Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Big universe, big thoughts

The 1980 PBS TV series Cosmos was a landmark in the history of television. The companion book to that series, also published in 1980, was the bestselling science book of all time (until Stephen Hawking beat it a few years later). The Cosmos book has 13 chapters that parallel the 13 episodes of the TV program. Alexander von Humboldt published the original Cosmos book back in 1845 to 1862, and Sagan does mention Humboldt in a footnote. The intent by both authors was to summarize and encapsulate in one volume the state of scientific knowledge on the heavens and the earth. Though Humboldt’s Cosmos was popular in its day, his was a pretty dry scientific text compared to Sagan’s more accessible and inspirational book. The way Sagan combines science writing with philosophy, skepticism, and freethought reminds me of another book from the end of the 19th century: Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe.

As one would expect from an astronomer and planetary scientist, Sagan spends much of Cosmos discussing the planets and other bodies in our solar system, as well as galaxies, the universe as a whole, space travel, the Big Bang, and the search for extraterrestrial life. In addition, however, he discusses particle physics, the origin of life, DNA, evolution, the history of science and astronomy (particularly in ancient Greece), and the human brain. The final chapter of Cosmos is about nuclear war. Although still a threat, Armageddon is not on people’s minds as much as it was in the ‘80s, and disarmament now seems further from reality.

Like any science book of years gone by, the obvious drawback to Cosmos is that it’s outdated. Sagan doesn’t really say anything wrong in this book, but what’s omitted is notable. There’s no mention of quantum physics or dark matter, for example. Sagan wrote Cosmos after Voyager 2 had performed its flyby of Jupiter but before it had reached Saturn. There was no Hubble Space Telescope. The existence of exoplanets was still suspected, not confirmed. The nearly fifty intervening years since publication, however, didn’t really bother me. I consider myself pretty well-versed in astronomical matters for a general reader, but I still learned many interesting scientific facts from Sagan’s Cosmos. Sagan is great at putting things into perspective, both humanity’s insignificance in the universe and the immensity of space and time. (He’s much more eloquent than the “billions and billions” catch phrase for which he’s known.)

I’d read much of this information before, but never as succinctly nor as elegantly put as Sagan presents things here. The other famous science book of this era was, of course, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though also aimed at the general reader, Hawking’s book is not easy to understand and his explanations aren’t quite user-friendly for the layman. Sagan, on the other hand, is great at explaining complex scientific phenomena in simple terms that anyone with a high school education can understand, without dumbing down the scientific content or the philosophical implications of the matters discussed.

Sagan stopped short of declaring himself an atheist, but for readers of a freethinking persuasion, he is one of the best areligious writers out there, if not the best. He is a superb rationalist preacher, without the pretensions or cynicism of Richard Dawkins and other “neo-atheists.” Since Sagan’s death, others have tried to assume his role as leading spokesman for science—most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye—but no one has quite matched his passion, eloquence, and trustworthiness as a public intellectual. Cosmos, although published in the middle of his career, is Sagan’s magnum opus, the distillation of his entire career. His other books may focus in more detail on some of the topics presented here, but no book better encapsulates his thought in its totality as this one. In the 1980s, this book was a must-read, and today it’s still an important and rewarding work for anyone who cares about science.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock

Small-town humor from a Canadian Mark Twain

Stephen Leacock was a popular Canadian author who publish many books of fiction, humor, and essays in the early 20th century. Though not much known south of the border, he is a household name in his native Canada. One of his most popular works is Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, published in 1912. The book is a series of stories set in Mariposa, a small town in Southern Canada, presumably in Ontario (because the Maritime Provinces are mentioned as a separate entity, and no one in Mariposa is French). Mariposa may be based on Leacock’s memories of his own hometown, Orillia, Ontario, but he stressed that the locale is a fictional amalgamation of many small towns in Canada.

Is Sunshine Sketches a collection of short stories or a novel? It’s a little of both, but I think it leans more towards the latter. The stories build on one another, so they should be read in order, and sometimes a story arc will be spread over two or three chapters. In form and structure, it can be easily compared to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Sunshine Sketches is not a modernist work, however. There are no traces of Winesburg’s Freudian themes, nor will you find the cynicism of Sinclair Lewis’s depictions of small-town life. Leacock makes fun of the citizens of Mariposa, but he’s not laughing at them; he’s laughing with them, as if he counts himself among them. He writes in a style of jovial, old-fashioned storytelling along the lines of Bret Harte, with plenty of humor that calls to mind Mark Twain. Leacock, in fact, won a Mark Twain Medal in 1935 (awarded by the International Mark Twain Society). Nowadays, while the United States has a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, inaugurated in 1998, Canada has a Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor, first awarded in the 1940s.

