The second to last week! Exciting! Let’s splash in. Oh, and if you are just tuning in, you can click on the “Dune Book Club” tag at the bottom to see all the Dune posts by themselves and catch up. And please, feel free to join the conversation!

OH THOSE HARKONNENS!

You know, I spend all this time reading and thinking about all the symbolic and thematic stuff going on with Paul and his mom and his dead dad and sandworms and blah-blah-blah, but it has killed me for anything to do with the Harkonnens. As Paul moves toward his big chrysalis-emergence, the Harkonnens just seem to get more stupid, cackling and rubbing their hands together at each other.

The addition of Thufir Hawat doesn’t help at all–if anything, having him present in their scenes just emphasizes their utter ineffectuality as antagonists. I’m beginning to think that this is the main weakness of the novel–you really know from page 1 that gross old pederast Baron Harkonnen is not going to win, am I right? He’s set up as the bad guy, floating around on his tippie-toes because he’s too obese to support his own weight; meanwhile Paul has a cadre of brilliant trainers turning him into Kung Fu Jesus. I mean really.

Speaking of Hawat, it’s strange how he is built up as a potential instrument in the climax of the book, which idea (spoiler alert) sort of fizzles in the end. I can never decide if this is just a little misdirection on Herbert’s part, or one of several plot points that got away from him over time. Much of the book’s finish seems sudden and not at all depending on the events before it, but I am undecided in this. I like being surpised in books, so it doesn’t bother me overmuch–but I like to be surprised on purpose, not by accident.

THEY DENIED US THE HAJJ!

One thing Frank Herbert does well, possibly best, in Dune is to wrap the Fremen in a deep tribal mystique. They are at once mysterious and simple–without devolving into long expositional descriptions of their ways, we are given enough information to construct our OWN mystique for them. I suspect that, more than any other single element, this sense of mystique is what binds the novel together and makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts.

One of the ways Herbert handles this is to tap into EXISTING “real world” tribal traditions, most obviously Islamic and Bedouin cultures. As you probably know, the hajj is a religious pilgrimage a devotee makes once in their lifetimes. As mentioned in a past post, Herbert liberally uses Middle-Eastern lexicons to give the Fremen verisimilitude. In later books there seems to be more Hebrew culture sort of retrofitted onto things, not always gracefully. Especially in the last two books, where Herbert was, frankly, not at the top of his powers–or maybe more correctly was too big for an editor to rein in some of his narrative excesses. But again, those are other books.

TODAY I AM A SANDRIDER

This penultimate section of our reading is one of my favorites, it’s packed with little tidbits. I love to see all the little seeds Herbert planted in the earlier chapters bearing fruit now; it’s like watching children grow up.

But the scene where Paul mounts and rides the sandworm is my favorite scene in the book, and for my money the beginning of the climax of the book. This is the end of Paul Atreides the man and the beginning of Muad’Dib, the legend. For me everything changes when Paul plants his maker hooks and rides up the side of the sandworm, the symbolic and elemental heart of Dune. When he stands on the back of the worm, with Stilgar and the Fremen arranged along it with their robes flapping, he is not only a leader of men but a leader of Fremen.

And look at the other characters after this point: everyone changes. Jessica settles into her role as Reverend Mother, remote, chilly, with her own spies and agents among the Fremen already. Stilgar becomes a satellite of Paul’s, somewhat emasculated by his own semi-religious devotion to the former boy. Even Gurney Halleck, rediscovered by this newly powerful Muad’Dib, is a more silent version of the old raconteur, reverent but suspicious of the change in his old master.

But Paul’s change to me is the most important, and in some ways the most subtle. Gurney Halleck points it out best when they are reunited after some bloodshed, and Paul wishes aloud they could have saved the vehicles. “Your father would have been more concerned for the men he couldn’t save.”

And of course the final change is to come in the next and final piece of the book for us!

YOUR RUGS ARE VERY DIRTY IN HERE.

This is one of my favorite passages in the book, emblematic as it is of the strange subtextual dialogue that Herbert does so well. It resonates with the change in Jessica, with the change in Paul, and with the coming end to the existing order of the Fremen:

“Your rugs are very dirty in here,” Harah said. She swept her glance around the floor, avoiding Jessica’s eyes. “So many people tramping through here all the time. You really should have them cleaned more often.”

