This book is a mix of the story of meetings between American and Vietnamese military men a couple of decades after the war and a treatise on leadership and war –plus some filler material. It’s a follow-up to a book written by the same authors on the Battle of Ia Drang, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. That book was the subject of a movie starring Mel Gibson.
Both parts of the book are interesting, but this book is at its best when it discusses the meetings with Vietnamese officers. General Moore (Lt. Col. at the time of Ia Drang) gets to meet with the opposing commander at Ia Drang, Lt. Gen. Nyugen Hu An, and get his perspective on the battle. While the meetings go from being tentative to cordial with changing political winds, one gets a feel for the tension and the melting away of those tensions. With the latter meetings, additional U.S. fighters from Ia Drang are present, and not all have as easy of a time letting bygones be bygones as Gen. Moore. The group of U.S. soldiers spends the night on the Ia Drang battlefield (in an area that was near the border and not entirely settled at the time of their return.)
I don’t wish to suggest that the second part, which talks about leadership strategies and views on war, is not worthwhile, but it very much felt like padding to get the book up to a salable thickness. Gen. Moore is obviously quite competent to address these subjects, but the shift in the book is glaring and jarring.
This is very different kind of book than its predecessor. If you are expecting a tale of war, that’s not what you’ll find. If you are interested about how mortal enemies can be come close friends, you’ll find this book intriguing.
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. –Kurt Vonnegut
Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. –Mark Twain
The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. –Ray Bradbury
Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. –Elmore Leonard
The first draft of anything is shit.—Ernest Hemingway.
Omit needless words. –William Strunk
The only rule for writing I have is to leave it while I’m still hot… –William Faulkner
Whoever wants to tell a story of a sainted grandmother, unless you can find some old love letters, and get a new grandfather? –Robert Penn Warren
When you write the thing through once, you find out what the end is. Then you can go back to the first chapter and put in a lot of those foreshadowings. –Flannery O’Connor
As far as I’m concerned the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. –Neil Gaiman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) follows an earthling, Arthur Dent, as he is introduced to galactic hitchhiking by a Betegeusian named Ford Prefect. This duo joins the other sole-remaining human and the Galactic president aboard a stolen ship. Along with a chronically depressed robot, the group gets to the bottom of life’s grandest questions.
I just finished re-reading this book. I wouldn’t have figured there was any reason to review a 34-year-old book. To my knowledge, there isn’t another movie in the works. Surely, everyone who is likely to read it already has, right? Young people like new stuff, and if you’re… let’s say… youthfulness-challenged and haven’t gotten around to it then it’s probably not your cup of tea (which, sad so say, means you are likely devoid of a sense of humor.)
Then I saw a “best in 2012” list by genre, and H2G2 was on it. Yes, I realize that “best-seller” lists are a euphemism for “most-printed” and are not a perfect indicator. Of course, when I went to look for said list, I was unable to re-discover it. It may have been the “top 20 books used to prop up the corner of a coffee table” for all I can prove. However, in looking for the list, I did find H2G2 on a lot of other lists including best-selling books of all time and most popular sci-fi of all time.
In short, read this book.
I don’t want to give a lot of spoilers, but here are just a few of the things H2G2 will do for you:
-It tells you the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (Now everything else will be anti-climactic and thus stress-free.)
-You’ll never look at a mouse the same way.
-It tells you what you need in order to hitchhike through the Milky Way (Spoiler alert: a towel.)
What more could one want from a book? (If you say vampires or zombies, I’ll choke you through your USB port.)
The poetry of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England was thought to have been completely lost when the Earth was demolished to make way for an interstellar expressway. However, a scrap was found adrift in space. Scientists believe the sheer awfulness of the poem may have made it impervious to incineration, which is to say that the rays of the Vogon demolition beams refused to land upon the piece.
Your Love
Your love, it warms me
like a midsummer’s flatulence.
I reel like a sorority girl in her
first instance of crapulence
I’m cocooned in an embrace
that reeks of tepid tapioca.
Tapioca, all lumps and fangs
fangs so very, very… very pointy.
