I hear my Homework is Excellent Reading in the Teacher's Lounge

So....I am currently sitting for a master's degree, as they say, at Virginia Tech (though I am not sitting at Virginia Tech but rather in my home or at the Library or at Starbucks and taking all classes virtually).  I am also 30 years old, and this Thursday I will be actually 31. I am holding down a job, raising a family.  I am a sometimes constructive member of the Church, especially on Wednesdays.   I have many leather bound books.  My house smells of rich mahogany.  Maybe even a little bit of teak mixed in there as well.  I've thrown out the Axe body spray and bought proper cologne.  I find myself more and more appreciating jazz music.

These are the trappings of a professional, serious man.  

Still, I couldn't resist doing this on my most recent homework assignment for VT's AOE 5444 Dynamic's of Small Craft Class with Dr. Leigh McCue who, in another tip of the cap to seriousness and professionalism, is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

On "The Gathering Storm" by Winston S. Churchill.

Yeah, that's right:  THE Winston S. Churchill, PM of Britain during the vast majority of World War II, Defender of the Realm, amateur painter, avid cigar smoker, wearer of nice hats and user of walking sticks, was actually a pretty darn good writer.

As an aside, I find it interesting that both Churchill and Hitler had connections to painting, though I have it on excellent authority that despite his otherwise incredibly fucking ginormously massive, massive shortcomings as a human being Hitler was probably the better painter.

Tasteless?  Without doubt.  But it always makes me laugh.

At any rate, Winston Churchill was actually a very avid writer.  When he was younger he did write a novel, but as his military and political career progressed he tended more towards a range of non-fiction.  During his "exile" from government in the 1930s (during which, as far as I can tell, he was still a member of Parliament but did not hold any actual ministry positions) he popped out 6 volumes on the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, who successfully commanded English and Allied troops against the seemingly invincible Louis XIV during the War of Spanish Succession.  Hero of Blenheim and Ramilles.  You should check him out.

And, after being discharged from the government post World War II, Churchill set to writing a history of the war he had been so recently played such a major part in, a work of 6 volumes of which "The Gathering Storm" is but the first.

The book starts with the First World War's end, details Hitler's rise to power and Germany's re-armament, and ends just as the Germans are invading France.  Churchill was a vigorous supporter of sternly dealing with German re-armament and territorial expansion.  If he had his druthers the German advance into the Rhineland, 1936, probably would have meant war -- his view seems to have been that France, with support from the League of Nations, had the manpower to defeat a relatively weaker Germany and that Hitler was gambling on the French and British reluctance for a war.  As such, there are a lot of "I told you so" moments in this book, and it does get a little annoying at times.

Oh, and naturally he thinks England is the greatest thing since some wonderful, wonderful man inflated a pigs bladder and tried to kick it into a net (I wonder how many pints of mead that little revelation took?).  Maybe that's true, but if you don't think so then you may not like this book.  Still, one would expect Churchill to think that way.  

Then of course there is Neville Chamberlain and the Appeasement at Munich, which our own politicians have spun into a morality tale concerning a lack of balls in dealing with dictators or defecit spending or a mistress with a penchant for blackmail diamonds.  Chamberlain is a reviled character in our time, but one must remember that he was the Prime Minister at the start of the war and, as Churchill relates in this book, once it was clear that war would indeed come he showed far more mettle than most people give him credit for.

The book then goes into the invasion of Poland and the "Phony War" (Churchill dubs this the Twilight War -- I like the Twilight War better but we have to stick to the Phony War these days as Twilight War only conjures up images of surly teenage Werewolves fighting against damn fine looking Vampires that sparkle in the sunshine), but also very interestingly into early naval battles of the war and the botched campaign to hold key ports in Norway after the Germans invaded that country in April 1940.

This is not my first attempt at Churchill -- I have twice grappled with a very abridged version of Marlborough but have turned back twice -- and he is at his best when discussing military action.  His descriptions of the action against the Graff Spree of the River Plate and the small naval actions supporting the Norwegian Campaign read like something out of O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series.

