A Different Look at Early Feminism: The Bostonians

Back when I did my review of A Room of One’s Own, I commented that political discussion seemed to be much more intelligent back then and, in consequence, less annoying than our present day state in which people on the other side of the argument need to be unfriended, because politics.

Apparently, I spoke too soon.

Henry James is probably best known for A Portrait of a Lady, but in The Bostonians, he ridicules the political obsessives of his own day, which in this case was the late 1870s. That he choses the female emancipation movement is probably not representative of James’ own political leanings, but more that he needed a political movement that made itself utterly obnoxious for an extended period of time. Feminism appears to have been that movement on that day.

Despite Virginia Woolf’s well thought out and beautifully delivered speech that formed the basis for A Room of One’s Own, we were naive in stating that this was an era of intelligent political discussion. Woolf did not represent her movement’s rank-and-file, or even the day-to-day organizers. She was a superstar in a different field brought to impart wisdom… and she succeeded.

But that daily membership was just as subject to ridicule as your friend who wears the MAGA hat and drinks bleach to kill microbes or your communist buddy who insists that the Soviet Union wasn’t “real socialism” and that all historical evidence of the failure of socialism is caused by either aliens or corporate conspiracies.

Here, the victim of Henry James’ satire is a young fanatic feminist who may (or may not) be a lesbian. She lives and breathes for the movement to such an extent that she ends up hating all men… which is no less adolescent in 1870 than it is today.

Making things even more delightfully ironic, her antagonist is a southerner, a man who recently fought on the losing side of the Civil War… and whose views are decidedly conservative–and who James also satirized and turns into a caricature.

The stakes are the heart of a woman who is the most original and persuasive feminist speaker the movement has yet discovered and, unlike others, is young and beautiful to boot. The Southerner wishes to win her hand, while the feminist wants to keep her in the movement (which she will abandon if she becomes the Southerner’s wife).

I won’t spoil this one by telling you who wins, except that no one comes out smelling like a rose… and that it paints a portrait of the politics of the time which allows us to see that even the suffragist movement, which managed enormous good was, at its core, populated by the same sad fanatics we see today.

Interesting stuff, and a good way to immerse oneself in the day and age.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose work spans the range from literary fiction to historical fantasy. His most mainstream novel is a thriller entitled Timeless which combines a fast-paced international-crime-driven plot with the inherent sexuality of a young globe-trotting journalist to create something unique and absorbing. You can check it out here.

Why Space Opera is so Much Better than Dystopian SF

We live in a world that seems to love its dystopias. From television shows about zombies to near-future resource-constrained novels to the sudden rediscovery of The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a crappy book that resonates with certain forms of gloom-and-doomism, it’s in vogue to consume media that tells us how awful everything will be.

The world, critically acclaimed media tells us, will be awful, and humanity will be trapped on Earth, never to leave again.

Of course, it isn’t actually obligatory to consume dystopian SF. While it’s difficult to escape it, there are good things on the shelves at your local bookstore and even, if you make the effort to look for it, on TV.

And while I can’t explain the popularity of depressing SF that takes place on Earth, I can tell you the name of its fun, inspiring antidote: Space Opera.

Now space opera doesn’t have to be Stars Wars cheesy. It can be technologically awesome, like Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space cycle, political, like Iain M. Banks Culture novels, or idea-driven in the tradition of Asimov or Heinlein. Hell, there’s even Eco-space-opera in the form of Dune.

It’s superior to the dystopian stuff for several reasons. The first, of course, is that it’s much more fun to read. Not only is the imagination liberated, but these tend to show humanity at its best, encountering and overcoming challenges on a galactic scale, as opposed to small-mindedly obsessing over the problems of one planet. It takes a very small mind indeed to feel threatened by the possibility of humanity spreading its wings; most people will be uplifted by this subgenre in ways that seldom happens in pessimistic portrayals of an earth-only future.

