War Dances by Sherman Alexie

(So I thought forget about the Read and Become an Asshole Tour. I don’t really want to become an asshole.)

Things to know about Sherman Alexie:

1.He recently won the National Book Award for his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.

2. He is insanely readable.

3.He is one cool guy.

Introducing Puma's new line of ceremonial moccasins.

You can find a stronger introduction to Alexie, though, than his brand new story/poetry collection, War Dances. It’s a very mixed bag that ranges from terrific to kind of lousy, but two or three of its stories together are worth the price of an eventual paperback.

The theme that holds War Dances together is patrimony, whether characters are dealing with failed fathers or are failed fathers themselves. Or, as the author said in an interview with Advance, “I’m mostly interested in the ways in which men fail at being men—or rather, fail at being good men.”

“War Dances,” the title piece, is a very good one. I’m not sure what its merits are as a focused story, but I found it amazingly honest and at times sidesplitting. (The protagonist complains to his brother-in-law that when he got an MRI, he asked to have the machine play country music because it was something his late father would have listened to, and they played ‘Shania Twain and Faith Hill shit.’ His brother-in-law replies, ‘You wanted to hear the alcoholic Indian father jukebox.’)

Nearly every piece concerns a bookish, married Spokane Indian man from the state of Washington dogged by issues with fathers and masculinity. I like to think I’m better than this, but I can’t help but slip into that distracting game of guessing which details from the stories are autobiographical, you know… which thoughts (especially the violent or creepy ones) are the author’s and are merely wearing a fake moustache called Fiction.

But Alexie’s most seemingly transparent memoirs are his best stories. “Fearful Symmetry”—in which the speaker’s name is “Sherwin Polatkin,” for God’s sake—is my favorite in the book. In it, the protagonist copes with writer’s block after his artistic castration at the hands of the Hollywood system. The story just has priceless lines:

“Weren’t Americans afraid of tragedy? As a Native American, Sherwin was, by definition, trapped in a difficult but lustful marriage with tragedy.”

“And yes, Polatkin [was] the possessor of a reservation-inspired messiah complex (‘I am the smartest Indian in the universe and I will save all you other Indians!’)…”

I’d have encouraged Alexie to venture beyond his backyard, but if stories like “The Senator’s Son” are what must come from that, then I think he’s fine where he is. That story is about a homophobe whose father is a hypocritical Republican politician. The son beats a gay man bloody to find he’s actually his best friend from sixteen years ago. It’s as moralizing as this collection gets—and moralizing is fine when you go about it with some subtlety, but subtlety isn’t Alexie’s approach to anything and as a result this story is a preachy mess.

Alexie includes several poems in the collection, too. Some aren’t as profound as they put on. Others, like “Ode for Pay Phones,” structured after a Fibbonachi Sequence, are golden.

His strength, I think, lies in his raw emotional appeal; he has an indisputable knack for making you laugh and tear up without you feeling at all ashamed for doing it. He’s like a Philip Roth who never quite matured, but that has its good points: Alexie may swing wildly at his targets, but there’s a likable exuberance to his writing amidst the angst whereas Roth is a calculating curmudgeon.

A coworker of mine read “War Dances” when it was published in the New Yorker and said Sherman Alexie might be the source of the next Great American Novel. Parts of this collection cast some doubt on that, but I have to say it’s still a possiblity.

Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince

And here we reach stop #2 on my apparent Read and Become an Asshole Tour. (If I continue, #3 might as well be either Atlas Shrugged or I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell) Now what would be more appropriate than a book whose author attained such notoriety that his name became synonymous with the Devil?

Evil Fun Fact: the Satanic epithet “Old Nick” comes from Niccolo.

Ah, the Italian Renaissance---when men were men who were so often mistaken as women.

Machiavelli’s most reviled statement, which has come to define The Prince as a whole, is that a leader is better off being feared than loved. But that line is actually preceded by Machiavelli’s somewhat less reprehensible observation that “it would be best to be both loved and feared. But… the two rarely come together.” So as for the rest of us… well, consider growing an imposing moustache and wearing an eyepatch, for starters.