Okay! One more week to go. For next week, read to the end of the book! I might do an epilogue post the week after, dealing with the appendix and an overview of everything.

Hello to all! I’m going to try to keep my usual over-verbosity in check this week somewhat–I’m really more interested in what YOU guys are thinking. I have had access to my own ideas about Dune for 20 years now, and yours are much more interesting. Especially when they lead to new Dune thoughts for me. Hey sue me, I’m selfish.

To that end, this week I’d like to focus on two points:

POINT THE FIRST: Frank Herbert does an interesting thing with his protagonist in Dune. We’re at a point in the book’s plot where Paul has been removed from the relative safety of his position as a duke’s son, and now is moving headlong into his role as the center of legend, both existing and new.

Herbert handles this change with a series of crisis points in Paul’s development–beginning with the gom jabbar in the first chapter, then progressing through various tests (flying into the sandstorm, eluding the sandworm, the fight with Jamis) along the way. Herbert builds things up in the internal world, and then they seem to erupt into real-world action. I hadn’t really thought of this as much in earlier readings, but it’s an interesting way to progress the story, both from a plot and a thematic point. It’s not like a person’s internal struggle with their own prescience always makes for the most gripping reading, but Herbert ties this struggle to the external struggle Paul has with his environment, the Fremen, his mother, etc.

When I was a kid we never went to movie theatres, so I read the Star Wars novelizations long before I ever saw the movies. I remember feeling almost breathless during the last half of The Return of the Jedi–the story kept switching from Admiral Ackbar with his massed Rebel fleet (”It’s a trap!!”) to Lando Calrissian flying into the Death Star (”We’ve got to give Han more time!!”), to Han and the Ewoks trying to break into the Imperial bunker on Endor. I know the Star Wars novelizations are hardly the best entry for pacing in a novel, but I am always thinking of them when I read books today, especially adventure books.

above, by Warren Craghead

In Dune Herbert seems to balance the internal world of Paul’s prescience (and his growing fear of his own “terrible purpose”) with the external world of the Fremen, conflict, the planet itself, etc. I think this is probably the thing that saves the book from the fate of its sequels, which are much more tilted to the idealogical side of things, and much less on adventure.

POINT THE SECOND (much shorter point): The scene where Jessica is taking the Water of Life and realizes that her unborn daughter is being exposed not only to her own consciousness, but the amassed experiences of the “corridor” of past Reverend Mothers that Ramallo pours into her… super important scene. This seems pretty mystical on the surface, as if some magical door opened up in Jessica’s mind and there were all these old ladies in robes hanging out in there. Later I think Herbert tempers this a little bit, makes it more of a chemical/genetic transfer–it becomes hugely important later, both in this book and the later ones.

I can’t help thinking that, while Herbert insists he had most of second and third books planned out before ever beginning Dune, this is one of the things he later had to retroactively refine. He revisits the idea (somewhat sloppily) of this idea of past lives existing within a person’s genetic structure in Dune Messiah, and then perfects it in Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune.

above, by Evan Dahm

Okay, sorry to keep mentioning later books. I admit that I have read ahead to the end, so I’m thinking about what comes next now a little bit. Sorry!

Questions: Count Fenring, am I right? I love that guy, I almost drew him this week, but I decided to go for the old lady instead. I thought in his scenes with Baron Harkonnen and Feyd-Rautha, he actually came off as much more dangerous than either of them. As I’ve said, I think Herbert does a bad job of making the antagonists in the book all that threatening. If Paul is going to turn into some sort of super-Messiah or something, then the bad guy needs to be pretty amazing, right?

I guess that was only one question, if you can even call it that. I’m running late here, and have already talked too much. I want to hear more from you guys though, you ask the questions this week!

And for next week: read to the end of the chapter where Paul thinks: “I will drown the maker. We will see now whether I’m the Kwisatz Haderach…”

Recently a good friend insisted I read Tender Is The Night, the last novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, after I complained about trying to read This Side Of Paradise (his first) and hating it. She forced the book on me, and I set it aside and forgot about it; then this week I was headed out the door to grab some dinner before a meeting, and the book was there on the table and I snatched it up on a whim and took it with me. At the restaurant the DJ was way too loud, I had to read the first page literally three or four times before I started to actually retain anything.

