Lost cities, modern Iliads, and American vampires.
And why evangelicals hate pornography, and themselves for watching it.
Welcome back to James Reads Everything. This week I read about ancient archaeology, why evangelicals love and hate porn, and giant vampire fights.
Also congratulations to the several readers who identified the series I was talking about in last week’s introduction: the extremely long Destroyermen books, in which a WW2 ship is cast into an alternate history full of lemur-men and dinosaurs. It should be about half the length it is, but if you like pulpy war fiction and an extremely nerdy (if not always plausible) account of turning pre-modern armies into modern ones, you’ll enjoy it.
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Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz, is a very strong example of journalistic non-fiction, where the writer isn’t necessarily an expert themselves but draws upon and synthesizes the work of others. Sometimes this can be distracting or irritating, but it works very well for the subject here because the material from the cities themselves is so scattered and subject to interpretation.
Newitz has a nice style, light without being glib, and a good eye for detail and interesting scholarly work. It is a little funny how often she describes archaeologists’ hair when she meets them, which is a very characteristic magazine tic – “her shoulder-length hair in slight disarray […] his dark hair was held back with a bandanna […] tucking an unruly strand of brown hair behind an ear.”).
I really liked, for instance, the comment Native writer Rebecca Roanhorse gives on the Mississippian city of Cahokia, which comes after a lot of emphasis from archaeologists on its “spiritual” function. “It’s important to me to say that we had governments, we had hierarchy, we had trade and technology,” she mused. “These are the things that [Europeans] denied we had, and our supposed lack of them was used to justify genocide and taking our land.”
The cities in question are Cahokia, Pompeii, Angkor, and Çatalhöyük; the theme is often survival – how these cities lasted and faded far beyond their heyday. The exception, naturally, is Pompeii, which is also the best chapter – in part because the material available there is so detailed and rich compared to other sites. We know which side of the road people drove on, for instance, because of “distinctive wedge-shaped bites taken out of curbs at intersections [caused by] thousands of poorly executed right turns from the right lane, as carriage wheels banged into the curbs or rode up into them.” (Some of the urban details reminded me of the fantastic 99% Invisible City, a great book for dipping into in the bathroom.)
But there’s one flaw in the book that I’ve noticed in a lot of recent histories; the over-emphasis on stories of agency and resistance. Newitz talks about female-written graffiti in Pompeii as a sign of women reclaiming their own sexuality, for instance. And sure, people always fight back or find cracks in oppressive systems. But if you don’t make it clear what the norm was, it takes away from the value of the resistance. Rome was a society built on constant violation – of women, of slaves, of the poor. That’s not clear in this account, which implies that Christians were puritans who took away all that fun Roman sexuality, like penis cups, without giving an account of just why Christians were fighting against it. (For a good account of that, see Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin, for books that get over just how goddamn monstrous everyday life could be in Rome while still recognizing humanity in it, see Craig Williams’ Roman Homosexuality or Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I reviewed for Foreign Policy)
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And while we’re talking about Christian sexual morality, Samuel L. Perry’s Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants shows just how warped the modern U.S. version of it can get. U.S evangelism is obsessed with pornography, but, unlike abortion or anti-gay bigotry, has somewhat given up on the public fight against it and instead devoted itself to self-policing. There’s a huge industry – Perry dubs it the ‘purity-industrial complex’ – devoted to weaning evangelicals off porn, routinely and inaccurately described in the language of addiction. You can install Covenant Eyes, for instance, a program that alerts your responsibility partners whenever you visit the naughty websites.
Despite all this, evangelicals view porn at only very slightly lesser rates than other Americans – but the feelings of shame and damage to their relationships are, as Perry shows, consequently much greater as a result of the moral incongruity they feel. A big part of this is that U.S. conservative Protestantism lacks a “theology of the body” – it’s centered on the heart, and the inner self, not on the actions you take.
As Frances Spufford points out in his great Unapologetic, one of the unusual things about Christianity is that it does, in fact, demand unachievable moral standards – to drive home the idea that sin and imperfection are natural components of human life, and forgivable. For many American evangelicals, though, that unachievable standard is presented as something that should be your natural state once you’ve been saved. This creates what’s effectively thoughtcrime: it’s not enough just to not watch porn, you should not even be thinking of watching porn. For evangelical women it’s even worse; men’s lust is taken as being in some sense natural or inevitable, but women who watch porn are doubly sinning in both their lust and their violation of gender roles.
Perry writes very sympathetically about a subject it would be easy to be dismissive or glib about, but also appreciates the inherent humor of some of the material, like the collection of WW2 nude photographs found in an elderly Baptist deacon’s estate. There’s also a deadpan comedy in the control group interviews with Methodists, Quakers, and agnostics who are like “Yes, I don’t think this is high on God’s priority list.” Which reminds me of an old joke -
Why don’t Episcopalians go to orgies?
They can’t stand writing all those thank you notes afterwards.
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After rereading The Long Firm last week I went back to Truecrime, the last in Jake Arnott’s trilogy. (My copy of the middle volume, He Kills Coppers, is hiding somewhere in the apartment.) Truecrime here refers not to the modern U.S. genre, centered mostly around victims and aimed largely at women, but to the 1990s British obsession with hard men and gangsters that produced Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. For a while, for instance, elderly London psychopath “Mad” Frankie Fraser was all the rage. (A version of Fraser shows up in Terence Blacker’s pretty good literary satire Kill Your Darlings, Blacker knew Fraser through “Wykehamist pimp, crack fiend, and adulterer” William Donaldson.)
