In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton

Typical star wars fare

American science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton’s career spanned from the late 1920s through the 1960s. His novella Crashing Suns was published in the August and September 1928 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This is one of Hamilton’s first handful of published writings. He was a prolific contributor to Weird Tales, making his debut in 1926 and eventually publishing 79 stories and novellas in that magazine.

Crashing Suns takes place about a hundred thousand years in the future. Mankind has colonized all the planets of the solar system. (No mention is made of Martians or other alien races.) The narrator, Jan Tor, is a captain in the Interplanetary Patrol, the law enforcement agency for the solar system. He gets summoned by the Supreme Council, the governing body of the League of Planets, to return to Earth for an emergency meeting. In this council meeting, it is revealed that a nearby star system, that of the red giant Alto, has changed its course and is heading towards our sun. In a few months, Alto will collide with our solar system, wiping out all human life.

Much like Bruce Willis in Armageddon, Jan Tor is tasked with leading a mission to stop this catastrophe. Engineers on Earth have created the first-ever interstellar spaceship, in which Jan Tor will lead a small team to Alto to investigate the cause of the red giant’s wandering trajectory. After literally five minutes of preparation, Jan Tor and his crew load into the new spacecraft and take off for Alto, a voyage that will take a few weeks. What they find when they get there will be no surprise to anyone, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say. For the most part, the story proceeds as expected from that point forward. Crashing Suns is the first in a series of seven stories featuring the Interstellar Patrol, presumably the successor to this story’s Interplanetary Patrol.

I had read a couple of Hamilton’s stories in the past and found them to be quite original and innovative. Crashing Suns, however, is very familiar fare. That’s likely due to the fact that it was so early in Hamilton’s career that he was still finding his way, as was the science fiction genre in general. Much of the sci-fi published in the pulp magazines of the 1920s all reads alike. One can tell from Crashing Suns, however, that Hamilton is a good writer in terms of characterization and suspense, but the general plot is common to many science fiction stories and every sci-fi movie since Star Wars. I will continue to look into Hamilton’s work, since what little I’ve read indicates a promising talent, but next time I’m choosing a story I’ll aim closer to the 1960s than the 1920s.

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner

An early collection of brain teasing quickies

Martin Gardner was a popular and prolific nonfiction author of the latter half of the twentieth century. Just as Carl Sagan was the great popularizer of science during that time period, Gardner was the great popularizer of mathematics. For over 25 years, he wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he presented all sorts of mathematical curiosities and puzzles and educated readers on the mathematical laws and theories behind them. These columns were collected into over a dozen books that enlarged his audience well beyond the subscription list of Scientific American.

Mathematical Puzzles, an early collection of Gardner’s mathematical writings, was published in 1961 and later rereleased by Dover Publications in 1986 as Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles. The puzzles in this volume are not taken from Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Some of them previously appeared in a magazine called Science World, for which Gardner also wrote a column entitled On the Light Side from 1957 to 1959. These are not the chapter-length mathematical explorations from Mathematical Games but rather what one typically finds in a collection of brain teasers: items of one to two pages, essentially a word problem followed by an explanation of its solution. Altogether, there are about 60 puzzles in this book. They are arranged into ten categories such as money puzzles, speed puzzles, plane and solid geometry puzzles, and probability puzzles.

Compared to his writings for Scientific American, these little brain teasers are not Gardner’s best work. It’s amazing how many of these puzzles conclude with “Nope. It can’t be solved.” You read the first page, wrack your brain to try to come up with a solution, and then turn the page to find out there’s no viable answer. Where’s the fun in that? If it were one or two puzzles, that would be reasonable, but it seems like nearly half the book is unsolvable. Another frustrating aspect of brain teasers in general is that they are essentially mathematics written with words, and if the author isn’t exactly precise and clear in the wording of the problem, then you end up feeling like you’ve been cheated or you wasted your time. Gardner’s guilty of that as well in a number of these riddles. Such occasions call to mind the questions on your old school math tests that no one in the class got right because the teacher worded them poorly.

