Rhino Ranch

I am bummed to finally see the Duane Moore novels come to an end. I first read Last Picture Show shortly after the movie came out, though I did not actually see the movie for years afterwards, and I even liked Texasville and When the Light Goes though they were both trashed in reviews. I've even visited Thalia, uh, Archer City, on more than one occasion, even before Booked Up opened its doors a few years back. In short, I've come to like and to identify with Duane as we have both grown older and I'm sorry to lose him as a friend.

OK, Rhino Ranch in pretty unrealistic in much of its plot and with many of its characters. Billionairesses and top notch chefs and porn stars hanging out in Archer City? I don't think so. And are there really that many meth heads cooking out in the open fields? I find that pretty hard to believe. The whole concept of the Rhino Ranch is pretty hard to believe, too, but there are enough game ranches and wildlife preserves dotting the Texas landscape now that maybe it isn't all that farfetched. And how about all those young things--at least two, anyway--that keep offering themselves to Duane? (Jimmy said that McMurtry really is a horny old man, a judgement seconded by Sara) Or that he didn't know that Annie was a meth freak while he was married to her?

And the final pages do read like McMurtry has gotten tired of the whole gig and is trying to bring the saga to a close. Of course, one of McMurtry's faults has been an inability to bring some of his books to a satisfactory close, but the ending of Rhino Ranch, where he covers 10 years in about two paragraphs or so, reminds me a lot of That Evening Star where Aurora's grandson remembers his final moments with her about thirty years later.

But I do think that McMurtry was spot on with many of his characterizations and puzzlements of old age. Duane, as always, is a pretty passive observer of life that continually surprises himself with his feelings and some of his impulses. He's also surprised at all of the changes happening to himself and to his friends and to Thalia as they all grow older, especially as he watches so many of his friends die. (Of course, nothing matches his surprise in having Karla suddenly die in an automobile acccident in Duane's Depressed--Sara reached over and slugged me when she read that part a few years back, "You didn't tell me that Karla dies!") And Duane's reverie where he considers that it would just be OK to go to sleep and not wake up seems to be a thought that I'm having more and more these days myself. It's just kind of a resignation that the best is over and the rest is just kinda sitting around watching it all come apart. So much of that comes from Duane's rudderlessness, his loss of sense of purpose, his feeling of pointlessness. These are feelings that I'm having to deal with more and more myself and it feels right on to have McMurtry give voice to them.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 2010

Length: 2010

print

A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

This is certainly a much different look at many figures of the Enlightenment than I've come across before. Israel maintains a major split amongst Enlightenment writers: the Moderate Enlightenment, as represented by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau among others, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, d'Holbach, Helvetius, Paine, et. al. 

"Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process." (Preface)

Israel traces this split back to Spinoza's positing of one substance--pure materialism--as the metaphysics of the universe, without the corresponding split between mind and matter "Spinoza…forged the basic metaphysical groundplan, exclusively secular moral values, and culture of individual liberty, democratic politics, and freedom of thought and the press that embody today the defining core values of modern secular egalitarianism" (location 1955) In other words, Spinoza really underlies most modern thought.

The moderate enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire and Rousseau, really come off fairly badly in Israel's eyes. Whereas I've kind of thought of Voltaire as an Enlightenment hero, to be revered alongside Erasmus and Montaigne, Israel sees him as a major conservative figure, who attacked the church, it is true, but only to destroy the abuses of its power and to consolidate power with the aristocratic classes. Of course, Israel may be talking more about the later Voltaire, but he maintains that Voltaire "consistently opposed radical thought and its egalitarian aims" throughout his career. Voltaire almost comes off as a pitiable figure at the end of his career as he stops attacking the church and begins attacking la philosophie moderne and its deplorable tendencies toward evolution, among other ideas. He recognized that his own influence over the ideas of the day were waning.

