Either fight or surf

 

“You either fight or surf!” is, of course, the famous choice posed by Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. In the madness of battle, Kilgore gives his soldiers a blank choice between two missions—take it to the waves or take it to the enemy.

Screenwriter John Milius later revealed that the scene was inspired by a comment made by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during the Six-Day War of 1967.

After winning a battle at Aqaba, Sharon went spear diving, as one does, shot some fish, and ate them with his staff, saying, “We’re eating their fish,” as if to say, “We came, we saw, we conquered, we fished a little.”

I’m not recommending either spear-fishing or surfing in the midst of battle. They’re both madness. But battle in and of itself is madness. In both cases, real and fictional, the pursuit of joy, of mastery, in such a mess is presented as a tunnel through the madness.

We are all in our own private wars with the future, because the future (spoilers!) inevitably brings death to each of us. But in this era of rapidly-advancing technology, it first brings obsolescence: the death of permanence.

Review: The Heiress of Northanger Abbey

 

I’m a sucker for meta-fiction, which reflects back on itself like a mirror within a mirror. So when someone comes along with a sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey which, rather than satirizing the gothic novel, embraces it, validating all Catherine Morland’s forbidding fantasies—I’m all in.

(If you haven’t read the original, Wikipedia sums it up as a coming-of-age story and a satire of the Gothic novel, and that’s all you need to know going forward, except that it’s my second favorite Austen novel, with Emma leading by a nose.)

So: it takes an enormous amount of chutzpah to attempt a sequel to a Jane Austen novel. It takes skill to capture an echo of Austen’s strait-laced prose style while retaining one’s own authorial voice. And it takes an enormous amount of sensitivity, research, and sheer talent to pull it off convincingly.

Nancy Bilyeau is more than up to the task. 

So? true?

Proteus

One expression that really irritates me?

“So true.”

I’‘m reminded of what my high school English teacher used to say:

“You can’t be very unique or a little bit pregnant.”

some terms by their nature are binary. They either are or aren’t. There are no degrees of truth. You can approach truth, as you can approach the summit of a mountain, but you can’t plant your flag on Everest until you’ve reached the top. There are no Mostly True and Slightly False tests.

“It oughta be true.”

Many things that ought to be true unfortunately are not. The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion, oughta be true. But you’ll always find it in the fantasy section, never the non-fiction.

Tall Summer Girls

 

               Delta Morning Empty Swing, Milly L. Moorhead

Here’s what it’s like to be on the cusp of life. It’s a Louisiana summer evening, suspended between twilight and night, suspended between 6th and 7th grades. Your hands are touching the shoulder blades of a tall girl who’s sitting on the swing in front of you. The swing must have been moving before, but now is still. You were talking before, you must have been, but now there is silence, not even insects buzzing, empty and full of meaning at the same time.

Is the swing part of a swing set, in a playground? Sounds logical, but you don’t remember. This is an intimate, close-up shot. There is only the swing, held up by the chains she has her hands wrapped around. They stretch forever into the sky.