“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

I had some concerns going in, being aware that this story was originally published in installments, by the weekly publication All the Year Round. I had bumped against another similarly episodic work earlier in my Kindling, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, and I found it unreadable, to the extent that I bailed after only a few chapters. It was painfully clear that Dumas was being paid by the word, and this reduced the story to grinding on at a painful and tedious pace, with copious descriptions of the tiniest elements. I feared this might be the same, but hoped the fact that Dickens owned and operated All the Year Round, rather than being merely a contributor, would help avoid this falling into the same traps.

Should I describe the plot? Do I need to? Has the spoiler statute of limitations expired, considering the book came out over150 years ago? I mean, even our son – for whom, sadly, reading is something very low on his list of leisure pursuits, likely falling between household chores and dental treatment – remembered reading this at school, albeit after some initial confusion with the plot to Oliver Twist. However, I was entirely unfamiliar with it, having neither read the book, nor seen any of the adaptations (most notably David Lean’s one from 1946, starring John Mills), so the various twists and surprises were indeed surprising. On that basis, let’s assume everyone else is as ignorant as I am.

It’s an oddly asymmetric book. While there’s an obvious hero, or at least central character, in Pip, an orphan, there is no antagonist, unless you consider life itself as qualifying. He’s brought up by his older sister and her blacksmith husband, and the first half concerns his youth, encounters with an escaped convict and relationship to creepy (but right) recluse, Miss Havisham, and her foster daughter, Estella. However, his life is changed forever by an inheritance from a mystery benefactor, which allows Pip to escape the grinding poverty of smithy life, move to London and become a gentleman of leisure. However, he’s in for a nasty surprise when the true nature of his benefactor shows up on his doorstep one rainy night, kicking off a series of events that will leave Pip poorer but wiser – and possibly, happier as well.

Which I guess is the point: money can’t buy you happiness. But, boy, does Dickens take the long road to that moral, especially since it’s a destination of which I’m already aware. However, the journey is not an unpleasant one. Pip does seem like a bit of an asshole at times: soon as he gets his mysterious inheritance, he bails on those who raised him for the big city, without much of a second thought or look back. While part of that is due to the terms imposed by his benefactor, and to his credit, he does seem to feel a bit guilty, that doesn’t stopped him from living the life of the indolent rich. He’s more than happy to use his new-found wealth for the benefit of his housemate, so why not send some back to Joe and Biddy? Dick move, bro’.

Perhaps the most memorable character is Miss Havisham, an old maid who has become bitter and twisted after being jilted, sitting around her largely decrepit estates in the dress she should have worn on her wedding day. She bring up her foster daughter, Estella, as a beautiful demon, designed for the sole tasks of breaking men’s hearts as revenge. This was one aspect which felt as if it had been pulled from a Wilkie Collins’ mystery, though it may just be that Collins is the Victorian author with whom I’m most familiar, and so might share a similar popular style. That said, I’d like to read a novel detailing their story, probably more so than one focusing on Pip’s inner monologues. [Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs apparently does something similar, telling part of the story from the convict’s point of view.]

I was pleasantly surprised by the flashes of dry, Dickensian humour present. If it’s not exactly Douglas Adams, nor was  this a particular chore to read, though some of the language was certainly archaic to a modern ear. However, it wasn’t exactly an unstoppable page turner either, and I typically found myself putting it down after a chapter, or at most, two. I am, however, curious to check out some of the film versions, and see how they compare. Not just the David Lean one, perhaps also 2011 BBC adaptation, with Ray Winstone as Magwitch and Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham. Or even An Orphan’s Tragedy, a Hong Kong version starring… Bruce Lee as their take on the young hero. Now, watching Pip wield his nunchaku against Magwitch: that’s something I can get behind…

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith. Divisions among such must come, and must be met as they come.”

“The question, as always, is how good is the evidence? The burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who advance such claims. Revealingly, some proponents hold that scepticism is a liability, that true science is inquiry without scepticism. They are perhaps halfway there. But halfway doesn’t do it. “

It’s no secret I enjoy conspiracies, and conspiracy theories. This is mostly for the entertainment value: the world would be a much more interesting place if those in power were, as David Icke has suggested, actually shape-shifting lizards. But a good general rule is, the bigger a conspiracy has to be, the less likely it is to be true. Another useful one is Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. So was the government behind 9/11? I doubt it. Should the government have known about it? Quite probably: the dots were there, they just weren’t connected by anyone in possession of all the data. Did America shamelessly exploit it afterward for an entirely unconnected foreign policy agenda, specifically, the invasion of Iraq? Oh, hell, yes. This doesn’t require a conspiracy, just standard political opportunism.

