Jim Jarmusch's "Paterson": The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round, and Round, and...

Warning: Contains Spoilers. 

Paterson, portrayed by Adam Driver, has a life of routines, of quiet and simple cycles. He wakes up at roughly six in the morning, eats cheerios from a glass bowl, and then heads to the bus depot to drive busses for work. He returns home, looks perplexed at the mailbox which is tilted; he straightens it. He enters, chats to his partner, Laura, portrayed by Golshifteh Farahani, about her day, usually filled with creative whimsy. He has dinner with Laura. At some point he changes his shirt from his bus drivers uniform into a casual shirt, and heads for an evening walk with their dog, Marvin, to a bar. He has a beer, walks home, goes to bed with Laura. Throughout he writes poetry in his notebook, honing a handful of poems over the week, at lunch time, while waiting for his shift to start, and in the evening in his makeshift study.

We are shown Paterson's daily rituals, spiced with random and unexpected events throughout; the recurring presence of twins, chats with strangers, minor dramatic occurences. Paterson's regimented lifestyle is partially explained with a portrait of him in Marine Parade dress on display. We are shown Paterson's life a day at a time, each day ritualistic but different to the last; but, what is there to suggest that Paterson is not stuck in a weekly cycle? The first thing that made me question Paterson's perceived reality is the unchanging weather -as a Brit who works outdoors I was envious- but then I began to think more about the final scene, where we are shown essentially the exact same morning scene as the previous 'Monday' section, but aren't shown the time; what if it is the exact same time he awoke the previous Monday?

If this is some sort of dream, heaven or Matrix loop, then the wooden, clichéd and saccharine conversations are at least explained. Paterson is but a bus driver yet has a lovely home, a dog, and a partner who he apparently financially supports. Laura has no daily cycle; she is in constant bounds of curiosity, creativity and change. What if she instead has a weekly cycle? Unlike every couple in the universe bar the filthy rich, Laura and Paterson don't talk about money; Paterson stumbles minorly when Laura wants to buy an expensive guitar & self-tutoring set, but doesn't even mention the money before finally saying yes.

Weather and riches aside, Paterson's cycles, daily or weekly, feed the viewer; despite having a defintie plot, the film is like a soothing fountain, calm, never ending, never unsettling. It is a snapshot portrait of that most sought after and seemingly impossible of human desires: contentedness.

Drawing to a Close: The Best Comics that I've read in 2018

This isn't the 'best comics released 2018,' just the best comics that I have stumbled upon this year, which very well might include comics that were released this year. They range from classics to weird little discoveries, slim indie prints to pulp serials. These are the best comics that I got stuck into this year.

Will Eisner- A Contract with God

Often cited as the first graphic novel, this collection of stories about early twentieth century life in tenement blocks in New York, centering especially on the lives of immigrants and their descendants, is a great eye into a historic underbelly of turn-of-the-century modernisation. Eisner depicts a New York landscape that we could recognise today in its infancy. Eisner himself is a giant among cartoonists, with his style predating the formalisation of style that came with artists such as Jack Kirby and others working at Marvel. The 'William Eisner Comics Industry Award' is named after him.

Brecht Evans- The Making Of

A comic about art that is itself intensely aesthetically pleasing. The vibrant watercolours and toying with colours and light made this work feel refreshing in an era slowly moving out of late-twentieth century comics draped in monochrome and shades of grey. Many page spreads felt frameable, and I could see myself enjoying them outside of the context of the story.

Craig Thompson- Habibi

Thompson made strong waves in the graphic novel game with Blankets, a coming-of-age memoir about first love between teenage Christians. I read Blankets well after Habibi, and am still won over by this later work. Almost every page shows a dazzling amount of work while also paying homage to the Arabic and Islamic writing and artistic traditions that he emulates and shares with the reader. The story takes a bold and unexpected step into the twenty-first century whereas Blankets was more concerned with a late 20th century adolescence. Pollution, globalisation, gender fluidity and equality is part of the rippling story while still umbilically linked to an ancient and largely unchangeable world.

