TheBlessingWay/KarlMarx/AreYouBeingServed?

Today I read the first fifty pages of The Blessing Way (1970), the first novel by Tony Hillerman to feature the Navajo tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn. Leaphorn would go on to become a very successful series character for Hillerman, but ironically started out as a minor figure in this novel until Hillerman’s editor suggested that this character be developed in more detail. Good advice! The novel’s original main character was Bergen McKee, an anthropology professor and friend of Leaphorn’s, who is conducting research into the Navajo legend of the shape-shifting witches known as ‘skinwalkers.’ McKee’s skepticism about whether skinwalkers really exist versus Leaphorn’s belief that they do give Hillerman a very effective way of debating the tension between the supernatural and the rational and how that tension can (or cannot) be accommodated within the genre of the crime novel.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. This section of the book covers Marx’s first years living in exile, which was a particularly difficult time in Marx’s life in both a professional and a personal sense. Politically, as the conservative reaction to the revolutionary events of 1848-11849 intensified, it became increasingly clear that no new revolution was imminent. Marx’s remaining supporters in Cologne were either imprisoned and/or driven out of politics, and Marx himself gradually withdrew from political activism, focusing instead on his writing, especially freelance journalism for the New York Tribune. On the personal level, Marx and Jenny had to deal with grinding poverty for much of this period, as well as the heartbreaking premature deaths of several of their children. One bright point during this period emphasized by Sperber was the appearance of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which Sperber characterizes not only as “a profound postmortem of the 1848 revolution,” but also as a “literary masterpiece.” Marx may have rescued something from political defeat in terms of this work, but I imagine that this success would have offered Marx only cold comfort at the time.

After I blogged yesterday in Airplane! it occurred to me that I had been a little disingenuous. It’s not that I think I was too hard on the film, rather, I realized that everyone has a film that in some ways defined their youth, that they feel nostalgic about now, and that they could not possibly defend. Nevertheless, they remain extremely attached to it. I think a lot of Americans of a certain age feel that way about Airplane! and for me that film is Are You Being Served?, the movie version of the British sitcom that run for much of the 1970s and 1980s. It is, by any objective standard, an awful film. Its plot is virtually nonexistent (and where it does exist, it’s completely confusing), the jokes are awful (for the most part) and its sexual and racial politics extremely conservative. I know all of this and yet I can still watch the film with pleasure because that sitcom and those actors bring back so many happy memories for me. It’s like the Arctic Monkeys say in their song “A Certain Romance”: “But over there there's friends of mine/What can I say, I've known them for a long long time/And they might overstep the line/But you just cannot get angry in the same way.” That about sums it up.