On Reddit, I’ve been amused and irritated in about equal amounts by the /r/conspiracy forum there, whose contents run the gamut from entirely reasonable speculation through to batshit crazy, with a copious helping of anti-Semitism (thinly disguised as anti-“Zionism”) and a relentless belief that every thing is a “false flag” – including, in an Inception-style piece of circular thinking, some who believe the anti-Semitic posts are false flags, designed to discredit /r/conspiracy. My particular bete noire are those who believe the Sandy Hook massacre was not just a false flag, but never happened at all. Literally, nobody died: it was a grand piece of theater designed to… Well, no-one has come up with an adequate motive: the most commonly mentioned one, to promote gun-control, conveniently forget that not one piece of federal legislation subsequently became law.

The evidence for this conclusion is wafer-thin, depending entirely on a conspiratorial interpretation of events with other possible explanations. For instance, a property database containing $0 transactions for homes in the area, has been cited as proof of a payoff to participants. But the alternative, is that these numbers are simply a place-holder – and the same database shows similar $0 for houses in other towns as well. Or one of the parents, Robbie Parker, who doesn’t behave at a press-conference the way the hoax proponents think he should. Me, I’ve never sent a child off to school and had them gunned down before lunch: I’m absolutely not going to tell anyone how they “should” behave under such a circumstance. Anything from catatonia to pure, undiluted rage would seem quite plausible to me.

What does all this have to do with Carl Sagan, best known for the original Cosmos series? Before I get to that, I did have the option to read his most well-known work, but I opted to pass, since the TV series had a tendency to send me off to sleep. Not that it was boring: just that it takes me back to being a 13-year-old, allowed to stay up late to watch the show. I rarely made it to the end, since his voice, pleasantly intoning “bill-yuns and bill-yuns”, had about the same soporific effect on me as mainlining a bottle of cough syrup. So, I opted for this one instead – though just to be safe, read it on my phone while doing laps of the courtyard at work on my breaks. Unconsciousness was successfully staved off. I can do no better than the Wikipedia summary: the book “aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical or skeptical thinking. It explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science, and ideas that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking, and should stand up to rigorous questioning.”

These are skills which are, in general, sadly lacking in /r/conspiracy. While there is skepticism, it’s a one-way street, that’s applied only to mainstream news sources where the reported information doesn’t fit the agenda. Now, it’s certainly wise to think about the agenda behind the reporting of FOX News or CNN. But it’s completely idiotic to think that alternative news sources have any less of an agenda, or don’t spin things every bit as much. There’s always the “want to hear both sides, because the truth is in the middle” argument – but that doesn’t apply to facts. If one source tells you Arsenal won the FA Cup and another says it was Manchester United, that doesn’t mean the final score was a draw. The other main problem is letting the theory drive your investigation and interpretation of the data. For instance, Sandy Hook hoax proponents wonder why we didn’t see any surveillance footage of Adam Lanza, in the way we saw the Columbine killers, hinting darkly that it’s because the story is made up. But the truth is, there were no surveillance cameras in Sandy Hook elementary. They’re demanding to see something that doesn’t exist.

The scientific method involves examining all the data, and coming up with something which then explains them, as completely as possible – with the caveat here that no event, subsequently described and interpreted by humans, will ever be perfectly without inconsistencies of detail. At Sandy Hook, the simplest, most elegant theory is that a mentally disturbed individual with access to lethal weaponry, used them to commit an almost unthinkable atrocity. Which may be from where the conspiracy theories spring, an attempt to find a less threatening alternative, i.e. “nobody died”, effectively wishing away the idea of 20 first- and second-graders being gunned down in their school. Sadly, that doesn’t make it true, and if you’re going to claim it, you will need to provide an alternative that explains all – not some – of the available evidence, equally as well as the “official” story. That just hasn’t happen. I’ve yet to hear any hypothesis which provides detail on how, why and by who the hoax, of necessity involving thousands of people, was carried out.