Joyce Farmer- Special Exits

This book made me scared and I think that's okay. It made me scared to grow old. It made me scared to die and leave family behind. It made me scared to lose my parents. It made me scared to grow old with someone I love and lose them. It also made me see how these fearful moments are barely blips in the warm pool of love and family that embroils us over a lifetime like a careful and unaware nest. This book about dying is about living. I still can't help feeling a familiar fondness for the father figure of the book, as if he was a elderly man I was neighbours with or chatted to in a pub or shop.

Tillie Walden- On A Sunbeam

On a Sunbeam rests on some solid paving stones; sci-fi, romance, teen-drama. What exists among the paving stones is pure imagination; spaceships are fish and worlds sprawl like canyons in the galaxy instead of being neat spheres. Walden casts a powerful defiance of masculine sci-fi that laboured to explain everything, sciences, cultures; Walden shows what a lived-in story might be like in a spacey otherworld; who will love who, what trials might someone face growing up, what otherworldly sports will they take interest in, what work will be available to them, what groundbreaking tribulations will they overcome. Oh yeah, spoiler!- there are no men in this book. It doesn't matter and shouldn't; it's never explained or made a big deal of.

Read On a Sunbeam by clicking here 

Daniel Clowes- David Boring

Despite all that happens, the steady pacing of David's narration and Clowes' aversion to lines demonstrating speed or motion creates a vacuum of a comic that you slowly fall through... Ironically noir in essence, David Boring, a skinny, strange looking ass-man with an unexplainable attractiveness for women- not in a spitzy, hollywood way, but a drifting, lulling manner, where his desires are met easily yet he lives as if in fugue- tumbles through a series of romantic and dramatic events, trying to make sense of his father through his comic creation just as we follow David's own life in earnest through Clowes' creation.

Ben Katchor- Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julian Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

It doesn't matter that they're fictional, you are still being let in on secrets, you are being shown the details that hold up the very nature of the urban that have been hidden under your nose this whole time. In foggy greys and twentieth century American nostalgia, Julius Knipl narrates his flaneuring as if half in a dream, floating through the streets lit by the melting pot of American immigration of his city home.

Katchor's latest work is a free online strip titled 'Our Mental Age', which you can read here and you should because it's hilarious.

Maria Stoian- Take it as a Compliment

Each of the stories in this book are true, and that's what makes it the most terrifying. Abusive relationships, sexual assault, societally accepted harrassment; this book lays bare true tales from a wide range of voices, retelling in their own style and writ of what happened to them. I could slap the labels feminist and anti-sexist on the book, but socio-cultural-historical-politics aside these are just true stories and voices birthed in comic form that need to be listened to, showing events that need preventing and punishing and understanding.

Joe Sacco- The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

I've previously read many of Sacco's comics such as his famous work Palestine, and Footnotes of Gaza both about current and historical events surrounding the plight of the Palestinian Arabs amid the Israeli occupation, and also Safe Area Goražde which, like The Fixer, is about the Bosnian War of the nineties. While I really enjoyed these works, The Fixer has a much less journalistic tone, and feels almost more like Sacco casting his memory back, or maybe sat next to you in a bar he says "Hey, back in the Balkans I met this guy..." I never expected a comic to make me think about the complexities of the 'war hero,' and how unheroic they actually are; each of the warlords and the titular fixer that Sacco mentions could be seen as bandits, war criminals- or war heroes.

Rutu Modan- Jamilti and Other Stories

I also read Modan's Exit Wounds and The Property this year, but have settled for this collection of comics by Israeli creator Rutu Modan because of the variation in styles; some styles have the tin-tinesque cartoon faces on realistic line drawings with block colour that Modan uses in her graphic novels, while others are sketchy, black and white and more abstract. These are heartfelt stories that peel away all the mish-mash, all the conflicts, fires, terror that happens everyday and lets the little loves, families and moments blossom.

Special Mentions in one line:

Jerome Ruiller- The Strange

The story of an immigrant through the eyes of those who meet him.

 Noah Van Sciver- Fante Bukowski Two

Fante Bukowski: the 'struggling writer' that all literature folks hate that they identify with.

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima- Lone Wolf & Cub

Manga for people who don't like manga. Well-researched Japanese historical drama.

Jason Aaron & Jason Latour- Southern Bastards

Tales of a Southern U.S. county, stretching Southern stereotypes to their limits. Football.

Eric M Esquiel & Ramon Villalobos- Border Town

Preacher for woke kids. Mexican mythology finally gets some air time.