Okay, there’s more to it than that. Here are some of his iconic statements on how a leader must think and behave:

“Men must either be pampered or annihiliated. They avenge light offenses; they cannot avenge severe ones. Hence, the harm one does to a man must be such as to obviate any fear of revenge.” (Ch. 3)

…

“He who causes another to become powerful ruins himself.” (Ch. 3)

…

“All armed prophets have succeeded where all unarmed ones have failed.” (Ch.6)

…

“Injuries must be committed all at once so that, being savored less, they will arouse less resentment. Benefits, on the other hand, should be bestowed little by little so as to be more fully savored.” (Ch.8)

…

“The mob is always impressed by appearances and by results; and the world is composed of the mob.” (Ch.18)

…

“….when occasion serves, a wise prince will cunningly provoke opposition and then, by routing it, increase his own stature.” (Ch.20)

Story goes that Machiavelli wrote and presented The Prince as an educational gift for the fledgling Lorenzo de Medici, practically with a resumé and cover letter asking for a permanent job as political advisor. The author was a statesman who knew both success and failure (though his most dramatic failures are historically thought to be the fault of the reckless ruler he was advising), legitimizing his claim to wisdom in all political situations.

Anachronistic Fun Fact: If Machiavelli had been advisor to President Bush during the Iraq War, he’d have been fired. Niccolo would have suggested the preemptive strike, certainly, but his insistence that The President then pack his bags and actually go live in the desert nation he had just smashed and conquered, though, would not have been as appreciated.

There are plenty of logical criticisms one might fling at The Prince, but anyone who decries it as “bad ethics” is making a silly statement. The Prince, in reality, has nothing at all to do with ethics—and that’s precisely the problem people have with it. What is right, according to Old Nick, is not the issue but rather what is effective; acting effectively may include the right thing or it may not. In short, if you’re worrying about the morality of your actions as a leader, you are handicapping your abilities. In The Prince, ethics is a non sequitur.

“A man who strives after good in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” (Ch.15)

I’ll leave off with what to me was real WTF statement of The Prince, which had little to do with its philosophy per se:

“… fortune is a woman and in order to be mastered she must be jogged and beaten.” (Ch.25)

Enchanting. I think that’s a perfect tone to set for reviewing Tucker Max, if I really had to.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

I was self-conscious reading The Art of War in public, like something was missing. I should have been wearing one of those blue button-up shirts with the white collar and a heavy gold watch on my wrist while squawking into my cell, “You’re breaking my balls, Don. You’re breaking my balls.” But not being this kind of guy, I struggled to discern the text’s metaphorical value to me, a 24-year-old working in retail who doesn’t even play World of Warcraft.

My mother used to dress me up in that, too, before I could go out and play in the snow.

Well, I can proudly say I now know that dust on the horizon, if it is low and spreading, means infantry is approaching, and dust high and peaking means they’re coming with chariots. This came in handy the day Dan Brown’s new book came out last week.

But who reads The Art of War nowadays? I mean, aside from the ROTC and marketing reps on the fast-track to success? Maybe just curious people like me who are simply drawn to its notoriety—as if the ancient wisdom to be gleaned from the spare, often elusive lines can somehow be applied to everyday, non-martial confrontations to our secret advantage.

You may already be familiar with Sun Tzu’s most famous tenets:

Ultimate excellence lies

Not in winning every battle

But in defeating the enemy

Without ever fighting (Ch.3).

…

The Way of War is

A Way of Deception (Ch.1).

…

Know the enemy,

Know yourself,

And victory

Is never in doubt,

Not in a hundred battles (Ch. 3).

Sun Tzu has an aura of pragmatism about him, but with his simple win/lose, good/bad, weak/strong dichotomies, he actually begins to sound idealistic. I missed Machiavelli’s occasional shrug of the shoulders when he said you can do everything right and still have your plans go to pot because of some merciless sweep of Fortune. There’s something I find untrustworthy about a wise man, in contrast, who insists that if you follow a handful of his rules in a given situation, victory is 100% guaranteed.

Also, someone who speaks so often in absolutes is bound to contradict himself from time to time.

If I could highlight one surprising point of his, it would be this one:

The Skillful Warrior of old

Won

Easy victories.

The victories

Of the Skillful Warrior

Are not

Extraordinary victories;

They bring

Neither fame for wisdom

Nor merit for valor (Ch.4).

The highest ideal is not to win glorious clashes of brave arms, but to prevent that exciting stuff from ever happening in the first place; it is to simply crumple the enemy with subtlety and stratagem, swiftly applied with deadly results. Effective, but terrible for ratings. Which reminds me—I wonder what Master Sun would say about the modern American military. Perhaps the tactical discipline he might find agreeable, but then there’s that little thing we like called “Shock and Awe”…

Most translations of The Art of War include commentary, and the section in mine is very, very interesting. I’d recommend the edition in my hand for this reason. The text feels like it is being looked over, line-by-line, by a panel of ancient and modern thinkers/historians who offer everything from clarifications of Sun’s meaning to battlefield anecdotes that support his philosophy.