Nevertheless, there’s still fun to be had here and math to be learned. Every puzzle has its little twist that forces you to think outside the box of straightforward solutions. As the aforementioned list of categories indicates, there are little lessons on geometry, probability, and arithmetic. These are not easy math puzzles, but you don’t need to know algebra or calculus to figure them out. The most unfamiliar area for most will probably be the little section on topology. Gardner also describes some games of the abstract strategy variety (think checkers or tic tac toe, for example) that can be played with pencil and paper, coins, or other everyday items.

The material here may not be Gardner’s most ingenious writings, but this little book still does its job adequately. The next time I download a volume of Gardner’s mathematical puzzles, however, I’ll make sure it’s one of the 15 volumes from his Scientific American series. 

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy does Elmore Leonard

Few American authors garnered as much critical acclaim over the last half century as Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). He published his first novel in 1965, but it wasn’t until about 30 years later that he achieved any commercial success. I rarely quote Wikipedia, but this was too good to pass up: “As of 1991, none of McCarthy’s novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and for most of his career, he did not even have an agent.” He hit it big in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses and has since become a household name. Not only the appeal, but the style of his work seemed to get more commercial in his latter years. He started out as the new William Faulkner, but by the time he died, it seems he had discovered an affinity for pulp fiction. McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was published in 1992. The film version, made 15 years later, won the Oscar for Best Picture. This book is a crime novel, similar in style and subject matter to Elmore Leonard’s work, but as he did before with Blood Meridian, McCarthy instills this gritty, violent story with the deep thoughts of highbrow literature.

In the borderlands of Southern Texas, Llewelyn Moss is out hunting antelope when he spots a group of trucks parked out in the middle of nowhere. Upon closer inspection, he finds the site littered with dead bodies. In an apparent drug deal gone bad, it seems that both sides have massacred each other. As is often the case in such scenes, there’s a briefcase full of money on site. Moss absconds with what he estimates to be 2.4 million dollars. The drug cartel naturally wants its money back, so it sends men after Moss. Among those hunting him down is a mystery man named Anton Chigurh, a cold-blooded assassin who uses an unusual weapon to make his kills, though he’s pretty good with a shotgun as well. One way to get to Moss is through his wife, so she has to go on the run as well. Ed Tom Bell, the local sheriff, considers it is duty to serve and protect the citizens of his county, including Mr. and Mrs. Moss. He sets out investigating the case, hoping to catch up with Moss before the killers find him.

Much of the plot takes place in motel rooms and highway diners on Texas desert roads, where gunfights frequently ensue. There are two aspects of the book that elevate this novel from a genre thriller to a great work of American literature. First is the character of Chigurh, a force of nature when it comes to dealing death, but also a philosopher when it comes to dealing dialogue. Second are the monologues of Ed Tom Bell that are interspersed in italics throughout the primary third-person narrative. These monologues alone could constitute a book worthy of a Pulitzer. Bell contemplates his mortality, old age, marriage, his regrets as a law enforcement officer, a former soldier, and a man, and how the world has changed for the worse on his watch.

Similar to Leonard’s writing, No Country for Old Men is written in curt, choppy prose—sometimes so curt and choppy that it’s a little tough to figure out what’s going on. It reads like an exercise in using as few words as possible. There are no visual or biographical descriptions of the characters, you just have to figure out who they are by what they say. The dialogue is brilliantly written, again calling to mind Leonard, but without so much overt humor. The manner of speech employed by the characters, intelligently rendered in authentically down-home diction, is also reminiscent of Charles Portis’s great Western novel True Grit.

Most literary critics don’t consider No Country for Old Men to be McCarthy at his best because it doesn’t have the Faulknerian profundity of his earlier novels. For that same reason, it may be his most accessible book to an audience of general readers raised on crime films and Westerns. This is definitely not a conventional thriller, but I was riveted to every page. I’ve liked McCarthy’s books in the past, and I like Leonard, so to me this novel was the best of both worlds.