Leacock’s stories of Mariposa are indeed funny, sometimes hilarious, and as charming as you would expect from a book with the title of Sunshine Sketches. The tone is very light. Occasionally you’ll find the melancholy mention of a lost loved one, but there are no dark themes here. Even when Leacock dwells on suicide, he manages to find humor in it. The reader quickly becomes enamored with this little town and gets emotionally involved in the characters’ lives. Leacock profiles Mr. Josh Smith, the portly and successful hotel keeper, Jefferson Thorpe, the barber with a shrewd knack for investments, and Reverend Drone, minister of the Anglican Church. Mr. Pupkin, the bank teller, courts Ms. Zena, the judge’s daughter. The Mariposans gather for a boat outing on Lake Wissanotti, engage in a fundraising campaign for the local church, and turn out in droves on election day. In all cases, these events turn out unexpectedly and with humorous consequences.

If you’ve ever traveled through rural villages in Southern Ontario, it’s easy to imagine a picturesque life similar to what Leacock depicts in Mariposa. Of course, such ideas are partially based on preconceived bucolic and idyllic storybook stereotypes. Leacock plays up to such notions but subverts them with wry and affectionate humor. I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, and I had no trouble identifying with Leacock’s Canadian characters. I suspect that my hometown, in the time of my grandparents’ generation, was probably a lot like Mariposa. I imagine many Canadian students probably read Sunshine Sketches in school, but there’s no reason why this enjoyable book should be confined to an audience of Leacock’s countrymen. American readers should definitely check it out for a fun and enchanting read.

Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles

A non-tell-all career retrospective

Minneapolis rock band Hüsker Dü existed from 1979 to 1988. Within that short tenure, they managed to have a profound influence on alternative music. Combining the raw power of hardcore punk with the catchy melodies and harmonies of pop, Hüsker Dü rose from Midwest indie band to big-label signees who flirted with Nirvana-level mainstream stardom. Music journalist Andrew Earles examines the band’s career in his 2010 book Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock.

In the introduction, Earles does his best to dissuade you from reading this book by telling you everything it’s not: It’s not a biography of the musicians’ personal lives. It’s not a behind-the-scenes tell-all. It’s not about the conflicts within the band, drug use, love lives, or the musicians’ post–Hüsker Dü solo careers. Earles states his intention in writing this book is to make a case for Hüsker Dü’s importance in music history. Luckily, however, the book is a little bit of all those things that Earles says it’s not. There are, in fact, elements of an exposé here, so it’s more than merely Earles’s critical opinion of their music. What biography there is, however, is very much a music-business narrative about recording, touring, and selling records. If one of the band members fell in love or got busted for drugs, Earles isn’t going to tell you about it.

Sometimes the Hüskers (as Earles repeatedly refers to them) seem like supporting characters in their own book. There are lengthy passages that chart out a history of the Minneapolis punk and post-punk scene, or the history of various indie record labels, in particular Los Angeles’s SST Records. Like music fans of all genres are wont to do, Earles demonstrates himself an aficionado of punk and post-punk by naming as many obscure bands as he can cram into the text. More annoying, however, is the great lengths to which Earles goes to define the genre of “hardcore.” At least a few chapters are spent belaboring that term, decreeing what is hardcore and what isn’t, and obsessing over exactly when Hüsker Dü stopped being hardcore and started being something else. Such hair-splitting of labels becomes tiresome.

Earles interviewed Hüsker Dü band members Grant Hart and Greg Norton for this book. Bob Mould declined to participate because he was in the process of writing his own memoir, See a Little Light (2011). The Hart and Norton interviews are the most valuable aspect of the book. You learn the most from what comes straight out of Grant and Greg’s mouths. Not surprisingly, Hart gets some digs in on Mould, declaring him an egomaniac and a control freak. Have no fear, however, Mould had much worse to say about Hart and Norton in his book. Reading Mould’s autobiography actually lessened my appreciation for Hüsker Dü’s music, because it revealed his personality to be everything Hart says it is—off-puttingly arrogant, pretentious, and vindictive. On the other hand, I’ve grown to have more respect for Hart’s work over the years. Outside of the band, Earles interviewed a few dozen other music industry figures, including their sound technician Lou Giordano, audio engineer Steve Albini, and colleague Mike Watt of the Minutemen. The book ends with a comprehensive discography of Hüsker Dü recordings that delves deeply into rarities beyond their eight albums.

As a fan of Hüsker Dü, I didn’t learn as much about the band as I had hoped, but I did learn some. Earles does a good job of making a case for Hüsker Dü’s historical importance and musical influence, but is that really necessary? If you’re reading this book, chances are you already know that. It would be hard to find an “alternative” band these days that doesn’t claim to have been influenced by Hüsker Dü. If you’ve never heard Hüsker Dü’s music, this book might make you want to listen, but you’re probably not going to want to know about all the minor punk bands that Earles discusses here. This would have been a better book if Earles hadn’t been so reluctant to just tell the story of the band, warts and all. Isn’t that really what most Hüsker Dü fans would want to read?

