Rock Island

by Bill Etem

to not know that big thick muscular or obese girls are less attractive than slim girls. And what was up with Dickens? Some parts of his novels are wonderfully entertaining, but other parts are just dull as hell. Look at Old Curiosity Shop. You get those great opening scenes, but then he goes on for page after page giving us info on Diggs. Who cares about Diggs? Why do we have to have all of this verbiage which goes on for page after page about Diggs? Or look at Barnaby Rudge. You get some fine opening scenes but it all degenerates into boring tangents, don’t you think? It is rather counter-intuitive to look for dumb-asses in Dickens’ novels because the slow-witted folk usually have some modicum of sense, whereas the villains are scumbags not dumb-asses, a distinction I believe I have been careful to emphasize. So much of the art of comedy is simply the action of making fun of other people in a funny way. Sometimes you get the impression that no one was funny in the past, like before the 19th century. The art of comedy had it rough in the old days because it threw a wet blanket on things when kings and nobles would torture people to death if they made fun of them. In the Renaissance days when tyrants ruled Italy, if a neighbor insulted you and your daughter by calling her a whore if she had sex before marriage, then you murdered your daughter, you kidnapped your neighbor’s daughter, killed her, cut the meat from her bones, put this meat into a ‘Thyestean stew’, then you invited your neighbor over for dinner, and after dinner you showed him what he had just eaten by showing him the head of his dead daughter. That was considered, by your more violent and energetic Christians in Italy 500 years ago, an artful and comedic way to take your revenge. Under the laws of les majesty which involved the torture and execution of those who besmirched the dignity of kings, popes, nobles etc., comedians in the old days learned via very tough love how to obey their betters. Who knows when modern comedy began? I was watching a film the other day from 1940 called Night Train to Munich starring Rex Harrison. It had these two English guys who were funny in a 21st century sort of way. Pickup from 1950 is really funny in parts. Beverly Michaels marries a guy’s bank account – a whole $7,000 – she’s sort of like Lana Turner and there’s a lot of plot-swapping between Pickup and The Postman Always Rings Twice. I suppose you might turn to Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers and people like that when you explore the genesis of modern comedy. Anyway, you marvel at how thick-skinned people like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barak Obama etc are. Not only do they not give contracts to hitmen to grease the comedians who mock and ridicule them, but they roll so effortlessly with the punches. Well, perhaps in private streams of profanity spew like great sewers of raw sewage from their mouths at comedians who mock them. Look at Nixon. In public he looked and spoke like a great statesman, quite elegant and dignified, at least the French gave him their seal of approval - but on those tapes he was so profane and obscene. Talk about evidence saying he didn’t have the Divine Law written on his heart! And LBJ was really crude as everyone knows. He would sit on the toilet and conduct business with journalists, or with the Vice President, or with the Secretary of State. I mean LBJ was just a really crude dude! Anyway, that would be weird, you know, if Bill Clinton, Barak Obama or George W. Bush just became raging madmen, just went off and turned the air blue with the vilest language, just screamed really disgusting stuff at the TV as they watched some comedian make fun of them on TV. They seem to roll so well with the punches, but what do I know? Espionage novels have a connection with religion because in religion we are asking: who are God’s agents and who are the agents of the devil? In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I can’t remember if Le Carré ever really explained why the spy for the Soviets inside British Intelligence, Bill Haydon, decided to betray his country. We’re told he hated of the USA. I seem to recall he hated pushy evangelicals, and perhaps he couldn’t find any aura of romance or aristocratic charm in the corporate culture we have over here. Don’t you think there is greatness in our corporate expertise: Google, Goldman Sacks, GM, Chrysler, Ford, Boeing, Intel, 3M, Microsoft, Seagate, Exxon-Mobil, Caterpillar, Medtronic, Du Pont, Warner Brothers, Columbia Studios, Paramount, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, MLB etc? Anyway, Haydon’s ex-best friend wrings his neck. And you can never be said to have led a truly successful life when your ex-best friend is justified for wringing your neck. Le Carré made Haydon a Tory at Oxford - which reminds one of John Buchan, who was a Tory at Oxford. Buchan was not a traitor of course, but I