Oddly enough the opening introduction of this massive volume on the seemingly inexhaustible topic of Gaius Julius Caesar was one of the best parts. This doesn’t detract from the excellent work of Adrian Goldsworthy. Historical parallels are supposed to be deplorable, and you can’t just lay one set of circumstances over another and say look it’s the same! However, Goldsworthy’s introduction begins by laying out the world Caesar was born into and lived in. His world, though removed by 2000 + years, doesn’t sound drastically different from ours.

The Roman system of government allowed senators, magistrates, consuls, and other members of the elected body to receive clients who would essentially pay the elected official to either introduce legislation, or influence a vote on an piece of legislation(now-a-days called a bribe). This was for the most part done in the open, but on the down low so to speak. This system also allowed for elections to be manipulated in the same way. Although in the Roman system the candidate often bribed the constituency as well. They also took bribes from influential prospective clients to make wider dispensation to the general voting public. So the bribing was two way. The widening rift between the richest senators and the poorest senators made it increasingly difficult for a young man to consider a political career without graft. As election season is now on full bore in the US, it is a painful reminder of the present. Those without patrician funds to run for an election are not really competitive.

The Roman Empire around 100 BC when Caesar was born was also under serious financial stress. It’s economy could not support all the freed men and women it had within Italy. Slave labor was causing unemployment to sky rocket. Money turned in from tax revenue was not supporting the system. To alleviate this problem the Senate, Consuls and Proconsuls would allow governors of provinces to essentially wage war against any territory they thought they could conquer. War was essentially a cash generating mechanism for the empire. It brought home booty, kept the army out of Italy, using foreign resources, and sending home gold, silver, and slaves for sale. When the republic was running low on cash they actually looked at surrounding territories and evaluated how much booty they could bring home if they invaded and conquered. Based on our problems in Iraq, I wonder if our oil problems were evaluated in the same way prior to the invasion.

This is not a direct parallel obviously. We are spending billions on the war in Iraq, our soldiers are not eating off of the Iraqi dime, they are eating off of the American tax payers’ dollar. The American government’s real reason to invade Iraq will likely remain secret until the Freedom of Information act makes it possible for us to see all of the documentation. The reasons the public were given were obviously less than factual.

Caesar as he is painted in the book, is not a moral person. Which is what is really interesting about the book. Often biographies try to give some sort of moral compass for a person’s actions no matter how questionable. Goldsworthy continually reminds the reader about the difference in world view the Roman aristocracy, and particularly the Roman male had towards his actions. Honor was more important than morality, a man’s auctoritas was his influence and how his fellow man perceived him. If he was respected, well thought of, even feared, he was said to be a great man. Morality simply wasn’t a factor. All of Caesar’s actions from the time he was a young man until he marched into Italy at the head of his legions to seize power from Pompey and the senate was a move to gain respect and power. None of it had anything to do with moral decisions about what was best for the republic.

If there are two lessons to take away from Caesar; it is leadership, and how to take risks. He built up a reputation with his men from the beginning that he would fight with them at the front of the line. He often risked everything on big gambles. He was often caught outnumbered in Gaul and rather than run, he would stake everything on a pitched battle. Even after some fairly questionable moves, such as invading Britain with a very small force, his men recognized his ability to calculate risk and determine the best course of action. Some might even call it luck. However his ambition seemed to soar him to greater and greater heights.

Some of the highlights from the book where Goldsworthy appears to be at his best, is the descriptions of the rebellion in Gaul. When Vercengetorix organizes a full tribal rebellion against the Roman occupation, Caesar is caught unaware. He loses the initiative and is in a defensive posture, (not his best trait). He is in a precarious position and only the loyalty of his men saves him. However once the initiative is regained, the final battle between the Gaulish tribes and the Roman legions reaches its apex at the siege of Alesia. Not even J.R.R. Tolkien could have dreamed up a double encirclement siege. (Perhaps he just outright stole it?)

The Romans dug themselves in and besieged the beleaguered Gauls in their French fortress town of Alesia, only to themselves be encircled by Vercengetorix’s reinforcements. Goldsworthy shines in these moments and even at the hefty 500 plus page mark it is well worth the read.