[INTERPRETIVE INTERLUDE: Herein the reader is encouraged to recreate their own impression of the first two stanzas through a capella interpretive dance…
Well, that should be quite enough, shouldn’t it? You got a bit carried away, I should say.]
Your squarish face squishes in my Winnebago memories
I’m a steel town girl on a Wednesday night that is so dim, dimmish, darkid.
Fluffernutter is like butter but jaundiced by mallowy goodness
Spreading it on pickled herring makes a treat that smells like feet
– a quart of milk
– lima beans
– three frozen pizzas
– hemorrhoid crème (not the mint kind this time)
And brings out the wicked amour of one who is without more, sans more.
But I need more; I must have… something, something [you get the drift.]
In summary, you are the wind above my wings.
[Dear estate of Douglas Adams, Please do not sue me. I am so very, very… very poor. That goes for the estates of Bette Midler and Hall and Oates as well… (Oh, you say those people are alive? Really?)]
This is an English translation of a book that was written long ago. The translation is by the Jinenkan Honbu Dojo — specifically Manaka Unsui (the head [Kancho] of the Jinenkan) and his students Robert Gray, Maurizio Mandarino, and Eric Shahan. The original is entitled Budo Shiroishi no Ei and was written in Japanese.
The book is the story of the seven-year warrior pilgrimage (musha shugyo) of a warrior named Takagi Oriemon who lived from 1625 to 1711. Takagi founded a martial arts school that, as was typical, branched out over the centuries. As I understand it, there are two or three descendant schools still in existence today.
Takagi was legendary for his strength. The book offers many accounts of descriptions of both his physical strength (from moving boulders to help farmers to chopping down a house to create a fire break) and his strength of mind (e.g. staying where others were afraid to because of hauntings.) However, mostly it portrays Takagi as a supremely humble and virtuous man. He misses no opportunity to assist those in need of help, and always humbly declines reward. He does not use his great power for wanton destruction, but does punish the wicked when no other choice remains.
Unlike Musashi’s Book of Five Rings or Yagyu’s The Life-Giving Sword, which are mostly about strategy, this book is mostly examples of virtuous living with a few strategic concepts thrown in.
I can offer a test for whether a reader might enjoy this book or not.
You’ll love this book if you:
– are fascinated by biographies of great martial artists.
– enjoy learning about life in Japan during the Tokugawa period.
– enjoy morality tales and the example set by great men and women.
– like to be inspired by people who really had their stuff together.
– don’t mind the occasional ghost story.
You won’t like this book if you:
– are an editor or English teacher and things like errant apostrophes make your head explode.
– are turned off by the flouting of conventional writing style (multi-speaker paragraphs of dialogue abound in this book.)
– find that ghost stories or supernatural elements completely ruin an otherwise down-to-earth read.
– find typos grate on your nerves.
– are really grossed out by gory manga-style line drawings (they are not all like that, but some are.)
I had to deduct at least a star for the many grammatical and formatting deficiencies of the book, but I still think everyone would gain from reading it and seeing the life example set by Takagi Oriemon: Budo Hero of Shiroishi.
A duck walks into the dōjō for his first session.He’s awkward and seems to be getting everything wrong.
The Sensei calls out, “Duck!”
The duck snaps to attention and says, “Yes, Sensei” — boot to the head.
Maai often gets boiled down to “distancing.” Understanding distancing is simple, understanding maai is challenging. First, maai understood in three dimensions is maai misunderstood. The fourth dimension, time, is critical. Second, maai is always interactive. Rules of thumb will only get one so far because the peculiarities of the opponent matters. Third, the interval between recognition and response that occurs in the mind is as important as the physical distance.
It behooves the martial artist to see the maai existing in exchanges outside the dōjō. Thinking of maai solely in terms of kenjutsu, for example, can encourage one to focus on the physical distance. The distance gap is what we can see, and that is what is most easily analyzed. However, another area in which maai is critical is joke telling, and in jokes one has to optimize for intangibles –timing and audience response to the joke. Not that this should be an intellectual exercise (that slows everything down); I presume it’s intuitive for people with the skill.