The Beloved Vagabond by William John Locke

Pretentious intellectual goes slumming

William John Locke was a prolific and popular British writer of fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He had a few bestsellers in his day, and about two dozen films have been adapted from his books. At least three of those movies are based on his novel The Beloved Vagabond, first published in 1906.

London poor boy Augustus Smith is the son of an alcoholic, slatternly mother who works as a laundress when she’s not abusing him. One evening when delivering some clean laundry to mommy’s customers, he makes the acquaintance of an odd fellow. When Augustus accidentally reveals a work of literature he is carrying on his person, this man, who calls himself Paragot, takes an instant liking to the young lad. Paragot immediately makes arrangements to buy the boy from his mother for a pittance, that is, to take Augustus on as a permanent servant. What Paragot really wants, however, is an apprentice with whom to share his unconventional lifestyle. He doesn’t like the boy’s name, so he dubs him Asticot [meaning maggot]. Judging from Paragot’s cultured loquacity, he is obviously highly educated, but he lives an austere hand-to-mouth existence. When his landlord evicts Paragot from his lodgings, he decides to tramp around France, indoctrinating Asticot into his vagabond lifestyle.

The reader is clearly meant to be charmed by Paragot. This free spirit becomes less interesting, however, when one discovers that he’s not a vagabond by necessity but by choice. Paragot has an unlimited supply of money from some mysterious source. He’s never hard up for a meal and has enough means to be quite generous to others. So basically, Locke wrote a book about the joys of European vagrancy, but he didn’t actually have the guts to write a novel about a poor person, so this hobo novel stars a wealthy English gentleman.

Paragot is also an intellectual, as Locke repeatedly points out. Paragot has read everything, knows everything, can do just about anything, speaks just about any language, refers to himself as a genius, and has the ego to match. Locke has clearly developed the character to be his ideal of a gentleman scholar who scorns convention. Paragot, and by extension Locke, scoffs at English “respectability” and gripes about the constricting social conventions that “respectable” people follow. The reader realizes, however, that Paragot is a pretentious intellectual who has his own ridiculous social code that must be followed. He looks down on anyone who hasn’t read this particular book or doesn’t drink his brand of liqueur. Paragot frequently comes across as an elitist know-it-all blowhard, like a cross between Cliff Claven and Frasier Crane with a hipster affectation for bohemian dishevelment. Later in the book, Locke does briefly show Paragot in the light of a buffoon, but for most of the book we are expected to admire him through the worshipful eyes of Asticot.

The Beloved Vagabond does have its endearing moments here and there, when it’s not being annoying. The ending of the book was unexpected and satisfying. I found Paragot’s life moderately entertaining and wasn’t bored by the book. This novel has the feeling, however, of a poser writing about the “counterculture.” Paragot is a dilettante for whom vagabondage is just another area of interest. He’s a toe-dipper into the lifestyle, not a plunger. Locke likewise comes across as a dabbler writing about a milieu he really doesn’t know.

Wayfarers by Knut Hamsun

Workingman’s blues, Norwegian style

Wayfarers, a novel by Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, was published in 1927 (Norwegian title: Landstrykere). Be careful not to confuse this with another Hamsun book, Wanderers, or his novel A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, part of his Wanderer trilogy. (Only the English titles are confusing, not the Norwegian titles). Wayfarers, on the other hand, is the first book in Hamsun’s August trilogy, the second and third books being August and The Road Leads On.

Edevart Andresen lives with his parents and siblings in Polden, the small Norwegian coastal village where he grew up. Like most men in his village, he makes his living primarily from fishing. Every winter the Polden men go on a fishing expedition to the Lofoten Islands and then return to dry their fish on the rocks of their hometown shore. One day, Edevart meets another young man, August, who has been away from Polden, traveling the world as a sailor, and has now returned. August, with his gold teeth and boastful talk, is frequently the object of ridicule from his neighbors. Edevart and August strike up a fast friendship. August is a big-idea man who’s always looking for a scheme to make a fast buck. He convinces Edevart to enter into various business enterprises with him. The two travel up and down the Norwegian coast like vagabonds, engaging in assorted occupations. Sometimes flush with cash and sometimes hard-up for a meal, the two traveling companions form a share-and-share-alike, what’s-mine-is-yours bond. The dynamic between the two is often comical, sometimes calling to mind the two tramps from Waiting for Godot. Though not much different in age, Edevart is still an inexperienced, naive young man while August is more a shrewd man-of-the-world. Edevart is still very much a “good boy,” but he begins to fall under the corrupting influence of August’s looser morals. Their relationship is not without conflict, and sometimes they separate for months, only to reunite for another adventure..