If you want proof of this concept, just walk down to your local bookstore. You’ll find Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, Niven, etc. well represented despite the fact that they created their best work forty years ago in the best of cases, seventy in the case of Foundation… The problem is that those books still attract the kind of reader that was attracted to science fiction in the first place, while the recent crop of dull, politicized dystopia is only good for as a sleeping aid for insomniacs. (recent space opera is much more likely to be on shelves in 50 years than the tripe winning most awards…).

The second reason Space Opera is better is that it is actually more likely to come to pass. While no one should be a climate Pollyanna, the truth is that humanity, through thick and thin, has always advanced technologically. Some of the forthcoming challenges will be tough, but they will be overcome. Moreover, humanity is finally pushing towards colonization of space and that is the kind of barrier that, once broken, crumbles like a piece of stale bread. We will be out there in numbers, very likely within our own lifetimes. So any climate apocalypse tale that doesn’t have a significant human space presence is just silly. I’d shelve it under fantasy and not SF.

Finally, the attitude of the writers is a turn-off in many dystopian books. These volumes are often a reflection of the fears that capitalism and individualism are destroying the planet. While one may agree or disagree with that sentiment, the kind of obsession with it that drives someone to actually pen a novel to show how badly it will end don’t necessarily make for someone in whose head you want to spend a few hundred pages.

They are, in fact, obsessed enough to ignore the fact that living standards have been steadily rising worldwide for the longest time. I recommend The Better Angels of Our Nature for the science and numbers that pretty much conclusively prove it. But not for our poor, angry content creators – they need the world to be going down the tubes, because if not, they’re wrong about everything.

But the technical considerations and political annoyances are secondary. The bottom line is that Space Opera is just more fun, and we read and watch science fiction to be entertained, not to be preached at.

So go forth and buy something fun for a change. It probably won’t have won a Hugo but if you’ve been following the Hugos lately, you know that that no longer matters (caveat, if I ever win a Hugo, you can take it as a given that I was drunk while writing this and that the Hugo represents the very pinnacle of literature of any kind. But until that enormously unlikely event happens, I stand by the above).

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer who writes a certain amount of Space Opera both in short and long form. His well-received novel Siege is a far-future space opera in a very dark galaxy. You can check it out here.

More Fine Books

As I’ve mentioned here before, I love Fine Books & Collections. I used to be a subscriber but, unfortunately, the postal service they use to mail magazines overseas just isn’t arriving in Argentina for some reason. And no one seems to have any clue as to where they are going missing.

So I buy them when I travel to the US, if I happen to spot it at a B&N newsstand. Which I did on my recent mid-pandemic trip to Washington and Philadelphia.

It appears their distribution issues are not just limited to Argentina, because the only copy I was able to snag was the Spring 2020 issue… in October. Still, I grabbed it without hesitation and, unlike the rest of the reading material I bought on the trip, I read this one immediately.

Totally worth it, even if a good chunk of the magazine dealt with the New York Rare Book Week (I assume that got cancelled due to Covid).

Even so, this one represents immersion therapy in a world of classic editions of beloved books, old maps, beautiful craftsmanship and art. Along with my visit to the Philadelphia Art Museum, which had some unexpected highlights in its holdings of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern art, this was my cultural break during my trip since the Smithsonian museums I am interested in–Air & Space, Art and American History–were closed on the dates I was in town.

My head spends a long time in the future because I’m in the middle of a science fiction novel, my kids ensure that I spend a good chunk of the day very much in the present (with both the joys and the annoyances that come with it), so just stopping everything and enjoying beauty and wonder created decades or centuries ago and seeing into minds who appreciate that sensation just like you do is a way to relax and just let go for a bit. I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say that these magazines are probably among the things I most enjoy reading.

In this one, there are the usual great articles and columns, but two, about the photography of Danny Lyon and the book listing high-tech inventions of the renaissance really stood out. I always leaf through these mags when I have a desire to be transported… and I still haven’t found one that disappoints on rereading.

Recommended (and maybe if enough people buy it, they’ll be able to fix their distribution problems!).

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer. You can check out his literary fiction in Love and Death a narrative that comes together out of several short pieces to tell the story of a group of individuals who never quite realize how closely they are linked. You can check it out here.