The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

The mundane aspects of space exploration

American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote a series of roughly two dozen short stories and novels known as his Future History. These works were all originally published in fiction magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction or The Saturday Evening Post before being gathered into book-length collections. The first collected volume of Heinlein’s Future History fiction, published in 1950, was The Man Who Sold the Moon. The second collection, published in 1951, is The Green Hills of Earth. This latter volume contains ten short stories that were originally published in periodicals from 1941 to 1949. The book’s final selection, “Logic of Empire,” clocking in at 41 pages, is the longest entry in the volume. The rest of the pieces included are truly short stories in the 10- to 20-page range.

Many consider Heinlein to be the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. Given such high praise, I found The Man Who Sold the Moon rather disappointing. Most of the stories were more about business and logistical matters than science and exploration. What was missing was any daring speculative thinking, deep thoughts, or any sense of wonder. In his desire to make his future realistic, Heinlein focuses on very mundane aspects of space travel and extraterrestrial colonization. For the most part, The Green Hills of Earth continues this prosaic approach. “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” for example, is about pressurized tunnels below the surface of the moon, and what happens when one springs a minor leak. “Delilah and the Space-Rigger” is set at the construction site of a space station, but the story is essentially about a human resources matter.

The first six stories in this volume are mostly about mankind’s base on the moon, the better part of which is built underground. There’s some mining going on. It’s not terribly exciting stuff. With story number seven, however, the book takes a turn for the better. In “—We Also Walk Dogs,” which takes place around the 1990s of Heinlein’s Future History timeline, mankind has established colonies on many planets and moons of the solar system, and some of those new worlds have Indigenous inhabitants—Martians, Venusians, etc. This story is essentially about a glorified interplanetary concierge service, but it provides an intriguing introductory look into Heinlein’s vision of solar system colonization.

The book’s title selection is about an interplanetary hobo-troubadour poet, kind of a Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly of outer space, who writes a famous folk song, “The Green Hills of Earth.” The aforementioned “Logic of Empire,” is the other notable piece in this volume. Two well-to-do Earthlings argue over whether the system of indentured servitude that prevails on Venus qualifies as slavery or not. Then the pair of friends get drunk and accidentally sign themselves to long-term contracts of hard labor on Venus, a jungle planet with amphibious natives. It’s really more of a prison story than a sci-fi story, but sci-fi has often been used to comment on social issues, and here Heinlein uses his dystopian Venus to critique colonialism and the exploitation of developing nations. I found the blunt pessimism of the ending admirably unexpected.

So far I haven’t been overly impressed by Heinlein’s Future History. Personally, I prefer the Terro-Human Future History of H. Beam Piper, which may not be as scientifically realistic as Heinlein’s universe, but it’s a lot more fun to read. Given his high renown, I’m guessing Heinlein has better work in his oeuvre. I suspect that his stand-alone novels, like Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers, are a whole different kettle of fish, so I’ll probably head in that direction next.

Stories in this collection

Delilah and the Space-Rigger

Space Jockey

The Long Watch

Gentlemen, Be Seated

The Black Pits of Luna

It’s Great to Be Back

“—We Also Walk Dogs”

Ordeal in Space

The Green Hills of Earth

Logic of Empire

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill

Zola’s effect on American and Japanese literature

If you read this blog religiously (which I’m sure no one does), you’ll know that one brand of fiction that Old Books by Dead Guys really likes is Naturalism. I started this blog by reviewing the complete works of Emile Zola, Frank Norris, and Jack London, all of them naturalist writers. The naturalist movement, spearheaded by Zola, was an offshoot of realism. It’s known for hyper-detailed and brutally objective descriptions of settings and social milieus. Naturalist authors often have an atheistic bent; they emphasize how human lives are influenced and governed by scientific laws of evolution and heredity, physiology, sociology, and psychology. I’m a well-read fan of French and American literary naturalism and have started to branch out into the naturalist literature of other nations. Wanting to learn more about naturalist authors in other parts of the world led me to Christopher Laing Hill’s 2020 book Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form. This book, published by Northwestern University Press, is available as an open access publication, meaning you can download a pdf ebook for free (or you can purchase a print copy).