seem to recall a critic who had a theory that Buchan might have believed the words that he put into Lumley’s mouth in The Power House that the difference between civilization and the law of the jungle was as thin as the glass in a coffee table, and Buchan’s novels are filled with these charismatic, genius villains - Medina, Moxson Ivory etc. Buchan along with Churchill might be seen as the last great leaders of the British Empire. Buchan was one of those geniuses who was not slow to attain his full genius potential - he’s in the pantheon with Disraeli, Gladstone, Shakespeare, Dickens, Churchill, Florence Nightingale etc. - being both a statesman and a prolific writer of thrillers, espionage novels, biographies, no end of magazine articles etc. Buchan was also a poet and his novels are filled with marvelous descriptions of nature. His best book might be his autobiography Memory-hold-the-Door because his novels are a little corny by modern standards, and I suppose none of his novels are masterpieces in the same class with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley’s People, but some are in the same league as Erskine Childer’s The Riddle of the Sands - a great novel from an author with a very curious biography - he was decorated for bravery by the British in the Boer War but he was also executed by the British for his support of Ireland years later. He invented a character in The Riddle of the Sands, a traitor named Dolman, and you wonder what part of Childers went into Dolman. Getting back to Le Carré, it’s hard to find any big problems with his best novels. When you read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley’s People you find they are works of genius and very expertly plotted. For instance, Karla, the Soviet spy master, gets burned by the British spy master, Smiley, after Smiley learns Karla has been misusing Soviet funds to pay for his daughter’s treatment in a Swiss hospital / school, with the upshot that the Soviet spy master has to tuck his tail between his legs and defect to the West and get out of Dodge before his Soviet masters learn about his financial shenanigans and send him to a gulag. Whenever you take big chances you get big rewards or big penalties, nothing ventured nothing gained. When Haldane says to Avery in The Looking-Glass War that he is a collator not an operations man, and putting a collator, you have to suspect, who is not even an analyst, in charge of running a big operation - Leiser’s insertion into East Germany – will end in disaster. Doesn’t everyone know that you want an operations man, or at least an ex-operations man, to run an operation? Le Carré is the master of piling up convincing details to make a masterpiece. When the General, the ladies’ man leader of the exiles of the Baltic Republics, is driven to his death - driven mind you - Driven - murdered in Hampstead Heath by Karla’s Moscow Centre thugs using a Moscow Centre assassination weapon - and then when Karla uses his thugs to torture and murdered the ‘Magic Friend’ on that sailboat in Hamburg’s harbor, after the Magic Friend burned the Ginger Pig in that Hamburg night club full of naked German girls - you might be thinking the West should not make life in the West comfortable for Karla after he defects. But you can’t treat defectors shabbily if you want to get more defectors in the future to defect and reveal more of the devilish secrets of the devilish Soviet Union. Still, you hate to lavish in Western luxury and throw lots of money at a guy who has tortured and murdered Western agents. Look at that huge, unsightly giantess, Connie, or try to look at her, with the saliva dripping from her huge mouth in her huge head holding her huge memory, the giantess who could recall every detail of every Soviet thug, spy and bureaucrat who ever saw the inside of the Lubyanka. She ends up living at that hideous pet motel - living an exilic sort of existence banished from her beloved boys at the Circus, unable to find some sort o
f rewarding work in which she can employ her superhuman memory. Maybe she was just too hideous to have around, with her saliva dripping from her huge mouth, I don’t know. But Le Carré really knew how to pile on the convincing details. Look at Sandro in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura. The film begins with those shots of Anna in the foreground, and, in the background, we see Michelangelo’s dome - the dome created by the 16th century painter, sculptor and architect Michelangelo, not by the Michelangelo of the 20th century who created L’Eclisse, Blow-Up, L’Avventura etc. The Vatican is only a mile or two away from the scene at the beginning of L’Avventura though, if not for the presence of that dome you would think the film begins in a rural setting – anyway, Sandro is passionately in love with Anna, but then she disappears on that island, and then Sandro swiftly turns all his amorous attentions toward Claudia, played by Monica Vitti. She is distraught at the