Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe’s Fortress

The third book in the Sharpe series, Sharpe’s Fortress, has him at Wellesley’s attack on Gawilghur in 1803. The British take the fort, and end up not even suffering all that heavy of casualties, and Sharpe fights his last battle in India before he heads back to England for the next set of battles, this time involving Napoleon.

• This novel follows along the same lines – Sharpe is a hero, a warrior, someone who consistently uses his street-fighting background to be a great soldier.  Hakeswill is still a cartoon character – I imagine him as Bluto,     only less realistic – and British officers are divided into those who recognize Sharpe’s worthiness and those who can’t see beyond their class blinders.
• As a cypher, I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by Sharpe. Cornwell apologizes in an author’s note at the end of Sharpe’s Fortress to Colonel Campbell, who he gives an auxiliary role to in the improvised move to climb the wall in an undefended place, a move that allows the British to take the fort relatively easily.  I don’t know how many British soldiers from the ranks became officers, but based on the need for money (the commission system of becoming an officer and raising a regiment) I can’t believe that it was many.
  • From a story-telling standpoint, Sharpe as cypher enables Cornwell all kinds of latitude in looking at a wide range of lives in both the British Army and the army of the East India Company.  He refines this technique in the Grail Quest series, and his portrayals become much more realistic and perhaps a bit humbler, but the use of the cypher gives him range he wouldn’t otherwise have as someone writing historical fiction.
• I don’t think I realized exactly how the British colonialisation of India worked, at least in regards to having a private company utilize an army to ensure their profitability. That is a scary model for the future, I’m guessing, but Blackwater will become the new East India Company if the current administration has anything to say about it. I can see nothing wrong with that plan.
• The ease with which the British take a fortress that had never been taken by an enemy shows the frightening power of artillery.  It reminds me of a co-worker at the time of the first Gulf War who had received all his images of combat from war movies. He was amazed at how destructive artillery is, how many casualties it accounts for – he thought that most casualties came from soldiers shooting each other. I completely understand how he came to this point of view.
• Cornwell also identifies the range of nationalities involved in the war, with the British and French aligning with various members of the Indian royalty, and Arab mercenaries joining the fight on both sides as well. Clearly, war is expensive, although if what it enables a country to do is to gain a monopoly on trade and collect egregious taxes than I guess it can be profitable.
  • I keep thinking, though, about how many humans over the centuries have died in these type of small “engagements.”  I can’t think of a grand statement here that fits…machismo, hard-wiring for territorial acquisition, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, tribalism – they all speak to a part of the picture.

Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe’s Tiger

I have read most of Cornwell’s Arthur books, about the Danish invasion of Britain, and having had the Last Kingdom series recommended to me by a friend and watching a couple of them I remembered that I wanted to read this series by Cornwell as well. I enjoyed reading Neil Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and his portrayal of Sgt. Shatoe’s dragoons – especially designed to kill cavalry, according to Shaftoe – and I knew that Cornwell’s Sharpe series was set not all that much later.

That’s a long introduction to this novel, Sharpe’s Tiger, none of which is about the novel. Thoughts:

• I struggle with the idea of Sharpe as super-hero, but I think that Cornwell is using him more as a cypher than an actual British soldier who doubles as 007. He’s not Derfel Cardan, who is based on a historical figure (even one who may or may not have existed), and Derfel felt much more believable.
  • Sharpe is simply someone who Cornwell puts in the a bunch of historical hot spots in order to let us as readers see into his portrayal of what happened, and my readerly attempts to make him more are sort of goofy.
  • Sharpe reminds me a bit as well of Jack Shaftoe, the King of the Vagabonds and someone who Stephenson sees as survivor much like Sharpe.
• Cornwell’s battle scenes in this series are not as personal as they are with St. Derfel, mostly because Sharpe is not simply fulfilling a cannon fodder role, whereas Derfel fought in the midst of the shield wall. This also seem a bit more cavalier and glory-bound than the series set in the time of Arthur, perhaps because that time is harder for us contemporary folks to understand.
  • I remember particularly the sense of loss and fall of civilization in the Warlord chronicle, mostly because so often they find themselves in a Roman ruin that is far better than anything current Britons can build. Life is much more difficult.
  • I also remember the superstitious belief in religion, which Cornwell carefully documents as a struggle between the remains of pagan religion and the newness of Christianity. Christianity looks far more appealing in this re-contexualization than it does now, offering a way forward into a brighter future rather than the nostalgic look back that Christians appear to favor now. In particular, in one scene Arthur’s druids put up a wall that consisted entirely of hexes and fetishes. That wall held their left flank until their enemy finally brought in their own druids to counter it. Not many flanks are held in the Sharpe series by religious icons.
• Cornwell starts this series before the Iraq war and what felt to me like a newfound sense among the American public about the ways that camaraderie fueled courage in combat. He’s writing from a British perspective, and the way that I have always heard British officers talked about (mostly Montgomery, but the Duke of Wellington  aka Arthur Wellesley as well) is that they don’t care all that much about their men. Still, this novel is not all that concerned with the loss and grief that individual soldiers feel for each other, nor does it give the sense of individual platoon tactics that made a series like the Malazan Book of the Fallen (or even Game of Thrones) so enthralling. Cornwell did provide this sense in the Warlord Chronicles I’ve discussed above, so maybe that sense of the individual lives at stake becomes more developed as he moves forward. Still, while there is compassion for the individual infantryman and admiration for his courage, troops still pretty much feel like cannon fodder.
• On the other side, though, Cornwell works at making Indians human, pretty carefully depicting the courage and humanity of those who led and those who fought with the British. Far more than in other discussions of this time period I got a sense of the reasons why Indians fought, and they felt much more realistic than I am used to.
• The British are not portrayed as beautiful people either. The first scene with Sharpe gives a vivid description of his looting of a corpse, and looting and rape are not ignored. Blood and destruction are also pretty carefully chronicled.
• Finally, the class divides between officers and enlisted men are not glossed over. Officers actually rarely come off positively, and most enlisted men are described sympathetically. As always, sergeants hold the line between, but they are rarely seen as American, WWII-type sergeants we see in Band of Brothers – determined to keep the men under them alive – but are instead mostly disciplinarians.