Even in 2020, it’s Hard to Look Beyond Good and Evil

Here’s a fun experiment to try: corner someone politically active on social media and ask them what they think about Friedrich Nietzsche.

Most, of course, will never have actually read the man. Of those who have, I’ll predict that the ones who were not philosophy majors will be divided as follows: the ones on the left will despise him and say that he’s a nazi jackass, while the ones on the right will likely find him an inspiration and proof positive that the left has its head up its ass.

The truth, as usual, is much more interesting than the silly little internet squabbles that define our age, and the armchair warriors whose sense of self-worth is tied up in them.

The title of Nietzsche’s book, Beyond Good and Evil, will serve anyone intelligent as a warning. It explicitly sets expectations and tells the reader that the moral judgements he held before starting the book will not only be ignored, but they will be subject of ridicule. In entering the world of Nietzsche’s mind, popularly held opinions (whether they are held by philosophers or by the unwashed) are considered anathema the the exercise of thought.

Once that is established, Nietzsche attempts, with varying degrees of success, to break away from his hated middle-class morality and establish some truths. Like all philosophers, he succeeds only to a degree, but what is valuable here is his tearing down of all the comfortable conclusions that we (still) use as starting points.

That’s where he goes beyond good and evil. Does your philosophy begin with the conviction that all humans are equal? Cool, then it’s not a philosophy, because you’re closing off a perfectly valid avenue of thought and analysis. Think that treating others well is positive? Again, that’s not philosophy, it’s starting from an unproven conclusion. To truly move beyond good and evil, you need to leave those concepts aside as unproductive and think things through from the base concepts. Most people are violently against this (just look at the two examples above… would you be willing to concede that they are just your own bias and start from scratch?).

Of course, leaving popular and religious conclusions aside leads Nietzsche down paths that are interesting, to say the least. Interesting enough that he unintentionally inspired two ridiculous antagonistic groups that he would have had the utmost contempt for: the Nazi party and the modern deconstructivist left. Silly extremists seem to find something in the man that justifies their own ideas… but they misread him as they do most true philosphers.

Of course, Nietzsche was no angel. Where he does speak clearly, he is delightfully controversial, and takes aim at everything he sees around him. A close reading will show you exactly where the extremists take their inspiration. Particularly interesting is his division of the moralities of his day into two types (which I think can still be applied today) – the master morality and the slave morality.

What makes that interesting is that, if you can look beyond the word “slave” and leave aside the moral positions of democracy, this division is exactly right… and the slave morality is how most people would expect you to act in the modern world. It’s the morality “for the common good over the good of the individual” which is considered “right” today.

In order to think about it dispassionately, however, and to measure whether that is positive or negative, one needs to leave aside the recent democratization of philosophy and go beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche is a good place to start on that journey.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose most philosophical book is entitled Outside. In this novel, he extrapolates current trends to their logical end state… and beyond. It’s also a rousing adventure and a posthuman love story. If you think that’s for you, you can check it out here.

Traveling During a Pandemic – One Writer’s Thoughts

I traveled internationally during the pandemic.

Leaving aside the inevitable argument about whether that was right or wrong, moral or immoral, shocking or perfectly normal (you can argue about that endlessly online, but I’m not really into that particular discussion), the truth was that it was interesting. And I’m always into interesting.

I went to Buenos Aires airport without any real expectations except that this one was going to be different from my other trips. It was October, and the first time I’d left the city proper in a motorized vehicle since March (Argentina did the world a huge favor by proving that long lockdowns and strict quarantine are completely useless in dealing with this disease unless you force the public to stay inside by putting armed troops on the streets with orders and authority to shoot to kill).

The airport doors were closed and people for the two flights that were leaving the country that day (think about that for a second… two flights) were all packed around the door.

Eventually, we got onto the airplane, which was fully booked. Every single seat was occupied, including the middles. Social distancing, apparently, is not necessary on airplanes according to international regulations.

