Origins, by Dan Brown

In Origins (2017), Dan Brown demonstrate the success of his formula. Religious zealots, exotic locales, great artworks and architecture, an attractive and intelligent woman, assassins, and, most of all, conspiracies. Once again, he exercises his ability to write persuasively and intelligently about scientific matters and great works of art.  Though the surface might be persuasive, the substance beneath is not. Over his six or so novels, he has improved and refined his formula, so that he is able to build tension and develop his narrative at a frantic pace, even when, upon careful study, you notice that nothing much is happening.  The build-up to an assassination that lies at the center of the novel takes forever to unfold, and though the tension does build it is counterbalanced by tedium.

The premise of this novel is that a famous and provocative scientist who loves public attention and has invented many world-changing devices (read in place of his name Elon Musk, Steve Jobs) is about to announce a discovery that will change how people think about the human race and that will answer once and for all the questions of where did we come from and where are we headed.  He is also certain that his revelation will upend and ultimately bring down world religions.  Not surprisingly, religious leaders want to stop him.  Not surprisingly, someone starts killing those leaders.  Not surprisingly, there are false leads, unexpected revelations, clues, secret codes, passwords, monks, priests, rabbis, imams, and youngsters on four-wheeled vehicles.

Everything is at stake here: the future of humankind, identity, God, religion, artificial intelligence, technology, authoritarian governments, homosexuality, and the Spanish monarchy.  There were moments and points of interest.  But after the tension ceased to build, tedium set in.

Most of all, the discovery itself is a letdown.

Bottle Rocket

Bottle Rocket (1996) was the first film directed by Wes Anderson. He co-wrote the screenplay with Owen Wilson, who plays one of the main characters, Dignan. Not as ornate and baroque as Anderson's later films, this one is nonetheless characteristically a Wes Anderson film. It's wacky, chaotic, random, and whimsical. The two main characters, Dignan and Anthony (Luke Wilson), both of whom have just been released from a mental hospital, are neurotically paranoid and dysfunctional. They aspire to be robbers. The Wilson brothers, especially Chris Wilson, are so flaky and spaced that they enhance the random quality of what happens. Dignan plans out their heists in obsessive detail, with maps and secret codes and events timed to the second. Their first robbery is at a bookstore. 

Although there was a screenplay, the film feels as if it were entirely improvised. I can't really say that there's a plot: this is a film about crazy characters and cracked aspirations. In the climactic scene, with the assistance of accomplices (including an Indian safecracker who seems on the verge of senility) Dignan and Anthony try to rob a warehouse. Carefully planned though this heist might be, it devolves into an anarchistic and hilarious mess. Everything goes wrong.

At times the film seems to wander off course, but such wanderings are characteristic of Wes Anderson's films. They're not wanderings at all. An example occurs at a motel where Dignan and Anthony have holed up after their bookstore robbery. Anthony falls passionately in love with a young housekeeper. He follows her from one room to the other, helps her clean and make the beds. They swim together and finally make love in one of the rooms. She's from Paraguay, he doesn't speak Spanish, so they can’t communicate. You never know what's going to happen next. Another bit of randomness is the appearance of James Caan as Mr. Henry, who heads up a small-time crime ring masquerading as a landscape service. Caan fits right in.

Anderson uses in Bottle Rocket a number of actors who appear in his later films, especially the Wilson brothers. One example is Kumar Pallana, the safecracker: he played secondary characters in Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007).

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

The novel Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas (1983) exploits the idea of parallel or alternate universes.  This is an idea more acceptable to physicists of the current day than it was in 1983, when Michael Bishop published this novel.  In the novel, something goes awry in the “space-time continuum” (for a lack of a word that would better describe what happens in the novel) year 1968, something connected to the Tet Offensive and the election of Richard Nixon.  Nixon institutes restrictive and racist programs.  He’s elected to a third and fourth term. Dissenters disappear.  African Americans are returned to Africa.  Travel and freedom of expression restrictions make life difficult.  The United States becomes a totalitarian police state.  And it establishes a moon base.  Obviously, this version of United States history is different from our own history. 