Sagan particularly speaks to this in a chapter entitled The dragon in my garage, in which he discusses a hypothetical claim about a fire-breathing creature, that’s impossible to disprove. You can’t see it? It’s invisible. You can’t feel the heat? The fire produced is heatless. It sounds like more than a few conspiracy theories, which are equally hard to nail down. We see this at Sandy Hook, with the allegation that there were no death certificates. When one of the parents released the certificate, it was then claimed, on dubious grounds, to be a forgery. [Again, one way scepticism: anything countering the mindset is scrutinized in painstaking detail; anything supporting it is typically accepted without question] It’s a continual shifting of the goalposts: you dispose of one claim, and another will simply get wheeled out to replace it. As Sagan says, “If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.”

I don’t agree with Sagan in some of his more socially-oriented opinions here – when you no longer have a fully-informed electorate, democracy becomes much more part of the problem, rather than a solution. And that’s why I do agree with him about the vita importance of education, and in particular, teaching critical thinking skills. Telling children 2+2=4 is all very well, but what happens when they then encounter 2+3? Giving them the ability to analyze data and solve problems is much better than the rote learning of facts. We should expect citizens to question authority, where the evidence is there to do so, and it’s part of science’s duty to do exactly that. Nicolaus Copernicus, for example, challenged the widely-accepted and Church supported notion that the sun revolved around the Earth in the 16th century, after he realized the data didn’t support it. But dogmatic scepticism is just as bad as dogmatic belief. Yes, the gumment will lie to you. But they don’t do so all the time – or even most of it, because they know it’s the truth that makes the lies plausible. Using the tools in what Sagan politely calls his “baloney detection kit” will help you separate the two.

It would certainly help many people, who mindlessly repost the most blatantly false shit on their Facebook wall, without a semblance of critical thought, or even basic Googling. As Mark Twain once said, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Oh, hang on: that wasn’t Twain at all. I think for most people, an increase in scepticism would likely help, and that’s why, in the end, Sagan’s approach perhaps has more common with /r/conspiracy than it would initially appear, even if the latter’s approach to scepticism is a half-baked one.

“The business of scepticism is to be dangerous. Scepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of sceptical thought, they will probably not restrict their scepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channellees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?”

The rules: A couple of years ago, I wrote about my Kindle, and the torrent I downloaded of 1,425 e-books. Going forward, I will be writing about each book I read off it. The aim is to expose myself to titles I wouldn’t otherwise read, from all period of history, but with a certain discipline.

1.  I don’t get to choose the book. I’m going through them in the order they appear on the screen. This is vaguely alphabetical by author first name, but that depends on the tags applied to each file.
2. I’m restricting myself to one book by each author.
3. I am not permitted to skip a book.
4. I must finish one book before beginning another, but can stop reading a book if I can write 500 words on why I will be stopping
5. However, I am allowed to have a different book simultaneously on my phone.

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

Bukowski is someone I tend to confuse with Chuck Palahniuk for some reason, though I’m not sure they have a great deal in common beyond a first name and a tendency (somewhat) to write about the raw underbelly of society. My first encounter was cinematic: the Belgian film, Crazy Love, based on three of Bukowski’s tales, and depicting a man’s inability to find true love, resulting in a downward spiral ending in suicide. I think it’s a very good film, but it’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d slap on for entertainment.

Fast forward close to 30 years, and I encounter Bukowski again, this time in his home environment of the written word. My instinct is this is less fiction, than thinly-disguised autobiography, with the story depicting a slice of life for “Henry Chinaski,” a writer who has achieved some popular success late in life. This has allowed him to abandon his day job at the post-office, and live on the income from poetry readings, royalties, etc. His life outside of this consists mostly of heavy drinking, and dysfunctional relationships with a series of women, who range from relatively normal, through to borderline psychotic [One wonders how the women felt about their portrayal]. Concepts such as monogamy seem entirely unknown to Chinaski, who will seize any opportunity he can for a fuck. He doesn’t appear to care much about the emotional toll this takes on those in the relationship, and in terms of a character arc, there isn’t much to speak of. At the end, however, he does hang up on another in the long line of literary groupies (reading rats? Is there a name for them), which I guess counts as some kind of progress.

What salvages the character – and the book – is the ferocious honesty. The author and/or his character are under absolutely no illusions about what a bastard they’re being. The overall tone reminded my of Klaus Kinski’s autobiography, All You Need is Love in a number of ways. That’s not just the obsessive sexual compulsions, but also the cheerful willingness to not care about whoring themselves out. “That night I gave another bad reading. I didn’t care. They didn’t care. If John Cage could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon.” Mind you, I also have to confess a sneaking admiration for the “hero” here, who finally got to quit his day job at the age of 49 – a mark I’ll reach myself in April – and seized with both hands, the opportunities that life presented him as a result. But, man: I clearly missed my chance if, as this book implies, all you had to do was write poetry and you’d have random chicks calling you up to pop round for a few drinks and multiple aardvarking. Of course, this was written in 1975-77 – a very different era, before sex could kill you.

