When We Flew Planes Across The Atlantic, And Also Battled Lions In British East Africa

In the era of White Privilege it feels sort of weird and wrong to read Beryl Markham's West With the Night, except that between the lion wrassling, thoroughbred traning, and death-defying trans-Atlantic flying you easily get sucked into the mystique and aura of this fuckin' boss lady. Clearly, you could feel completely free to disregard the adventures of a special snowflake in British East Africa, but you'd miss out on a lot of really fuckin' boss badass stories. Also, if it makes you feel any better, she never left Kenya, and in fact died there in the 1980s.

There are, in my mind, a few legitimately weird aspects to West. One, where are the parents? In the early parts of the book, she is hunting big game on her own. Forget helicopter parents, even the most free range or just negligent parent would protect their child against elephants or whatnot. On the other hand, it's sort of an object lesson: if you want your child to set aviation records and tame lions, neglect them.

Then there's the sex, or lack thereof. Maybe we'd love to assume that adventuresome individuals are monomaniacal eunuchs, but that's frankly ridiculous, and only more so when you observe the habits of A-listers: these people bang. If you're flying planes in the bush, people will want to bang you. If you're training racehorses, people will want to bang you. If you're crash landing into Nova Scotia, people will want to bang you. The lack of sex or relationships or anything at all in West is ridiculous, or at the very least noticeable. I can respect that people in a certain day and age didn't talk about stuff, but as a modern reader, it's weird. And if you read her Wikipedia page, it is certainly an omission: this lady had relationships with dukes, airplane pilots and even humped the Little Prince dude.

A word about the dubious provenance of the writing: I don't know if I give a fuck whether she "wrote" "every" "word" "of" "the" "book." And I understand that this is a leap of faith, or at least amounts to taking a definite side between "it's great, brilliant" and "it's full of shit and fraudulent." I was going to say something along the lines of, "The fact that Wilt Chamberlain used a ghost writer doesn't negate the 20,000 women he bedded" except that apparently he didn't use a ghost writer or a co-writer or anything of the sort. But you get my point. As for what I think after having read it, this kind of sealed it for me.

All that aside, look, the writing in West is great: taut, clean, crisp in a way that lets the yarns speak for themselves. I can't believe her voice isn't in there somewhere. And it's especially crazy in this time, where authorship is as ephemeral as a Drake-Meek Mill feud, that people are fucked up about it. That said, I so badly wanted her to have hunkered down over a Remington and pecked away at this bit of brilliance. Even so, she still a) battled lions, b) trained racehorses, c) flew across the Atlantic, and d) whatever else she did that was awesome; wanting her to be articulate to the point of lyrical about the whole thing is asking a lot. Also, using "inauthentic" as a criticism is too easy and too cheap; boss people don't need to write their own stories because writing your own story is lame and beneath totally awesome people (Wilt Chamberlain aside).

If I Were To Let A Toddler Title A Post It Might Look More Like "gooee==ee/CinNNMOn"

As someone who does not care much for science fiction — OK, doesn't like it — or, OK, maybe hasn't read the right science fiction — or at least reads what people say is supposedly the right science fiction and then still doesn't really care for it — I think it's saying something that I really enjoyed Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

So there's this world that exists far from Earth which people from Earth can get to because they have super-awesome flying machines and they also know how to hibernate and, anyway, the thing about this world is that they're sort of human (I think) except that they're all androgynous and they have sex once a month (think like a woman gets her period except for a day or two) and sometimes they take on the female role and sometimes the male role. I skipped over the particulars about their sex organs because, frankly, it sounded really unappetizing.

The key is that this is a world not only without sexes but also without omnipresent sexual desire. So sort of like Denmark.

Hand was published in 1969, when it seems like topics such as gender were being explored — from my close reading of Mad Men, at least. As such, the whole thing seems sort of dated. Which is to say, if the concept is to imagine a world where sexes literally don't exist and sex is a completely absent variable in day-to-day life, it seems like in the forty-plus years since then the pendulum has swung back the other way (sort of; maybe until a few years ago) and people tend to account for rather than seek to eliminate those variables. The dividing line may have been (spoiler alert) Peggy's workplace romance with Stan.

[The heady anthrophilosophical commentary aside, Darkness is at its core a great story, with a harrowing adventure in the middle there and some cool spacetastic Star Trek-style doo-dads and whatnot.]

So anyway, I came away from reading Hand of Darkness thinking that the idea of a sexless species was a kind of corny sixties-era relic and interesting primarily as a time capsule of that era, and then the next book we read was West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

I don't think we need to perseverate on the inherent weirdness of English people setting up shop in British East Africa, or what we now know simply as Kenya. It hangs over the book so much that you kind of quickly ignore it. At one point, page 60, she writes, "I made what niggardly salutations I could bring forth from a disinterested memory and left the house at a gait rather faster than a trot" and you're kind of like, lady, I know damn well what that word actually means, but seriously? (For what it's worth, she actually spent the rest of her days in Kenya, where she seemed more at home than England, so there's that.) But eventually it just kind of seems like a thing that happened. Some more quinine, please.