Another interesting thing was contrasting Miami airport with JFK in New York. Miami was open to business, and the airport was crowded, happy and alive, even though everyone was wearing a mask. JFK was surreal. I had entire waiting rooms and long, empty corridors to myself at two o’clock on a Saturday.

But the truly interesting thing was being in another country (the US in this case) and listening to cab drivers, hotel employees and other people I could chat with essentially say the same thing: “Now that we understand the pandemic better than we did, it’s time to open things back up.”

I found that educational. In Argentina, people saw that the government had no clue what to do about the pandemic except to take away our normal lives, and most people began ignoring the lockdown about a month into it. Even the people who were saying “you need to stay inside to take care of your neighbors” were outside.

But that’s Argentina. We’re used to the government taking measures that no one will ever comply with… we’ve learned that ignoring such undemocratic noise is pretty much necessary. So, just like when the government says “you can’t have savings in dollars” and everyone saves in dollars, when the government says “you have to stay inside”, we gave them a chance to show us they knew what they were doing… and when it became obvious they didn’t, the population moved onto the next step: ignoring the decree completely.

I thought the US would be different, though. US democracy is much stronger than that of other countries (and yes, I know that the US is in the middle of a very difficult election cycle right now, but in general, this above is true). One thing the US is famed for worldwide is that it defends the rights of people to do what they want.

So to hear every single person spoke to say that the restrictions should be dropped was a shock, mainly because the restrictions haven’t been.

Now I’m sure that there are many people who prefer to leave the restrictions in place, but in light of my very informal polling, it would be truly hard to convince me that they are a majority. It really looks like the population at large is against them.

So another interesting thing I’ve found is that the world’s leading democracy is criminalizing behavior things that a majority is in favor of. Like the 55 Mph speed limit, it’s an antidemocratic law; you can’t be a democracy and be against the public at the same time: you have to choose one. So it will be interesting to see how this evolves as politicians remove heads from asses and see that everyone hates the restrictions and will immediately go back to normal if permitted. I predict another round of fun fights online.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the trip was that everyone is sure that the next flu season will be interesting. Not because of covid itself, but because of the flu. People seem to believe that no one will have an immune system left at the end of this.

I have no clue if the science backs that up, but it does mesh with the sense that I’ve had of the helicopter-parent society being crappy for the long-term development of children. All this antibacterial soap probably won’t lead to robust, healthy adults with well-developed immune systems. Luckily, I’m not a doctor, so I won’t be advising anyone else on this topic.

It was an interesting trip… and my conclusion is that the world will be fine. Covid won’t destroy our lives. Hell, it won’t even change them that much because, like me, most people are willing to risk it for themselves but also respect other peoples’ requests to take care of themselves. That means that those who want to go back to normal (knowing there’s a risk) will likely be able to do so… and those who want to take extra care will be respected.

That’s the way it should be, and I think humans are, as a species, much better than the twitterverse makes them out to be.

Gustavo Bondoni loves to see places. New or well-known, there is always something to discover. That passion is expressed in its full dimension in his collection Off the Beaten Path. These are fantasy and science fiction stories for readers who want to be transported to places you don’t always read about, outside the usual European or North American settings. You can check it out here.

A Great Man in the Old Tradition: Rob Walker

I was recently in the US and bought a couple of issues of Road & Track on the newsstand. They are slim things, quite glossy but devoid of the dense content that made magazines worthwhile in the past. I suppose they’re a victim of the mania for online stuff, but people in the future are going to have cause to regret this generation’s lack of taste in media, as they won’t be able to delve into the past in the same way that I have… and if you’ve ever tried to recover content you saw once on a long-gone website you’ll understand why this is important in more than an aesthetic sense.

Back in the 1970s, however, this things were different and magazines were not only the principal way for people to get information on their interests, but they were rich enough to be able to afford contributors who were not just great, but memorable.

We’ve already mentioned Henry N. Manney III here, but there’s another colossus of the motoring industry who was writing for Road & Track in the seventies (and was still doing so when I came in in 1989, and remained on the payroll for some years afterwards). That man is Rob Walker, and as I read the October 1974 issue above, I realized that I had to talk about him.