To make sure I remember, I've started a list of all the books I read. For whatever wierd reason this interests you, click here to check it out.

So That I Remember: All the Books I Have Read Since September 2018

If Art Garfunkel did it, why not me, a man from Gloucestershire you've never heard of?

September 2018: 
-George Orwell- Down and Out in Paris and London
-Cormac McCarthy- Outer Dark
-Sarah Glidden- Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq 
-Brecht Evens- The Making Of
-Jim Harrison- Legends of the Fall
-Craig Thompson- Blankets
-Harvey Pekar, Ed Piskor & Others- The Beats: A Graphic History
-Riad Sattouf- The Arab of the Future 2
-Joyce Farmer- Special Exits
October 2018:
-Tillie Walden- On A Sunbeam (read it here)
-Jim Crumley- The Last Wolf 
-Jeff VanderMeer- Annihilation
November 2018:
-Jeff Vandermeer- Authority 
-Kate Beaton- Step Aside, Pops.
-John Wagner & John Ridgway- The Dead Man
-Karrie Fransman- The House that Groaned 
-Jeff Vandermeer- Acceptance
December 2018:
-Jean Giono- The Man Who Planted Trees
-Clarice Lispector- Daydreams and Drunkenness of a Young Lady 
-James Rebanks- The Shepherd's Life: a Tale of the Lake District
-Jérôme Ruillier- The Strange 


January 2019:
-Phillipa Perry & Junko Grant- Couch Fiction: a Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy
-Bastien Vivés- Polina 
-Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian 
-Alison Bechdel- Are You My Mother?
-Sebastian Barker- Monastery of Light
February 2019:
-John Fante- Ask the Dust
March 2019: 
-Laurie Lee- Cider With Rosie
-John Steinbeck- The Pearl 
-Adrian Tomine- Scenes From an Impending Marriage 
-Frank Herbert- Dune Messiah
April 2019:
-Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
-Noah Van Sciver- Fante Bukowski Three: A Perfect Failure
-Chester Brown- The Playboy
May 2019:
-Lisa Hanawalt- Hotdog Taste Test
-Michela Wrong- I Didn't Do It For You
June 2019:
-Iain Banks- Song of Stone
July 2019: 
-A.G Street- Farmer's Glory
-Will Eisner- Minor Miracles
August 2019:
-Mark Twain- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
-P.J Harvey & Seamus Murphy- The Hollow of the Hand
-[re-read] Pat Grant- Blue (read it here)
September 2019:
-Michelle Obama- Becoming 
-Junji Ito- Uzumaki
-Junji Ito- Gyo
-John Porcellino- Perfect Example
-Raynor Winn- The Salt Path 
October 2019:
-Raymond Briggs- Ethel & Ernest: A True Story
-Jim Ottaviani & Leland Myrick- Feynman
-Patti Smith- Just Kids
-William Carlos Williams- Selected Poems 
November 2019:
-Ron Wimberly- Prince of Cats
-Scott McCloud- The Sculptor

January 2020:
-Winshluss- Pinocchio
-Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson- Beasts of Burden
February 2020:
-Andrew Wood- The Word
-Isabella Tree- Wilding (used a quote as a prompt for this article)
-Ricardo Delgado- Age of Reptiles 
-Ezra Claytan Daniels- Upgrade Soul
April 2020:
-Seamus Heaney- Seeing Things 
May 2020:
-John Porcellino- From Lone Mountain
-Guy Delisle- Hostage
June 2020:
-Declan Shalvey & Gavin Fullerton- Bog Bodies
-Declan Shalvey, Phillip Barrett, Jordie Bellaire & Clayton Cowles- Savage Town
July 2020:
-Manu Larcenet- Blast
August 2020:

-Roberto Bolaño- 2666

September 2020:

-Junot Díaz- Drown

October 2020:

-Delia Owens- Where the Crawdads sing

November 2020:

-Alan Moore & Kevin O' Neill- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest

-Roy Dennis- Cottongrass Summer

December 2020:

-Gilbert Hernandez- Heartbreak Soup 

-Gilbert Hernandez- High, Soft Lisp

-Gilbert Hernandez- Luba 

-[Re-read] Raymond Briggs- When the Wind Blows 

January 2021:

-Brian 'Box' Brown- Andre the Giant: Life and Legend 

-Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill- Marshal Law: The Deluxe Collection