So right, once you get past that and you settle into these fuckin' bomb-ass tales about being a preteen and battling lions and flying planes and training racehorses and shit you're like this lady's a fuckin' pro. Holy shit. It's something.

Which is exactly where The Left Hand of Darkness comes in: one of the most jarring things, for me at least, was how free of gender West was. I don't expect some Oprah-style emotionalization of what it meant to be a female among the lions and elephants and whatever else, but that it never came up not even once (it came up once, actually, vaguely in passing, where someone told her that some other person might not think much of an 18-year-old woman's horse training prowess, but as far as I can tell that's it). It's at least as obvious as the racial politics, and maybe more so. Her gender ends up hanging there like a [can't come up with a good comparison]. In a way it is cool: I'm a lady, so fuckin' what? But ultimately it's a little strange. Or at least I thought it was.

It's so jarring and so notable that I was thinking — without knowing her biography — that she must be hiding something. My first thought was that she was gay or something — that's just how it reads: something published in 1942 would simply omit that aspect of one's life. My copy of West didn't even have any pictures, so it set my thoughts spinning.

Little did I know that in reality — or at least Wikipedia — she had relationships with dukes, big game hunters, pilots and whoever other manliest of men on the planet in the first half of the 20th century.

Look, I understand and totally 100 percent respect the notion that your private shit is your private shit, and I get that Britishy people in the era of The English Patient are all, like, there's no reason to know about my shit, but what the fuck, I want to know about your shit. Even if it is published in 1942.

And then there are the theories, kind of convincing, that Markham was maybe somewhat less involved with her memoir than one would expect. Which is to say, if you're working with a ghost writer it's probably going to sound less "gendered," right? You come away thinking that Ursula K. Le Guin was onto something.

And then — and then! — there is that whole thing with her being the first woman to fly over the Atlantic. Talk about burying the lead! I spaced out during the discussion about this book about who this lady was, so I forgot that she was "the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west" — it creeps up on you like crazy and presents itself like the most elegant fart in the history of literature. If you read this in the 1940s thinking you were getting some sort of highlight you would likely be disappointed — but it's such an awesome touch, like "and oh, by the way, then I became the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west."

On The Great Korean Novel "The Cho-Sen"

The theme for book club this month was stuff read in high school, or school in general, so we chose from The Scarlet Letter and Chaim Potok's The Chosen and two more I can't remember easily enough. We, uh, chose The Chosen. After reading The Chosen I didn't understand what the point of it was, and I couldn't really imagine what a teenager was meant to take away from it.

My recollection of shit we read in school was that very little of it was enjoyable. Most were taut symbol-laden "thoughtful" books. With a lot of value-added stuff like history, diversity or whatever else. Freshman year I think I "read" Nectar in a Sieve. Sophomore year I think I "read" Things Fall Apart. Junior year's Crime and Punishment seemed less bad. But for the most part it was all so, so deadly. I think there's an article about this that Jen showed me. I resisted it at the time but I'm sure I was wrong.

I had the opportunity to ask a friend who teaches English in a middle/high school why they teach The Chosen in her school's eighth grade and she at first said it was a good way to introduce the idea of symbolism — the main character is injured in the eye by his antagonist-then-friend. He "sees" differently afterward; get it? "What about To Kill a Mockingbird," I asked, "I read that in eighth grade." That was taught in her school's seventh grade, she explained. (I guess they're too good for Where the Red Fern Grows?)

Admittedly, her other point–that kids were able to identify with the tension in the book's child-parent relationships–made a lot of sense. Still doesn't make the book any less boring.

Ultimately, I think most of us just viewed the book as being really weird, and esoteric even if you're familiar with Judaism. It's interesting in that it's set against the backdrop of WWII through the birth of the state of Israel. An interesting era, for sure, but novels are not eras.

All of which is not to say that Chosen is not entirely interesting — not true. There's an imperfect sort of anachronistic/fascinating example of respectability politics at the outset with the interest in playing baseball to show that Jews were good Americans. That deep dive into different Jewish groups in Jewish neighborhoods in war- and post-war New York City was interesting. Don't know that I needed to learn about those things during a Book Club, but they were interesting, in a sort of "interesting" way. And then there's the arcana of Judaism — a lot of it is hard to follow. And oh by the way — Gematria? I don't even know where to start.

Otherwise, I'm kind of scratching my head. It's clearly geared toward young adults yet it's stubbornly heady. And then there's the ending: the one character has a lousy relationship with his dad in part because his dad refuses to talk to him in order to teach him something about suffering. Fine, whatever, but when he's asked at the end of the book whether he'll do the same for his theoretical child he's like, "probably." Point being? And how would you teach that ending to a teenager? Don't get it.