That's because a flood of literature in the 1760s-1780s bought about the predominance of the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. Israel vents against the historicism of the revolution for failing to emphasize this role and concentrating almost exclusively on social and political forces at work. "One cannot begin to grasp the revolutionary position in 1789 rightly without acknowledging that philosophisme was seen to have engineered a vast "revolution of the mind." And this phenomenon is in turn inexplicable without looking at the long, and in part self-conscious, build-up to its climax in the 1770' and 178os of a radical tradition reaching all the way back to the 166os. (location 1861) And it was the thinking of Rousseau that directly influenced Robespierre and the Jacobins in the excesses of the Terror, not the supposed "coldly clinical, unfeeling machine of rational ideas" that many critics of the Enlightenment have pointed to.

The moderate enlightenment thought lost influence because, in the end, it could not effectively criticize the abuses and social grievances of the day. The radical enlightenment became the "mouthpiece" for social resentment, calling for radical equality, the redistribution of wealth and happiness, and the universal education of mankind. It seems to me that that is still the world that we strive for today.

Author: Israel, Jonathan

Date Published: 2009

Length: 296 pp & 7 hr 28 min

electronic print & audio

Narrator: Adams, James

The Brothers Karamazov

I'm still trying to mull this over. This is obviously a "classic" and recognized as Dostoyevsky's culminating masterpiece, and it has sat on my bookshelf for, what, 40 years now, at least since I first read "The Grand Inquisitor" in LS 52 with Kay Bethune in 1970, if not before. But whereas Ivan comes off as the protagonist in telling his "poem" as he calls it, and hence, a heroic figure for me at the time, that is certainly not the direction of Dostoevsky's thinking at. In short, Brother K may be an important book but it just didn't turn out to be an enjoyable read.

The fact of the matter is that Fyodor Pavlovich and Dmitri Fyodorovich (Mitya) are buffoons--idiots, really--and I just didn't care for them at all. And it is the trial of Mitya for killing Fyodor that is the central plot structure of the book. Ivan and Alyosha are really the only major characters in the book (well, I should include Father Zosima, but he dies early on) worth caring for, and that includes the females Grushenka, Katarina and even Lise. Nobody seems to have a clue. The first half of the book with Fyodor and Mitya furiously quarreling with each other over Grushenka, while Mitya also dumps Katarina after spending large sums of her money, is really unpleasant, relieved only by "The Grand Inquisitor" and maybe by conversations between Zosima and Alyosha. Then so much of the rest of the book is taken up with Mitya's protestations of innocence "I am a scoundrel but not a thief or a murderer" that become so tiresome after a while. I guess my real reaction to his conviction in the trial, even though we know he is innocent, is "who cares." He and his father are so led around by their dicks--the sensualist Karamazov personality that is pointedly described again and again--that if Mitya didn't kill his father, he would have sooner or later killed someone else. And neither he nor Fyodor had a clue that Grushenka was playing them all along.

It sometimes takes a shovel to beat an idea into my head, and the cover of the Norton critical edition has the "troika" of the prosecutor's speech emerging from the heads of the bothers, implying that the story of the bothers is the story of Russia: the out-of-control sensualist Dmitri, the intellectual and skeptical Ivan, and the saint Alyosha. Many commentators claim that Ivan and Alyosha represent the fight for the Russian soul. Of course, it is Ivan who says that without God, all things are possible, and hence leads directly to the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich, and so Ivan is instantly discredited. Alyosha is almost goodness itself, if quite naive and simplistic in his thinking. And since the book ends with the exclamation "Hurrah for Karamazov" I guess that means he wins in the end, especially with the exhortation of love and remembrance to the boys at Ilyusha's funeral.

This leaves out the fourth brother, Smerdyakov, and it is he who is misled by Ivan's Enlightenment philosophy and actually kills Fyodor since all things are possible. But then he ends up killing himself while Ivan goes mad (of brain fever?) after his "interview with the devil." Evil really does permeate the book and makes any kind of optimistic view of human nature impossible without the saving power of the orthodox church.

I really need to ponder and read about Brothers K some more.

Author: Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Date Published: 1880

Length: 735 pp & 34 hr 50 min

print and audio

Narrator: Davidson, Frederick