Which Side Are You On, Boys?

On my walk today this song kept going through my head.

I’m pretty sure I get why, but I think that the impulse speaks to my own desire to idealize and simplify what’s going on in our political system. As I listen to the presidential transition, I keep getting drawn into these huge questions that I have no way of answering, and I find myself idealizing past labor movements. I think of the 1880s and Big Bill Haywood, I think of the movements of the 1930s, I remember the Harlan County Mine Strikes from the 1960s and 1970s, and I keep romanticizing the ease with which choosing sides happened. Hell, the coops and cityscapes of the 1980s and 1990s were this same sort of movement, a way to idealize and stay out of larger, impossibly tangled and hopelessly corrupt consumer-driven idiocy.

Were the sides ever that clear? To me this current mess seems unbelievably clear, but the people who voted this administration in are a large part of those who will be hurt by our new grifter-in-chief. Are we simply doomed to always be seduced by some ferret-faced shitgibbon who tells us that none of this is our own responsibility, that we can take revenge on whoever and thus earn our greatness back again?

And none of this is knew, right?  De Tocqueville identified the rot at the bottom of the American soul a long time ago, and it hasn’t changed. But when I see Americans worshiping someone like a dictator, I have to admit I fear a bit for the republic.

Enough angst, folks…

Dervla Murphy

I can’t remember who suggested that I read Murphy, but whoever it was gave me a whole bunch of incentive:  Irish grandmother who rides a bike through all kinds of countries, someone who started writing sort of fluffy pieces and who has become a tough as nails old school cynical leftist, finding fault with nearly everyone.

I read The Island That Dared, A Place Apart, and Through the Embers of Chaos, and found each interesting if a bit of a slog at points. Murphy is fascinated with detail, and with getting to know a place as best she can (while acknowledging the impossibility of truly knowing another’s culture), and that detail got a bit wearing on me in the middle of an impossibly busy term.

Notes:

• The text that kept my attention the best was Chaos, which describes travels taken ten years after the Yugoslavian civil war. I had always felt the most sympathy for those opposing the Serbs, mostly influence I think by some strong reporting and storytelling (as in telling of stories, not lying) in the British magazine Granta.  I felt almost as if  I recognized the landscape through my earlier reading.
• The Island That Dared interested me the least, as it felt to me as if it showed the most limitations of language. Murphy prides herself on finding English speakers or communicating without verbal language, and this book seemed to show the limitations of that, especially in a place that has reasons to resist English.
• A Place Apart was the most powerful in terms of its clear anti-violence, anti-war ideology, and her knowledge of the place (obviously) helped make the text feel more authoritative. I can’t put my finger on the why, but this text also seemed not as powerful as Chaos perhaps because of her expertise. I got far less of a sense of seeing landscapes and interacting with people for the first time.
• Grand powers as identified by someone like Paul Kennedy dominate these novels, and  her emphasis on them brought my Americanism to the forefront repeatedly in my own mind. Her Irishness (something that she uses to her advantage as a traveler to place herself in a position of being just outside of privilege) and sense of growing up a second class citizen helped give her credibility as a traveler in many situations, according to her reports.
• And about those reports…she’s almost relentless in her pursuit of showing all sides of her travel, from getting ripped off, from having to bribe officials, to hotel owners and others who actively despise her for all kinds of reasons. These might be ways to show how brave she is, but I’m not sure she really needs to brag about that – she is cycling alone through some areas that I wouldn’t dare set foot in.
• These include a harrowing tale of riding in the mountains of Serbia and getting attacked by a bunch of kids, who manage to steal at least one of her packs before she drives them off by throwing rocks at them. This scene is so surreal I can almost imagine it…
• Murphy sympathizes most with those just trying to live their lives, and has little truck with powers that manifest their own global destinies and capitalist desires onto folks just trying to raise their families and be decent people.