-Daniel Clowes- Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

-Paco Roca- The Lighthouse

February 2021:

-J.M Coetzee- The Death of Jesus

-Xinran- The Good Women of China

March 2021:

-David Aja & Ann Nocenti- The Seeds 

-Gilbert Hernandez- Bumperhead

-Gilbert Hernandez- Loverboys

-Eimear McBride- A Girl is A Half Formed Thing

April 2021:

-Bastien Vivès- A Sister

-Herr Seele & Kamagurka- Cowboy Henk: King of Dental Floss

-Daniel Clowes- Ice Haven

-Gene Yang- American Born Chinese 

-Carolyn Novak- Girl Town 

-Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O'Connell- Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

-[Re-read] Brian Ralph- Daybreak

-Benoit Peeters & Francois Schuiten- Samaris 

-Alys Fowler- Hidden Nature

-Joe Sacco- Paying the Land 

May 2021:

-Neil Gaiman & Eddie Campbell- The Truth is a Black Cave in the Mountains

-Anne Simon & Catherin Sauvat- Man In Furs

-Tillie Walden- A City Inside

-Shaun Tan- The Arrival

-Micah Stahl & Bram Algoed- Assholes

June 2021:

-George Orwell- Burmese Days

-Zeina Abirached- A Game for Swallows

July 2021:

-Inés Estrada- Alienation

-Cookie Kalkair & Ophélie Damblé- Guerilla Green: An Urban Gardening Survival Guide

-Graham Greene- Brighton Rock

-Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie- Aya

August 2021

-Jeff Lemire- Roughneck

-Noah Van Sciver & Paul Buhle- Johnny Appleseed

-Noah Van Sciver- Saint Cole 

-Seth- It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken 

-J.G Ballard- High Rise

-Seth- Clyde Fans

-Guy Singh-Watson- Vegetables, Soil & Hope

-Adrian Tomine- The Intruder

-Adrian Tomine- Shortcomings

-Adrian Tomine- Killing and Dying 

September 2021

-Kseniya Melnik- Snow in May

-Noah Van Sciver- Disquiet

-Nick Drnaso- Beverly

-Eleanor Davis- How to be Happy

October 2021

-Nick Drnaso- Sabrina

-Jason- I Killed Adolf Hitler

-Jason- Werewolves of Montpelier

-Jason- Why are you Doing this?

-Jason- The Iron Wagon

-Fred Pearce- The New Wild

-Edward M. Hallowell M.D.- Driven to Distraction [audio]

-Robie Macauley- A Secret History of Time to Come (wrote a short review here)

-R. Kikuo Johnson- Night Fisher

November 2021

-Jason- On the Camino

-Frank Herbert- Children of Dune 

-Jason- O Josephine!

December 2021

-Max Porter- Lanny 

-Michael W. Conrad & Noah Bailey- Double Walker

-Various, Ed. Catherine Thornhill- Tamesis Street

-Chris Ware- Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth

-Thomas Ott- Dead End

January 2022

-Adrian Tomine- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

March 2022

-Chuck Palahniuk- Damned

-Chester Brown- I Never Liked You

-Michael Chabon- The Yiddish Policemen's Union

-Cormac McCarthy- The Orchard Keeper

-Noah Van Sciver- Slow Grafitti

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Clandestine in Chile 

-James Albon- The Delicacy

-Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips- Bad Weekend

April 2022

-Ray Fawkes- One Soul

-Eleanor Davis- The Hard Tomorrow

-Frankie Boyle- The Prometheus Vol. II (an audiobook in Boyle's The Prometheus series that collects much of his written work) [audio]

Frankie Boyle- The Future of British Politics [audio]

May 2022

-Linnea Starte- Stages of Rot

-Robert MacFarlane- The Old Ways [audio]

June 2022

-Dave Goulson- Silent Earth [audio]

-Mark Boyle- The Way Home [audio]

-Durian Sukegawa- Sweet Bean Paste

July 2022

-Hal Herzog- Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

-Tillie Walden- Clementine

-Cal Flyn- Islands of Abandonment [audio]

-Diego Agrimbau & Lucas Varela- Human 

August 2022

-Brian Ralph- Daybreak [re-read]

-Cormac McCarthy- The Road [re-read]