I must say, it does get more than somewhat repetitive by the end, even broken up into 100+ chapters, some only a couple of pages long. While the spectrum of women in his life does show variety, it seems more in the physical sense, and none of them stick around long enough to make much impact, either on the reader or Chinaski. But the moral appears to be, why worry about bothering to treat someone with respect, even for the purely selfish reason that they’ll stick around – after all, there will be another one along in a minute? It’s a difficult mindset to relate to, though I will confess to wondering what the film version might have been like. The rights were sold to Paul Verhoeven at one point, and I can’t think of any other director who possibly – just possibly – could have done the mean spirit here justice.

‘I’m not a thinker. Every woman is different. Basically they seem to be a combination of the best and the worst – both magic and terrible. I’m glad that they exist, however.”

Silver Screen Samurai
Cocoro Books, $19.95

The samurai is an icon of Japanese cinema, standing for many of the same attributes that the cowboy does in Hollywood. His popularity may wax and wane as the decades go by, but will never die out completely, not as long as there is a yearning for simpler times, when a sense of honour and a weapon were all a man needed. The genre is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment, with Takeshi Kitato’s Zatoichi and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume 1 showing the concept still has relevance in the 21st century.

It is thus a fitting time for Cocoro Books’ third volume of Japanese movie posters, after their general edition, and one devoted entirely to anime. Its 116 full-colour pages cover films from 1935 up to Kitano’s entry of last year, along with side-essays covering topics such as Zatoichi, or women in samurai films. These help explain what to look for in the posters, and the significance of the various elements therein.

For fans of the genre, this is an absolutely essential work, with many of the photos likely never before seen in the West. The sense of a auction catalog that permeated the first volume is toned-down, though prices are still attached to each item. Actually, they seem pretty reasonable: a 20×28-inch poster for the 1959 film, The She-Devil Lineage is only $35. Few original posters for Hollywood movies of that vintage can be had at such a low cost.

As more of a dilettante when it comes to these films – who, if truth be told, doesn’t like cowboy movies much either – there was a certain sense of sameness about a lot of the pictures. A samurai, with sword and top-knot, stares out of the frame while projecting an expression of intense seriousness; red text sprays down one side of the image, like an arterial gush from one of his victims. Woman are rarely seen, active ones, even less frequently – and if you’re looking for miles of smiles, this is the wrong volume entirely.

In such homogeneous company, the odd one that bucks the trend stands out more than usual. Kurosawa clearly didn’t need to use traditional imagery for one of his takes on Shakespeare, Ran. Similarly, Nagisa Oshima’s Taboo [Gohatto in its native land] portrays an androgynous figure, in keeping with the unconventional nature of its story. I also noticed that more recent entries seem to be favouring black as a colour – guess it must be the new red…

The presence of no less than three indices – by Japanese, Romanized and English titles – is definitely a welcome addition, even if I’m certain this book merely scratches the surface, rather than making any claim to be comprehensive. While more narrowly-focused, and thus personally less interesting, than its predecessors, it is still worth a look for anyone with the slightest interest in Japanese cinema, design or even if you simply appreciate unusual art.

For more information, see the publisher’s website – the book is also available from Amazon.

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Kaiju Big Battel
A Practical Guide to Giant City-Crushing Monsters
Hyperion, $14.95

If we were neutral – though we certainly aren’t – we might have to admit that Kaiju Big Battel is a one-joke idea: “What would happen if you mixed the worlds of professional wrestling and Japanese monster-movies?” And, let’s be honest, neither of those fields are exactly deep in themselves. Yet, somehow, Kaiju is becoming far greater than the sum of its parts, and this book shows, without a doubt, that there is more life to the concept than perhaps even its creators expected.

What started off as guys in bizarre costumes hitting each other with cardboard buildings in Boston has become a merchandising juggernaut offering T-shirts, stickers, DVDs, even little packs of meat harvested from dead monsters. [The last idea is borrowed from Japan – I got Chris a tin of Mothra eggs for Christmas. On the other hand, a Kaiju sticker graces the previously pristine bumper of the Trash City PT Cruiser] And now, a 170-page volume that explains the basic concept for beginners, yet is sure to delight any existing fan of Dr. Cube, Silver Potato, Dino Kang and the other Big Battelers.

