The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| 50 years on, ‘Catch-22’ still resonates Posted: 30 Sep 2011 12:28 AM PDT  An early edition of Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22" is seen in Washington September 25, 2011. — AFP/Relaxnews pic In addition to a fresh edition of the novel, publishers have rolled out new books to coincide with the anniversary — including a major Heller biography and a memoir by his daughter. The absurdist, often cartoonish story, about a hard-to-kill World War II pilot stationed on a small Mediterranean island and trapped in a perverse bureaucratic cycle, has sold more than 10 million copies and introduced to the English lexicon one of the most penetrating new phrases of the 20th Century. Released at the dawn of the 1960s, "Catch-22" seemed to foretell the ghastly war in Vietnam, and prophesied a counter-culture spirit that would dominate the last half of the decade. Despite its slow pacing and repetitiveness, "remarkably, college students are still reading it," said Tracy Daugherty, a professor of English at Oregon State University and author of this year's "Just One Catch", a major new biography of Heller. "But the basic situation — an average person caught in a maddening bureaucratic nightmare — still resonates, maybe more than ever as our institutions have only grown more bloated," he told AFP. The novel's catch — "anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy" — has rattled militaries worldwide for decades. Daugherty said it is the people seeking to enter the US workforce who instantly relate to one of today's obvious logical impossibilities: to get a job, you need experience, but to get experience you need a job. "They live with that paradox every day," he said. With America's longest-ever war dragging into its 11th year in Afghanistan, officials sometimes get sucked into the pretzel logic about a conflict that from afar may look like an infinite loop. On September 16, 2009, ex-soldier and former diplomat Rory Stewart, who walked across Afghanistan in early 2002 months after the US invasion, laid out what might well be the primary military Catch-22 scenario of the 21st Century: "You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban," Stewart told a US Senate hearing. 'They're trying to kill me' Captain Yossarian may or may not be insane, but one thing is clear: the novel's anti-hero bombardier wants out of a war routine that he is convinced will ultimately take his life. "They're trying to kill me," Yossarian explains to his friend Clevinger. "No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger responds. "Then why are they shooting at me?" "They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger says. "They're trying to kill everyone." The black-humor exchange set the novel's cynical tone, which author and cultural observer Morris Dickstein said "rapidly became the default mindset" of American youth, inspiring movies like "Dr Strangelove". Heller's novel "mocked heroic ideals as little more than manipulative rhetoric, eviscerated mass organisations as totalitarian institutions that chewed up individual lives (and) treated the army as a system for killing its own men more than the enemy," Dickstein wrote this month on "The Daily Beast" blog. Alan Arkin, who played Yossarian in the "Catch-22" movie in 1970, said in a 1996 documentary that he felt "Heller for the first time completely validated the idea of paranoia." Heller, who died in 1999 at age 76, had tapped his own World War II experience flying 60 missions as a B-25 bombardier. At first they were largely uneventful, but by the 37th mission, things turned bloody. "There was a gunner with a big, big wound in his thigh, and I realized then, maybe for the first time, they were really trying to kill me," Heller said. After that, "I was scared stiff." Christopher Buckley, the American satirist who wrote an introduction to this year's edition, said young US soldiers sometimes took the book to Vietnam — and such acts of defiance are still likely happening today. "It's not hard to imagine a brave but frustrated American marine huddling in his Afghan foxhole, drawing sustenance and companionship from these pages in the midst of fighting an unwinnable war against stone-age fanatics," Buckley wrote. The book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, is hosting a New York panel discussion the week after the novel's October 11 anniversary which will include Buckley and "Catch-22" editor Robert Gottlieb, among others. "It's certainly a special book, and we're glad that 50 years later people are still recognising that," Simon & Schuster senior publicist Emer Flounders told AFP. Heller's catchphrase almost never came to be. He had first called his book "Catch-18," but Leon Uris was releasing his novel "Mila 18" that year, and a numeric clash was to be avoided. Heller penned more novels but none came close to matching the influence of his debut. Daugherty wrote that when Heller was asked "How come you've never written a book as good as 'Catch-22'?" The author shot back: "Who has?" — AFP/Relaxnews |
| Scientist: Sky confirms ‘shining moon’ behind Frankenstein Posted: 26 Sep 2011 07:40 PM PDT  Shelley has long been doubted for her claim that she wrote the Gothic classic during a "waking dream" as the moon shone through her window in June 1816. — mouthshut.com pic Shelley has long been doubted for her version of events that led to the writing of one of the most beloved Gothic tales in the English language: That she wrote it on a challenge one night in June 1816 during a "waking dream" as the moon shone through her window. But Donald Olson, an astronomy professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, told Reuters yesterday that the night sky would argue that she was telling the truth. "Some scholars are very sceptical, they even call her a liar," Olson said. "But we see no reason, either in the science or in the primary sources, to doubt Mary Shelley's account." Olson has made a hobby out of using the sky to solve the mysteries of many of the world's most famous works of art and historical accounts. His study of tides in the English Channel forced historians to change the accepted date of Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55 BC, and he used astronomical tables to pinpoint where and when Vincent Van Gogh painted the famous painting alternately known as "Moonrise" and "Sunrise over Saint-Remy." Shelley first wrote of how she came to write Frankenstein in the preface of the book's 1831 edition, and critics immediately began questioning her story as simply a ruse to sell more books. The story goes like this: Shelley was staying with her future husband, Percy Shelley, at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in June of 1816. Also present were Lord Byron and friends Claire Clairmont and John Polidori. Byron challenged all of them to try their hand at writing a ghost story. Waking dream Shelley saw the "bright and shining moon" through her window that night and wrote the story while she was in what she called "a waking dream." The closest account of Byron's challenge comes from Polidori's diary, in which he tells of the party gathering at the Villa Diodati for a philosophical discussion that ended "after the witching hour" of June 16, 1816. The next day he wrote that "the ghost-stores are begun by all but me." But Olson said there was no record of the challenge itself from any sources other than Shelley's preface, and the assumption has always been made, though not proven, that the challenge and the writing took place early in the morning of June 16. But he said that had never been confirmed until now. "We verified when the moon would have shone on her window, which is when she first came up with the idea for the story we know as Frankenstein," Olson said. The Villa Diodati still stands above Lake Geneva and the room where Shelley stayed is well known. Olson and his researchers made "extensive topographic measurements of the terrain" and investigated "weather records for June of 1816," described by Lord Byron and Polidori as unusually wet and rainy. On that night, however, "we determined that a bright, gibbous moon would have cleared the hillside to shine right into Shelley's bedroom window just before 2am on June 16," Olson said. He said that had there been no moonlight visible that morning, it would have indicated fabrication on her part. "This indicates her famous "waking dream" that gave birth to Frankenstein's famous monster occurred between 2am and 3am on June 16," he said. "Mary Shelley wrote about moonlight shining through her window, and now we have recreated that night," Olson said. "We see no reason to doubt her account, based on the astronomical data." Olson's study appears in the October edition of "Sky and Telescope" magazine. — Reuters |
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