Aside from actual warfare, there are some pretty legitimate modern applications for The Art of War. I used to be a fencer and found his emphases on deception, distance, strength, weakness—nearly everything to be excitingly translatable to the sport. In fact, I can see almost any competitive athlete finding Sun Tzu worth reading.

But what about professionals? After all, you’ll almost always find some version of this book in the business section of your local bookstore. But its usefulness to Brian in HR is, to me, a bit of a stretch. If he truly thinks he can put Master Sun’s treatise on life-or-death conflict into professional use, chances are he’s having melodramatic fantasies about the importance of his job.

But my situation is different. Honestly, if I don’t find out when I’m due for a raise soon, I will use the wisdom of Chapter Thirteen. I will hire spies.

Too Early To Call Worst Children’s Book of the Year?

Not that you ought to come to me for all matters children’s book, but I can’t help this one.

Where the Mild Things Are: A Very Meek Parody didn’t snag my attention until I saw I had to shelve it in the children’s section. Normally, spoofs of kids’ books (Goodnight Bush, Pat the Husband, etc.), which often rely on grown-up social or political gags, go in the adult humor section because kindergartners are famously unappreciative of satire. This is not the fare that’s enjoyed by both children and adults, who would merely be in on a joke. The people who gave “Maurice Send-up” the green light don’t know this.

Mommy, who the hell are these people?

So in this version, you have not Max but Mog, a pipsqueak monster in a rabbit suit who drives to Dullsville (in a Gremlin! See… c’mon, these are the jokes kid). There he encounters its four denizens who each uncannily resemble Bill Gates, Al Gore, Martha Stewart, and Jay Leno—all public figures ripe for satire cerca 1997. Mog is welcomed by the lot of them and participates in all the boring things they do, like experimenting with alternate light bulbs. You see, they do boring things!

The centerpiece is a pictorial montage riffing the one from the original Where the Wild Things Are. One of the illustrations has Mog raising his hand in a classroom where Bill Gates has gleefully written on his blackboard “Computers: Fun with Binary Code.”

HEY-ohhhhhh!

If you think that’s funny then I’ve got a Bad Cat book to sell you.

Not convinced it’s supposed to be for kids? Neither was I until I saw it was published by the children’s arm of Simon and Schuster, who even include a URL on the back of the book where children can “get activities” related to the book. The odd thing is that I had a hard time finding details on Mild Things online. I can’t get it to surface when I search it on Simon and Schuster’s very Web site (Interesting… disownment? Disavowal?). All that’s worth telling here is that the book is stunningly bad and its marketing was surely directed by a collision of dodos.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps, one fine day, a six-year-old will come into my store with his mother, and the mother will say to me, “Hi, my son’s looking to see if you have a certain book. He heard about it on NPR today—what show was it, Corey? All Things Considered? No? Oh, Fresh Air. He heard about it on Fresh Air and said it was a parody of Where the Wild Things Are with Bill Gates in it. Do you have that? Wonderful! Oh, and he’d also like to know where you keep Captain Underpants.”

Mr. Darcy, Inevitable Vampire

Say what you will about Stephanie Meyer—she was perhaps the first author to realize that the problem with Mr. Darcy was that he wasn’t a vampire. (Or a centenarian impregnating a teenager, but two birds with one stone, as they say.) That’s the kind of thinking that can bust a book market wide open.

Now would bloodsuckers be considered amiable or merely agreeable?

But why don’t we fix this problem more explicitly? thought Amanda Grange. As a result we finally have Mr. Darcy, Vampyre.

Because why the hell not? In the world of romance or teen fiction anymore, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horny vampire. It’s simply beyond me why someone hadn’t written this novel earlier; not only are you combining two of the most romantically appealing themes in all of literature in one man, but you don’t exactly have to shoehorn vampirism into Darcy.

In the new novel, Darcy’s famous aloofness and dark, unpleasant mien, among other things, serve to explain that he was hiding a supernatural secret the whole time. This is meant to compel readers to return to Austen’s original novel and think, No way! He’s so a vampire! (but other Austen fans, like my girlfriend, would insist that this sort of thing compels the beloved author to do a rotisserie in her grave.)

And yep, you can count on authors coupling their cars to the Darcy-Vampire gravy train. Regina Jeffers will be a bit late out of the gate with Vampire Darcy’s Desire, which arrives December. Who knows how many other versions are to come in the meantime? Maybe some different offerings to the line of P&P horror hybrids… like Wolfman Darcy?

Mummy Darcy?

Darcy From Outer Space?

Mr. Darcy, Fishman?

(C’mon, gotta be some ladies out there secretly jonesing for Fishman)

But somebody, anybody, please tell me something: how did the zombies happen before the vampires?