Caesar’s own undoing it seems may have been one of his virtues. Unlike the previous dictator Cato, Caesar attempted to show clemency to his enemies. Cato had made several bloodthirsty purges of his detractors, enemies, and enemies relatives in his tenure as dictator after the previous civil war. During the civil war, that raged across Italy, Greece, and Africa, Caeasar allowed the men who fought against him to throw down their arms and embrace him as a friend. Marcus Junius Brutus was his biggest mistake. When Caesar allowed him back in the fold of Roman life, he seized the opportunity and used all of his patrician influence to assassinate Caesar. Apparently frenemy was not a term he knew.

Goldsworthy’s notable quote at the epilogue of the book captures the reason why Caesar still gets caught in the net of our imagination, “It is hardly possible to imagine how his life could have been more dramatic.”

While Caesar’s failure as a politician is the dramatic denouement of the book and his life, his military victories are the zenith of his achievements and ultimately what catapulted him into his position of power. And this is clearly where Goldsworthy spent most of his energy in writing and research.

Out of all of William Gibson’s Novels, Spook Country is the least evocative. A lot of Gibson’s now all too common critics read and loved Neuromancer for its impenetrable descriptions of the ephemeral and then unknowable internet, (or cyberspace), the vague chic of apathetic criminal characters, and the all too potent tincture of drugs, sex, and violence.

I was certainly among the throng of disaffected youth who read and loved the early books when I was fifteen, had a punk rock hair-do, wore a black trench coat and wanted to punch authority figures. Certainly because of William Gibson I became more literate. But I was not among the hordes of disappointed cyberpunks who’ve been gravely disappointed by Gibson’s move towards more mainstream fiction; I am merely disappointed in the lack of narrative cohesion, snappy dialog, and pointed cultural observations.

Pattern Recognition was a terrific novel. It was full of good characters, good dialog, and the Gibsonian specialty- the culture technology intersection. Gibson’s knack is recognizing where technology and culture have created something unique. Where as with his novels previous to Pattern Recognition he was writing in what he dubbed as speculative fiction, we would call it science-fiction. He moved into the present with Pattern Recognition and is firmly fixed there for Spook Country as well. The move to the present did not jar or upset me with Pattern Recognition.

Cayce Pollard and her allergic reactions to poor branding was in complete synch with where we were at as a culture. Globalization, marketing, brand recognition, and the interference or inevitability of anything and everything become merchandise or marketable spoke to me. I wish I’d thought of the character with the allergic reaction to Tommy Hilfiger first. But he also spookily worked in 9/11 in a way that did not seem hokey, or overworked. A character walked into the tower, and a ghost walked out to haunt Cayce. It was subtle and effective. Cayce’s zen statement to ward off bad mojo has stuck with me since reading the novel, “he took a duck in the face at 200 knots.” Also no one can ever forget, L-O-M-B-A-R-D. Loads of money but a real dickhead, which referred to Hubertus Bigend. Hubertus was a gift of a character, sinister in all the ways one might imagine a real person to be, but with a pearly white Tom Cruise smile.

I was pleasantly surprised by Bigend’s triumphant Belgian return. However the three intertwined narratives of Tito, Hollis Henry, and Milgrim don’t really compliment or contrast each other. The whole novel never really gels. We do have a few good moments where Gibson makes us chuckle at his cleverness. But his characters don’t pop, the narrative never reaches that point where the book created an inner moment for me the way his other books have. This failure is probably due to a few things. The first is not the lack of cyberpunkness, but the fact that the author’s knack of finding the precise moment to comment on a unique cultural technological nodal point (to use the Gibson term for a paradigm shift) was missing. The use of the i-pod as a storage device was unsurprising and commonplace. The idea that art could be locative and part of blended reality was also sort of commonplace and unsurprising. I never got that spooked feeling about seeing River Phoenix’s ghostly corpse outside the viper room. And for anyone who has used google maps street view, it just wouldn’t surprise the reader.