Meme Culture

This article, “Reflections on Meme Culture,” makes a lot of sense…it can be found here, and the bibliographic reference is

1. doi: 10.1177/1470412914544540Journal of Visual Culture December 2014 vol. 13 no. 3 388-394.

My only question is how I screwed up and thought that Elitist Jerks committed the WOW funeral sin, when in reality it was the Serenity Now guild…

Ah, those dreams…

Yes, indeed…

As the pressures grow intense I escape, into music, the wilds, urban dreamscapes (and realities), strange barrooms with folks who I probably should not have been hanging out with, and more…all the world of memory and nostalgia…

I’m reminded of West Virginia friends both here and gone, a community that surpassed the music community that always seemed to alienate me from normal folks…and also of wonderful nights in which I got away from the bullshit of corporate existence, even if just for a bit…

So, a recreation:

Work night, of course, and I’m off to see Concrete Blonde. They’re playing on a hot summer night at Peabody’s DownUnder (formerly the Pirate’s Cove) in the Flats, and as I expect it’s a zillion degrees in the club.  As we’re about to enter my friend bags (after all, it is a work night), and I’m left with a dilemma – be the loner loser really creepy looking dude, or go in.

You can guess my choice.

The black, wide, sloping entrance to Peabodys (replete with the standard 90s indie music club bouncers at the door, guys either paid not to smile or physically incapable of the act, and cheap ass flyers with usually impossibly cool art for impossibly cool bands that would be playing the club later) smelled as it always did, a little urine (hopefully wafting in from the toilets), a little beer, a little vomit, all aromas that perhaps paradoxically promised a good night. I had already pregamed at Harper’s, one of the few places where you could buy good beer, and I had walked over from the restaurant.  On a beautiful July evening the sky was twilight, with the sun going down over the lake, and so the walk helped me understand just how sacred this space I was entering in was, a holy place, a divine place, one in which I would commune and worship albeit in a distinctly dissatisfied late twentieth century American way, although I would have done it even in winter. To do anything else seemed somehow sacrilegious…as if missing the stench of the polluted lake and the trash and sketchy people would return me back to the suburbs, the Office Space like existence that I seemed to be unable to pull away from.

And I gave up all that beautiful outside scenery for even more scenery on the inside of the club. I used to love the way that the space itself opened up to your right as you walked in, with ill-placed, solid-as-fuck pillars interspersed at spots guaranteed to serve as the source of eddies in the mosh. I had missed the opening band (which sort of bummed me out, because they were a local Cleveland group I liked a lot), mostly due to the argument outside about whether or not to give up on the night, so the stage was lit up and mostly empty, a roadie or two changing gear.

After a beer or two at the bar, one surrounded by all the markers of coolness that indie clubs tried to vibrate with, I went to the front of the stage, because oh my lord Johnette Napolitano was incredibly hot, weird, dark, frighteningly intelligent, unwilling to put up with shit, and a survivor, and what the hell, maybe tonight was the night that I discovered my soul mate played in a rockkinroll band…

Wouldn’t that be a far cooler story than this?

Although of course that didn’t happen, I was still close, and the music was loud and incredible, and the band tight and not fucked up, and the mosh pit alternately brutal and huggy, and my ears rang and the sweat poured from my veins and my combat boots were soaked and I got punched in the ear (which I would have to cover tomorrow at work, fuck the posers at Fight Club) and perhaps punched someone else (my knuckles were swollen and scraped up, but I wasn’t drunk enough to do that and forget it), and I didn’t even care that I was there by myself because despite the fact that we were all assholes and not nearly as cool as we thought we were (which wasn’t cool for me at all, because I was firmly rooted in my nerdiness even as I tried to fight it) this was my tribe, my club, my band, linked through music and adrenaline and rage and sorrow and a feeling that maybe, just maybe, the corporate world was missing something.