What I was hoping to get out of Hill’s book was an international list of authors and books for further reading, and I certainly got that. Some of those books may have never been translated into English, but if even a quarter of them are, they ought to keep me busy reading for years. Hill focuses primarily on French, American, and Japanese literature because he reads in those languages. The bulk of the book is comparing novels from those nations to show how Zola’s ideas spread from country to country. His detailed examination of works by Zola, London, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kosugi Tengai, and Tayama Katai brings up many interesting and thought-provoking points. Like most literary critics, Hill gives away the endings of all the novels he discusses, but I’ve already read all the French and American books, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever read the Japanese. In addition, Hill does mention and briefly discuss many other works from other countries. He gives particularly good overviews of Spanish and Latin American naturalism and East Asian naturalism. Hill says almost nothing about British and German literature, but he does reference plenty of naturalist authors from other European nations such as Denmark, Greece, and Slovenia. 

Having an avid interest in this subject, I naturally liked much of what Hill had to say. As a nonacademic, however, I can’t say I like the way he says it. Hill is a PhD writing for other PhDs, and the text is the jargon-heavy academic prose you’d expect for an audience of specialized professors. It drives me nuts how many words are used to make a point, how many times the points are made over and over again, and the pretentious, obscure vocabulary (ugh, the title). The word “figure” is used over 400 times to mean just about anything and everything. There are chapters on “the body figure” (anatomical imagery), “the Nana figure” (sexually liberated and/or independent women), and “the social figure” (just about any time and place, as far as I can tell). When Hill comments on the work of other Zola scholars, he points out exceptions to any proffered thesis as if to nullify its value. He then seems hesitant to say anything concrete himself for fear that his arguments will be likewise picked apart. Every statement has to be made with heterogenous multiplicity, so that nothing can ever be nailed down as fact, theory, or even an explicit opinion. 

Naturalist literature can be enjoyed and appreciated by nonacademic readers, not just the intelligentsia within academia. As intended by the author, this scholarly monograph only addresses the latter category. For the nonacademic audience, if nothing else, the bibliography and the index suggest myriad opportunities for further reading. With this blog I try to turn a few readers on to some readworthy naturalist literature, and hopefully the knowledge I’ve gleaned from Figures of the World will help me do that.

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part III: 1844–1849

Treasures are few in this batch

This year I set out to read the compete short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. To make this task manageable, I have broken these 65 tales into three sizable portions. The first and second installments in this series followed Poe’s published output chronologically. This, the third of such reviews, covers the last five or six years of Poe’s career.

In this third batch of short fiction, you won’t find much of what is considered classic Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story every American reads in school, is the headliner here. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man to see if the trance will survive the transition to the afterlife, is another skillful tale of horror and suspense. “The Purloined Letter,” is the third and final mystery starring Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. It’s a familiar title in Poe collections, but a bit overrated. It’s the least ingenious and satisfying of Dupin’s trio of adventures.

A few other tales of horror, suspense, or science fiction include “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Sphinx,” and “Von Kempelen and His Experiment”—all capable efforts, but none of them earth-shattering. As with the previous two batches of Poe tales, a good portion of these 24 works are humorous stories, or at least intended to be. Such titles as “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “X-ing a Paragrab” give some indication of what you’re in for. In most cases, Poe’s comedy has not held up well over the intervening century and a three-quarters. “Some Words with a Mummy,” however, really is quite a funny piece of social satire.

Another interest of Poe’s was gardening. “The Domain of Arnheim” is an expanded retread of his 1842 story “The Landscape Garden.” Neither of these are really stories but rather essays in which Poe pontificates on what makes a good landscape garden. Poe’s final published story, “Landor’s Cottage,” is also devoted to this subject. Poe describes his perfect landscape, perfect house, perfect furnishings, even his perfect woman. None of these three “tales” have any plot, they’re all quite boring, and when it comes to nature, Poe is no Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. His natural descriptions read as surprisingly geometric rather than poetic.