-Tillie Walden- On a Sunbeam [re-read]

-Bastien Vivés- The Blouse

-Merwan & Bastien Vivés- For the Empire

September 2022 

-Ali Smith- Autumn

-Derf Backderf- Trashed

-Adrian Tomine- 32 Stories

-Noah Van Sciver- Please Don't Step on my JNCO Jeans

-Apollo, Brüno, Laurence Croix- Tzee: An African Tragedy

October 2022

-Margaret Atwood- Year of the Flood

-Various- Granta 160: Conflict

-George Orwell- The Road to Wigan Pier

-Roberto Bolaño- The Romantic Dogs

-Jesse Jacobs- Safari Honeymoon

-Jesse Jacobs- Crawl Space 

November 2022

-Jordan Crane- Keeping Two

-Primo Levi- If This Is a Man

January 2023

-George Monbiot- Regenesis [audio]

-Tracey Williams- Adrift

-David Sedaris- Me Talk Pretty One Day [audio]

-William Goulding- Lord of the Flies

-Patti Smith- Year of the Monkey [audio]

-Koren Shadmi- The Abaddon

-Seth- Wimbledon Green

-Will Eisner- Last Day in Vietnam

-Patti Smith- M Train [audio]

-John Steinbeck- Cannery Row

-Will Eisner- Fagin the Jew

-David Sedaris- Naked [audio]

-Olga Ravn- The Employees

February 2023

-Olga Tokarczuk- Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [audio]

-Dash Shaw- Doctors

-Joff Winterhart- Days of the Bagnold Summer

-Brecht Evens- The Wrong Place

March 2023

-Manuele Fior- Hypericon

-J.G Ballard- The Drowned World

-Wasil Bolverton (Basil Wolverton)- Meating People: A Beginner's Guide

-Will Eisner- Dropsie Avenue: A Neighbourhood

April 2023

-Dash Shaw- The New School

-Spike Milligan- Puckoon

-Chris Gooch- Under Earth

-Cormac McCarthy- Child of God

May 2023

-David Sedaris- Happy-Go-Lucky [audio]

June 2023

-Primo Levi- The Truce

-Roger Deakin- Waterlog [audio]

-Amy Krouse Rosenthal- Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal [audio]

July 2023

-Brian ‘Limmy’ Limmond- Incredibly Down to Earth and Very Funny [audio]

-Wendell Berry- Nathan Coulter [audio]

August 2023 

-David Graeber- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory [audio] 

-Sjón- From the Mouth of the Whale (read my short review here)

September 2023

-J.M Coetzee- Life & Times of Michael K

October 2023

-B.S Johnson- Christie Malry's Own Double Entry 

-Luis Alberto Urrea- The Devil's Highway: A True Story [audio]

November 2023

-Claudia Rankine- Citizen: An American Lyric [audio]

-Paul Lynch- Prophet Song [audio]

December 2023

-Justin Madsen- Breathers

-Don DeLillo- White Noise

January 2024

-Blindboy Boatclub- Topographia Hibernica [audio]

February 2024

-Miriam Toews- Fight Night [audio]

-Derek Walcott- White Egrets

March 2024

-Claire Keegan- Antarctica [audio]

-Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

April 2024

-Jennifer Egan- A Visit from the Goon Squad [audio]

Here are more lists of my recommended books, click them to go to the article:

Drawing to a Close: The Best Comics that I've read in 2018

Rewilder’s Toolkit: some texts that got me thinking critically about a radical new future for human life and the planet.

Best Nature Writing I read in 2018

Greens

Some Photos of Green Things. 2016-2018

All Pictures my Own.

 Sussex Roots London Trip: Dalston Eastern Curve Garden 2017

 Sussex Roots London Trip: Nomadic Community Gardens 2017

 Crickety, Bisley, where my Grandfather grew up 2017

 Berries on Rodborough Common 2017

 Foraged Haws, Sloes, Blackberries and Crab Apples, Rodborough Common 2017

 St. Catherine's Valley, Batheaston with Avon Wildlife Trust 2017

 Hills in South Bristol, 2017

 Nightingale Valley, Brislington, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Newly Planted Orchard, Batheaston, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Hengrove Mounds Wildlife Reserve, with Avon Wildlife Trust 2018

 Incredible Edible Millenium Square Raised Beds 2017

 Ogmore-by-Sea Coast 2018

River Ogmore, Ogmore-by-Sea 2018

 Devil's Dyke, East Sussex 2016

Devil's Dyke, East Sussex 2016

Fragments of Colonization in Ray Bradbury’s “The Long Rain.”