His commentary on the finances of the Iraq war and the intelligence community are also interesting, but hardly earth shattering.

Milgrim as a Junkie seemed to be purely a passenger for the novel and a vehicle for Brown, who was far more interesting as a character but lacked the definition the reader wished to see. His sermonizing was if anything was “under the top” and could have acted as more of a counter point to the “old man” to act as yin-and-yang, but alas this never developed.

Tito and Bobby Chombo were both alas pale comparisons to Bobby from Count Zero, or the Vat Grown Ninja Assassin from Neuromancer.

Hollis seems to be more of an archetype from Gibson now. He seems to be developing a pattern for his female characters now where they are delicate and sensitive, slightly daring, but rely on an older wiser male for their insight into the world’s inner mechanics. For Pattern Recognition Cayce relied on the not quite film maker boyfriend, and Hollis seems to rely on Inchmale.

The reveal at the end of the novel, just didn’t offer the payoff for the effort spent reading through the three disparate narratives. And Bigend as a result of his inclusion somehow seemed less sinister and more banal.

Hopefully Gibson finds his stride again, providing he feels he’s lost it. Certainly this book is not representative of his other works. Idoru and Pattern Recognition are still two of my favorites.

For many years, despite my more haute couture tendencies, I have secretly harbored a dirty and sinful pleasure in reading trashy fantasy novels. It began when I was about eleven, and like smoking for some; I have never been able to give it up. I buy these books clandestinely, telling no one. Then I consume them voraciously in one sitting. I feel like an obese man I saw once wedged into a tiny Toyota Prius shoving a box of powdered crispy cremes into his chunky jowels. When I looked at him, he had this feral, but sad look on his face that said, “yes it’s disgusting, but it’s my life. Leave me alone.” This is how I feel when I read R.A. Salvatore novels.

I picked Jon Turk up at the Kalamazoo airport on Friday after work. I’d heard that he wasn’t as chatty and vivacious as some of the younger pups we’d had to symposium over the last few years. Simon and Justine definitely are very fun and very very social, which is great. Jon Turk though is in a class all his own. We hit the road and he started talking almost immediately. Much to my surprise he is a listener as much as he is a speaker, or better yet a story teller.

I’m always interested in hearing about couples that have children young who have their adventures too. What sacrifices are made? What are the repercussions from those long periods of time away from home might have been. While I have ultimate respect for Simon and Justine, I have a deep affinity and respect for a man like Jon because he made hard choices in life. He had to choose to be away from home and family to do the things he needed to do, and he had to live with those choices. Further, his family had to live with them too.

Jon has done some amazing things in life, probably so grand that it boggles even his mind how he did it. He’s crossed the northwest passage, gone from Japan all the way to the Siberian straits, paddled in Greenland, climbed and mountain biked in Asia.

Our talk in the car circled around the inherent social dynamics of human beings, adventures, his children, and ultimately his dead wife Chris. We could talk about anything from UFO’s to paddling and Jon ultimately circled back to Chris. Her death clearly haunts him. How could it not. For the full story read this.

Trip dynamics are a difficult relationship to manage. When selecting a paddling partner you’re sort of looking for that sibling/spouse/wing man vibe from the person you may have to share a tent with. I’ve been relatively lucky on my trips to have really good vibes from my tent mates. We comprise separate elements of the Aubrey/Maturin dynamic. For those not in the know, Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his particular friend, (no don’t read gay lover) Doctor and Natural Philosopher Stephen Maturin are the protagonists of author Patrick O’Brian’s wildly popular Napoleonic naval warfare novel series. 21 Books in all.

Captain Aubrey of whom I’ve written before is at sea, a leader of the James T Kirk variety. His presence commands respect among both the officer gentleman class, as well as the foremast jacks. He is a gifted navigator and seaman. He is blessed with a keen tactical sense that has provided his crews and his career with bountiful wealth in prize money. He is friendly, open, and eager. On land, though he is a bit of a buffoon. Incapable of managing his money, or political maneuvering against his best interests. He is his own worst enemy on terra firma.