Truecrime wasn’t as popular as the first two books, but I like it the best; it’s a razor-sharp take on failed masculinity, violence, and class, in which the gangsters of the previous books are reduced to old men and the real money has been taken over by the posh boys. The two most important figures in it, I think, are Gaz and Jez – the first of whom is a minor-league criminal who becomes a minor-league celebrity, the second of which is a public-school educated filmmaker who makes the film that drives much of the action, Scrapyard Bulldog.
Gaz’s mixture of self-pity, occasional insight, and banality in his own narrative is very accurate, as is the depiction of extremely petty organized crime in the 1990s. (I used to know a girl whose dad ran a series of go-karting tracks that doubled as a location for drug dealing, for instance; they kept a gun in their house in Dorset with which she accidentally shot off her toe after hearing what she thought was an intruder outside.) Jez is, in the lacerating words of his girlfriend, “traumatized by not having had a homosexual experience at public school.” But the names are also an implicit contrast. Gaz is a genuinely working-class name, a shortening of the Irish (and thus working-class) Gareth. Jez was what boys named Jeremy, the most upper-middle-class of names, called themselves to try and sound cool.
Side note for fans of the great British cringe comedy Peep Show: this is one sign that Jez is in fact posher than Mark.
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Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich is the latest Nazi Downfall book, this one written by a well-known German journalist and historian, Volker Ullrich. It’s a solid example of the genre, and I have an unending appetite for reading about the Nazis getting stomped into the ground. I was hoping that it would be a tight chronological account, which can be really helpful for illustrating and explaining events, but it’s much more far-ranging – a discussion of one event will leap far forward into the next few years. But Ullrich’s moral judgements are sharp and informed, and he’s very good on showing how quickly all sides moved to set up the structures of post-war power, from the Communists in the East to, far more laudably, the Social Democrats returning from exile to demonstrate that there could be another Germany.
I would love to read a book that was just about the Flensburg Nazi government, headed by Karl Donitz, which continued, theoretically, for 23 days after Hitler’s death before the Allies arrested everyone. It would be a very dark comedy because the Nazi leaders kept shoving and backstabbing for position even as everything crumbled into nothingness around them. (There’s a Mitchell and Webb sketch that captures this well, though Donitz never actually got the title of Fuhrer: I learned from this book that people really did say “Heil Donitz!” – but only sarcastically.)
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Prince Charming, a 1999 memoir by the British poet Christopher Logue, is anecdotal, elliptical, often funny, equally often frustrating. It’s mostly about the 50s, especially his time in Paris among literary expatria – which looks much like expat life in Asia today, equally enabling of talent, curiosity, arrogance, laziness, and addiction. There’s a good passage from Paul Johnson, a friend of Logue’s who went on to be a unpleasant columnist (and private spanking enthusiast) comparing later New York Review of Books editor Bob Silvers and Logue: “He was interested in literature. I would say he loved literature. He was equally interested in infrastructure, the politics of literary coteries, about which you know absolutely nothing at all. Very silly of you. Pretending to yourself that they don’t count.”
Logue had gotten out of the army with a dodgy eye, which saved him from an ignominious discharge following a two-year prison term after he was caught trying to sell paybooks when posted in Palestine in 1945, and left him with a small disability pension that let him, along with various bits of family money, grants, and eventually a regular Private Eye column, get by with never having to have a real job. He was clearly equal parts delightful and infuriating, attractive to women despite being largely impotent (by his own account) until he was forty or so, and extremely intelligent but also extremely determined not to get out of bed until twelve
All this produced some reasonable poems and one work of genius that occupied most of his life; his extremely loose version of the Iliad in English, War Music, breaking Homer up with advertising slogan and the images of later wars (“Hapless as plane-crash bodies tossed ashore/still belted in their seats.”) It doesn’t always work; the bits that do work brilliantly, like his rendition of one of the poem’s most elegant and brutal killings.
Ahead, Patroclus braked a shade, and then
And gracefully as men in oilskins cast
Fake insects over trout, he speared the boy,
And with his hip his pivot, prised Thestor up and out
As easily as later men
Disengage a sardine from a tin.
I wonder which editor at the London Review of Books disliked Logue enough to assign a review of his Iliad to the 81-year-old Bernard Knox, a famed translator who very much Did Not Get It, and earlier to Claude Rawson, another unlikely reader. It may have been the same reviewer who assigned Logue’s memoir to A.N. Wilson in a particularly self-righteous mood. Knowing Logue, he might have made the requests himself.
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Hey kids, comics! Or graphic novels, if you’re being fancy. Doomsday Clock is one of two attempts – the other an excellent TV series - to make a sequel to Watchmen, Alan Moore’s 1986 classic about superheroes, predestination, and the Cold War. It is a misbegotten crossover between the world of Watchmen and the DC Universe, the hope of Superman et al, that focuses on the least interesting thing about the original: superheroes. Watchmen gets its razor-sharp deconstruction of superheroes done with pretty early on, and then goes on to be about other things; this comes back to a hackneyed ‘superheroes are about hope!’ conclusion. Highly miss-able, and a reminder of how smart the HBO series was in doing its own thing.
American Vampire: 1976 is National Treasure, but with vampires. At one point the good vampires escape from the bad vampires by lighting Betsy Ross’ flag on fire and throwing it at their car. It is the conclusion of a series that’s been running since 2011, and that has always been an excellent example of the B-grade action comic: it has absolutely no depth but fantastic fight scenes. (Every so often the writer tries to make a Point About America; ignore this.) The original series escalated from “Aspiring Hollywood starlet revenges herself on the vampires who abused her and left her for dead” to “A team of crack vampires fight demons on a Soviet space station.” The series ends with two kaiju-size vampires, a cowboy and an outlaw, decking it out in downtown Las Vegas.