And now it’s time to admit something painful. As a thirteen-year-old reader of Road & Track who hadn’t intentionally missed a live Formula One race since I discovered the sport in 1983, I had no idea who Rob Walker was or why the fact that this man was writing the F1 race reports was a privilege which put other publications to shame.

But I found out.

Briefly, Walker was the heir to the Johnny Walker distillery fortune, and he used some of this money to become the most successful private entrant in the history of F1. Imagine winning the lottery and buying a car from one of the teams today… and using that car to win several races with drivers the likes of Stirling Moss or Jo Siffert at the wheel. Well, that is exactly what walker did. (it speaks to why F1 was also much better back then, but this isn’t a rant, it’s a celebration).

Better still, Walker was a apparently good guy, which meant that he got invited to the parties, which, in turn, meant that his prose is rich with anecdote and detail. As a teenager, I was hooked, and now that I’m reading his work in the 1970s, it gives me a look into how R&T became the top automotive publication in the world, to the point that a random teenager would pick it off a newsstand in Argentina in 1989. Walker is a huge part of that. I don’t think the magazine could ever have achieved its status as the class of the field without that man writing F1 reports. They are, reading them fifty years later, perfection… and again, I hope there are similar reports of today’s races being produced in hardcover somewhere, because if not, people in fifty years are going to hate us.

Best of all, though, is the fact that Walker was a gentleman in the traditional sense of the world. Rich enough to know that life exists to be enjoyed, but educated in the liberal old British way that informed him that the enjoyment is to be shared by all, without regards to class or economic level. He is the epitome of what a gentleman in the 20th century should be–and what so few managed.

The fact that he resembled Ken Tyrrell is, of course, unfortunate, but no one is perfect (both Rob and Ken were nearly so, so the fact that they had imperfections to deal with is only fair).

As a car nut, I would have loved to live his life… but he was more than just cars, and that comes through in his writing. A truly great man in all meanings of the word, and the kind that the world would be better of having more of today.

Gustavo Bondoni’s fiction has appeared in hundreds of publications. His debut novel, Outside, extrapolates the current trends in digital civilization to their logical conclusion–and is also a rousing tale of love and hope. You can check it out here.

Friendship, Courtship and the Big Sky

The phrase “Bro’s before ho’s” has several drawbacks. The most obvious, of course, is that you really can’t say it without feeling like you should be living in a 90’s exploitation film. Almost as bad is that you expose yourself to public censure and accusations of everything from cultural appropriation to rampant sexism. We live in delicate times.

But the worst part of all is that it’s never, ever true. Not in real life… and not even in that ultimate man and another man against nature genre, the Western. At the very least, not always.

The Big Sky (1952) is yet more proof that Kirk Douglas was taking over Hollywood. Apart from being immortal (or at least immortal enough to survive into his 104th year), the man was clearly also precisely what film audiences of the time wanted to see. Maybe his sneering attitude was a nice change of pace for audiences sick and tired of things being too wholesome. Or maybe they just knew a macho man when they saw one. Whatever the case, he seems to star in about half the decent movies from the era.

This one is a love triangle where bro’s most certainly do not come first. The alluring woman is the prize, and the trading journey and the wealth the men are chasing–the reason they’re crossing the country in the greatest of western traditions–is strictly secondary (even if it does provide most of the film’s entertainment value).

The interesting part of this one is that the “wrong” man wins the triangle, and his redemption–or lack thereof–is what keeps the tension going in the film after the initial objectives of the expedition have been met.

It’s a good film, gently paced but with enough action to keep it moving, and I found it amusing that not only did Douglas live to a truly advanced age, but that his main co-star and the other male corner of the love triangle, Dewey Martin, also lived into his mid-nineties, and died in 2018. The should have called this one The Immortals.

This is one I can recommend without qualms, even though my western-hating wife fell asleep within minutes during both of our attempts to watch it together (for one she enjoyed, see here).