Image from here

We weren’t meant for this; no Earthman was or ever will be able to take it.

                                                                                                                        -p.64

Article may contain spoilers

“The Long Rain,” one of Ray Bradbury’s famed short stories within the collection The Illustrated Man, is first and foremost a science fiction tale. This should be fairly obvious to the reader from the outset; all of the surrounding stories are science fiction, ranging in subject from artificial intelligence, virtual reality, to nuclear apocalypse, also the story is set on Venus (a dead giveaway, some say.) I believe that, intentionally or not, Bradbury has effectively used the short story form to give an allegory for colonization, from the vapid perspective of the colonizer.

            The Illustrated Man was written in 1950 and published in 1951. Although fairly removed from the traditional colonial sphere in America, Bradbury still collected the stories for publishing in the midst of a colonial overhaul; independence movements were springing up across Africa, Asia and the rest of the globe, with India already gaining independence from Britain in 1948, just three years prior to publishing. The twentieth century would continue to see revolutions and recedings as empires in their last formal appearance were beaten back. Although America was and is not usually seen to be an empire in comparison to the former empires of Britain, Germany and other nations, it isn’t impossible that the global backdrop to Bradbury’s working period worked it’s way into his writing thematically.

            The environment of Venus in “The Long Rain” is horrific and treacherous. Bradbury describes it thus:

           

The white, white jungle with the pale cheese- coloured leaves, and the earth carved of wet camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools- everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn’t it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last, the sea?

                                                                                                            -p.55

The image of a jungled and treacherous landscape plagued with dense rains is reminiscient of previously colonized lands such as Bangladesh that have monsoon seasons; many logs from soldiers in 17^th century campaigns in these regions complain of the heat, rain, damp, jungle plants & beasts, and disease, as if  they had invaded a forsaken planet rather than another country. It should be noted that the description of the land as being bodies of water is relevant to the colonial experience, as water has frequently acted as a conduit of empire; the Americas were discovered and claimed during Columbus’ voyage to find a quicker way to India, the Atlantic would eventually be crossed time and again for the trade of sugar, spice, and humans as slaves while rivers would be used as prying paths into continents such as South America and Africa.

            Despite the obvious hostility of the Venusian landscape, humans have built abodes on the planet’s surface, called ‘Sun domes.’

A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house fifteen feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in a space at the top of the bulding where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as they stayed in that house and idled their time.

                                                                                                                        -p.55

As part of the process of assimilation, the colonizer will bring in their own systems of governance, commerce, finance, and ultimately culture. Bradbury creates an excellent image of this in the mini-earths, complete with mini-suns, existing in ignorance and defiance of the host planet’s own environment. The story ends with the lieutenant entering a Sun Dome, feeling its warmth, looking at all of the luxuries, and abandoning his wet clothes, and indeed the memories of the events outside the dome.

The Venusians themselves never actively appear in the story; instead, the aftermath of one of their attacks is observed at the anguish of the rocket crash survivors, who hoped to find the shelter of a Sun Dome. Instead, it lies in ruins.

Every once in a while the Venusians come up our of the sea and attack a Sun Dome. They know if they can ruin a Sun Dome they can ruin us.

The Venusians took [the Sun Dome survivors] all down to the sea. I hear they have a delightful way of drowning you. It takes about eight hours to drown the way they work it.

                                                                                                                        -p.59

The reader is given only savagery about the alien inhabitants of Venus; we are not offered a view as to why they attack the Sun Domes and torture humans in such a way, but only that they do. We perceive them through the eyes of the colonizer, appalled by the actions of the host inhabitants who may be actively resiting colonization.

Bradbury’s story retains a focus on the journey of a group through a hostile and maddening imaginary landscape where the rains never stops, the storms are lethal and all colour has been washed away, but still the story carries some signifiers at the relationship between colonizer and colonized subjects and objects that were apparent at the time of writing, and remain important in reading the story today.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Long Rain” in The Illustrated Man. (Bantam: New York, 1967) pp. 53-65

The Environment of Nation, City and Country in Roberto Bolaño's 'The Insufferable Gaucho.'