The other thing that strikes me as I am reading this book is that World War II was such a cataclysmic event that it just changed everything.  To read Churchill's summary of the strategic situation at the outset of the war doesn't sound so far off a Wellington or a Howe spreading a map out on a table and marking enemy concentrations with crusts of bread and glasses of sherry.  Churchill spent his formative years in the 19th Century and he strikes me as a 19th Century man who thinks like a 19th Century man (though his mind was certainly acute enough to grasp how the airplane and other technologies had changed the battlefield -- though he didn't seem to quite appreciate the new offensive roll of the tank).  Perhaps he was a hold-over, but I will make a bold generalization and say that a person from the late 19th century could probably bop around much of antebellum Europe and be pretty comfortable after a short period of acclimation to motor vehicles, radios, movies, and wide spread electricity.

Not so after the War.  It changed everything, including that mode of thinking.  

I think another evidence of this fact is that nobody writes six volumes of non-fiction on anything anymore.  A trilogy maybe, but a hexalogy?  Six volumes?  Cor!

So, I am afraid I'm going to have to leave the Germans on the doorstep of France, and leave old Winston all comfy-cozy with a large glass of whisky and one of those schmelly cigars at his new digs in Number 10 Downing Street;  I need a chance to rest and recover before starting on Volume II.  I also think it would be worth reading a biography, hopefully something that puts Churchill's character between that of a Savior and a Warmonger, before I continue to get a bit more perspective on the man writing the work, particularly with regards to his early life.  I think it could make the remaining five volumes (five volumes!) far more rewarding.




 

On Christopher Moore's "Sacre Bleu"

Sure, I could talk about how the President visited Newport News Shipbuilding the other day, and how his visit disrupted traffic and shook down hot dog vendors and emptied parking garages, and how he talked about this and that in an effort to deflect blame for Sequestration away from him and on to Congress, and how I didn't get to see him because I had mandatory training, and how as a consolation prize I happened to run into Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus at the IHOP where we had an epic game of Battleship over a few short stacks.  I would have won if my Submarine hadn't defected.  Damn you Jack Ryan!  I don't care if you are the shit, those Irish terrorists should have had the experience and tactical acumen to waste you when they had the chance.

But I won't talk about any of that, because I just finished Christopher Moore's Sacre Bleu, and I would rather write about that.

The plot is complex, and even now only a day after finishing the book it is difficult to remember the many twists and turns.  But I will try to summarize it enough to talk about some salient points (I wonder how many readers I just lost with the phrase "salient points"?  Stick with it.  I promise you, there will be boobs):

Lucien Lessard is an aspiring painter working in his family's bakery in Montmartre, Paris, in 1890.  It is not the happiest of lives for him, especially as the family tests their freshly baked baguettes by cracking them over Lucien's head (if the crust wraps around his skull with a satisfying crackle, perfection is achieved).  After the death of Vincent Van Gogh (whom Lucien studied with briefly at one of the many art schools in Paris) the lovely Juliette, the woman who broke Lucien's heart when she suddenly vanished two years ago, returns.  After some brief re-introduction she pretty much demands Lucien paint her nude.  He, with little hesitation, obliges.

Lucien gets sort of unstuck in time.  He and Juliette work on the painting as artist and muse, they take go to resorts on the Seine that burned down in 1873 (it is 1890, mind you), they go to London to see the Toilet of Venus by Velasquez.  When he returns he is near death, practically in a coma and Maman Lessard cracks Juliette over the head not with a baguette but with a crepe pan (Ah....the food of France).  Despite the heavy blow to the skull Juliette escapes into the night.