A joke has a two-part anatomy: 1.) a set up that is straight, plausible, and –perhaps even– factual; 2.) a punch line that must turn expectations on their head with punch. The interval between parts 1 and 2 separates masterful joke tellers from horrible ones. If one runs the punchline into the setup, one risks the joke falling flat. If the recipient doesn’t recognize the transition they may start thinking about what was said (ugh –analysis is the nemesis of humor.) However, if one pauses too long, one risks the recipient anticipating the ending. Some jokes are easier to tell than others. The one that opened this post is easily anticipated. Recognition of the dual-use of “duck” happens quickly.
For a more user-friendly joke consider the one that a scholarly survey suggested was the world’s funniest joke:
A woman gets onto a bus with an infant. The driver vomits in his mouth a little and says, “Lord, that is the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.”
The woman is appalled and speechless. She scowls, pays the fare, and proceeds to the rear of the bus.
Sitting down, she says to the woman next to her, “I’m outraged; I can’t believe how insulting the bus driver was.”
The woman says, “Well go give him a piece of your mind. Don’t worry. I’ll hold your monkey.”
The elaborate set up makes it difficult to anticipate the ending, and the twist between kindness and cruelty is readily apparent. (“Monkey” is very visual.) The punchline is really a punchword, the very last word.
Other jokes have more balance between set up and punchline, and that increases anticipation risk.
I was in the bookstore the other day and I asked the clerk for the self-help section.
She said that if she told me it would defeat the purpose.
Here one starts getting clues much earlier.
Other joke concepts are so well-known they invite anticipation.
Blonds all want to be like Vanna White, they yearn to know the… alphabet.
As for rushing the punch line, consider the joke:
I’m thoroughly familiar with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know “Y.”
While in writing the joke is clear, this is the type of joke that can easily be missed and fall flat. It’s not just because it’s not exactly hilarious, but because the recipient may have to reconstruct the joke or, worse yet, have it explained to them –both of which are death.
The other thing that one must recognize is that there are always specific exceptions that work. “Interrupting cow” is the perfect example of a rushed punchword that works.
I hold contrary views to the character Bill, played by the late David Carradine, in the Kill Bill movies. Bill said that Superman was his absolute favorite superhero. The Man of Steel is among my least favorite superheroes. From a writer’s point of view, it’s hard to write an edge-of-the-seat Superman tale because readers have to feel the protagonist is in peril at every turn. That’s a tough sell if your hero is all-powerful and invulnerable. Superman writers learned this quickly, and they responded by creating a rock that could weaken or kill their character by its mere presence. In books and movies, the bad guy should be stronger and smarter than the hero. Lex Luthor is a devious fiend, but he’s no match for Superman in any domain but wickedness.
There’s a lot of talk about this year’s Superman movie, entitled Man of Steel, being darker and grittier with the implication that it’ll be more interesting than past Superman movies. The involvement of Christopher Nolan, who is most famous for the outstanding Dark Knight movie trilogy, makes many optimistic. It may be that they can tap into some of the Dark Knight narrative power. However, it’s easier to have gripping Batman tale. Batman is only human, with no superpowers, and he is inherently a loner (or in some cases a dynamic duo.) Batman may be smart, but he’s not the smartest. He may be strong, but he’s not the strongest. This makes it relatively easy to write him into perilous situations in which he is outmatched.
I have high hopes for Man of Steel, but I’m skeptical.
I took these five years ago… how time flies. But, tis the season.
City Ice Rink next to the Vajdahunyad Castle
This has been one of the most popular pics on my photoblog as of late.
The Neo-Gothic Parliament building as seen from Normafa.
Normafa overlooks Budapest from atop of the hill. On this day the hilltop was dusted while there was not a trace of snow in Budapest.
Normafa near the tower
The aforementioned dusting of snow written over by long shadows of winter.
A cross in the woods
A solitary cross and headstone next to the trail.
Winter markets
It wouldn’t be Budapest in winter without a shot of one of the markets. When it’s blustery and gray outside, the warm scent of roasting nuts or baked goods bring a smile to the face.
We Are Soldiers Still by Harold G. Moore
Tiger Riding for Beginners 