As I left, unable to hear a damn thing and suddenly aware that the Flats looked a helluva lot sketchier at this end than it had when I walked in, I was still buzzing, joyous with the fact that I shared such a holy night with the cosmos, and heard amazing music that seemed to speak of human experience and existence without feeling like that same experience had been packaged and sold back to me.

And I might have danced, and I might have skipped, and I might have run, and I might have fantasized, and I might have just wondered at how amazing the night sky was, and would I ever find someone willing to put up with my nerdiness and inability to be satisfied and disgust at my corporate self and dreaminess and vague, unfocused resistance to an existence that outside of these moments seemed just dreary.

Iggy and the Dream World

The moment I hear the spare notes of acoustic guitar that mark the beginning of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” I get all gushy. The gushiness comes from the joy that is Iggy’s voice and music, of course (although I am pledged to Kill All Rock Stars), but it also comes from the dream world that Iggy sings of.  He’s not in control – he’s the passenger. He’s not part of the scene – he rides and rides. He doesn’t act – he just looks.

And yet the cityscape the song paints is one that I recognize, one that feels so incredibly, impossibly open and full of possible worlds. Some of them are dreams, of course, and some of them are the passengers’s vision alone, but they incorporate all of us, bringing us into this Calvinoesque world that sports multitudes or geographies and archaeologies, platforms that are clean and bright (but not pure) and that scream of green vistas and cityscapes loaded with wondrous images that belong to you and me.

The you and me is key, of course. The song creates its own community, one that is concerned with the immediate and the past and the future, one that shimmers and shakes and seems to be nearly falling apart while constantly, miraculously staying together. It’s not a place that exists perhaps, but it’s a place called home (thanks PJ Harvey!), one that is tinged with the sadness of contemporary poetry (and its love of language) and has the energy of good hip-hop or punk or ska or post-punk. It can be junked up, sort of, with stacks of cultural detritus that may or may not be metaphorical.

Being the Passenger in this landscape places me in a ship, a boat, a convertible, a bike, a motorcycle – open vessels that acknowledge our lizard brains and hard wiring and that still allows to dream of being fully human, completely realized, self-actualized in ways that Maslow couldn’t conceive (or maybe he could). The stars float by, the sun warms us through the trees, and we arrive at a club in the wasteland. We dance to smart, ironic, beat-laden music, with lots of sweaty, sexy-with-no-makeup (except on the guys) types who just dance. And we’re there with ones we love, who enjoy this beat from Armageddon as much or more than we do, and who teach us lots (and learn more).

No containers, no barriers, no borders. We dream big dreams, occasionally nightmares, and we stride through landscapes humbly, with no desire to do damage except to ourselves (and to acknowledge our own). We look for minimal impacts, and get muddy and dirty and bask in the green. We feel speed as we start to lose ourselves in the joy of adrenalin falls and plunges, and we feel exhaustion as our muscles pull us to new heights and strange locales. We climb to plateaus and plunge through channels and are constantly reminded of both our loneliness and our connections.

We wonder about our souls, but don’t worry about their states. We sleep in the open air by moving water, lured by the smell of fire and cooked food and we revel in our basic beings without being utterly self-absorbed. We communicate minimally, and yet know what we need and how we need to move and what we need to experience. We know terror, and we know fear, and both are essential parts of our beings, of the shared moments that we revel in, and the fears are delicious and chilling and yet another part of what it is to be human.

We wander down roads that are lone markers in some sort of wilderness, surrounded by ruins and dregs and reminders of just how fall we’ve fallen. We chase and are chased, we escape and are caught, and from each episode emerge wiser and more in tune. We dive into  terrifying nights and come out the other side intact but more sorrowful and in tune, and we walk through primal scenes and weatherscapes and know what it is to inhabit another’s skin and feel their pains and joys, even if those feelings are completely alien to our own.

We think we feel the devil, even if he exists in what we bring to the world ourselves, and stop by his campsite on a cold winter’s night, basking in both the heat provided by his fire and the fear of his presence, the uncanniness that Freud loved, hair on edge and aware that just beyond this fire lies a world that we probably cannot imagine, one in which family relationships disintegrate into splinters that reflect who we are, and that open us up again.

And yet we return to the city, this dream city, this dream world, one that is both completely open and deserted and empty and uncared for and yet full of life below the surface, full of mythical creatures and machines and structures, places where we live in the open air that is loaded with the fragrances of what it means to be human. The moon is full, and it’s always full, and the sun is always muted but warm and broken up by trees both short and tall.  Hidden spaces pop up all over, ridges that lead nowhere, natural features tamed but not, artificial constructions that nonetheless take up fantastical spaces in our minds and beckon us in. The music fades to that of the wind, and the trash swirls, and we know that this moment, this time, this place, is all that we need, forever.