'The Insufferable Gaucho' is available to read online at the New Yorker

“The cemetery I’m talking about, said Pereda, is an exact copy of eternity.” (26)

The Patagonian Mara.

Manuel Pereda, the titular insufferable gaucho, is not a gaucho. He is a lawyer and an ex-judge, but also a wearer of environment; he breaks the borders between environs and wears their characteristic like a veneer. The environments at hand are simple; nation (Argentina), country (the Pampas) and city (Buenos Aires.) Pereda outlines the three accordingly:

Argentina’s like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of Crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the Pampas- the Pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that’s what they’re like. (26)

City and country are aliens to each other, but both share a bond with the nation; Pereda’s Buenos Aires is the hub of the political uprising of General Perón and the collapse of the Argentinian economy, while the country shoulders the image of nation, the hardened and skilled gaucho’s of an idyllic Argentinian widerness. Much to Pereda’s lament, images are static, while reality is transitional.

            The wasteland feel of the story has strong similarities with works of J.M Coetzee that are purposefully displaced, with certainties and realities kept well away from the reader, most notably in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Childhood of Jesus. But Bolaño’s story is set in a real place, in Argentina, but Bolaño lets the reader witness displacement and dislocation occur. All of the gauchos, and Pereda for that matter, are elderly, suggesting a decay, added to by the aimlessness and lack of skill the gauchos show. The train that reaches the wasteland sometimes doesn’t even come, “as if that part of Argentina had been erased from memory as well as from the map.” (28)

As a result of hardships, the gaucho’s of the Pampas have sold their cattle and horses for slaughter, giving up the action (ranching & horse-riding) that made them gauchos, leaving them with the image; everyone in Capitán Jourdan wears bombachas, the baggy trousers typical of a gaucho. Pereda adopts this style on arriving in the Pampas, and slowly builds up a ‘gauchoness’; he buys a horse that he rides everywhere, even into stores, and daydreams of riding into Buenos Aires on it. He eventually buys two cattle. As the hardships of the nation forced the country dwellers to give up their cattle and horses, the environment reacted, and, free of large herbivores, is now rampant with rabbits (more likely Patagonian mara) which add to the homogeneity that the country seems to suffer from. The food and work that this monocultural environment offers do not fit with Pereda’s image of the valiant gaucho, leading him much anguish (“Rabbit hunting! What sort of job is that for a gaucho?”) (24) Pereda thinks that “the shame of the nation or the continent had turned them into tame cats. That’s why the cattle have been replace by rabbits, he thought.”(35) Here he sees the environment as a reflection of people and nation, not something that can be viscerally imprinted upon by occurences from both forces. Pereda’s wearing of the environment veneers eventually leads to the ending farcical confrontation, wherein he, as the countryside gaucho, pricks the groin of an over-excited literary socialite in a café in Buenos Aires. Pereda’s affinity for and desire to use his knife and to start a fight is a residual machoism from gaucho culture, which is alien both to the people of the Pampas and the people of Buenos Aires, apparently to Pereda’s lament.

He is confronted with a final choice about his visit to Buenos Aires; “stay in Buenos Aires and become a champion of justice, or go back to the Pampas, where I don’t belong, and try to do something useful… [with the locals and the gauchos.]” (40-41) The fact that Pereda chooses the less appealing of the two, the Pampas, shows him heading back to an environment where he can live in fantasy as a macho countryside gaucho, instead of engaging with the reality of the times in Buenos Aires. The story ends in signature Bolaño style; a non-ending, a middle of a story, but understandable in some way. In some way, this is the end of Pereda’s story for his colleagues in Buenos Aires, as he returns to the Pampas, dislocated from national time & space, while a real political emergency emerges before them, widening the trifecta between city, country and nation out of view. Although, it is not clearly stated which path Pereda chooses; does he go ‘back’ to the Pampas, or ‘back’ to his life in Buenos Aires? The final line can be understood casually as the former, as a narrational direction; he is leaving Buenos Aires to go back to the Pampas; or deeper as the latter; he is in Buenos Aires, but is giving it up, this farce of being a swaggering gaucho, to resume his previous life in Buenos Aires.