ellis does.  Nor more accurately.

I thought I’d written about flying to Hesperia Airport before, but it seems like I didn’t.  I flew there again today, so I’ll write about it now.

Hesperia is the airport in a fairly small desert town north of the Inland Empire.  The town is north of Lake Arrowhead and sort of along the way to Barstow.  It was growing pretty rapidly during the housing boom.  The airport is used primarily by the Mercy Air air ambulance folks, but there are hangars and some based planes there as well.  There is also an inexpensive fuel pit and a restaurant.  The restaurant is what drew me in there, of course.

I’d been out to Hesperia once many years ago looking for a restaurant that I’d heard of, but it was closed.  The fellow working the local FBO offered to share his sandwich with me, which was kind, but I didn’t take him up on it.  I saw from our friends at AirNav that there was indeed a new restaurant there, and tried it out.

The restaurant itself is a classic airport cafe: sandwiches, burgers, and breakfasts.  Everything I’ve had there is really tasty and the staff is very friendly and helpful.  It’s a good fly-in joint.

The field itself is kind of small.  There’s ample runway length, but it’s kind of tucked away and there’s not a lot around the airport.  It feels very close to the houses and highway nearby. It’s also in the high desert, so it can be windy and is higher than it might seem.  When I was there today, the density altitude was in the 6000′ range, and it was very noticeable on takeoff.  The wind was gusty though only 10 knots or so.

I took a few pictures.  I love the airport restaurant sign, and found a Cessna labeled with “Realtor.”  I have no idea why you’d need to label a plane with that, but there must be a reason.  For someone.

I seriously need to get all my news from these guys.  Via Boing Boing.

The new Tron trailer is up, courtesy of Boing Boing.  We love our CS actives.

Many people are concerned about the liberties that social media, especially facebook, take with their information.  Recently Warren Ellis mentioned that the likeness of a friend of his had been used without her permission in the theatrical trailer for a social media movie.  Her response is awesome, both in that it is simply more speech rather than some sort of suit, and in its content.

Brenda’s in the other room watching The Old Spice Guy.  That’s cool; he’s pretty awesome. But, me, I prefer to kick it old school.

Then again, you knew that.