It begins with the origins of Kaiju, as an epic battle of good vs. evil, that previously destroyed cities, but is now constrained within the ring – despite the evil efforts of Dr. Cube and his posse to achieve world domination. It then segues into two-page pieces focusing on each Kaiju creature, and also describes previous Big Battels, the weapons used therein, how the monsters work, plus quizzes to test your “Kai-Q”, and handy survival tips for what to do if a Battel suddenly erupts nearby.

Like we said: there’s a lot more to this than you probably thought.

All of this is written in an utterly engaging mix of sarcastic English and Japlish – if you cycled the same text repeatedly through an automatic English-Japanese-English translator, you’d be in the right ballpark for that delightful hybrid. Hence, phrases such as: “Dr. Cube is mostly evil plastic surgeon helps hide him and in real is monster man with amazing bloody spattering squares type head.” The full-colour section in the middle is a repository of many such gems.

Should you be one of the ever-diminishing number unaware of the Kaiju phenomenon, this is an ideal place to start. If you have, you’ll still learn much from this tome, which received (and fully deserved) Chris’s highest award: being taken to the Post Office to amuse her while she’s in the queue. If it can calm, soothe, and entertain under such a stress-provoking situation, imagine what it can do for you…

For more information, see the Kaiju website – the book is also available from Amazon.

Japanese Movie Posters
Chuck Stephens, Tetsuya Masuda, Kairakutei Black
Cocoro Books, $30.00

There can really be no argument: film posters are works of art, in a way that no other advertising medium can quite match. Hang a car advert on your wall, and people will look at you strangely, but a movie poster is simultaneously aesthetically pleasing, cool and a statement about your personality. Room with a View or Stewardesses in Heat? The choice is yours…

Bruce Hershenson’s collections of posters, mostly themed by genre, have done sterling work in gathering some of the best examples of such art, but are limited in scope, covering only the output of Hollywood. Just as great films are produced around the world, so it is for great artwork, and Cocoro Books’ collection of promotional material for Japanese movies is particularly welcome because it opens the doors to a world that is little known in the West.

The book is divided into seven categories: yakuza, sci-fi and monster, samurai, pink, horror, animation and new cinema. “Pink” is the Japanese term for erotic films, and the posters therein are eye-popping, simply because they are notably more explicit than anything permitted in America or Britain – along with the nudity, bondage and coercion seem common themes – making them perhaps somewhat questionable candidates for decorating your living-room.

Less likely to offend your maiden aunt are the yakuza films, featuring tough guys (and gals – in one case, even nuns!) looking…well, tough. The samurai section is not dissimilar; swords replace guns, but the emphasis is still on staring Very Intently. A number of the titles in the animation section may seem familiar, since it’s one area where Japanese cinema has made significant exports in recent years. But the poster for Ghost in the Shell is still different enough from the Western one to be striking.

However, my favourite section of all was the one devoted to the monsters, simply because these are films for which there is no real equivalent in the English-speaking world, as the woeful Hollywood Godzilla proved. Whether it’s the Tokyo Tower being destroyed by Mothra’s caterpillar, or what looks like a giant narwhal with a laser-beam coming out of its forehead (that’ll be Jigura, then), these provide a glimpse into a universe that is at once fascinating, frightening and surreal.

Each poster is accompanied by three or four lines of information on the film (studio, year, etc.), and trivia about it. Each section is also prefaced by commentary from Masuda and Black, talking about the genre’s history and place in society. These little mini-essays are teasingly short, and I would have welcomed their extension to greater length.

The book also operates as a catalog for Masuda’s store, @wonder, offering all the posters in the book for sale, at prices ranging from $20 for the new films, up to $150 for Sleepy Eyes of Death and the fabulously named Ship of Blood-Sucking Skulls. If the walls here weren’t already completely covered – with poster-tubed reserves waiting in the cupboard – there are a number I’d be very tempted to acquire.

Maybe instead I’ll just buy an extra volume of the book, so I can hack it apart and frame individual pages as mini-posters. But what, then, to do when we have Mothra on one side, and Son of Godzilla on the other? Better make that two more. Such cunning marketing, which requires the reader to purchase multiple copies of the book, can only be admired. Sigh… 🙂

For more information, see the publisher’s website – the book is also available from Amazon.