This novel performs the science fiction version of It’s a Wonderful Life—it contemplates the what-if scenario of a United States considerably different from our own.  The novel is essentially comic, riven with dramatic irony as it explores the reality of a Nixonian world and invites us to compare that reality with our own.  

In one section, six guinea pig-like creatures called Brezhnev bunnies accompany the main character Cal and President Nixon to the moon.

Philip K. Dick plays a significant role in the novel, which more or less begins on the day of his death.  He appears to Cal and to others in different forms, in his “resurrection body.”  He seeks counseling from Cal’s wife Lia, a psychologist.  He appears as a horse.  He inhabits the body of an African American dwarf who falls, inexplicably, into trances during which he travels in some sort of astral manner all over the world and to the moon.  The so-called resurrected Dick is at the center of a plan to fix what has gone wrong with the world.  The absurdity of the novel is part of its charm.

Murder at Broad River Bridge: A True Story of Murder and the Ku Klux Klan, by Bill Shipp

Murder at Broad River Bridge, by Bill Shipp (1983; reprinted 2017 by UGA Press), is powerful journalism, reportage, and historical recovery. Most people living in Athens, Georgia, today don’t recall the murder of Lemuel Penn in 1963 by members of the Ku Klux Klan headquartered in Athens on Prince Avenue. Today Athens is a progressive town full of people with progressive attitudes. Athens almost always appears on election maps as a blue patch in a red state. It is important to remember Lemuel Penn’s murder. It was one of many murders and attacks committed by the Klan in the early years of the civil rights movement. Yet Penn was not a participant in the civil rights movement. He was an educational administrator in Washington, DC. He was murdered as he was returning home from a three-week stint of service in the Army reserves. Penn and two fellow reservists drove up from Fort Benning to Atlanta, where they stopped to refuel. Then they headed to Athens, where they asked a police officer for directions, and headed out of town towards Colvert, Georgia, which they thought would be a direct route to their destination but which instead was an empty  two-lane state road. Several miles outside of Colbert at a bridge over the Broad River, a car pulled up beside the one carrying the reservists. Two shotgun blasts penetrated the windows. Penn was killed instantly. The car nearly ran off the road until the surviving occupants regained control and pulled over. A passerby saw there was trouble, but instead of stopping to help he drove back to Colbert and informed the local policeman on duty that there were problems at the Broad River Bridge.

In the investigation that ensued, the FBI, GBI, and local police determined that local Klansmen had committed the murder. Ultimately, the two individuals who wielded the shotguns and fired the shots were identified and arrested, along with several accomplices. In the trial that followed the state made a convincing case but the jury voted to acquit. In a federal civil rights trial several months later, the two primary perpetrators were found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Shipp is particularly concerned in this book with the willingness in 1963 of Athens citizens to tolerate the Klan’s presence, with their unwillingness (with some exceptions) to speak out publically about the murder and about the Klan.

Shipp covers all the primary details of these events. A writer and editor at the Atlanta Constitution, he followed the investigation of Penn’s murder and the trial closely. He's done a service in writing this book. It's interesting to consider this book in the context of the ongoing controversy about Civil War historical markers and whether they should be removed. Historical markers may commemorate, but they do not explain and reveal history. It's far more important that books like Shipp’s are read and discussed than it is that we worry over the presence or absence of historical monuments to Civil War generals. Few of us in the contemporary South would choose to return to the era of the Civil War, which included slavery and the abuse of the rights of human beings. There is nothing about this period in Southern history that is honorable or laudatory. I see no reason to commemorate it. I stand with those who want to move the historical monuments, most of which were erected in support of white supremacy in the deep South rather than as monuments to Civil War figures. I'd be happy with relegating those monuments to museums, or to the back lots of cemeteries where Confederate soldiers are buried. What's most important is that this country find a way to move forward and to heal the still festering wounds of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, decades of suppression of the rights of African-Americans, the Civil Rights movement, and the conflicts of the present day. Books like Murder at Broad River Bridge make possible the understanding of historical events that are far more important to remember than the Civil War, which took place over 150 years ago. Everyone should read this book: to remember how things were in 1963 in the deep South, in Georgia, in Athens. We have come a long way since 1983. But not far enough.