The Lessard family, worried about Lucien's health and sanity, calls on his friend Toulouse Lautrec to try and reach him, to try to get him to stop seeing this girl, and to get the garish yet masterful Blue Nude he and Juliette created out of the house.  When Lucien comes to he is convinced that the ultramarine blue that Juliette supplied him for the painting is driving him insane (not a bad theory....there are some who say that Van Gogh's habit of actually eating paint while he worked poisoned his mind and made him mad...though there is probably some kind of chicken and egg thing going on there).

So over the rest of the book they try to solve this mystery.  And it turns out that Juliette actually is a muse, a spirit who inhabits the body of different people in the lives of artists.  She is working with a shamanistic,  little, twisted, awful man named The Colorman -- who is basically a paint maker with magical powers.  For centuries, CENTURIES, he and the muse have roamed the earth creating art.  The muse inspires the artist, gives the color that The Colorman makes to the artist, and eventually takes some of the paintings they produce back to The Colorman.  In a strange ritual the painting is drained of its color and it winds up on the muse's naked body as a powder, and The Colorman scrapes the color off of her skin and stores it in jars.  In this ritual their strength is renewed and...

Yeah, I know.  It sounds dumb.  And for a while, around page 100 or so, as things were just beginning to take shape, I thought that the book was indeed going to turn out to be really stupid.  But it didn't.  It turned out to be profound.

I think, in a hilarious and vulgar sort of way (the book is actually quite funny - Christopher Moore is a gifted humorist if you didn't know.  I will be reading more of him) the book is trying to get at what makes great art. In the ritual we see a couple of things that suggest what Moore thinks about that.

First, there is a price to be paid for great art.  It may not be a universal truth, but to me it seems that the greatest works of art have been created or composed or written by those who have not only great talent but also a certain depth of spirit and a certain willingness to pour themselves into what they are creating.  Even on a lesser mode of creative output the creative act takes something, it costs something.  Even this crappy little blog costs something (this blog post alone has taken me 6 fucking hours....which makes me think maybe I am missing the point of blogging....).  I think that is something worth pointing out in an age where I want the world's entire library of cute cat videos to be accessible by a device I can carry in my pocket and I wanted it yesturday.

You know something?  If Obama actually HAD made a Royal Presidential Decree (or an RPD for you military types) that now all Newport News Shipbuilding Employees could have smartphones with cameras (there are very few without them), than maybe I would have actually had that yesterday   Another opportunity missed, Number 44.  Another opportunity missed.

Where were we?  Ah.  Point number 2.....uh, I can't remember it.  Something about how art feeds on itself, how it inspires itself, it regenerates itself.  Lets move on.

Any book about artists living in Monmartre is going to have a good bit of seedy sex, and as a counterpoint to all the serious insights Moore has the Touluse Lautrec's of the world who seem to draw their inspiration not from depth of spirit but by spending their days at the bars and brothels in a happy kind of debauchery, giving way utterly and completely to a blotted experience.  Juliette herself, as a muse, is suggestive of the criticism from a  few circles that great swaths of Western art is more about "Hey, look at these" than anything else.

See?  I told you there would be boobs.  

Now, I don't know if that's quite true (if nothing else its certainly a grand, Freudian over-generalization), but Moore definitely keeps pointing to the nexus between sexuality and creativity throughout this book.  Though, naturally, he does so in a hilarious way.

Okay, so what have we learned?  If you want to create great art, just take two parts passion, one part pain, some old ideas, a good dollop of sex, and mix it all up.  Bake it in the oven at 350 degrees for two hours and Voila!  A souffle fit for a King (if you have the talent to actually keep it from all falling apart, that is).  Did I just compare Van Gogh's "Starry Night" to a cheese soufle?  Yep.  Reckon that I did.  And Art is now ruined.

As a side note, this book really was right up my alley.  It had everything I could ever ask for:  Paris, the 1890s, sex, absinthe,  art, the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and lots and lots of humor.  Its the kind of book I wish I could write one day.

Art Credit:  Bather Arranging Her Hair, Auguste Renoir, 1893.  Downloaded courtesy of the National Gallery of Art; deemed public domain.