The story takes place in the late 1860s. Judging by the fickle fortunes of the characters in this book, Hamsun depicts a time of economic hardship in Norway. While much of Europe has transitioned into an industrial economy, the denizens of these small villages on the Norwegian coast still live a subsistence lifestyle not much changed from many generations past. No source of income, not even the fish, can be relied upon, so Edevart and August must turn to other avenues of income, including itinerant peddling, storekeeping, farming, and thievery, among others.

This novel meanders just as much as its two protagonists. The story often proceeds at a lackadaisical but pleasant pace. As you become involved with these characters, you are content to take life as it comes, just as they do. If there is a message to this story, it isn’t hammered home. This book is about the journey, not the destination. Hamsun considers the question of whether it is better to accept one’s lot in life and be whom one was born to be, or to venture afar, forge one’s own path, and try to determine one’s own destiny. This novel shows both the positive and negative aspects of wanderlust and vagrancy. Another issue that’s discussed is emigration to America. No doubt Hamsun saw many of his countrymen leave Norway for the United States during hard times. Here he questions the milk-and-honey, rags-to-riches image of America and asserts that crossing the Atlantic is no happily-ever-after panacea.

After completing this book, I was pleased to find out that it’s part of a trilogy. I enjoyed following the lives of these two men, and I look forward to catching up with Edevart and August in the second and third novels of the August series. Because these books were published late in Hamsun’s career, however, there are no English translations in the public domain, and paper copies of August are not cheap.   

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki

Swapping spicy stories in Spain

Jan Potocki (1761–1815) was a Polish nobleman and world traveler who published several travel memoirs in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He wrote all of his books in the French language. Potocki wrote one work of fiction, a unique and baffling picaresque novel entitled The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Portions of the book were published as early as 1805, but I don’t believe the entire novel was published until 1847, more than three decades after the author’s death.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is similar in conception to The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron. The narrator, Alphonse van Worden, is an officer in the Walloon Guards, a unit of the Spanish Army composed of troops from Wallonia (the Southern, French-speaking, predominantly Catholic portion of Belgium). Van Worden is traveling across Spain to get to Madrid. Over the course of his trip, he accumulates a diverse group of traveling companions. Every night the party stops at an inn or a camp, where they exchange fantastic stories of their lives. The book is divided into sixty-six chapters documenting the sixty-six days of van Worden’s journey. That doesn’t mean, however, that the book is comprised of sixty-six stories. Some stories go on for dozens of chapters, and most of the stories veer off into extended digressions that amount to stories-within-stories. At one point, for example, you’re reading a gypsy chief tell the story of Don Busqueros telling the story of Señor Cornádez telling the story of a pilgrim named Blas Hervas telling the story of his father, Diego Hervas.

The tales told are not confined to Spain but take place all over Europe, the Middle East, and even Mexico. The characters represent multiple nationalities and ethnic groups. Presumably the author was a Christian, but many of the characters depicted here are Jews and Muslims. Potocki does not stoop to negative stereotypes or racism but does emphasize the exotic, mythical aspects of other races and cultures, like all Jews are mystics or all Muslims seem like they stepped out of The Arabian Nights. One recurring character is a “Wandering Jew” who is possibly immortal and relates events from the Bible as if he witnessed them firsthand. Through his characters, Potocki demonstrates an admirable breadth of knowledge. When a mathematician is telling a story, for example, Potocki discourses intelligently about geometry. When a cabalist is doing the talking, Potocki includes just enough details on the occult. Potocki even manages to work some Enlightenment philosophy and science into the narrative. The text is chock full of delightful details.

You’d never guess that this book was written in the early 19th century. Many aspects of the stories told resemble pulp fiction of a later era. One of the funny things about this novel is the number of threesomes that take place. Threesomes with cousins. Threesomes with (maybe) ghosts or demons. A foursome with mother and daughters. Potocki was certainly no prude, and the way he doubles down on shameless titillation indicates that he was no literary snob either.

This book is ingeniously constructed but unfortunately confusing as hell. The story is as complicated as The Count of Monte Cristo, but unlike Alexandre Dumas, Potocki doesn’t leave the reader enough bread crumbs to navigate what’s going on. The stories-within-stories structure is disorienting. Characters assume false identities, swap genders, or show up under different names. You have to keep track of everyone’s noble, clerical, or military titles. All of the stories are somehow connected, but how is not always clear until later in the book. In order to really make sense of this novel, one would have to take notes and draw charts, family trees, historical timelines, maps, etc. Who wants to go through all that just to read a work of fiction? I admire what Potocki has done, and I know there is more to this novel than what I got out of it, but it was an ordeal to get through. I might give this book another try someday when I’m prepared to do the work required, but for now I’m kind of glad I’m done with it.