Dr. Stephen Maturin on the other hand is an Irish Catalan who signed on as a ship’s surgeon in Jack’s first command, the Sophie. His temperament is moodier, more introspective, and mercurial. He knows nothing about the sea. Even after years aboard a square rigged man of war, he is deeply ignorant of the mechanics of sailing. He is however deeply interested in natural philosophy in the vein of Darwin. Because of his natural hatred of tyranny in any form he has swallowed his Irish pride and decided to work against the common enemy of Napoleon. But his linguistic gifts, Latin, Greek, Catalan, French, Gaelic, and Portuguese have provided him with a natural inclination towards clandestine work. He is a keeper of secrets and confidences by nature. And as the popular author, Daniel Silva has said, “to speak another language is to possess another soul”. His various souls have allowed him to thwart intelligence activities of the French and her allies in many countries during the HMS Surprises voyages across the world.

The relationship between Stephen and Jack is rooted in their love of music. And they encourage and entertain one another through cello and violin duets while at sea. The relationship has weathered many storms and come back to some basis of respect because of music.

No one person is really all Stephen, or all Jack. But possess traits in kind with each. We recognize parts of ourself in each. And certainly I identify with Jack deeply at times. Feeling ungainly on land, unnecessary and lost. But while at sea, alive and finally whole. But I also see a great empathy with Stephen in his need to understand every thing that walks and breathes, and what they mean to one another. His intellect serves him well in most ways, but makes other things both unavailable and impossible at times.

Jim Svensson and myself form our own Aubrey and Maturin in this way. Each of us in our own way both inept and competent. Certainly I can’t explain why we as two men apart in years and temperament choose to continually go to sea together and put up with cold, rain, danger, confined living quarters, sub-standard food, and lots of insect bites.

Suffering is just part of the joy I think, one is intrinsically linked to the other. So we venture out again on the premise that there is more joy to be had on Lake Superior, more beauty, and to paddle because it is hard, and slow. We leave family and comfort at home to have something to miss. So we can feel that longing for home at the end.

I can’t figure out all the reasons why it’s necessary to go, but I can say I know why we go together. The dynamic just works. And it’s a good thing. Having seen Derrick’s post on Kayak Quixotica, I feel for him. I’ve had a bad trip dynamic vibe myself. All I can say is from my minimal “expedition” tripping whatever experience, you do not want bad mojo at sea. Anyone can tell you that. The sooner you get that bad black voodoo in the open the better. It may seem ugly on land, but I guarantee it will be f#@!ing ugly at sea.

I don’t know Wendy, I do know Derrick. So I wish him the best of luck on his trip and hope the bad vibes run their course on land and are quickly forgotten once at sea. I hope he finds his Aubrey/Maturin voodoo soon.

The Typewriter Museum of course.

The museum is rife with imagery for the aspiring historical nut looking to find everything from typewriter postcards, unusual models, and even typewriter erotica. Yes you heard me. Scantily clad, provocative women wrapping their stocking draped legs across the keyboard of a 1920 Remington portable may not do it for every man. But they have their own web sites!

I really recommend taking a look at Garage sales this spring to see if you can find an Underwood manual, despite their ubiquity, everyone should have one when the EMP hits so you can keep blogging it old style.

If you can believe it there is an amazing diversity in typewriters. Upstrike, Downstrike, frontstrike, and bizarre single element machines.

I think I’m going to have to take another look at the collection and see what’s what!!!

Color me a sucker for any ancient epic battle where a bunch of guys with spears and shields fend off a vengeful horde. Frank Miller’s 300 found it’s way into my eager hands. The art is classic miller in it’s iconographic depiction of Leonidas, and the elite Greek 300. The comic presents few problems even as an historically inaccurate piece of graphic art. It is simply a stylistic presentation from Miller’s and Varley’s imagination of the Battle at the “hot gates”. Sure there’s machismo, oversimplification, and graphic violence. There is also inexplicable stylistic choices for Xerxes gold thong and body piercings, but hey, it’s his comic. I can roll with it.

The movie as an adaption of the comic succeeds visually, but fails in the tone where expansions go astray, and current events color our interpretation of the film.