But once I started paying attention, I was enthralled–this may very well be one of the best intros to a book I’ve ever read, the quality of the prose, the setting, the slow slide into the story… just amazing. Here’s the first few paragraphs:

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood–she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:

“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

!!! Just amazing. I love the paragraph that begins, “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.” What a sentence! You have the whole scene right there–when I came to that sentence is when I forgot about the overloud DJ and immediately started wishing I had my sketchbook with me to draw it. But with the description of the daughter, I forgot all about it; I was in love: “…who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame.”

I love this passage so much that I’m tempted not to continue reading the book–it’s like meeting a girl who you fall for in an instant, your mind is filled with possibility and excitement. But over time exposure tires you both out, and what was fresh and new is old and hackneyed and dull, and privately you both wish you could meet another person that exciting and new. Haha, but of course you can’t not be excited about your new girl, can you? And of course I will read this book–if it’s even a third as good as this first page, it will be a good book indeed.

I’m seeing a lot of things upon this rereading that are resonating differently than on earlier readings, due mainly to considering them more closely as part of the Book Club.

Chief among these is the way Herbert embeds things in his characters dialogue. Less in an expositional way, although he does that sometimes too in the early parts of the book, occasionally to dulling effect; Herbert often uses dialogue as a stand-in for other ideas in the story, sometimes combat, and sometimes as an analog for larger thematic ideas.

The one I’m thinking of in particular is the conversation between Thufir Hawat and the leader of the Fremen band he finds himself sheltering with, after the Atreides forces are decimated and driven from Arrakeen. Half the conversation or more is spent with Hawat struggling to divine what the conversation is about, with violence always just beneath the surface. And remember that Hawat is an educated man, a man whose counsel and devious mind are much sought after–but thrown into the idiomatic swamp of the Fremen’s questions about what to do with his wounded, he’s utterly lost, struggling to stay afloat at best.

above, by Evan Dahm

And of course, so are most of the characters, who just a few chapters ago were enjoying their fancy dinner party, throwing their conversational jabs and ripostes back and forth across the table. In the conversation between Thufir Hawat and his Fremen rescuer, we see the Fremen as less an esoteric tribe and more a FORCE, just as much as the planet they’ve adapted to live on is a force. Imagine the idea of removing all the water from a comrade’s body SO YOU COULD DRINK IT; but also imagine that this is the shape of your new world, and the first of many such surprises.

Ditto Paul and Jessica, trying to outrun sandworms and dig themselves out from sandstorms, also encountering for the first time the planet as such. This is the point in the story, in the many times I have exhorted people I know to read Dune, where if you don’t like it yet you never will–from this point forward, the status quo is destroyed for every character. This for me makes the somewhat duller opening chapters less egregious in retrospect, because while the story starts slow, the characters are also drawn so clearly that, when everything changes we really feel the drama; we’ve gotten use to who these people are. On the other side of this change we can’t be sure what will happen. Witness the way Herbert writes that whole careful conversation between Hawat and the Fremen, only to kill practically everybody a few pages later.

above, by Warren Craghead

But the best thing about this part of the book is the clash of cultures and legends when Paul and Jessica finally encounter Stilgar and the Fremen of Sietch Tabr. Remember that, for all Herbert’s other explanations, he never really goes into real depth regarding the Bene Gesserit and what they are able to do. We know at this point about Voice, but I remember reading this the first time and being all “Whoa!” when Jessica is kung fu-ing people left and right. The interactions between her and the Fremen legends of the Lisan al Gaib are my favorite Jessica scenes in the book, seeing her restless intellect weighing options in crisis, making choices based on severely limited information.

As opposed to her son, making choices with his strange, cloudy prescience; Jessica is doing a similar thing except with far less information. But also a much reduced scope–Jessica’s decisions are involved in moments, while Paul seems to fear momentum more than anything else. Such a good spot in the story, and the next one’s even better!

Speaking of which: for next week read to the end of Part Two (”Muad’dib”). I think after that we’ll have two more weeks worth of reading, in around 75-100 page a week chunks.