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer who doesn’t write westerns. What he does write are science fiction stories that challenge stale ideas of where we’re going and what we’ll do when we get there. His vision of humanity’s far future is best expressed in his well-received novel Siege. You can check it out here.

Rara Avis: A Bad Paul Theroux Book

I’m a fan of Paul Theroux’s work. It started back in 1993 when I was preparing an English A-Level and was utterly bored by the Shakespeare we were studying. The Bard himself wasn’t to blame (for my opinion on Shakespeare, see here), as Much Ado About Nothing is always good. Rather, my classmates were. The problem is that, while I grew up in English-speaking countries, they were studying English as a second language, so their pace was a bit slower than mine.

Having read the play, I took advantage of where I usually sat in class (at the very back where I could lean my chair against the lockers) to randomly pull out a book from the lockers. The only thing available was a Penguin copy of The Mosquito Coast, which I read over the course of a couple of weeks of class while everyone else was discussing Benedick, Beatrice and Hero.

It was a wonderful book.

My next experience with Theroux happened a couple of years ago when I picked up a free copy of The Great Patagonian Express. This one was equally good and once again, I loved it. I especially enjoyed reading a travel book from the era when one could clearly and openly state how foreign cultures looked to a First World eye. It’s a refreshing change from today’s excess of sensitivity.

Unfortunately, third time was most certainly NOT a charm.

Kowloon Tong is a book whose premise had potential. It focuses on a British family in Honk Kong, tied to the colony by ownership of a factory, in the days leading up to the handover of the territory to China.

It’s a situation fraught with melancholy, the loss of a unique way of life, one which can’t be created in the modern world and doesn’t seem to have been improved upon by the new communist regime (at least judging by recent events). As the great Peter Egan once said: wherever the British planted their flag, you most often ended up with democracy, safe drinking water and a decent lifestyle.

But the book falls flat on its face. In the tradition of A Confederacy of Dunces, the characters are intentionally made to be unlikable. And like Confederacy, I enjoyed it very little.

Without giving spoilers, it’s a novel of human weakness and the duller, less interesting sordid side of humanity. Instead of going for the huge gesture, the major statements, the characters in this book are wet, uninspired and small.

Which is a pity, because the loss of the unique anachronism that was British Hong Kong deserved a great monument.

Perhaps that monument exists, but this isn’t it.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer fascinated with exotic places and interesting cultures. He celebrates human differences instead of trying to minimize them, and nowhere is this more evident than in his collection Off the Beaten Path, where science fiction, fantasy and non-Western civilizations combine in a unique and heady mix. You can check it out here.

The Creative Impulse

My social feeds are essentially composed of two very distinct types of people: friends from my everyday life and people I’ve met through my writing, be that other writers, editors, comic book artists or even cover artists.

The interesting thing is that the people from the writing world are much more likely to be painters or artists than the rest. There’s even a sculptor or two among them. (I can’t say much about music, because I’ve been singing in choirs since childhood, so a LOT of my non-writing friends are in the music scene).

But let’s look at that fine arts trend. People who should be spending an enormous amount of time sweating at the keyboard are apparently spending a good chunk of that at the easel.

Why? Why do these people still feel the need to create even though they’re already building literary works.

Herman Hesse – Ticino in Switzerland

Psychologists probably have hundreds of different explanations for this, but my own take, as far as I’m able to read my own impulses (I draw cars. They probably aren’t “fine art” but I like them) is a combination of wanting recognition for having made something beautiful combined with a desire for immortality.

But shouldn’t the writing itself take care of these urges? After all, my writing friends are mainly published authors who have had at least a few editors tell them “I love this, I’d like to publish it.” Added to this is the fact that somewhere before that, people were already telling them: “hey, this is really good, you should consider publishing.” So the desire for approval is, to a degree, met by writing.

And immortality? No writer knows how that will play out. Melville died a forgotten failure. So did Poe. And then there were the writers who wrote the bestsellers from a hundred years ago. Lauded and fêted, they are forgotten today (if you want to have a bit of fun, here’s a list of the ten bestselling books per year, starting in 1900… a LOT of utterly forgotten writers on that one).