The Battle of Thermopylae (as every one knows by now) was the standoff between a small band of Greeks and perhaps as many as 500,000 Persians. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the prime historical source of data for Thermopylae was notoriously an exaggerator of troop numbers. It is more likely that the maximum number of troops present was more likely between 150,000-175,000.

The small band of Greeks is also of course badly misrepresented. While there were only 300 Spartans, or Spartiate peers as they were known. There were several hundred spearmen, shield bearers and other personell brought from Sparta. These men were made up of Helots, (Messenian slaves) and Parachoi, or non-citizen Spartans. In addition to these were the various other polis that joined with the Spartans Thespians, Phoicans and so on so that the total number at the pass was actually more like 7000.

So 300 even as the title of a comic or a movie sounds cool, but is really a bunch of bollocks.

The site of the battle was elected by the Spartans led by their co-king Leonidas. The pass of Thermopylae or the “hot gates” was chosen as a choke point to take advantage of their phalanx and hoplite tactics. In this way the two Persian advantages could not be utilized. The cavalry and archery. The Greeks would force the Persians into attacking on foot in a narrow point where a Phalanx wall of heavily armed infantry could grind the Persians into hamburger. It has been said by some sources that the narrow pass held a phalanx wall 6 deep all bearing 8 foot ash spears. When used against the Persians lighter armor, wicker shields, and little javelins they were slaughtered. This much is accurate. The comic and the film to a certain extent do some homage to the phalanx wall, but fail to stick to the theme. This is one thing that will always drive me crazy. Seeing men drop spears to fight with swords makes no sense. Why would anyone drop a weapon that has 8 feet of effective reach to close with a short sword, (Xiphos) that has two feet of reach. The best advantage any Greek Hoplite had was to stay inside the phalanx wall for protection. The use of the shield in combination with an overhand thrust across the top of the shield wall was the most deadly tactic. In this way the hoplite would remain safe, and still manage to annihilate the enemy. I know sword fighting seems sexier to Hollywood, but it is really quite stupid. The Spartan aphorism exists for a reason, “Your shield is not for you, it is for the man on your left”.

The side trip in the film for Gorgo, (Leonidas’s wife) and the Spartan assembly is really distaracting and not part of the comic either. Spartan women held the most rights of any women in the ancient world. They could own property, move freely without their father or husband. But still they were not allowed to speak at the peers mess, or assembly and so the thought of Gorgo addressing the assembly is quite stupid. And therefore the intrigue spent getting the audience there is wasted. Better to show Spartan women doing their exotic dancing, no kidding- that is historically accurate. Topless Greek women hopping around. Athenian women were soooo jealous.

Next, I know a lot of blokes who will cringe at this, but the selection of the 300 by Leonidas may actually have been 300 homosexual pairs. The agoge (Spartan military school) was an indoctrination into pederasty where a teenage boy was paired with an older more experienced Spartan for initiation. So those men were really, really, close. That never made it into the comic or the film either. I’m sure 17 year old boys would not pay $8.00 to see 300 gay men cuddle under red cloaks before being annihilated. But it is an important part of the story.

Last is the part that Dr. Joseph Natoli cannot beat out of me. Based on Hauntings his 1994 book on postmodern film criticism. I think Hollywood tends to make films from what our culture fears. I think the message is really quite plain. We as a culture are terrified of Iraqi/Iranians (Persians) who might be able to blow us up, either individually, or en masse. We feel we have to say it is a valiant cause to fight them. Is it a glorious fight in Iraq where young men fight for freedom? If that were only the case. The army wouldn’t have any trouble meeting recruitment numbers with young men hot with anger at the Persians threatening to make slaves of us all.

Americans have grown too savvy to buy into this. Even the 17 year old video game/comic book culture of America is too hooked into all the different narratives our culture to be duped by the “prepare for glory” speech. They know it is not glory. They know it is a hot ticket to Baghdad with a rifle and a belly full of hope. Hope that your number isn’t up when the bomb goes off. For the men and women there now, the one thing that is still true is: “Your shield is not for you, it is for the man on your left.”