New strip! As it says in the little teeny synopsis with the art, I’m pretty sure that’s what the pattern to my future jams looked like. I remember mainly because when I picked it, I was SURE–as I am with many things even today–that it was the perfect pattern for jams, and would succinctly sum up everything that was wonderful and unique about me. So when in fact this did not happen, the bum choice became retroactively more important in my memory.

When we moved to the deep country from the suburban country, the bicycle became the only feasible means of transportation for me–there were no friends within easy walking distance. I think my closest friend was about a 20 minute bike ride away. Part of what makes the country “the country” is that there simply aren’t many people out there. So most of the first few years of high school I spent on my bike–I have to say that, while I was definitely a little spindly guy, even moreso than today, I had the ropey thighs of a marathon runner from all that biking. I remember being unable to benchpress even 30 pound without having to pray first in gym, but on the leg press machine I was going toe to toe with guys who played actual sports!!!

For those of you checking my blog for DUNE BOOK CLUB Week 05, it will go up this evening, as I have a dentist’s appointment in the morning and then some actual paying work to knock out during the day. But then the nighttime will be the right time.. to be with the one you Dune.

So I did some research this morning while posting this new page–by “research,” I’m specifically referring to about ten minutes on Wikipedia, 8 of which was spent reading about the P-38 Lightning. But anyway, under the Jams entry, I discovered precious little info, besides that the creator of “jams” was a systems analyst turned surfer, and named his patterned shorts after a truncated version of the word “pajamas.”

Does anyone remember me complaining bitterly about the lack of internet info on Cugas last week? Friends and neighbors, I ASK YOU: is there a conspiracy afoot to remove any mention of momentary 80’s fashion from the Information Superhighway itself? I found this so-so entry on parachute pants, but frankly I’m too afraid to even look Members Only jackets up. Oh the humanity!

But anyway: new strip.

A new series! Huzzah! This one I promise is going to have more laughs and less uncomfortable silences that the last one. Yes indeed it’s a new age! Also, a contest: while Cuga brand shoes have only the most incidental importance to this strip, I wasted an hour or two the other day trying to find ANY mention of Cuga’s online. What’s the deal? But if anyone can send me real proof of Cuga’s online, including a photograph or ad or SOME real mention, I’ll make you a nice (though smallish) drawing of a pair of Cuga’s as a prize.

I get to choose what constitutes a winner, so don’t be upset if I don’t like your entry. I really am looking for some photographic evidence, even an ad circular, whatever.  All I’ve found so far besides listings of the brand’s owners are incidental mentions by people, especially some guy comparing Air Jordans to Cuga Pros.

Oh my goodness, how the time has flown–here we are at Week Four already, as the leaves fall around us and the Halloween decorations are whisked away in favor of Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the many shelves of Christmas bric-a-brac lie waiting in the shadows, already sending outliers among us, annexing as much of the month of November as they can with their witchy Christmas ways.

Wait what was I talking about?

Guys, I was sick this week, and I confess that I read far ahead in the book. I’ve been trying to ONLY read the parts we focus on each week, to focus my brain powers on just that part. It may be because of this that this week I’m even more inclined than normal to view the present chapters in the larger context of the story. Although it IS the beginning of the more action-packed portion of the book, and the real beginning of Paul’s genesis, as we will see later.

The thing that interests me most about this part of the book, and indeed, about the entire book and the series it spawned, is its approach to the idea of prescience. For me, prescience in Dune is an analog for the idea of the power of the human mind. As I’ve said before, I’m almost religiously interested in this idea of the human mind as an object of real power and possibility.

On the other hand, I’m pretty UNinterested in mysticism, at least when it comes to my humanism. So the idea of Paul Atreides having some sort of mystical spirit visions, for me, would utterly destroy any suspension of disbelief I could bring to this story, and thus to many of the ideas embedded in it. But I just want to point out that Frank Herbert is always careful to describe this prescience in terms of its possibility–there’s never a sense that Paul just “sees” things, especially as an artifice to move the plot along.

Herbert describes Paul’s prescience in terms of its limitations–”He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.” It’s not that Paul SEES the future, he sees probabilities, something we all can do to some extent. Our brains are constantly collecting and storing data, the great majority of which we are never directly cognizant of. When we talk about a “gut feeling” or a “best guess,” our bodies are sifting through this data, the collected memories and minutiae of our lives, and–dare I say, in Mentat fashion–producing a calculation.