Worse, there’s the survival factor. Do we have any idea whether Beowulf was a good ancient story or just mediocre hackwork? Not in the least, because its contemporaries haven’t survived. It’s great because it’s here. Same with Gilgamesh. So maybe only writers who get their work in print books will survive. Or maybe sea levels will rise and paper books will be used to absorb excess moisture in houses, and only a few authors published in non-paying online journals will represent this generation of writers. We just don’t know.

So why, to that, add painting? My own theory is that adopting another art form allows authors to create without performance anxiety. When we’re writing, we’re always creating for an imaginary editor, a reader or a Pulitzer Prize judge (to each his own). What we create has to be good. It has to be literary. It has to entertain, or teach, or preach, or emote. It has to be memorable.

And under that pressure, some of the innocence of creation cedes. The joy of writing a good paragraph might be exactly the same, but it is tempered by the fear that it might not be good enough. And that’s true whenever you’re writing for publication, whether you’re a writer with a single story published in a 4-the-luv magazine, or a Nobel Prize winner (admittedly, I’ve never been a Nobel Prize winner, but I’ve read things where they say this).

But painting a picture? Sure, I can sit down with a YouTube tutorial and do a watercolor. I can buy a box of colored pencils and draw cars. Or I can go straight to oil paint and pretend to be Renoir. My friends and family will say things like “that’s very nice”, and I will have the satisfaction of having given pleasure to someone via something I created and left behind palpable proof of my existence to survive in garage sales and flea markets long after I’ve gone from this Earth.

And no one ever rejects my drawings.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer from Argentina. His book of interconnected short stories, Love and Death, gives a complete narrative of several families across generations, allowing the reader to delight not only in the events of the stories themselves but in the irony of the twists and turns of fate. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, you can check it out here.

The Bad, the Beautiful, and Another Film About Hollywood’s Obsession with HollyWood

Wow, we already knew Hollywood was fascinated with itself in the early 1950s, but we seriously didn’t know how much or how badly. But we probably should have after watching, Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place and Singin’ in the Rain in such quick succession.

The Bad and the Beautiful takes up the subject matter once again, and once again, we get a good film (unlike the other 1950s Hollywood obsession, westerns, I find these films to be interesting and well-paced… and find Westerns glacial and a bit flat). Maybe there actually is something in the old “write what you know” saw.

While this one is as self-indulgent as Sunset Boulevard, it goes about it in a very different way, with a much lighter-toned story, far less dense than the earlier film. This makes it a fun film; even if it’s essentially a drama plot-wise, building it from a connected series of entertaining episodes never allows the emotional weight to overwhelm the action–much to its benefit.

The pacing is likewise brilliant, keeping audiences entertained with shenanigans and incidents… while never losing sight of the central driving force which is how hyper-creativity and living for one’s art often cause people to forget how other humans actually work.

This film made me notice something else about Hollywood, and that is that they seem to have discovered Kirk Douglas. We’d seen him starring in another role that looked at the media business, but now (and more of this in future posts) he seemed to be showing up in significant films almost as often as Cary Grant, playing a bit of a bad boy counterpoint to Grant’s Mary Sues.

If I had to rank Hollywood on Hollywood, Id do it as follows:

1. Singin’ in the Rain – it’s just good on so many levels that it transcends the subgenre.
2. The Bad and the Beautiful – I enjoyed this one more than Sunset Boulevard when I watched it.
3. Sunset Boulevard – I originally had this one in a tie for second place, but eventually decided to avoid cop-outs of that sort. It’s a little denser, but it has more chops, in my opinion as a great film that B&B. I will likely remember it more clearly ten years from now.
4. In a Lonely Place – it was good, but the others on this list are great.

All of these are films I’d recommend without hesitation. And I’d add Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to the list if you enjoy them. It’s the modern equivalent of these movies, and well worth your time.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer. His own look at the media industry can be found in Timeless, a fast-paced and sexy thriller that follows journalist Marianne Caruso as she uncovers a smuggling and drug ring in Southeast Europe. You can check it out here.