Overall, reading Poe’s complete stories has proved rather disappointing. If you buy any collection of Poe’s tales of mystery, horror, and/or suspense, you’re probably going to get twelve to fifteen stories that are the cream of the crop. Most of Poe’s comedic attempts won’t be included in such collections, as they have deservedly faded into obscurity. On the whole, I would say Poe missed more than he hit, at least for a 21st-century audience, but the same could probably be said for his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. At least Poe did leave us with some masterpieces­—like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—that are among America’s best works of short fiction.

Stories in this collection

The Spectacles

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

The Premature Burial

Mesmeric Revelation

The Oblong Box

The Angel of the Odd

Thou Art the Man

The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.

The Purloined Letter

The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade

Some Words with a Mummy

The Power of Words

The Imp of the Perverse

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Sphinx

The Cask of Amontillado

The Domain of Arnheim

Mellonta Tauta

Hop-Frog

Von Kempelen and His Experiment

X-ing a Paragrab

Landor’s Cottage

The Lighthouse (a fragment left unfinished)

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Hard-boiled carnage with no one to care about

Red Harvest, published in 1929, is the debut novel by Dashiell Hammett, who would soon after author The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which both became classic American films. Hammett is the author most associated with the genre of American noir crime and detective fiction, with the possible exception of Raymond Chandler, who came along a decade later. Red Harvest may very well be the inaugural novel in that genre. France’s leading noir author, Georges Simenon, didn’t start cranking out books until a year later.

Red Harvest is narrated by an unnamed agent of the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. He is engaged by a client—Donald Wilsson, a newspaper editor—to come out to Personville, a mining town so rough it’s nicknamed Poisonville. It’s a city of 40,000 people, and judging by this novel, most of them are criminals. The exact location of Personville is never specified, but it seems to be roughly in the vicinity of where Utah, Nevada, and Idaho meet. When the operative arrives in Personville, he finds that his client has been murdered, before the two could even meet to discuss why the detective’s services were needed. As he looks into Wilsson’s untimely demise, the detective discovers a network of organized crime and corruption. He decides to clean up this rat’s nest, and he finds another client who will pay him to do it.

This novel is about as hard-boiled as they come, and for that I admire it. Most gangster stories from the pulp fiction era read as watered-down or phony compared to Red Harvest. In this novel, if a killer wants to kill somebody, he’ll actually kill them (or try to); he won’t talk their ear off before shooting at them. There is a refreshing realism to the book’s utter lack of morality or restraint. Criminals act like criminals.

The problem with that approach, however, is that there is no one or nothing to really care about in this novel. The hero has no name and very little personality. The only woman in the book is a greedy, sleazy whore. The villains are all nondescript thugs who differ in name only. Hammett constructs this very complex web of intrigue in which all these characters blackmail, double-cross, or rat on each other. It’s all very confusing, and the reader doesn’t care enough to want to figure it all out. Never at any time did I understand why the detective was pursuing all these criminals. He has no reasonable motivation. There’s some money involved, but it’s treated almost as an afterthought. What does he really get out of this, other than the triumph of good over evil, law over corruption, which is totally antithetical to everything that happens in the book?

Red Harvest has never been formally adapted into film. A film noir version might have been more successful than the book, since some charismatic actors might actually convince you to care about these characters. One can easily see Humphrey Bogart or John Garfield in the lead. Red Harvest was likely one of the influences behind Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, which in turn set the template for many subsequent gangster thrillers, from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars to Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The latter film is the one that most obviously resembles the novel. It takes place in the 1920s in a Western town (but Texas), the Bruce Willis character very much resembles Hammett’s nameless detective, and the plot consists mostly of gratuitous mayhem and violence. Both that film and this novel have a direct-to-video feel about them. If this genre is your jam, however, then by all means read Red Harvest. For better or worse, it’s the Homer’s Odyssey of hard-boiled crime fiction.