What Paul sees, this shifting landscape–as shifting as oh say, a series of sand dunes?–of the future, is no different. In Dune, Paul’s mind is more highly trained, and supposedly more GENETICALLY predisposed to this sort of operation. Paul is not just the protagonist of THIS story; he’s in a way the protagonist of humanity, of this boiling race consciousness he keeps sensing inside of him. The way this idea–of humanity evolving toward points of singularity, followed by enormous explosions of war and gene-mixing–informs the other books is pretty fascinating, although some of those more idea-laden books can be hard to read.

Okay–lots to do today, so I have to cut this headscratch-fest short. But a couple of points for discussion, what say?

–JESSICA: Whoa-ho, we begin to see some of the Bene Gesserit abilities, yes? Again, note that there is nothing mystical at all about it–Jessica is someone highly trained for very specific purposes. The idea of the Voice being merely a system of sonic manipulation of a person’s deep brain functions is just amazing.

–PLANS WITHIN PLANS: I am always impressed with authors who are able to take noble, likable characters, and make them do foolish or represhensible things. Thufir Hawat, first in his suspicions of Jessica and later in many other ways, is one of my favorite characters for this reason. Such a challenge.

–QUESTION: Speaking of pathos, what if anything was accomplished by the Duke’s death? Think about it, then discuss.

above, by Evan Dahm

–TENSION: In close-reading these chapters, I noticed for the first time that ALL of the Harkonnen scenes are dripping with tension and danger, without exception. There is no shred of trust or comfort between any of those characters, friend or foe. Whereas most of the Atreides scenes, certainly in the earlier portions of the book, are reflective; characters are discussing ideas or plans, there is not the same idea that the scene could quickly turn to violence at any time.

–PAUL’S CHANGE: is a scene that’s not as exciting when you first read it, but I return to it in my thoughts often throughout the book. I have a religious background, and it is very VERY easy for me to see Paul’s change in those terms, like that other Paul on the road to Damascus.

Okay! For next Monday, read from the beginning of Part II (”Muad’dib”) to the end of the chapter that ends “All of them, she thought, an entire culture trained to military order. What a priceless thing is here for an outcast Duke!“

I have talked about my friend Dylan Chorneau on this blog before, but I love him so much I’d like to do it again.

Dylan is a photographer, but he’s more importantly an image-maker, a distinction that gets lost sometimes I think. It is easy for uneducated dummies like me, and even regular-ole educated dummies, to forget that photography is a science and discipline and an artform, not just a legion of high-school students taking pictures of stairwells and ashtrays and elbows.

To strip the label even further, let’s call Dylan just a maker, like many of us with a hard-to-satisfy creative passion. We make things, we construct them, we arrange and build and tear down and rearrange until we are satisfied, though we are rarely satisfied. We are engineers and architects, sonata and sonnet writers, painters and photographers. We are often many of these at the same time.

I was looking at some of Dylan’s photos one time and made a comment about one of them being unflattering to a friend of ours–she’s a beautiful woman, so it really stuck out. Dylan looked at me like I had grown a second nose beside the first. “I’m not interested in making people look good,” he said, “as much as I am in making pictures look good.”  Dylan is just as comfortable talking about apertures and light meters as he is Velazquez and Van Eyck. He could talk for hours about Rembrandt’s “light sculpting” technique, or baking the perfect pizza crust, or his son’s first potty-training victory.

I’ve known Dylan since we were both teenagers, we entered adulthood together, I was lucky to be the best man at his wedding. It is inspiring to be around him, his restless creativity gets my own fired-up, knocks the ideas loose from the various stalactites and recesses of my brain. Over just the last couple of years he’s moved into photography, and is already ridiculously skilled at it. I would love to see him get rich from it too. I am super ready to show up Entourage-style for some of that money.

You can see a wild plethora of Dylan’s photos and paintings on his Flickr page. Enjoy yourself!

Guys, I’m sorry this turned out so sad. I was a little surprised myself, I wasn’t sure how I was going to end it until yesterday morning. I’ll try to make the next Dharbin story more upbeat. Maybe, we’ll have to see, don’t hold your breath.