Banjo by Claude McKay

I really enjoyed this novel. I felt close to the voice of the narrator. 
It was written in the late 1920s while the author was in Marseilles and Barcelona, two active port cities on the Meditranian Sea. The ports, the ships are critical to the action of the novel.

(I had a year of so myself in Barcelona in the mid-1980s playing the guitar and singing on the streets. The people were kind and supported me and my partner. This is a personal reason the novel worked so well for me, a certain nostalgia for the end of my wild youth and perhaps the beginning of my wild old age.)

The character, Banjo, is part of a loose network of traveling black street people, men. He plays the banjo and is a carefree somewhat wild character from America.
The novel is delightfully plotless. McKay apparently didn’t feel the need to contrive some through-story to carry the reader along.. That is a good thing. For me, that kind of thing, plot, in fiction and film has become increasingly annoying feeling so surprefulusly, artificial, as a cheap mechanism of wannabe popular commercial appeal.
In this novel, as in life, there is a series of episodes with a small cast of characters who move through and in and out. In this way, the book feels more real as if it is a fictionalized memoir and there is something very appealing about that over the plot/story thing that we are so often faced with in these fiction forms.

Among the international cast of black man characters there is one who we come closer to. He is another American and a writer. The novel is written in the third person voice, yet it is Ray, the writer and thinker whose thoughts and motivations we become privy to. It is certainly Ray who I felt close to. He is definitely a kindred spirit. Ray is a writer/intelectual. (I am caught in the modern bind of thought and ideas. This causes a constant measuring and distance, a position of observation, connected yet forever separate.) The novel is given its beautifully textured and deep philosophical and political detail through Ray.
He is part of this international gang of four or five, bums and panhandlers. But he gets a bit of money from the USA with a couple instances of selling a poem or two to some unstated publication.
Through clearly more “educated” and book smart than any of the others, he is legitimately egalitarian, he sees and feels the innocent human beauty and all of the others no matter how they might mess up in ways that might be seen as not beneficial to themselves.
He cherishes the uncivilised core in the others and traces that back to the African roots of them all. This is a philosophical rebellion against the enslaving machine of money profit getting ahead Euro-culture that is building the USA empire, it’s ultimate product. You call them savage, He calls them beautiful and naturally human. 

They party and form a little band that plays music in cafes. They drink. They share their windfalls. They eat and get by this way and that. Ships come into port and the cooks share food with this band of beach boys. Some of them have worked on boats themselves and know other sailors who come to port, feed, and party them all. 

Toward the end of the novel we see that things are changing. There is a tightening up. The English boats are not hiring black crewmen any longer. Only whites. A couple of them are arrested and kicked out of the country on the next boat. Passage paid for by the government. But sometimes they remain free, slip away. 

Some  of these changes are mirrored in B Traven’s novel written around the same time The Death Ship.That novel points out that a lot of this clampdown stuff is new. This need to produce “papers” to move freely around the globe. A fact we take as a given now, but according to Traven it is a ghastly new feature of the Industrial age. Before if you could manage to get somewhere, there you were. Free to walk across Europe and enter and leave at will. But these novels are written on the cusp of nationalistic control that is not all too familiar and continues to be on the rise. 

This novel remains powerful and relevant now, a century later because it so clearly sets the case for uncivilization. For the core hunter-gatherer human spirit of the ages that is being wiped out by civilisation’s necessities brought about by one of its major and troubling manifestations. Perhaps over-population contributes to a vicious circle of machine controls and one form or another of enslavement.  

The novel is a sort of “Fuck you modernity. I don’t owe you a damn thing and I will live wild and free on whatever fringe I can find and whatever handout and scam I can come up with without shame for this is the world I have been given to operate in.” It’s more of “I prefer not to” than a hostile tone.   
It is beautiful, wholesome and true in that.
This is a powerful graceful and beautiful piece of work of universal human relevance now and for all time.

All that said it is a man’s a male story. This is acknowledged in the final dialogue, the last paragraph. Banjo states that it’s also part of the current situation that the men can move and live on the fringes: “And theah’s things we can get away with all the time and she just can’t.”
Claude McKay saw things as they were and as they sadly yet also happily still remain 100 years on. How to set it all right? Hell if I know. We play it as it lies. There is no other choice.  
         

Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.

The Tale (2018)

The Tale
Written and directed by Jennifer Fox

This is a complex, well krafted and very effective autobiography movie of a young girl, age 13, who is raped and pulled into an ongoing exploitative association by a male running coach age 40.
Personally, the movie was not an easy entertainment at all.
It is like being inside someone else's nightmare dream, which also parallels one's own.

So much of the movie and these actual situations is reconstructing memory, verifying memory, and discarding memories that have been softened and made more manageable, less horrible. The abuse can be seen as one’s conscious act of righteous rebellion which is natural in a child who can see the flaws in their parent’s troubled relationship and imperfect lives. The child can be alienated by that and seek light and hope by looking up to and following a handy and charismatic, in a child’s eyes, mentor. These memories are dealt with, placated, and reconfigured as a matter of choice by the victim when the reality is far from that. This is well represented in The Tale.

The Jennifer character now, at age 48, is played by Laura Dern. Jenny at age 13 is played by Isabella Nélisse. There is a brilliant and very effective moment involving memory and the casting of the young girl. When Jennifer starts to remember, and we see her past depicted, Jenny is older, played by a 15 year old. But then in a scene looking at old photographs with her mother she is shocked and has to reset the age and the extremity of her innocence at the time of the abusive calamity when she sees a photo of how she really looked when this occurred, at age 13.. From then on young memory Jenny is played by a much younger girl who’s childlike look and contenance of innocence and inexperience cannot be denied.
(This moment really sold the movie to me personally because there is something that went on with me during childhood that I am unable to place without question on the blurry timeline of childhood. Was I 10? Younger? Older? I have reconstructed the age of the boy at 5 years older. Does that make the ratio 10 to 15, 9 to 14, 12 to 17? None of these ratios look good for him and his buddies, but I would like to know what it is for sure.)

The movie deals with this sensitive subject quite explicitly. There is no question of the totality of the phsyical rape. Yet there is not a hint of erotism or gray area in the sexual scenes reenacted. There is text at the end that states that an adult body double is used for these horrible scenes that would not be proper to put a child actor through for the sake of a movie. I wish I could say that for some other films that involve children crisis sexually or otherwise. 

The viewer might want a “trigger” warning for this one. And although a difficult ride, it is so well done and carefully thought through that one can also come out of it with personal insight to the ongoing damage that such an experience causes throughout life even into old age. Is that the reason for one's addictive behavior, lack of a wholesome fulfillment in social life, or spoty career? The reason one hid out wishing not to be noticed?